Lu Ban's axe and working with your Chinese suppliers

> Convincing of what - people to work for effectively nothing?

Not quite. Things cost money; trying to get something for less than it honestly costs is delusional, disrespectful, wastes everyone's time, etc. I don't want to do that. (I'll admit I didn't convey the sentiment I was getting at in my last message particularly well.)

Rather, it seems that there are few options if want to make something that isn't going to be superscalar in terms of volume demand. Instead of "we need ten production samples of this design to judge tolerance, and then our plans are to do a volume order of xxx,xxx items"; I want to do the minimum order possible (for reasonable and non-irritating (!) values of "minimum").

Essentially I'm in the same part of the spectrum typically catered to by hobbyist 3D printing, but I'm trying to do things that are tricky to manage with just a 3D printer. I mentioned keyboards before as an example; I've wondered about how much it would cost to tool for custom keyboards for a while.

> People just seem to lose their ability to comprehend that people in China have the same constraints on time, and particularly the value time, as everyone else outside of China.

FWIW, I think this is because China is viewed as a kind of magical place that makes so much of everything with such amazing prices that there must be some superhuman magic in there somewhere. :P So all reason and logic kind of goes out the window. Somehow stuff is being made for impossibly cheap, so surely that must mean that the actual manufacturing cost is cheap too, right? (It would seem that these people don't comprehend economies of scale. I get the impression that the reason that (for example) a given cheap toy is only ~a dollar is because some super-wholesaler did an order for ~a million and paid ~$8xx,xxx (?), and then forwarded their costs on to a bunch of toy stores.)

> I own a factory in China and I see this all too often. For example, people come to us with complicated electromechanical projects with half-baked designs. Designs that would require at least 3 additional months of prototyping before we'd even be ready for tooling. That means we are very likely going to spend 6-12 months working on your project. Too often, they don't have a dedicated engineering staff so there are a lot of gaps we must cover. Verification and validation of designs. Resultant CAD changes. Circuit design changes. Prototyping. Strategic sourcing. Lifecycle testing. Safety and agency. Packaging, packout and shipping. More, much more. It can easily consume 1000+ man-hours even 2000+ man-hours from a team of 8-10 professionals working on it. And then, lets say I quote $35,000 USD nonrefundable engineering fees or labor and overheads for 1000+ manhours. That's about the cost of a secretary with an associates degree from my home state in WV. What do I usually hear? Crickets. I hear nothing back because people are too busy expecting that they are going to work with a factory here in China and get something for nothing.

I see I have a lot to learn about. (I'm very curious where I should start. On the one hand I'm yet another confused tangle of dime-a-dozen ideas, but on the other hand I do think I have the patience and determination to manage a couple of them down the track a bit.)

Reading this makes me think of the line "Reproduced by (...) from camera-ready copy supplied by the authors." at the front of one of the textbooks I have upstairs. It sounds like I could eliminate significant cost by applying similar diligence and aiming to deliver complete specifications that are immediately usable. I presume it's possible to request that mistakes be pointed out so I can do the work to correct them on my end. That said, I say this 100% naively; I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually infeasible :)

> And in the end, they are all wondering "why didn't I get what I tried to buy from China?"

I remember having a brief conversation with someone selling kitchen supplies at a kiosk in a local mall (IIRC) many years ago about manufacturing arbitrary things in China versus elsewhere. That's when I learned that the main reason "Made in China" has such a bad reputation is because it's the customers on the non-China end that are always trying to "optimize" their costs - and that end quality was judged acceptable by sampling at the receiving end, not the source.

That's kinda saddening, but it seems that the prices people expect to pay for different things have been pretty much been locked-in since the manufacturing boom of the ~60s-80s, so anybody who wants to pay the factories a tiny bit more for better output quality is going to have a very hard time competing.

The angle I've been coming from here is biased a bit towards manufacturing in general - I've mentioned toys, everyday objects, etc, as I have little awareness of the technical/industrial side of manufacturing at this point.

An example would be: I know this different schedule can probably save the company $xxx money, but since it's my boss who proposed it I'll just let it pass.

It really takes a village. The culture of standing up against higer-ups is sometimes way out of the league for a single person to achieve.

That's pretty much every country, including the US. Even many Silicon Valley companies are this way.

For instance, to continue with your example, suppose the boss certainly would like to save $xxx with a different schedule they hadn't considered, but isn't even aware that the engineer is competent enough to propose it and knows how to do so: so in this case what could the boss have said or done differently that would have caused the engineer to propose it?

I assume ending each meeting with "We must now talk about anything that would improve the proposal just made; even if it makes me look like an idiot. Zhang Wei, do you know of any improvements?" and then going around pointing to each person and making them tell you whether they do, does not sound like it would "work". In this case Zhang Wei would say "no", as would the rest of the engineers... so how can the manager learn that an alternative schedule which Zhang Wei can propose could save them $xxx? (And maybe even complete production sooner, etc.) Any concrete suggestions here?