It is not that far either, I bet Software Developers do not have beyond 7 years for this to take shape and of course, those massive layoffs are just around the corner when remote works becomes the standard.
Not if we keep raising the barrier to entry by developing and making fashionable ever more complicated programming languages , libraries and concepts! /s
Their skills are just different.
QA is done with a keyboard but is considered less skilled.
Sculpting statues may use a water jet but would be considered more skilled.
So the question seems to me: what are people doing with these water jets in US automotive plants? How long does it take to learn? How much variance is there in ability? (We talk about 10x programmers, are there 10x machinists?)
Yes. Why wouldn't there be? Asking honestly?
A story, if you will-because I have a very intimate relationship with industrial machinists: My father was a certified industrial welder, pipe fitter and metallurgist for General Electric's gas turbine division for 32 years (he was also a licensed master electrician) He was the only individual in his functional team with the number of licenses and depth of mechanical engineering background to his name. He oversaw several manufacturing retrofits in their plant, and lead a team of 10 other engineers, all of whom through his time and tenure became family friends. I know all of their stories and backgrounds intimately.
When he left GE due to layoffs in the early 1990's, he opened his own shop and hired several of those machinists to come work for him. Despite getting to see this work daily, up close, and learn for myself the family trade of metal smithing (both of my brothers, my father, two of his brothers and my grandfather were all metal workers and passed down the trade through to my generation), I was the first to cross over the digital divide and go white collar as a full-time career, but I still have a strong appreciation for mechanized labor and I took this with me into automotive.
So, all of that said, to answer the question, I think yes, there absolutely are 10x machinists (I don't personally buy into the "10x" thing generally-at least not the way it is sometimes applied, but in alignment with your question, yes) and I remain firm in my objection that these people are less skilled because their skills are different or differently applied than ours as SWEs.
If I had a cent for every time I heard this in the past 25 years... it started with the 4GL craze, at least that's when I started. And look where we are now.
The truth is that software development is an inherently complex process. You can automate the menial parts of it (and you probably should), but can never tackle the core of its complexity. Writing performant programs is hard and always will be. Writing correct concurrent programs is hard and always will be. Constructing easily understandable and refactorable business logic implementations is hard and always will be. And there is no silver bullet.
The argument GP made was that someone in the EU can write correct concurrent programs for ~60k/year (and feel they are makng great money) instead of the 100k+ you need to pay someone in the US. Software jobs are even easier to offshore than car manufacturing plants.
yeah... but the choice here is political, it's not the natural forces of the market (it's rarely the natural forces of the market).
Working in Germany as autoworkers, you still get a more than decent wage. Sure, work is hard. But money is good.
America instead, decided to get cheap till the point to move plants to Mexico or Asia. It was a political choice.
Offshoring doesn't happen in a vacuum. And in some countries, offshoring hit harder than in others. For instance, Germany and Italy are still export powerhouses. This, again, was a political decision.
In the US the decision was to privilege financial and tech industry, more than production industry. It was a strategy, and like every strategy it created some winner and some losers.
Americans have to decide if keeping this strategy or trying something else.
The IT jobs that were like assembly line jobs (support, helpdesk, CRUD programming) has been outsourced like crazy to the rest of the world.