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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#951

Post by vel0city »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #944
Retric wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is more expensive than Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care. Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.

> Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care. How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee? The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will…

It's almost like maybe there was a point to unions and guilds and what not...

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#952

Post by vel0city »

bornfreddy wrote: post #916
dangjc wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.

If you are willing to have a remote team then this is not a problem - lots of great (senior) developers in EU, Asia,... No need to pay FAANG level compensations either. Curiously enough not many US companies do that, or those that do, put rounds and rounds of interviews in front of each candidate. Which is OK I guess - if you pay FAANG salaries. But if not, maybe just limit to 3 interviews, one hour each? If that's n…

You don't even need to go out of the US. Plenty of good US people are down to live in non-FAANG COL areas and thus can have more take-home for less upfront pay.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#953

Post by vel0city »

silisili wrote: post #929
rlpb wrote: post #921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you replaced every worker with someone else of equal skill of course manufacturing company would continue to operate. No it wouldn't, because a senior worker wouldn't be around to say things like "oh yes we use a jig under this circumstance that we keep over here ". Every business has ton of institutional knowledge like that.

It turns out, that isn't worth much. Because they upended the factories and sent them to Mexico and China overnight without a person to point and say where the jig was. Seemingly, they figured it out. To be clear, I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, I do think it's important to have those people. But companies felt otherwise.

At least in the instances I've been aware of, they usually weren't really "overnight". Usually a good bit of knowledge transfer or actually moving institutional people, sometimes having the other factory coming online in parallel so they can tweak processes, etc. Usually a years-long process. I think few truly overnight shut down one factory and opened the other with those other people having zero knowledge or training on specific processes without experiencing big issues.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#954

Post by runako »

klooney wrote: post #940
runako wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive? Tariffs will have to go a lot higher than 145% for this to be a relevant question. US labor (and now due to tariffs, raw materials) costs are so much higher that frequently even doubling the import price would not make US cost-competitive. > Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers? No, I…

> A person could QA a T-shirt or QA the Netflix app Netflix famously fired all their QA people and requires their devs to do test automation.

I guess HR didn't get the memo?

https://explore.jobs.netflix.net/careers/job/790301756355-qa...

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#955

Post by throwme0827349 »

korse wrote: post #710
NoTeslaThrow wrote: post #581

We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials. The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-bus…

I'm American and heavily involved in manufacturing for industrial/mining/agricultural customers. 'We just don't want to employ people' is a gross simplification. We do want to employ people, and lack of skilled labor is a serious problem which has hampered business growth for years, The first unspoken problem is that very few young people want to live where many factories are located. I can't blame them. I certainly…

Oddly, literally everything you just described is true about my pure remote software engineering position, except I had to get bachelors in computer science first.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#956

Post by Retric »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #944
Retric wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is more expensive than Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care. Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.

> Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care. How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee? The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will…

> The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years.

No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.

Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.

As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#957

Post by ninetyninenine »

tptacek wrote: post #948
ninetyninenine wrote: post #945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey. Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectiv…

>I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey.

You said IQ by country doesn't exist. And i said, IQ is so pervasive it fucking does. You also referenced something completely off topic. Some random book claiming that because that random book is invalid the whole concept of IQ by country doesn't exist which is absolutely wrong.

>Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectively.

I'm well versed enough in IQ to know that even the first link on google is good enough to refute you. You don't have to believe me, but you can always do your own research to find out I'm right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM&list=PL_K7XH1AIG... this can help

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#958

Post by tptacek »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #957
tptacek wrote: post #948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey. Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectiv…

>I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey. You said IQ by country doesn't exist. And i said, IQ is so pervasive it fucking does. You also referenced something completely off topic. Some random book claiming that because that random book is invalid the whole concept of IQ by country…

You cited a ranking of countries that was based on Lynn and his colleagues collecting data from childrens hospitals, because IQ is a diagnostic and not a ranking mechanism, and outside of wealthy western countries nobody has done latitudinal studies. If that was the worst thing Lynn had done to generate his data, it would already be fraudulent, but it isn't. Unfortunately, I don't think you actually understand the statistics you're citing.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#959

Post by ninetyninenine »

tptacek wrote: post #958
ninetyninenine wrote: post #957

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey. You said IQ by country doesn't exist. And i said, IQ is so pervasive it fucking does. You also referenced something completely off topic. Some random book claiming that because that random book is invalid the whole concept of IQ by country…

You cited a ranking of countries that was based on Lynn and his colleagues collecting data from childrens hospitals, because IQ is a diagnostic and not a ranking mechanism, and outside of wealthy western countries nobody has done latitudinal studies. If that was the worst thing Lynn had done to generate his data, it would already be fraudulent, but it isn't. Unfortunately, I don't think you actually understand the st…

[flagged]

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#960

Post by ashoeafoot »

vlovich123 wrote: post #939
giancarlostoro wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat. I think R&D for tax reasons n…

One reason Bell Labs is remembered so fondly for the innovations is that they really only benefited the broader world once Bell was broken up. I’ll also challenge the assumption that these companies only do R&D if it’s immediately profitable. For example, Microsoft and Google both are investing heavily in quantum computers despite the fact that it’s unclear that that is a profitable endeavor (or profitable to be the…

There is also the negative effect of over-expensive ip blocking product development as no new product with unclear potential can take on prohibitive license costs.
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