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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

The insane amount of work that goes into QA of consumer electronics.

I also now viscerally understand how China has a stranglehold on world manufacture of electronics. The concentration of skill, infrastructure, and related industries in Shenzhen or other Chinese industrial cities is unequaled in the USA. We have utterly given that up to Asia.

Back to QA: I learned what "DPPM" means: Defective Parts Per Million. A modern, large-scale production pipeline measures failure rates at the per-million level. Also, the amount of iterations in developing a product for mass-production. From that perspective, a well-produced thing on Hackaday barely qualifies as a proof-of-concept, from a production perspective.

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> We have utterly given that up to Asia.

It's now obvious to me that recovering this capability in the US would require decades of focused investment and trade policy. The Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is just that, a debacle. Scott Walker is an even bigger fool than I thought. I've lost hope for the US political class to have the concerted will to enact the required policies and incentives.

On the other hand, the amount of money you can actually make on electronics manufacturing pales in comparison to the money that can be made selling software for those devices. The margins in electronics suck, and this is coming from someone who really enjoys doing electronics design.

It's also worth noting that in a lot of areas the software effort required to make things work well dwarfs the work that goes into the physical hardware, both in terms of money and engineer time. Anyone can spin up a board with some chips but actually doing all the bringup/drivers/DSP/UI requires a ton of skill and effort.

I think it's probably ok to let Asia have this and worry about staying ahead on all the tons of stuff that has to go on top.

> I think it's probably ok to let Asia have this and worry about staying ahead on all the tons of stuff that has to go on top.

Why does it have to be mutually exclusive? We should have a strong manufacturing base in addition to being strong in software and "stuff that has to go on top".

Specialization and development takes resources away from other things. Just getting people to move in any given direction alone takes political capital that could otherwise be used for other things.

That's not to say we should abandon it as there are national security concerns inherent to not being able to manufacture electronics in the country, but we shouldn't stress ourselves over being the world leaders in the maximum possible generation of plastic+FR4 shit.

> Anyone can spin up a board with some chips but actually doing all the bringup/drivers/DSP/UI requires a ton of skill and effort.

I disagree. As an embedded software engineer myself, there's a ton of driver work out there that's hacky, low-quality work coming out of cheap areas... and we still rely on it. The niches for high-value software design related to hardware are shrinking rapidly.

Mechanical Engineer here: DPPM has been around forever at least since six-sigma and Total Quality Management was touted to improve Japanese manufacturing after WWII.

Today it seems the Six-sigma fad is over and everyone is trying to be lean and agile, even in businesses that need fat and slow to management complexity.

That physical manufacturing seems like some form of wizardy to people now just shows how containerized our product ecosystem has become, people can press buy now on amazon with no understand of how the thing was made.

I kind of forget that NPI (new product introduction) engineering is second nature to me now after nearly a decade of training, but to being able to robustly deliver a designed and manufactured physical product seems hard to many.

Indeed, coming from the software world (as I suspect many HN readers are), concepts obvious to production engineering are novel to me.

The insane amount of work that goes into just manufacturing.

The United States prides itself by having high-value functions like design, while offshoring manufacturing. But manufacturing consumer electronics is no longer simple. We have given up on manufacturing these electronics completely.

> The United States prides itself by having high-value functions like design, while offshoring manufacturing.

And looking at the meteoric rise of Huawei, Xiaomi, and Mediatek, I have no doubt that the US will lose that lead sooner than we think.

> We have given up on manufacturing these electronics completely.

I don't think it was the American people so much as it was the CEOs who were pandering to Wall Street in their quest for ever-increasing shareholder value.

It's so short sighted because good product design and design thinking led projects need to be close to the production methods to design to and for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking

For those wondering about this, I recommend some of the electronics factory tour videos on the YouTube channel Strange Parts. Even a small component manufacturer will generally have automated inspection of in-progress items on the line, automated test harnesses for functionality testing, x-ray machines for verifying connections, human QA of a subset of final products for functionality, and human QA of final product aesthetics. An interesting note on this is that it's getting noticeably more automated over time thanks to improvements in computer vision, cameras, and sensors.

Unfortunately, software seems to have gone the other direction with many companies ditching their QA departments and relying solely on "Developers Own Quality" initiatives.

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