Comment by brk
7 hours ago
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.
That $45,000 factory worker is often operating a $1.5 million piece of equipment with $10-50,000/hr of materials going through it.
It's an entirely different cost structure.
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.