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Comment by frant-hartm | Hacker News Reader

If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value.

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Unions add the same kind of value whether you're writing a Hollywood screenplay or assembling a Tesla because you have the same relationship to capital either way.

The same divide/conquer tactic was done 100 years ago when owners of mines in Pennsylvania pitted white and black miners against each other.

The actual distinction doesn't matter to the owners provided it divides labor. Anything that makes you feel special and separates you from people in the same boat as you is fair game - whether that's the intellectual needs of your job or just plain old racism.

Do I have the same relationship to capital? A miner’s relationship to capital seems pretty plausibly adversarial to me: capital buys a bunch of tools and shafts and scaffolding, asks miners to use them to pull coal out of the ground, then pays the miners a fraction of what the coal sells for. My relationship with capital is that rich investors send money to my company’s bank account and they forward it directly to my bank account.

Rich investors send money to your companies bank account. Upper management then pays as little as they can get away with. You might have “shares” in your company that gain value in an “exit” event, but have you looked at how those payout structures are arranged? Mostly the investors and “founders” are paid out first with great returns. What little is left gets divided up amongst the rest.

There is value in an investor paying for the shafts and scaffolding. The investor also takes the risk that coal prices will fall (eventually the miner is laid off, but the investor takes a lot of the risk)

Mines also had investors and they also paid wage bills before the company was profitable. Did you think that they did not?

>If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value.

Have you worked on an assembly line? I have.

You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.

So there’s a cap on the maximum value (always doing it on time), and a cap on the minimum value (never doing it).

The above poster takes the position that the ratio between the maximum value, and minimum employable value is less than 10.

I think the distinction is the relationship between the median performer and the 90th percentile performer. The two are very different employees for software development but not on an assembly line. As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer and the 10th percentile performer on an assembly line, but that's not the comparison the parent comment introduced.

>As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer

But I didn't say that, and I don't agree.

I think the 90th percentile never causes delays on a particular station, while the median may cause a few per hour, and the 10th percentile might delay every 2nd or 3rd cycle.

There are tangible costs associated with those levels of performance.

Generally you design your cycle times so that the median performer never is late. Remember if each median performer has 1 delay per hour, on a line with 100 workers that mean each cycle there is a delay somewhere and so the line always moves slower than expected. How much slack to add is a complex question, but you have to assume there will be delays. The 10th percentile cannot be allowed to delay the line, so you have to deal with it (training, fire them, give them faster tools, or switch to a station they can do in time come to mind, there may be more)

This is a completely different argument though and irrelevant to the comment chain you replied to. Everyone involved may even agree with you - why did you frame it as an argument against the claim that there is less capacity for 10x performers?

> You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.

This makes his point though. There is no capacity to be 10x more productive.

With all due respect, why are you both talking about yourselves as if you were machines? If your job is so mechanical it can be automated, you're screwed. If it's not, but your boss wants to downsize it bc "savings", a union would help you.

That depends on the assembly line. The assembly the car line works like that: you get 45 seconds (or whatever time) to put your part one, then the car moves to the next station.

However I know of assembly lines where things spend several hours at each station. The people (often as many as 10 people per station) all work together for that time putting different parts on. If you can do the job faster than the time in station you can take an extra break to do what you want. Such lines are generally planned so that if you work as expected you get a 20 minute break when the lines move, most teams work faster and get a 30 minute break, almost never does some team get less than the 20 minute break planned.

The car model assembly line is the most efficient, but it has high costs. When you make a lot of something it is well worth those costs, but if you are only expecting to sell 100 "things" per year it isn't worth setting up the line.

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