Comment by Bayramovanar
6 hours ago
I will avoid getting into a “who understands economics better” debate.
But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.
By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.
Factory overhiring can happen easily by adding speculative 2nd and 3rd shifts. No need for extra equipment, tooling, or physical capacity.
Lines with specialty equipment and tooling can also often be sped up. That can allow for other jobs to be added to all the functions that support the processes involved before and after the specialty equipment.
New employees also often require training and some apprenticeship time, meaning they can get hired ahead of actual demand.
I am really not debating whether over hiring is possible in factories.
in tech cost of hiring is lower which makes headcount a much easier speculative bet and layoffs a much easier reset when the bet fails.
The 90th percentile of factory workers makes $45,000. The 90th percentile of software engineers makes $230,000. Hiring in tech is insanely expensive; I'm not familiar with hiring in factories, but it can't possibly have the supply problems that tech workers have. I do on average 115 interviews for every person I hire in tech.
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There exists greater issues in hiring for manufacturing when it is for new shifts. Master level technicians and foremen willing to work those hours can be exceptionally difficult to find, and everything flows out of these people. While similar issues likely exist relating to discovering talent for software development, I speculate that the factory will, in practice, have a harder time finding people (for new shifts).
My experience with seeing new shifts added is initially with only specific processes, and even with those it is with journeyman level technicians running a small crew to support relieving a bottleneck in production.
Alternatively, manufacturers can outsource until they have enough volume to add a shift, but across the economy the net is just transferring production from one facility to another.
> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie.
Alas, gone are the days when engineers too required specialized equipment like a desktop computer on the desk that you couldn't move with you. Every evening, you left it at office and went home to live a 100% home life. Alas, gone are those days.
Maybe for some. I've worked from home for 15 years and a huge thing that I've learned is that I have to have a hard physical boundary. My work laptop stays at my desk unless I'm on call and actively fighting a fire. When I want to use my desk for non-work things the work laptop gets put away.
Crunch time in those days sucked. I remember mandatory nights and weekends and the managers ordering in pizza for everyone.
I was a contractor for a FAANG. My immediate cubicle neighbor liked to work out on lunch break, and to hang his sweaty, smelly gym things on the framework of his desk to air dry when he returned. I would've KILLED for a laptop I could take to the complimentary office café so I could get something done without holding my nose. If I were a full employee, I could just ask for one. Alas, as a mere contractor I was something less than a person, so I had to remain tethered to my desktop per company policy.
I mean, if killing was an option, getting rid of the cubicle neighbor would have solved the problem as well.
> But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.
> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.
Software engineers also need
- specialized machinery (at least when they have to upload to some computation cluster or cloud), think for example of the costs for GPU/TPU clusters for AIs at the moment
- tooling: depending on the sector, the license costs for the sector-specific business software can be similar as expensive as specialized machinery
- mental capacity (instead of physical capacity)
The low marginal cost also means that the job market is easier for software engineers in times when expectations are optimistic.
This, and I would also assume it's easier to spot idle factory employees, where idle devs (especially remote ones) can be easier to miss.
And, (assumption again) the factory boss doesn't have an incentive to increase idle worker numbers, where a dev manager often benefits from being in charge of a larger number of hardly working people.
It is a lot easier for a software engineer to overcomplicate things.
All of a sudden it is no longer enough with a few shell scripts. No, we need a full kubernetes cluster to run a service used by 10 secretaries.
No, we can't just use PostgreSQL as a queue, we definitely need Apache Kafka for 1 msg per second.
This only holds for companies that do not have to comply with some regulation or standard, e.g. ISO 27001, to do business. Especially infrastructure, banking, and defense tech have high compliance requirements that also, and sometimes esp. cover software development.
> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie...
> That low marginal cost
Not true. That's how everything falls apart. Scaling software teams isn't simple. There's lots to account for. Do you just assume everyone commit to the same file and let it crash?
The more people, the more work is required to standardize, organize, document and fix gaps. You can say you're already at scale and things "should" be done but they never are. You hire a team into a specific area to find it was a giant hack supported by a part-timer and as you try to fix it the problems keep escalating.
What's the cost of a programmer-quality laptop, with two large monitors, plus licenses for all the software that they need? That's 2-3K.
Does anyone know what the typical tool cost is for a factory worker?
(And the tool cost for a factory worker can be zero if you're hiring for a second shift - they would use the same tools as the first shift, just at different times. In contrast, I don't think there are very many places that ask programmers to use the same laptop in shifts.)
they even cut costs by leasing the computers...
I'd add that companies write off their equipment investment over a 3-5 year depreciation period. After that, when the laptops reach EOL, employees can often buy them through the company's EPP (employee purchase program) usually for just the fair market value, which might be a couple hundred € or sometimes even less.
So, eventually they recoup the equipment costs, wouldn't get surprised if they even make a profit out of it sometimes.
First thing they do, they write off VAT (20-23% of laptop price). Then at the EOL, they just set the EPP price to the higher market value. And return the cost.
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