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Comment by topspin | Hacker News Reader

You look for reasons and inevitably get handed the same old story; the pandemic. Except this was happening before the pandemic. Yes, the problem is worse now, but components having been getting difficult to obtain for a while now.

It's consolidation of manufacturers worldwide and centralization of production in select parts of Asia. Lack of competition, in other words.

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It's a familiar story.

Companies think they can save money by outsourcing engineering expertise. They think they can save cost by outsourcing everything to suppliers. So their financials look great, but that's absolutely misleading.

Then you have companies like SpaceX eating everybody's lunches, and to my surprise, still eating everybody's lunches.

Would you say SpaceX has been eating a free lunch, then? Sounds about right.

That reminds me of this article about how companies/countries/continents lose their tech knowledge:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

That was very insightful. A bit of a rambling read but worth it.

Incredible read.

This is nothing new, it’s just the MBA syndrome. Go to any MBA school and they’ll tell you how sales is a clear “profit center”, while engineering is a “cost center”, and that companies are made more profitable by “internalizing profit centers” and “externalizing cost centers”.

The ridiculous part is that this has extended to the point that subcontractors have other subcontractors, that have yet another subcontractor...

There was a good comment about it recently which moves the blame to automotive and their inventory management. Not sure if it's true, but it's a good different take to read. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931498

Again, this theory relies on the pandemic; "For some reason in early 2020..."

If you're in the business and have to acquire components you know with high confidence that component scarcity did not start with the pandemic.

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