[jonmrodriguez]

> In an interesting twist, the factory boss suggested that we could build the precision molding tools in China and then send these tools to a US shop for running production.

> This role reversal is an indicator of how the technology, trade, and know-how for injection molding has shifted to Shenzhen. Even if US has the manufacturing capacity, key parts of the knowledge ecosystem currently exist only in Shenzhen.

This is what really saddens me about outsourcing manufacturing from America, is that we lose the knowledge about manufacturing technology. Although we may be at the forefront of software development, in many areas of manufacturing technology the cutting edge development happens in China now.

I'd really like if we could bring about a revival in manufacturing engineering in the US. Other than the ecosystem effect, the main way that China has an advantage is labor cost, so I propose that we could build up a "Shenzhen of America" in the San Diego / Tijuana free trade zone. The repetitive work that takes a lot of hours would be done on the Mexico side, where labor is now almost as cheap as China. The manufacturing engineering and tool-making would both happen on the American side, bringing these jobs back to the USA from China.

San Diego / Tijuana are shipping ports on the Pacific, facilitating importing electronic components from China, Japan, and Korea, and then we could do all of the PCB fab, PCB assembly, injection molding, and final device assembly (as well as all tooling for all of these processes) over here in the Americas.

I'm very supportive of China's development but competition is good and as American citizens we can't just throw in the towel, we have to build our manufacturing knowledgebase back up and be willing to actually compete.

[Wogef]

>...we have to build our manufacturing knowledgebase back up and be willing to actually compete.

Some days I think this, other days not. There’s an old expression “box a wrestler, and wrestle a boxer”. Basically don’t compete on their strengths if you can avoid it. Better to fight a shark on land than to start taking swimming lessons:-)

The thing is- as huge as America's manufacturing gap with Mainland China is, the creativity gap is equally large. That’s a result of our much maligned Western educational system.

Art class in Mainland China is the teacher draws a bird on the board, all the students copy that bird. I'm not passing judgement on that- it's just a different system. When I was a kid in New York Public School- the teacher said “draw a bird” and we had birds in the park, Godzilla size birds destroying the city, robot birds- no two were alike. In China it's very much a color-inside-the-lines affair. There is a little movement here, but it’s very slow and only with very well educated Chinese parents who see the advantage: http://www.dddyin.com/portal.php?mod=view&aid=2580

Before a project with the scale and ambition of bringing back American manufacturing was launched, I’d like to see how this existing high value attribute could better be monetize and scaled. It will take a long time before we can ever hope to make things as well as the Chinese now do- but we can design better things now. The problem is profiting from that without stifling domestic innovation.

[jonmrodriguez]

You're definitely right - why not both? I'd like us to succeed in all areas. To use a very cliché word, there's a big "synergy" if we have both creativity and manufacturing in this country. For example, the product I work on is a pair of smart glasses with a computer inside. The idea is not unique, it's our innovations in engineering and manufacturing that let us make our product much smaller and more stylish than competitors. Our creativity is applied in solving these technical and manufacturing problems.

To make a metaphor with cofounders at a software startup: right now, the USA buying from China is like the USA is an "idea guy" / "business guy" who has an idea and access to capital, but no ability to implement the tech, and China is like an outsourced coder. But this duo is a little disfunctional, I wouldn't want to be either one of those characters. I'd much rather be the best of both worlds: a smart and creative technical founder who can have the ideas AND implement them. That guy's company will run circles around the other duo... As an example, SpaceX, by having both the ideas (reusable rocket) AND owning the factory, SpaceX can make rockets much more cheaply than competitors who design in the USA but outsource e.g. the engine production (ULA Atlas V rocket uses Russian-built engines)

[walterbell]

Some capital owners may prefer to use online labor marketplaces (e.g. 99designs, fiverr) to commoditize global creativity, drive down prices and avoid labor law obligations that apply to full-time employees.

[yourapostasy]

Much of this is the result of a single- or limited-iteration analysis of the manufacturing ecosystem by decision makers and policy analysts. Elsewhere in this thread, there are comments about how "blue collar" jobs are looked down upon by "white collar" workers. This excerpt puts the lie to that notion:

They had access to the factories, but more importantly, they had access to the trade skills (and secrets) of all of the big brand phone manufacturers whose schematics could be found for sale in shops. These schematics and the engineers in the factories knew the state of the art and could apply this know-how to their own scrappy designs that could be more experimental and crazy. In fact many new technologies had been invented by these "pirates" such as the dual sim card phone....There is a very low cost chipset that bunnie talks about that seems to be driving these phones which is not available outside of China, but they appear to do quad-band GSM, bluetooth, SMS, etc. on a chip that costs about $2. The retail price of the cheapest full featured phone is about $9. Yes. $9. This could not be designed in the US -- this could only be designed by engineers with tooling grease under their fingernails who knew the manufacturing equipment inside and out, as well as the state of the art of high-end mobile phones.

What happened was decision makers and policy analysts took a snapshot in time of the ecosystem throughout the 1950-70's, and decided that certain activities would be "low value" for all time, ever more, amen, period, end of story. What is ironic is that the same strata of high priests today are banging the drum of "innovation". You even see the hanging of the West's future hat on innovation in this thread.

While in software we deplore leaky abstractions, it turns out having leaky abstractions in that high priest strata would have been A Good Thing. Airtight abstraction of what the manufacturing sector actually does caused them to miss how the chaotic, unruly, boisterous activity they characterized as "low value" is evolution in action. More importantly, that activity enables a continuous Cambrian explosion of small, Fail Fast projects to take place in the interstices of the ecosystem in a positive feedback loop of constant improvement working hand-in-glove with design activities that cannot be matched by a top-down, centralized command-and-control system that separates design from manufacturing. The sheer economic inefficiencies strangle the top-down approach in a near "because physics" set piece explanation.

If you expect to innovate your way to economic success through design-heavy activities without a correspondingly massive, vibrant manufacturing ecosystem that surrounds the design/sales/marketing/management ecosystems, then you're gonna have a bad time.

For China to "win", that does not mean America has to "lose". For America to also "win" in the future in this landscape will take the kind of massive mindset change that is rarely seen in history. But if I had to bet money on any nation making that kind of change, it would be America. It might not happen soon enough for many people's tastes, but that's pretty par for the course for America.

[jordanbaucke]

That would probably require a revival of Americans actually having the motivation to go to trade-school to be a machinist, carpenter, electronics manufacturing technician, etc.

On the other hand the US is steeped in an omnipresent push toward the value of a '4-year degree' no matter the discipline.

Until there is a serious motivational shift toward technical-trade, America's workforce will continue to atrophy it's industrial knowledge base.

[clarry]

How are these jobs perceived in America?

I've found that if people even have any idea about what e.g. a machinist does, they tend to see it as a dirty low-paying blue collar job for dumb people. Which can be true, but it doesn't have to be this way. The problem in .fi is the divide between smart students (who go to high school and then pursue higher education, which means no skilled trades) and vocational education which is for the rest of the students, who don't get good grades or just don't care about studying, etc.

But there's a lot of cool tech involved in machining & fabrication, and if there was a programme that maintained the academic level suitable for the better students and combined the trade with e.g. mechanical engineering or mechatronics, I'd see a lot more people getting into it. I've also heard that in some countries there are high schools during which you also learn a vocation or two.

I think I lived through high school without ever hearing the word "machinist" or even knowing what it really meant. And I suspect this is the case for the other students I knew.

Today, I'm going to spend around seven hours playing with a CNC lathe. In the evening, I'll be attending another school to study machine & fab tech (it's an engineering degree). So far, I'm loving it :-)

[jordanbaucke]

Agreed 100% perception is a "big issue". At my engineering program we had the "ITLL" (Integrated Technology Learning Lab) which had a cross-discipline set of tools and laboratories (Machine shop, 3d Printers, Fluids Lab, Electronic workbenches, etc.)

Pretty much the only thing it lacked that I thought it should have had was a bio-engineering and/or chemistry laboratory, but there were those in the specific programs.

Even doing Computer Science, the exposure to using an a lathe and a 3D printer, was very eye-opening, and fortunately for the engineers, and imop one of the most useful learning tools at the entire major university.

It was the first time I actually felt like my engineering degree (or any 4-year degree from my University) was actually touching the real-world. It's a shame only a small subset of disciplines in engineering spent any real time there (and it was mostly introductory classes)

[jarek]

I got thrown into a machine shop as part of my engineering degree at a university-in-name-but-practically-a-polytechnic in Canada and in retrospect I am super glad. It was an excellent widening of perspective and gave me appreciation for physical side of the work (feasibility, implementability, etc). It is true I didn't give it much thought before.

[akgerber]

I grew up in Milwaukee, and my mother worked at the local technical college, so I heard about tool-and-die making and machining and so on growing up.

But the last 30 years or so haven't been kind to skilled manufacturing workers in the Upper Midwest, and on account of that I think most people who had other options avoided the field. I know one classmate's older brother became a welder, and he's spent a lot of time unemployed in the past few years.

[7952]

Practical skills are certainly seen as seperate from design. It is amazing how many engineers can't even use AutoCAD! What this article is saying is that in Shenzhen people with practical skills can also be creative.

[jordanbaucke]

Yes, being here in Hong Kong now, I'm going to try to find an opportunity to spent some more time in Shenzhen and def. want to look into some of these exploratory incubators!

[starky]

A lot of what you are suggesting is quite feasible today. I work for a company that does its PCBA's and final assembly here in North America. PCBA assembly is so automated that there is actually not much benefit to making them overseas and has a lot of added flexibility. Exactly the reason we are able to do that is because we are located close to a major shipping port.

Tool making is such a labourious process (even with all the CNC machines available) that I don't see it coming back to North America unless wages significantly increase in Asia. Other countries like Mexico or Malaysia definitely can or are providing competition with China on these fronts too.

[jonmrodriguez]

Good point about the tool-making being labor intensive, I guess I really mean the tool design should happen in the USA so we learn that knowledge. Ideally a corporate campus could straddle the USA/Mex border and have some buildings on each side that are just a walk apart.

[seanmcdirmid]

Forget about America, think about Germany. Many of their small/medium sized companies produce factory tools, and they still have great business in China, but that could change quickly.

[dbarlett]

Isn't that what a maquiladora [1] is?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora

[jonmrodriguez]

Yes! Although the term Maquiladora may have a connotation of low-tech work, e.g. textiles rather than high-tech electronics.