[syntaxing]

Was a MechE for 10 years here in the US and now I’m a SWE. Even here, no one cares about hardware engineers. Don’t get me wrong, you can make enough to be “comfortable”. But anecdotally, maybe 10% of MechE do design. 10% of that are paid handsomely to be in tech and are “Product Designers”. Even then, almost every tech company want to be a predominantly software company. They just happen to need hardware to execute their product. Admittedly, it’s really hard to do hardware in this economy when one country has 60% of the global manufacturing output and can copy your design, make it cheaper, and make it better. Ironically, the biggest dividing line that makes a hardware product better is good software.

[wakawaka28]

That's what happens when there is not much manufacturing in the country anymore, and everyone is encouraged to go to college. I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines. Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.

[nine_k]

Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost. There are no assembly line workers in software (and the very word "assembly" means a different thing). A software engineer very often brings in revenue many times their salary.

Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing. Production of each physical item costs you. Production of every physical item has a chance to go wrong. Production of each physical item requires a number of humans (often a large number) to do repetitive, high-precision, high-skill work, as fast as practical. You can augment or replace some of them with robots but it also costs you, and you can't replace all the humans with satisfactory results.

So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.

Of course there can be situations where the workers are highly paid, and produce very valuable things through their skilled work. Ford in 1950s famously paid the assembly line workers very well, so that they could buy the cars they produce, and valued their employment. But this does not always occur; people doing work that does not add a lot of resale value also want to live well, especially if the society does not want a flood of immigrants who are willing to work for much less. Check out how much the work of a plumber costs in Switzerland. So only high-precision, high-margin, low-volume manufacturing remains in Switzerland, such as precision optics, precision industrial and medical equipment, or premium mechanical Swiss watches. The US is in a somehow similar situation.

[imtringued]

I disagree very slightly. Mostly with this part:

>So, with hardware, the cost of the workforce plays a major role, while with software it does much less. To produce physical things, you need a lot of people who are not well-off, and for whom factory work is an upgrade of their financial and social standing. A "developing country", with huge swaths of population leaving rural life for a better city life and factory work, is best in this regard. Ideally you sell your product to richer folks, maybe outside the country of production.

You don't need a lot of people who are not well-off. You can automate the entire process. The problem with automation and labor saving technology is that it is capital intensive. The higher the capital investment per job (higher capital intensity), the bigger the chunk of money that flows to capital rather than labor.

This means that the cost of the workforce in a software company plays a bigger role than in a hardware company, where financing costs to pay for labor saving technology play a bigger role.

There are mining companies in Africa, who have nothing but an army of people equipped with shovels digging a small scale open pit mine. There is no way the labor cost here is the biggest constraint. An excavator and wheel loader could accomplish more with less people, but it would mean getting a USD loan to import foreign equipment and then selling for export to pay the foreign debts, rather than local production.

[foobazgt]

This all resonates very strongly with me. We have tons of automation - the proverbial "economies of scale", but we haven't managed to solve the last mile.

Auto assembly seems like a poster child. There's wild automation going on, but the typical plant still requires thousands of employees doing things by hand. Musk tried to automate a lot more of this away with newer/better robotics, but failed. (Tesla has still achieved a lot here, but it's been more towards creating designs that are more amenable to the current state of robotics).

IMO, this problem should be solvable now. I.E. we don't need "new physics" to reach another step-function in automation. We need more investment. We're still largely in the mindset of "special-purpose" automation.

[raverbashing]

> Production of software is nearly 100% R&D. Making a million copies of a software product has a trivial cost.

> Production of hardware is some R&D, and then actual manufacturing

Totally. And if you think deployment errors are bad, wait until you see how many production errors exist and how many items out of your line come out working and within spec

[nine_k]

Indeed. You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part or a PCB.

[moregrist]

For a PCB it’s called a rework, and it’s very common for first spins of boards to have to do one.

Also common is to patch around issues, when possible, in firmware. This is often lower cost/effort, but can’t fix everything.

There are similar kinds of fixes for purely mechanical parts. Depending on the part and problem, mechanical can be easier than a PCB rework (eg: modify a part in CAD and 3D print or get your local machine shop to do a run).

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Or require a particular type of motor oil with a particular type of metal-based lubricant additive when you realise 100,000 cam shafts have shipped made of metal you’d assumed was to a higher spec but isn’t, just so the engine will make it through warranty period with insanely long service intervals.

I briefly looked at a couple used vehicles just outside of warranty and one within warranty that had literally had two oil changers in 100,000k, that’s 60,000 miles for the uninitiated.

[kjkjadksj]

You just release a new version. How many xbox 360s did they actually release? I think its close to a dozen iterations.

[throwaway2037]

    > You cannot release a patch for a mechanical part

In NATO, this is frequent and normal. Many, many "recalls" are issued by military manfacturers, then local support staff spend X hours to replace the defective part. It is not so different from automobile recalls.

[raverbashing]

Correct. Also the economics of a mechanical patch are favourable for something in the M$ range with a fix costing in the 10k$ to 100k$ range

[zmgsabst]

You can and people do.

It’s just a lot more expensive and labor intensive to apply.

[torginus]

Yeah I remember one of my friends working for a German auto company during the 2008 financial crisis and having insane stuff routinely happen like an auto manufacturer having to buy truckloads of sensors from a subcontractor that had nowhere to go as car manufacturing lines were stopped.

Failing to do so would have meant these manufacturers would go under, (along with their own subcontractors) and once demand shot back up, cars would be literally impossible to manufacture as key suppliers went out of business.

[Brybry]

The U.S. is still the second largest manufacturer in the world by a large margin [1][2]

Like, yes, manufacturing's % of US GDP is low (and has been decreasing for a long time) and manufacturing employment is flat or slowly increasing but we're still making a lot of stuff.

[1] https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturi...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufactu...

[wakawaka28]

I don't think we make a lot of stuff but we do make some of the most expensive stuff. So a lot of stats really don't reflect how unbalanced our trade is in real terms.

[CraigJPerry]

Interesting that you say that, my understand of the data is that manufacturing output has never been higher - ignoring lingering Covid shocks - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMANSICS

But because productivity is higher https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0100CUSM070NNBR - which doesn’t mean the workers are working harder: a man with a shovel can work as hard as he likes, but he’s never going to compete with the business owner who invested in productivity and gave his worker an excavator.

Therefore employment in the sector is down due to increased productivity, not decreased output.

But increased productivity is a radically different thing from decreased output. A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.

[concerndc1tizen]

Nice charts, but M0100CUSM070NNBR is from 1948 to 1963 :)

[CraigJPerry]

Eh, well, this is a bit embarrassing! On mobile, I can’t local a chart that covers the post war until now, best I can find is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS which shows late 80s onwards BUT shows a drop at 2008 onwards which goes against my argument (notwithstanding the big gap between both charts)

[wakawaka28]

The nominal value of highly automated processes has never been higher. Meanwhile, ordinary people are not able to find as many good jobs as they once did. Wages in almost every industry are stagnant at best, at least when adjusted for inflation.

>A claim that manufacturing should employ more, in the face of increased productivity, That’s a claim that manufacturing should replace other endeavours in the economy which, is a complex claim at the very least.

It is a complex claim but I'll make it really simple. We import most of the things we rely on. Everything from plastic toys to car parts to critical medicines are all imported. Letting yourself become totally dependent on other countries while our STEM grads are underemployed, and would-be manufacturing line workers are forced to do bullshit like driving for Uber, is no way to run a country. It is going to backfire one day unless there is a major reversal in the trend.

[bluGill]

Engineers are not ordinary jobs though and so the plite of the 'common man' is irrelavent.

[wakawaka28]

You can't have so many engineer jobs unless you have manufacturing, and if you did have manufacturing then there would be "common man" manufacturing jobs too. It's all connected. Every job market that is really critical for national security is depressed by this outsourcing and importation of cheaper goods and labor.

[bluGill]

because of automation there is often a lot more engineering jobs. one 'man' with a laser cutter can do the work of 50 with saws.

[lotsofpulp]

>Maybe the profit margins for software are higher.

This is easily confirmed by checking public financials of publicly listed companies. The profit margins are much higher, and the liability is much lower. The only exception is for those hardware manufacturers at the cutting edge whose products cannot be commodified, such as TSMC and ASML and the ilk.

[marsRoverDev]

I've been told that acceptable software margins are around 75%. Hardware focused yields closer to 20%-40%. Hence why there is such a strong push towards software-only.

[petesergeant]

> I don't know why the software industry hasn't suffered more along the same lines

Growth of the software industry isn't constrained by the cost of capital