Hacker News Reader

Comment by kokokokoko | Hacker News Reader

Can I inquire how you recruited and what your minimum requirements were?

It seems like you said something a highschool students could do but then you discuss masters degrees.

I've personally found that a lot of employers still hire like it's 2009 during the great recession. Sometimes these days you have to be more creative. Like hire an additional manager at $80k and then hire workers at $40k and have that manager be more hands on.

When an economy is expanding, it is statistically impossible to fill all positions with experienced workers because there are now more jobs than there were before but the same amount of experienced workers. The opposite is true during recession when the economy shrinks. In that case there are a surplus of experienced workers because the amount of jobs have reduced.

Please don't take that as criticism, I just wanted to shed some insight into hiring based upon the rate of growth in an economy.

View on HN

Yes, we surely tried the usual "worker demographic," but got people who can't distinguish volts from amperes and miswiring simplest assemblies even with the most detailed assembly instructions possible...

Electronics assembly requires at least a high school level knowledge of things like physics for a person to just to have an idea what, and what for he is doing, and what each component does.

It does not work as a "fully mechanistic process" where assemblers are treated as brainless robots. It requires cognitive skills, despite of high class "creative" people hating to admit that.

> Electronics assembly requires at least a high school level knowledge of things like physics for a person to just to have an idea what, and what for he is doing, and what each component does.

At least in the state where It each, that means they know nothing about physics. Literally, all that's required is an introductory course split between chemistry and physics. Time constraints means the second one usually gets thrown under the bus, and they barely talk about the laws of motion, let alone electricity.

So, basically, these employees probably do have high school level knowledge of physics.

I think what is really meant is science literacy. You need some sort of context to be able to understand the meaning of resistance, polarity, serial vs. parallel etc. It isn't that hard of course, but when there is maybe a hundred different things you can't purely memorize them all and expect to be efficient, especially not when things change.

That said, basic physics in bloody useful as well. I was always a shitty student, but I am constantly surprised people can't even figure out that they need to use physics to know certain things. In contrast with things like economics, physics is actually quite forgiving for the layperson when it comes to casual discussions about e.g. transportation.

It was stupid on my part, but I remember being surprised in an undergrad Physics I lab when our inclined plane motion experiment matched predicted results so accurately.

I went to a decent high school with science labs, but most knowledge seemed so abstract. How often do you do accurate chemistry in everyday life?

Classical mechanics, on the other hand, is most of life. Everything moves. And it felt pretty magical that suddenly I had math that could predict the future.

If your manufacturing process requires your line workers to be making judgements that necessitate "distinguish[ing] volts from amperes", you have a fundamentally flawed manufacturing methodology that cannot and will not scale (as you apparently have seen firsthand).

> If your manufacturing process requires your line workers to be making judgements that necessitate "distinguish[ing] volts from amperes", you have a fundamentally flawed manufacturing methodology

This way of "thinking" is what has happened to manufacturing industry in the states.

It works totally fine in factories staffed with thousands of "poorly educated" workers in China, but not in USA. Why?

Chinese workers aren't poorly educated as such, even if those still exist of course. Contrary to popular belief what make China succeed in manufacturing is ample supply of semi-skilled workers. A lot of Chinese factories aren't that sophisticated overall. In a smaller factories equipment might be domestic Chinese or second hand Japanese/Korean equipment. Every few days, or even multiple times an hour, the machines needs help or maintenance. A light will go red and a machine operator will come an poke it for a bit until it works again. Poking a machine a bit is like a revered hobby in the west, if not a $100k job. And you can barely buy a screw retail. All so the rich can get richer through rents.

This is a good point. It feels like we've chased hyperefficiency in the West by specializing processes and workers.

The end result is that you have great jobs, but no good jobs. Because you've eliminated room for them in the economy.

Or even worse, we still a lot of the really crappy jobs. Where people have no education and very little security. Basically anything that requires some sort of community seems to be diminishing. Which is really the multiplier for human activity. Seemingly even nurses, teacher and policemen are struggling now and it is hard to deny that those professions are pretty crucial to society.

So, I can speak to some of that authoritatively. I work in enterprise process automation and date a nurse.

From what I see, any deterministic back-office job that can be documented is gone by 2024 in leading enterprise companies (various tech). With first-order analysis jobs following in another 5 years (basic feedback ml).

In critical professions, there's a labor-vs-capital struggle. There's a critical shortage of workers (e.g. a nurse can get a job anywhere, tomorrow), but they're seen as cost-centers by the for-profit companies that are managing most of the employers (i.e. hospitals). So you get sluggish wage growth and chronical overwork / shortages as the management companies optimize for financials by delivering just enough service.

"light will go red and a machine operator will come an poke it for a bit until it works again"

This was exactly what I remember, and literally the guy will take a tool that is not a hammer, a screw-wrench, and hit the shit out of the machine like it was a hammer, and then loose some screw, and then bang-bang again, and then tighten some other screw...

Even the young, like 26 y.o. guy , from faraway Sichuan Province thats works doing this will receive a respectul title...

... and will be called a "Gong" (engineer) For example, if the guy's name is Zhao, he will be called with respect even by the bilionaire owner of the factory with the name and title: "Zhao Gong".

Some old Eletric/industrial design like 66 years old are making good bucks still kicking, no one is at Key West drinking margheritas...

If you take a look at my earlier comment you'll notice I mentioned adding additional managers which directly train and supervise the workers.

China tends to have a much hire ratio of supervisors on the actual assembly room floor as opposed to in the office. In the west, many would consider it micromanaging.

Not sure if would have made a difference in your case, but just wanted to mention it.

I'm going to guess it's because they have an engineer or two hands-on fixing and optimizing the process (not the individual assembly tasks) to avoid this problem. I doubt the workers themselves are that different anywhere in the world.

He was probably just giving an example, right, not literally requiring someone to know the difference amp/v, he was saying that the guy was bad at electronics.

I find surprising that this was hard to understand.

Logic and common sense on text comprehension are at it's historic lows, it seems.

The wiring of PLC control panels with servo motors, vacum-pumps (AIR-TACs) and All the moving parts of big machinery is the Slowest job at a chinese machinery assembling factory.

It looks complicated at first, then you see it everyday a lot and it starting to look easy.

Then you try do do it by yourself in a PLC that you have programmed yourself in the simplest and smallest model of the machine and you see that is actually very hard job to do.

Its actually like programming, because if you wire the wrong little cable among hundreds of little cables then you have to "debug" the wiring to see where was the damn little cable miswired...

In this place she was a 16 old girl, who had a son at 14 or so, from GuangXi province, very beautiful mountains but also has poor areas , but she was so nice and so patient and so good-hearted, it was unbelievable.

And she would wire cables all day, but not fast, slowly...slowly...because is hard.

And she learnt everyday from the 60 or 70 years old Shifu (Master, like in the kungfu movies)

I never met a better human being in my life, 100% sure, like this little girl from guangxi.

probably made around 350 USD a month. Poor child. I still have her wechat contact, I will rescue her someday...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com