Comment by nvader
20 hours ago
I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion.
However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation."
This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts.
After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed.
There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you.
This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
'brittle' here, I interpret as: not simple to restore, the knowledge to get them stood up again is brittle. A bus factor of one, to get back in SWE parlance.
If that factory burns down or a forklift crashes into the machine, it might be gone with no chance of recovery because the knowledge is gone.
It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of understanding and interacting with the way that your factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just don't know when.
This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective.
Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
It depends on the item. Let's take this screw pitch gage: https://www.starrett.com/details?cat-no=155
Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.
There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
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> How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
That's very unlikely. New materials would require the company requesting the part to reengineer it, recertify it, or at least retest it. But even still we're not coming up with materials that are a significant improvement in most fields. Aerospace, sure. It can be worth it to iterate and improve. Most things, a part that's worked for 50 years will keep working and will be happily profitable in maintenance mode. Those customers want reliability, not to test some improvement on a part that has negligible impact in the overall system.
And the common metals (gears are typically steel, maybe a yellow metal) are made in such large amounts that new materials are going to cost a heck of a lot more. So the customer is going to wreck their profit while the machine shop probably isn't going to have to change their process that much.
There definitely is innovation in machining. New processes are making tighter tolerances more achievable or material removal faster. But to the top commentor's point (who showed me how to use a benchtop lathe over a decade ago), the capital investment for a new machine plus the labor of duplicating all of your work plus the unknown maintenance costs, etc etc etc just don't make sense when Moore's law doesn't apply.
> but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
The ecosystems are an approximation of the people that run them. The ecosystems want to get rich quick and cash out with no regard for economic sustainability in the medium or long term because that's what the people who run them want.
> not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done.
For sure, but how do you know?
If it's only via:
> The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch with what consumers want ("Everyone is buying lamb now, buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's under the assumption that manufacturers never improve/iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-protein diet increases birth dates").
Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that many manufacturing improvements have been driven by marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.
> For sure, but how do you know?
In actual engineering, one can work out the theoretical limits (strength, expansion, etc) and measure the current product's performance against the limits. A new widget-making machine or process cannot imbue widgets with physics-defying properties. Any fundamental improvements can only be made on the outside, auch as new alloys; but that would be an entirely different product, nor the one you've been selling for 40 years that your customers trust and love.
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Well, I would suggest if a thing is around that long and still does the job, it’s close enough to done. Something going missing in the pushback here is this is a physical machine shop. My grandfather was the shop foreman for a jewelry maker and he was intensely proud of the fact he was the one person on the floor who still had all his fingers. Intact. Different jobs have different ideas about good Developer Experience.
Improvement is usually done via competition. Sometimes the competition is price based, and sometimes quality based. In the best of worlds, both.
For example, there are a ton of cheap crappy woodworking tools. Think Stanley etc. They barely do the job if at all. Then there are a group of vendors like Wood River that constantly create newer tools that are much more expensive than what you find in a big box tool store. And then farther up the food chain are vendors like Lie Nielsen who craft luxury tools that are amazing to use.
This market segmentation extends to most tools; someone like Woodpecker comes up with a ton of clever tools for marking/measuring etc for woodworking, then others copy them. Oldest story in capitalism.
The manufacturing improvements in this process are non-stop. For some really good examples in consumer electronics, read "Apple in China" to see how China transformed into a power house in a relatively short amount of time.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic
Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things?
> capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional just in case is very expensive insurance policy.
Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap events, but the premium on this options contract is never worth it on average.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.
I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there.
It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come.
Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently.
I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
Do you have some references for the pick and place and other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out of this space for a while but last I checked these were still incredibly challenging things to get right.
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That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.
I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
Machine shops, and serious software shops don't fo their mucking about in prod. Any machine shop experimentation that takes fown the production line is like Google or Meta going partially or fully offline - which has happened - but is also financially painful, so they do all they can to avoid it.
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I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me.
It is very britlle.
The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation.
That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative.
But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.
You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either.
There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering
For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes.
There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount.
making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people.
if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple
I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this.
I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc.
Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.