Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delfinom | Hacker News Reader

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>and a great education system. Those are the things automated factories need.

Disagree. I work with a few factories. There are barely any engineers on staff. Needing engineers to service the factory is considered a failure of automation. Instead the factories are maintained by great guys who like doing hands on work but most of them that I know don't even have college degrees. They are just capable of following instructions and basically are the guys who in older times would be fucking around in a machine shop or working on cars.

The engineers who designed the automation are actually from a design and service provider that can troubleshoot the machines remotely and tell the on-site techs what to do. And even that's rare because of the automation is breaking down frequently, you also have a failure of automation.

So I argue education really isn't required for automated factories.

I've worked with the factory techs before, and my experience was the same. The techs move assemblies from point A to point B, and hit the big green go button, and occasionally hit the big red stop button. They know how to diagnose failures that they've been given a runbook for. New failures they're clueless about and don't have even the first idea how to diagnose. For that, there's the engineers that designed the station and the engineers that designed the underlying thing being assembled.

Once the factory is up and running, the engagement of the engineers follows a power law distribution until the failure rate is below whatever is considered acceptable for what you're producing (starting point: 0.1%), at which point the engineers are fully disengaged and fully working on the next product.

Factories do not need engineers on staff other than for reconfiguring space to support producing a new widget and controlling the data flow from stations to whatever central repository exists within the factory confines.

The engineering isn't in the factory, it happens behind the scenes. Often in different cities from the factory .

One factory i supported has gone from 2000 workers in 1950 to 200 today, while producing somewhat more than before. The same quality of people are in the factory, but there are a lot less because of automation.

They are all contractors. It’s contractors all the way down.

The contractors need education though, especially the ones designing the automated machines.

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