Hacker News Reader

We build our own cameras and write our own drivers here in Amsterdam, and sometimes get requests from other companies here that rather pay more than trying to explain their projects to Chinese manufacturers. Some industrial cameras we buy from Basler and the guy who builds them lives right around the block in a village close to Amsterdam. So maybe it's coming back around.

As an engineer I have a really strong opinion about only finance being left in Europe and all the engineering being outsourced to cheaper countries.

I personally think in tech the ladder to the top is made so you have to switch to management at some point in order to promote any further. I see managers and people that actually want to volunteer to become a manager instead of an engineer as the root of this problem. At my company we organize the hierarchy more like a hospital or a law firm, with the best engineers having the highest positions, just like partners at a law firm.

I work at a product design firm here in the US, we're also organized like this. Engineers that can deliver end up getting more clients, so it does end up somewhat like a law firm (their hourly rates are still higher, which IMHO is crazy..).

We also make cameras, I've become the MIPI expert.

Our bread and butter includes mechanical design, PCB design and firmware / FPGA design. This maybe sounds like basic stuff, but includes things like RF and COMSOL / ANSYS physical and mechanical modeling and simulation.

A startup company in India hired us: they had plenty of software developers, but wanted experts to de-risk the hardware and low level firmware.

https://www.nklabs.com/

Our experience with Basler was pretty bad. We got a few daA1280-54uc and all of them had insane noise levels. Their German support never took us seriously and just argued that our 10% noise level was normal.

Basler Vision Beijing later confirmed that it's a firmware issue and indeed switching from RGB to YUV reduced the noise to less than 1%, but it left a very sour taste that the support team in their supposed headquarter didn't recognize a noise issue when we sent them test pictures, like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ahht53ht6moa40g/Image__2021-04-07_...

Also, the marketing photos of dart Cameras had a "Made in Germany" sticker on the back. Ours shipped from the US (to Germany) and didn't have a "Made in Germany" sticker.

In the end, our client then decided to go with a custom camera. They wanted full control over the FPGA firmware to avoid future issues like this.

> And lastly: Most embedded C/C++ jobs went to China! We used to design hardware and firmware in the west. But nowadays, you just book a Shenzhen shop to design, code, and produce your product.

That's a key part of my depressing realisation in the last five years or so (my realising, not putting a timeline on the happening, that's rooted in industrialisation basically I suppose) that practically everything is just marketing. Some tiny amount if product and then just marketing.

It's 'drop shipped' 'import' 'Chinese tat' with its bizarre fonts & 'brands' and unintentionally humorous instructions that clued me on to it, but now it's everywhere. Hand soap. As fancy as you like, essence of bullshit and aroma du markèting, it's all made in a big stainless steel vat.

Greengrocers have to be the one avenue you can still find authentic no-nonsense products. Even then you basically have to go 'ethnic'. A British mainstream supermarket will charge a couple of quid for a pathetically sized, masses of food miles (and time) short-dated pack of some herb; the grocerywali opposite will gladly sell you two big bunches, far fresher, for less. I don't really get that? Even in the British supermarket they'll sell you a 10g glass jar marketed to white people for £2 while the same bloody thing is £1/100g (and in that sort of quantity, i.e. spend less for more) on the other side or in the next aisle in a plastic bag sold as 'world foods'.

(I've probably digressed enough...)

You're sadly not wrong. I've seen the financials of selling bikinis.

$2.5 product + $9 shipping + $20 in facebook ads => sold for $75

As for supermarkets, the main difference is probably what they charge you for placement. If you (the manufacturer) want your product inside a supermarket, you typically have to rent the shelf space from them. And depending on where inside the shop that shelf space is located, it'll be priced vastly differently. That is also one of the reasons why you typically only see high-throughput high-margin products close to the cashier, e.g. sugar candy for kids.

But I feel like on the electronics side, it's not that obvious. When you need access to electronic components, being close to the markets in Shenzhen is a huge advantage. Shenzhen engineers can just walk over, chat to the manufacturer, and buy some sample products. Western engineers need to read the spec sheets and then wait 2 weeks for the samples to make it through shipping and import clearance. Also, some top-notch components only have descriptions in Chinese, because the manufacturer knows that 99% of their market is selling to other Chinese companies, so they don't bother producing an English datasheet.

The result is that Shenzhen shops are not only cheap, but also better quality.

> Ruby on Rails just has a much better bang for buck than C++ and customers know it. Powerful hardware is dirt-cheap these days, so nobody wants to pay for the extra +50% you get from C++ over JavaScript.

Depends. Use cases with highly constrained hardware SWaP where inches, ounces, and watts matter, the expense to optimize may well be worth it.

You'd get a lot more than 50% from C++ over Javascript (and definitely way more than Ruby)

But probably not compared to Rust, Go, Kotlin, or Java. Few people are going to opt for C++ for an internet-facing web service given the multitude of better options.