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- Hacker News
- It depends on how you look at it.
I've traveled all around Asia visiting different factories for projects over the years. After some time, factories just tend to blend together, big rooms filled with machines where materials come in one end, and are modified to be more like the final product at the other end. The rooms might look/feel different, whether it is the dirty floors and heat of a die cast grinding room, the green floors of an injection molding factory, or even a clean room you have to squeeze yourself into a bunny suit for (They never have large enough suits for me), its all just equipment in a room to transform material.
A factory is also a set of people and processes, which is what truly matters. If you don't have good people with expertise and the processes in place you don't have a chance at getting good product. You build relationships with the people at the companies and they will move mountains to help you. You build a truly excellent relationship with a factory, and they will anticipate your requirements and sometimes ship you perfect parts at T0.
I've got plenty of examples of factories that are fantastic, and ones that have been horrible from my time in working. The good ones all have the same differentiator, people that we have built a good long term relationship with. The bad ones almost always have a constant rotation of different people you have to talk to.
by starky - I don't think awe demoralizes children the same way it does adults. Kids want to be an astronaut, president of the United States, et cetera. They're still dreamers.
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
by bryanlarsen - I do think though that the astronaut, president, etc roles are imaginable. And that seeing the crazy automated factory with all manners of machines drillings stamping etc, that that is much harder to imagine oneself doing. The making of that factory is not on display, just the output of the human. Trying to emphasize the human, the role itself, is I think what Matt is getting at, and that needs to be imaginable.
- See "Maker Movement", 2005-1018.
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get. Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
by Animats - 2018, sorry. When TechShop went bust.by Animats
- This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
- China scales its approach to demand. It can build mega- factories or it can build small batches. Small batches require the dextrous artisans you mention.
A recent story I heard. A mega factory, highly automated, and making 1000 units an hour offered to make niche products at 1000 units every 3 months. They didn't change their line, they added a new one that was manual. No MOQ, no long term commitment. No long delays. Just got in with it
by jimnotgym - Very interesting! How are those garages coordinated? Who designs and who commissions?
- Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.by kjkjadksj
- I admire Chinese industry quite a bit myself, though I haven't yet completed my pilgrimage to Shenzhen. Just a quick clarification about the healthcare plans, though. As a single-person LLC I'm able to get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente plan here in SF. It's not super cheap or anything but it's there.by arjie
- This is China's massive differentiator than anywhere else. They have impeccable supply chain management. You will find that certain items are almost always made in the same city. Shenzhen (and surrounding area) is just the hub for electronics manufacturing. Within the city there is the main output, and then a bunch of smaller manufacturers making all the input components within driving distance of that factory which allows it all to work incredibly efficiently. This makes manufacturing in China so much faster than elsewhere.
I'd even go so far to say that Shenzhen is probably the wrong place to build the electric train motor above. I bet there is some 2nd or 3rd tier city somewhere in China that specializes in just that. For example, the only reason I'm aware of the city of Yueqing is because I did a project with pushbuttons once and that is the pushbutton city in China.
by starky - But is there any reason, other than money and some bureaucratic overheads, why that could only work in China?
I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.
It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.
I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.
The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.
by numpad0 - This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.by random3
- I agree that awe and accessibility are often opposed, and that children are easily inspired by things that feel tractable but not boring
I like the idea that we can teach children to feel inspiration instead of intimidation when learning how things work
- There is an interesting interplay between mystery and motivation. Churches/theologians generally are good with this interplay.by riazrizvi
- I loooove the idea of teaching children inspiration instead of intimidation. Everything in the built world was made by a person just like you and me. That person may have had special training or unique experiences, but we too can move towards training and experiences and build/do cool things.
One of the ways I try to do this with my kid, is to try to investigate what's behind what we see and interact with -- with technical stuff it's asking how it works and how things fit together, with social stuff it's asking what's going behind the scenes and getting involved with it. Then reflecting on how cool the technical thing or event/social machinery is and what function it serves. This has been generative of tons of great questions from my kid and great discussion with them.
by thenobsta - It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.
Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.
I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.
by hrideshmg - To be fair: this was a parent stepping up to offer the students something unique. Doing so with children is easier than it is with teenagers, but I think that has more to do with the values we instill than it does with the nature of schooling. While children are still interested in how the world works, while teenagers are more interested in popular culture.
The reason why I say that is because most children seem to be curious about non-school stuff, but even the little ones can lack curiosity about the things they learn in school. Math is the classic example. While you will always have a few who are intensely curious about it, I have to mentally prepare myself to present how amazing math is anytime I say the word in front of children. (In my case, it's not that hard since I grew up fascinated by math-adjacent subjects. For most people though, that would be difficult.)
by II2II - By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.
It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.
by munificent - I have an industrial engineer education. My master’s degree was specifically a collection of small projects to demystify (and have the keys understand deeply) all kind of manufacturing processes and the designing that goes with it : machining, soldering, smelting, forging, electrical circuitry.
I ended up working in IT for a large company because of opportunity. Both in terms of interesting projects and pay. All my fellow classmates that went into industry seem to be stuck in heavy internal processes, or working like hell to finish projects that barely recoup their costs. Those who went into hardware entrepreneurship struggle to find clients and investors. The only sector that still seems sexy is the very high end for B2B and luxury.
My analysis is that scale cannot be reached by non Chinese companies except for very specific and high end products (that have a smaller scale by design). Therefore it is impossible to compete on the price/quality ratio of large scale products. And I end up thinking that tariffs could be the solution.
I am based in Europe by the way
by 0wis - Agree job-wise somewhat. With the caveat that you're discounting that you're good at IT, which is why you find it easier; your classmates wouldn't.
On entrepreneurship - the low execution cost and huge capital inflows in software startups actually makes it very hard to succeed in that space because it leads to intense competition. The success stories are the tip of the iceberg.
This makes hardware startups relatively easier to build, believe it or not.
by mmarian - I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.
We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.
by legitster - Zoning and related matters is what really holds the US back. You are allowed to open a restaurant nearly anywhere, but good luck renting out a random office space or garage to start any other kind of small factory without a whole lot of pushback, especially if the process is "dirty".
Unsurprisingly, 70% of the manufacturing that does take place in the US is in rural areas. Trouble is that 80% of the population live in urban areas, so when a factory starts to gain some steam it cannot find anyone around to hire, starving any potential growth.
by win311fwg - It's all about what transports well and what doesn't.by flemhans
- There's an up-market brand for everything:
https://www.reef.com/collections/mens-best-selling-footwear#...
- I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
- Any pointers how to get into that? I think I’d enjoy it. Was at a company that did manufacturing, and I was supporting it, but factories were in China and I was in the US.by rogerrogerr
- Super cool, what did you make? How large was the factory? How did it work out? One observation from my experience, the closer you are to production, the more stressful things are. But probably scale changes experience. For me, working on stuff that entered automotive production lines, anything that made the line stop or go slow was insanely stresful.by RealityVoid
- Its still one of the summer jobs I look back on with a wistful what-if. I worked in a small (10ish employees) factory in the 1990s. I selected, bent and inserted resistors into fire alarm PCBs. If I'd been there longer than 6 weeks I think I'd have learned more about it. But I'd already lined up my next job at the pub a few doors down.
- I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
by rm445