But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning.
By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.
Lines with specialty equipment and tooling can also often be sped up. That can allow for other jobs to be added to all the functions that support the processes involved before and after the specialty equipment.
New employees also often require training and some apprenticeship time, meaning they can get hired ahead of actual demand.
in tech cost of hiring is lower which makes headcount a much easier speculative bet and layoffs a much easier reset when the bet fails.
It's an entirely different cost structure.
My experience with seeing new shifts added is initially with only specific processes, and even with those it is with journeyman level technicians running a small crew to support relieving a bottleneck in production.
Alternatively, manufacturers can outsource until they have enough volume to add a shift, but across the economy the net is just transferring production from one facility to another.
Alas, gone are the days when engineers too required specialized equipment like a desktop computer on the desk that you couldn't move with you. Every evening, you left it at office and went home to live a 100% home life. Alas, gone are those days.
> By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations and unwind just as aggressively when those expectations change.
Software engineers also need
- specialized machinery (at least when they have to upload to some computation cluster or cloud), think for example of the costs for GPU/TPU clusters for AIs at the moment
- tooling: depending on the sector, the license costs for the sector-specific business software can be similar as expensive as specialized machinery
- mental capacity (instead of physical capacity)
> That low marginal cost
Not true. That's how everything falls apart. Scaling software teams isn't simple. There's lots to account for. Do you just assume everyone commit to the same file and let it crash?
The more people, the more work is required to standardize, organize, document and fix gaps. You can say you're already at scale and things "should" be done but they never are. You hire a team into a specific area to find it was a giant hack supported by a part-timer and as you try to fix it the problems keep escalating.
Does anyone know what the typical tool cost is for a factory worker?
(And the tool cost for a factory worker can be zero if you're hiring for a second shift - they would use the same tools as the first shift, just at different times. In contrast, I don't think there are very many places that ask programmers to use the same laptop in shifts.)
So, eventually they recoup the equipment costs, wouldn't get surprised if they even make a profit out of it sometimes.
First thing they do, they write off VAT (20-23% of laptop price). Then at the EOL, they just set the EPP price to the higher market value. And return the cost.
Not that everything has to be about the US, but it's weird to make a claim about the tech market as a whole that doesn't apply to its biggest single region.
The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context.
I also want to note, that EPP isn't the correct term here. For US, EPP would mean Manufacturer Employee Purchase Programs for New Products with a discount. Like, if you work for HP, you can purchase a product it manufactures at a discount price for your personal use.
The EU practice that I was mentioning is called IT Asset Disposition through employer to employee disposal program[0]. I don't believe big companies in the US get involved in employer to employee ITAD for lots of reasons. But in EU, it's a thing, much to my surprise.
[0]: https://www.mddp.pl/disposal-of-used-equipment-by-an-employe...
>The article goes into considerable detail about the EU tech industry. My comment relates to that context.
You know what, that's entirely fair. And I'll also note that American companies can claim depreciation to offset corporate income taxes, so there's some parity there, it's just s different mechanism.
It's probably lower. Apart from safety gear like helmets and gloves, everything else is most likely reused across shifts or shared across workers simultaneously (think industrial machines).
And, (assumption again) the factory boss doesn't have an incentive to increase idle worker numbers, where a dev manager often benefits from being in charge of a larger number of hardly working people.
All of a sudden it is no longer enough with a few shell scripts. No, we need a full kubernetes cluster to run a service used by 10 secretaries.
No, we can't just use PostgreSQL as a queue, we definitely need Apache Kafka for 1 msg per second.