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Comment by lobsternumber1 | Hacker News Reader

I think it comes from a basic lack of respect or understanding of the actual skill requires to work an assembly line properly. Highly educated creative class are trained their whole life to look down with disgust on the people who do repetitive labor. The name shows it.. They call it unskilled. And yet how many of them could do it?

It takes an enormous amount of focus and concentration, the ability to learn complex routines quickly, to create efficiencies without breaking rythyms or rules. All while being payed less and treated like a second class employee.

Why is toyota different? Because they dont think like this. Line workers are thought of highly. Their ideas are integrated into the system. Most of all they are not disposable cogs

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> The name shows it.. They call it unskilled.

Fun fact: This seems like a very American thing to me (that is being imported into my culture). Where I live apprenticeships (2/3/4 years work and school) are frequently required for assembly work and the like, and has usually been seen as a solid way to make a good living. In the last 10-15 years there has been a pronounced rise of arrogance against journeyman ("Gesellen" i.e. those who completed an apprenticeship) and state-certified technicians ("Techniker" i.e. those who completed an extra two years of school on top of an apprenticeship; this usually entails a bunch of other additional qualifications and certifications); parents act like their children are failures if they don't manage to study at an university and put immense pressure on them.

Rationally speaking that doesn't make any sense; Gesellen and Techniker work full-time years earlier than anyone who goes to university and often climbed the pay ladder quite a few steps in those years as well. Depending on the profession they make good money. In some professions even a lot (e.g. industrial field service can pay six figures all things considered).

University and Abitur (the highest level of secondary school) aren't for everyone, but parents act as if it were so, often with detrimental effects to their children.

50% of all German school students graduating this year will be awarded with an Abitur. The changed view of learning a trade isn't just in the peoples minds, it's actually encouraged by the government. Thanks to the Bologna reform, the old way of going to a trade school is being looked down upon and graduating from college is the new default. Even when you are completing trade school, you are nowadays often awarded with a "Fachabitur" which again encourages people to go to college.

In my city for example the number of college students doubled within the last 10 years. Rents for small apartments got raised accordingly, obviously, and this put more pressure on blue collar workers to put their children into college.

Likewise the latest fetish for teaching CS to all school kids.

Nothing wrong with exposing as many children as possible to coding. Forcing them isn't good, but making sure that in grades 1-4 they get to play good logic/coding games in computer lab time is a plus.

Why is the government encouraging this?

Even for basic assembly jobs? I doubt a time served mech apprentice would want to take that job :-) let alone a Techniker (which is effectively what I did albeit in a hyper specialised area Thermofuids which had been set up to cater for the local industry)

The tech world seems particularly self reinforcing of this mindset. If your immediate job title doesn’t sound appropriately “tough” then you’re a fool and ignored.

Here’s hoping I’ve just ran into a round of bad eggs.

Otherwise I’m glad to hear about jobs that cannot be automated away.

>If your immediate job title doesn’t sound appropriately “tough” then you’re a fool and ignored.

And hence why programmers decided to appropriate the word "engineer" for their title...

And "architect". Oh and those that work on "old" software are "maintenance" developers.

We have an "Enterprise Architect" where I work, with several minions under him. His primary role is to hold a wet finger up in the air, sense the air currents, then plunk said finger down into Gartner's 'magic quadrant' and select whichever company/technology it landed upon.

I think for Tesla, it is less about the workers and more about the entire design process at other companies that they're skeptical of. There are alot of items in the product design and manufactoring for GM, etc. that are there because "they've always been done", and it's difficult to tell from the outside what's important and what isn't.

Toyota's approach is different in that it takes in more input from people on the manufactoring line who are actually doing the work. It also helps that when they were getting up and running, their geography meant that pretty much everything they need is in a relatively short distance and they can make changes without needing to worry about long shipping times.

The "Big Three" which cares more about central control of the product and using their size to get everything done more cheaply. Their advantage is having the world's largest economy available to them so they have many suppliers to choose from.

Tesla's approach is that they're better at the technology and if you can throw more computers/robots at the problem eventually you can conquer anything. I think they're learning that this isn't always true, but it's still one of those cases where they're going to reach for the toolset they know best first.

The pen versus the hand. What you do manually isn't expanded on paper, procedures and books. Yet it does require finesse, patience, precision, attention.

There is a whole range of trades that go into making a car I doubt that any one working on the line is "unskilled" in the formal definition of the term, semiskilled is probably the term for a lot of line workers

But there is a difference between a time served machine tool setter and some one working on the line attaching wheels.

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