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Comment by antoniuschan99 | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to figure out how to bring manufacturing closer to North America. For example, getting a prototype batch of PCB's from Advanced Circuits cost ~$400 for 5-10 pieces. Whereas it costs ~$30 from Seeed Studio.

The quality is obviously better from Advanced Circuits, and it doesn't take a whole month as it would from Seeed (I've heard good things about OSH Park and they're US Based).

The quality of Chinese products is improving, and the parallels with the history of Japanese tech are strikingly similar.

In terms of software expertise, I think the talent is still in North America. The hardware expertise though is somewhat non-existent. I'm surprised there's no city like Shenzen here.

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Check out DirtyPCBs too. Based in Shenzhen but offers next-day DHL. Usually a 4 to 6 day turn-around time for me; great prices and good quality too.

If you're in a bigger city, also check out some smaller shops near you. There are a few nearby in the suburbs of Chicago for me and sometimes I go to them for quick turn-around time and a price that's higher than DirtyPCBs/Seeed's, but much closer than Advanced Circuits'.

Do engineers in China view software engineering as a kind of "second best" or even "third best" pursuit when compared to hardware engineering and manufacture?

Talking to some hardware engineers from Japan gave me the sense that they really think of hardware as the more "noble" or "higher" pursuit when compared to software engineering. They don't necessarily think of software as a really interesting challenge. Or something like that.

I know this is all very vague. I'm not sure about these attitudes at all. Curious about your take on it.

I'm not sure but we know that the government invested into manufacturing. Perhaps Electronics Manufacturing was a byproduct that came from that? I think they're in a better position for the future if software innovation does slow down and hardware innovation continues to accelerate:

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-firmware-engineers-paid-a-lowe...

Software and Hardware is pretty fragmented now, and it seems its converging because of IoT and availability of cheap hardware.

In terms of noble pursuits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763367

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