I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
Factories, were like that. Giant Mills, Planing machines, vacuum forming tooling, welding stations, etc. Configurable, yes. Tooling, yes. It's why ford, singer and a hundred other american factories could start making bombs, guns and anything during WW2. You had machinists who could read a drafting diagram, and drafters who could draft anything up.
Today, could we do that? probably not. Not even - we don't have the basic bootstrapping tools in capacities needed, we don't have a wide group of people with the skillset.
So yes, you can make anything in a factory designed to make mostly anything
With specialization, especially like in the auto industry, you'll have one shop in mexico that gets an order 6 weeks ahead of time and has to deliver down to the day on the production schedule of ford to supply say a car headrest, and thats it. So, could we... today... maybe?
I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
Its still one of the summer jobs I look back on with a wistful what-if. I worked in a small (10ish employees) factory in the 1990s. I selected, bent and inserted resistors into fire alarm PCBs. If I'd been there longer than 6 weeks I think I'd have learned more about it. But I'd already lined up my next job at the pub a few doors down.
Any pointers how to get into that? I think I’d enjoy it. Was at a company that did manufacturing, and I was supporting it, but factories were in China and I was in the US.
Super cool, what did you make? How large was the factory? How did it work out? One observation from my experience, the closer you are to production, the more stressful things are. But probably scale changes experience. For me, working on stuff that entered automotive production lines, anything that made the line stop or go slow was insanely stresful.
I loooove the idea of teaching children inspiration instead of intimidation. Everything in the built world was made by a person just like you and me. That person may have had special training or unique experiences, but we too can move towards training and experiences and build/do cool things.
One of the ways I try to do this with my kid, is to try to investigate what's behind what we see and interact with -- with technical stuff it's asking how it works and how things fit together, with social stuff it's asking what's going behind the scenes and getting involved with it. Then reflecting on how cool the technical thing or event/social machinery is and what function it serves. This has been generative of tons of great questions from my kid and great discussion with them.
I don't think awe demoralizes children the same way it does adults. Kids want to be an astronaut, president of the United States, et cetera. They're still dreamers.
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
I do think though that the astronaut, president, etc roles are imaginable. And that seeing the crazy automated factory with all manners of machines drillings stamping etc, that that is much harder to imagine oneself doing. The making of that factory is not on display, just the output of the human. Trying to emphasize the human, the role itself, is I think what Matt is getting at, and that needs to be imaginable.
I think it's appreciation of the world and people to look and think, "some people did that". So many people working together globally to produce anything you see, sometimes over decades and many lives.
This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
I admire Chinese industry quite a bit myself, though I haven't yet completed my pilgrimage to Shenzhen. Just a quick clarification about the healthcare plans, though. As a single-person LLC I'm able to get a non-fancy Kaiser Permanente plan here in SF. It's not super cheap or anything but it's there.
I don’t know about health care but a lot of stuff in the US is set up for megacorps and individuals but nothing in between. As an individual you can easily get a self funded 401k plan. As a small business you basically can’t.
Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.
There's 'sourcing agents' whose job is to coordinate the garages. They don't work for any of the garages but as a westerner you'll get in touch with the "electric motor guy" who knows all the factories to contact for that particular purpose. They'll meet you at the airport gate and you essentially pay them as a guide to negotiate the shanghai business environment.
Yay and nay. That's only for very small manufacturing stuff. To assure the quality control and lower the price, it will eventually head to the large scale factory. The difference between what happened before and now is that, the minimum order quantity has gotten so low (thanks to CNC and computerization etc), now bigger factories can even handle MOQ down to 100.
I would advise you against going to those smaller factories -- QC is a nightmakre. Problems will arise. When you go to Canton fair or Yiwu for trade shows, I always, always, always recommend you to make a factory visit, and for the first batch, have a reliable Chinese person you trust to fly there and do the QC (if you hire someone that you barely know for QC, the other side might just bribe him off) and you will end up getting garbage when it gets to Long Beach port.
Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.
Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.
There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.
But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get.
Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.
That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.
Today, could we do that? probably not. Not even - we don't have the basic bootstrapping tools in capacities needed, we don't have a wide group of people with the skillset.
So yes, you can make anything in a factory designed to make mostly anything
With specialization, especially like in the auto industry, you'll have one shop in mexico that gets an order 6 weeks ahead of time and has to deliver down to the day on the production schedule of ford to supply say a car headrest, and thats it. So, could we... today... maybe?
If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.
I like the idea that we can teach children to feel inspiration instead of intimidation when learning how things work
One of the ways I try to do this with my kid, is to try to investigate what's behind what we see and interact with -- with technical stuff it's asking how it works and how things fit together, with social stuff it's asking what's going behind the scenes and getting involved with it. Then reflecting on how cool the technical thing or event/social machinery is and what function it serves. This has been generative of tons of great questions from my kid and great discussion with them.
If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
There is extraordinary in the ordinary.
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
Of course the US still biases towards megacorps who get to do things like distribute dividends taxed at capital gains rates instead of ordinary income like sole proprietorships.
I would advise you against going to those smaller factories -- QC is a nightmakre. Problems will arise. When you go to Canton fair or Yiwu for trade shows, I always, always, always recommend you to make a factory visit, and for the first batch, have a reliable Chinese person you trust to fly there and do the QC (if you hire someone that you barely know for QC, the other side might just bribe him off) and you will end up getting garbage when it gets to Long Beach port.
Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.
There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.
But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.
https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...
Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.
A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get. Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b12sOQ2hOF4