Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

There are a lot more women in HR than men, and there are a lot more men in programming than women. There are many reasons why this is the case, many of which relate to sexism, but the fact that your overall result is gender-skewed is not in any way indicative of sexism in the hiring process.

It's not just "repairing code"... Oftentimes, small job shops will be taking a dimensioned drawing and write their own G code to actually generate the objects.

This will probably involve some back-and-forth with the machine stepping through the part manufacture, and must be done carefully to guarantee that both the machining is done efficiently by the machine and that the program doesn't result in a catastrophic failure damaging the workpiece, the tool, the machine, the operator, or some combination of the above.

This is, in fact, skilled work. Moreover, experienced operators know how to check parts for proper dimensioning (QC at the bench), perform maintenance on their machines and change tools, and watch a part in progress to make sure something really dumb isn't about to happen.

Moreover, the job doesn't stop at the machining center--you may still have to go and clean things up manually, do welding, do polishing, or any number of finishing touches.

Keeping this all working together is not something to laugh at.

I haven't even touched on the logistical challenges of retooling or upgrading equipment, or operating with machines that (unironically) still accept paper tape.

The pricing error argument can be made based on a definition of "value" that is in fairly common use around here (market price) and no more data than is included in the article: they offer a certain price for the labor and don't get as much of it as they want, therefore the price they offer is lower than the value.

EDIT: Actually, I want to tell more of this story to emphasize what you can do with a reasonably competent employee willing to learn.

At the time, I was hired as a temporary contractor for 3-4 months. I had basically most of 1 month to get to basic competence with Rails, and it was supposed to be less. Then I started getting real work thrown at me. By the end of 3 months, I had justified my pay and my employers had no more temporary work to throw at me. They offered to hire as a full-time salaried employee, but by then I had a plan for grad-school and research.

That was at the end of June. Midway through November, my friend who originally recommended me to that employer messages me on Facebook. He tells a bit of an ironic story, one point of which is that he himself is now using and expanding-on the code I wrote in those two-point-something months. Apparently it's holding up pretty decently, and the team is able to ship product.

All this because the proprietor of the firm figured he could hire someone smart with a good work-ethic for a while and give him time to get competent with Rails rather than go unicorn hunting.

The key point being that there is a skill 'valuation' gap which is being forced on the manufacturers by competition in distant countries. So piecework manufacturer in Minnesota has to compete with piecework manufacturer in Shenzen, and the former pays employees more and uses more automation and the latter has traditionally been able to throw many more humans at the task. Between the slowly rising demands in these countries, and the challenge of working with your factory that far away, we're just about to the point where its going to flip. I would have called it for this year but the great recession seemed to push everything back 2 - 3 years. So perhaps in 2015. Small manufacturers will either go out of business or require a higher price per good delivered, which supports effectively doubling the wage paid to their line workers. And those line workers will be essentially programmers programming tools, not doing the actual tooling.

The switch will be enabled by "high resolution" workstation automation. Today the last unassailable benefit of the 'tool and die' shop is that you've got a machinist and a machine tool which can be dynamically scheduled for any kind of widget. They are 'soft tooling' in that all of the gear that makes stuff doesn't need a dedicated fabrication line. The benefit is realized because setting up 'hard tooling' has a huge upfront cost and while the dedicated line is much more efficient, it also takes space away from other lines.

The calculus goes something like this : 0 - 1,000 widgets a 'precision' shop can make them; 1000+ to 50000 widgets a 'sweat shop' (primarily labor driven shop) can make them, and for 5000+ widgets you start to get the benefits of hard tooling amortized over your widgets.

As we get to the point where we have machines that have 'high level' sorts of capabilities (some early machines have been demonstrated by the Japanese and others) where your machine can take a dumped out pile of parts and assemble the widget, or 'partial hard tooling' where a machine creates intermediate tools to maximize efficiency "automatically" then it flips back to the place where a well equipped precision shop can make 10,000 widgets a month or arbitrary design and amortize over all 10,000 which switches the economics question back to transportation and re-spins (interaction with the original designers).

When I see robots that can pick up a cell phone, toss it and then catch it again at an arbitrary angle, you realize you can do material transfer by having workstations literally toss partial assemblies from one station to the next. That kind of flexibility is going to make for a very different kind of factory, and of course factory worker.