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1971genocide

As a engineering student I have been very frustrated about this.

One of the main reasons why I think engineering is failing in the west is the deep separation between the math and actual production.

Software is an exception and this is why the US churns out world class software engineers.

But I think rather and throwing more billions into teachers and saddling students with more debt it would be be much better if the mid-level technical jobs existed to allow mid-level engineers to learn from experience rather than excel purely symbolicly ( in maths )

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I call BS - I design in the west and manufacture in Schenzhen (and Shanghai) - you're only separated from the manufacturing if you refuse to get a passport and travel - it's a small world these days and the people a day away are friendly

The big truth here is in one of the last paragraphs of the article - Shenzhen (and China) is going through an accelerated industrial revolution - they're making many of the same mistakes the west made (don't forget the killer smogs of the 50s in London), and learning from them - Shenzhen has simply banned the 2-strokes scooters ubiquitous throughout Asia, replacing them with electric ones, petrol powered taxis incur a 3 kwai tax over the blue electric ones ....

To be fair that's often not a viable expense on a student budget.

compared to what you'd likely spend for a build in the US vs in China you'll still likely come out ahead, I'd argue that if you can't afford to go you likely can't afford your project

Isn't the contention "it would have been possibly affordable / reasonable if mid-tier manufacturing were still locally available in the United States"?

It is, you just don't know about it I guess. I spent the past 15 years working for Sanmina, another global high-tech manufacturer like the aforementioned Flextronics. Just within the US we had facilities in CA (Fremont, Livermore, Newark, Costa Mesa), AL (Huntsville, Guntersville), NH (Manchester, Derry), WA (Bothell), SC (Fort Mill), NC (RTP), TX (Allen, Carrollton, El Paso), CO (Louisville, Colorado Springs), AZ (Phoenix), UT (SLC) and more. These are factories building everything from simple injection molded plastics or PCBAs to stuff like MRI machines and military avionics. In the San Jose area we helped do DFM on Bloom Boxes for Bloom Energy, and designed & build massive storage arrays for Netflix.

Just because most people don't know about US manufacturing doesn't mean it's not still around, and in fact has hit recent peaks as the economy has recovered after the global recession (we'll see what happens now that economies are wavering again).

Yeah, but if your factory is down a flight of stairs, and you have daily face to face meetings with your Manufacturing engineers, who get involved with the product at the first meeting, it's a whole lot easier.

deep separation between the math and actual production.

This has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with management.

Take Tektronix, for example. They used to have world class engineering and manufacturing in Oregon. Then they got bought by Danaher, a conglomerate that exists solely to acquire and "monetize" companies, while not investing sufficiently in future R&D.

Now Tek is a hollow shell of itself. The remaining engineers travel often to China, where all the production is.

But a lot of non-technical people got very very rich in the process. So I guess it's a good thing. Right?

But it's also a yin and yang thing. Tek wouldn't have been scooped up by Danaher if they were able to succeed on their own. But maybe they would be even worse off if Danaher hadn't bought them? That's the eternal lifecycle of most companies. Scrappy startup -> successful -> ossified -> bankrupt or merged away.

That's the eternal lifecycle of most companies

Is that an eternal lifecycle?

Or is it merely one of the unintended consequences of a largely unregulated financial market that doesn't have the patience for research and development?

I keep thinking about acquisitions like Tek's and the incredible value that was accumulated over decades that's being destroyed in favour of a quick return and I keep thinking that 'market efficiency' doesn't lead to a lot of wealth.

Unless you manage a hedge-fund, I guess. Even then, though - they'll only be able to pick the meat off of the bones of western industry for so long - sooner or later the corpse will be picked clean and all of that wealth and technology will have migrated east. And no one in the east is so tolerant of that sort of selfish wealth-destruction and corporate vandalism as we are.

The financial markets have patience for R&D that actually pays off. Look at how much money companies like IBM and Intel are spending on shrinking design rules. Heck, IBM does a lot of research in a lot of areas.

The large unregulated financial market has plenty of patience for R&D by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. They just don't have patience for R&D by Danaher.

Assuming you were investing, would you personally be more likely to park your money in Danaher or Uber?

What kind of R&D is Uber doing?

Aren't they researching self driving cars?

Right you are. I didn't know this. They are indeed researching self-driving cars.

The only reason they get a "pass" is because their share price is too high for junk bond strip mining.

Their share price is high because greedy wall st types believe that they will make lots of money in the long term.

Amazon, Google and Facebook have protected themselves from the "limited time horizon" of the market. They have either small floats or class B shares, guaranteeing that the long term vision of the company is grounded on effective control by the ones steering the vision.

Managing future value is challenging. It's easy to say that the market is thirsty for value now. However, if you submit to a golden "invest in the future" strategy, your company may be inefficient (from an investor's perspective): Returns will be lower than what you can get elsewhere, meaning that the company should release funds to investors instead of investing internally. On the other hand, if you submit to maximizing local (in the time axis) returns, you'll surely forego disruptive jumps, their gains on efficiency and the future profit they entail.

It's not a simple problem.

The "protection" GOOG/AMZN/FB have may prevent hostile takeovers by Wall St if share prices drop, but it can't keep share prices high.

Given a choice, you have $10k to spend on either Uber, Facebook or Danaher shares. Danaher will continue to invest in the future, rather than being gutted.

Where do you park your money?

What are you suggesting? That companies be required to invest a portion of their earnings in r&d or be delisted?

Market efficiency leads to a massive burgeoning of wealth - for investors, producers and consumers. Look at everything around you. All produced by market efficiency ruthlessly killing off poorly managed, run or outdated products and companies.

The siren song of 'dem markets done me wrong' is a pleasant place to submit to - nothing soothes the soul like a blame-figure to pin the ills of the world on - but I would suggest thinking it through a bit further.

For a start, hedge funds have nothing to do with conglomerates acquiring businesses and failing to understand that business.

What are you suggesting? That companies be required to invest a portion of their earnings in r&d or be delisted?

What I'm suggesting is that the cost of entering and leaving a position in equities is now so low that it's become difficult to be an income investor, especially when there are so many growth investors seeking positions. And its only income investors who want R&D - growth investors carry axes to shareholder meetings.

I know that 'creative destruction' is a popular valley trope, but everything around you was actually the product of a whole lot of expensive R&D which is difficult to do now in 2015 unless you own a market and can tell your own investors, blindly demanding quarterly price growth, to go fuck off for a bit.

We have equity markets filled with investors all maximizing their portfolios by selling mom's and dad's silverware and china. Maybe Tek's name and reputation really is worth more in the next 5 years than the company itself. Fire the engineers and run lean until the market passes you by and you close up shop. But is that actually creating wealth? Killing off 'poorly managed companies' isn't creating wealth - it's a crude form of arbitrage. Real wealth always comes from new technology.

For a start, hedge funds have nothing to do with conglomerates acquiring businesses and failing to understand that business.

Hedge funds are a symptom of the same problem, which is that no one wants to be an income investor when there's more money in selling mom's and dad's house.

Sounds like they were junk bond strip mined.

In essence, a massive leverage is used to grab a controlling share, followed by a disassembly and sale to cover the initial leverage.

Shit been going on since the 80s, if not before.

Companies that could well have provided a steady income for generations end up being slaughtered for short term Wall Street profits.

"mid-level technical" - This is the position that has disappeared most rapidly in the last 20 years. It has been replaced by software in CNC machinery. The present and future mostly will rely on high-level engineers that are able to manage a large amount of machines and non-technical machine operators.

>One of the main reasons why I think engineering is failing in the west is the deep separation between the math and actual production.

It's not that. It's just not economically viable to manufacture in the west when western currencies are kept artificially high, Asian currencies are kept artificially low and Asian manufacturers face less stringent environmental and labor regulations.

Get a job or internship at the right company. I work for a hardware startup and recently spent two weeks overseas at our manufacturing facility along with two of our interns. The opportunities are out there if you're looking for them.

>engineering is failing in the west

Designed in California, Assembled in China, soon to be Vietnam or Malaysia.

And before China, it was Designed in California, Manufactured in Japan.

After SE Asia it will be Africa. Then who knows?

If the pattern keeps repeating, I speculate the end result is more consistent quality of living around the globe, labor costs would be a much less important differentiator. Country after country that used to be suitable for cheap manufacture has, as it grew & developed, become less suitable than some other country.

In the end, quality of living will increase world-wide until the cost of manufacture is roughly equal in all locations.

This is perturbed by a variety of costs that make it more expensive to pay an Elbonian worker $10/hr than an American worker $10/hr if the goods are to be sold in America- but it could close the gap dramatically.

> And before China, it was Designed in California, Manufactured in Japan.

Was it? I wasn't around for that time, but I was under the impression that in the pre-glory days of "Made in Japan" it was still designed in Japan by Japanese companies (which is how Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic got their starts). They didn't have the global manufacturing outsourcing we have today with "Made in China".

Whereas these days, any startup Chinese brands have to compete with international brands who can still enjoy the same cost of Chinese manufacturing

There was a lot of this in the PC hardware component / peripheral space in the 70's and 80's.

Probably not so much for end consumer devices, like you say.

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