Hacker News Reader

Comment by magic_smoke_ee | Hacker News Reader

You're making a pretty awkward value judgement about what a "good" engineer is, but you're describing an unethical one with a bizword like "value engineering". I realize ethics are no longer understood by much of Western society because the culture teaches transactionality, worships trickle-down economics and greed, and hyperindividualism.

> It isn't that. It's pressure at the shelf that does it. Consumers behavior simply does not reward equivalent-feature products with premium components that claim (true or not) to have a longer lifespan. Unfortunately, they will buy based on their uninformed sense of quality first.

This is a failure of marketing and buzz of the sales channel(s) and manufacturers to educate properly, not the failure of the customer.

View on HN

A good engineer is one that has a job, doesn't put their employer out of business, and produces work that fulfills the requirements they're given.

Many people think there's some unethical conspiracy going on, and consumers actually want a product that lasts a long time, but companies are refusing to give it to them. But this is projection of individual preferences on to the market as a whole. Consumers want cheap shit that is in fashion, and their buying preferences prove this time and again. Maybe you want a 50 year old toaster in your kitchen, other people are buying products based on other factors.

If consumers really wanted to pay a premium for high duty-cycle equipment with premium lifespans, they can already do that by buying commercial grade equipment. But they don't.

If you are familiar with the history of home appliances, you'd probably come to appreciate the phrase 'value engineering'. Even poor people can afford basic electric appliances now because of the ingenuous ways that engineers have designed surprisingly usable appliances out of very minimal and efficient designs.

If you look at ads for electric toasters 100 years ago, you'd see they cost over $300 in today's money adjusted for inflation. Thank god for value engineering.

A good engineer provides value to society. If they fulfill requirements that are bad for others then they are not good engineers.

I seems to me that there is also a social dynamic to things. If consumer grade products become a race to the bottom then it is going to become more difficult for regular people to purchase products which aren't low quality. There's also a degree to which society (e.g. in the form of government policy, cost of living adjustments, etc.) factors in differences in prices.

The fact that poor people can now afford to own some household appliances isn't a huge value to society?

It completely changed the way our societies operate. I think it is a good thing that people have the option to buy crappy washing machines, rather than being forced to use the washboard and bucket my grandmother used. Yeah, they sometimes do develop a bad belt, or the timer mechanism might fail. But it beats being unwillingly forced into homemaking as a career.

The world only has so much wealth to go around, and that isn't the moral quandary of the engineer picking an item on a BOM on Tuesday morning to fix. If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty. At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted that could have been spent elsewhere.

> If anything, squeezing a few more pennies out of that BOM is going to lift some people at the fringes out of poverty.

If it squeezes a small but solid chunk out of product lifetime too, then it's also likely to harm people on the fringes. If they can buy it with one less month of savings, but then it breaks a couple months earlier, they're probably worse off. (For actual pennies divide both of those numbers by some orders of magnitude.)

Yeah, walk up to someone in the hood and tell them that for 15% more they could have got [insert product] that last 2x as long. You're gonna get punched in the face, because they already know that. They're not dumb. What you're missing is the time-value of owning something now, which is greatly amplified when life is tough.

People don’t want to walk their clothes basket down to the laundromat for one more month while they save for the nicer washer that lasts a little bit longer. They want the cheap one now, because they just got off some shitty shift at work, and they’re sick and tired of lugging their laundry down the street. Having a quality washer [x] years from now is not a desired part of the equation. Immediacy is of higher value.

1. Immediacy doesn't help once it breaks and you can't buy a new one for years.

2. If everything lasts twice as long for 15% more, you can get a half-expired used one for even cheaper.

> they already know that. They're not dumb.

I think they're not dumb and they already know it's extremely difficult to figure out which brand fits that criteria, if any, so it's not worth it because it's such a gamble.

> it's not worth it because it's such a gamble.

That's also true. At the individual unit level, small differences in MTTF/MTBF are negligible because product failures are naturally distributed anyway. The mean time is just a mean, and nobody gives a shit about a good mean product failure rate when theirs happened to fail below the mean. That's true no matter how much you spent.

(Butting into your 2-person conversation to point out:)

> At the opposite end of the product value equation, every unused and functional component in every product that is no longer in service, is wealth that is wasted

This also is a counterpoint to your position though: of everything that goes into say, a fridge, it’s all wasted in 5 years now because Samsung chooses to put a PCB that is barely fit for purpose and will just fail with an error code, and because instead of putting such a failure-prone part behind a door and using an edge connector so it can be swapped in 5 minutes, they bury it God-knows-where in the chassis requiring an $800 labor charge, and charge $300 for the part. (As though that PCB is actually more complex than an iPad logic board, lol). So the whole 600 pounds of steel, refrigerant, insulation, glass, ice maker, and the compressor goes to the dump since who would invest $800 in a fridge that could have the same failure in a month and only the part is warrantied (you have to pay labor again). The poor people you’re worried about are buying these components over and over again because the appliance makers like this system. All this is done in bad faith. They’re morally bankrupt compared to their grandfathers who made appliances that lasted decades.

Engineers are to consider public safety first. This is not negotiable for real hardware engineering. Poor people could always purchase used appliances.

I agree that products shouldn't be unsafe. And value engineering does not mean making products unsafe.

> Poor people could always purchase used appliances.

The reality in mid 20th century US demonstrates this isn't the case. Most went without the modern appliances that are commonplace today.

> If consumers really wanted to pay a premium for high duty-cycle equipment with premium lifespans, they can already do that by buying commercial grade equipment. But they don't.

That costs a ton. I just want a better lifespan, I don't want to 20x the duty cycle and also pay B2B prices.

It's too hard to figure out which consumer products have a better lifespan, so companies do a bad job of catering to that need. This makes companies try too hard to be cheapest, and they often fall below the sweet spot of longevity versus price. Then everyone is worse off. That's not the fault of the engineer but it still means the engineer is participating in making things worse.

> That costs a ton. I just want a better lifespan, I don't want to 20x the duty cycle and also pay B2B prices.

Therein lies the problem. A more durable product exists, and yet, even you don't want to pay more for it. And you are likely much more privileged than the rest of the world. What do you expect the rest of the world to be doing? Most of the world isn't picky about whether their hand mixer has plastic bushings or ball bearings. They're are choosing between any appliance at all and mixing their food with a spoon.

> It's too hard to figure out which consumer products have a better lifespan, so companies do a bad job of catering to that need.

There are many companies that try to break this barrier over and over, with tons of marketing material proclaiming their superiority. Why do they all fail? Because their hypothesis is wrong. The majority of the mass market doesn't want appliances that last for tens of thousands of hours. Most people use their appliances very lightly and for short periods of time before replacing them.

I think a lot of people on this forum have points of view tainted by privilege. Poor people aren't dumb, they know that they are buying cheap stuff that doesn't last as long as more premium options. They're making these options intentionally because a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush to them.

> A more durable product exists, and yet, even you don't want to pay more for it.

This is disingenuous as hell.

I want to buy a version that cost 15% more to make. I don't want to buy a version that cost 3x as much to make (or is priced as if it does).

When I can't find the former, that is part of problem. When I don't buy the latter, that is not part of the problem.

> They're making these options intentionally because a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush to them.

The best way to have the most birds in hands on an ongoing basis is to optimize for both price and lifetime per dollar, not just price.

> I want to buy a version that cost 15% more to make. I don't want to buy a version that cost 3x as much to make (or is priced as if it does).

Well, it just doesn't work that way. Premium components that truly extend product life are multiplicatively more expensive than what you'll find in value engineered products, if not exponentially so. Furthermore, a product that is 15% more expensive than competitors won't sell 15% fewer units, it will sell significantly fewer units, and then your fixed costs will also be higher, on top of the higher BOM costs.

Quality products with measurably longer lifespans in pretty much any product category are significantly more expensive than lower quality equivalents. The entire global manufacturing industry isn't in on some conspiracy.

You are the one that came up with the 15% number. And you also said that the difference between a 5 year washing machine and a 30 year washing machine is probably "a matter of tens of dollars". Why is it suddenly multiplicatively or exponentially more expensive? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit, and I'm focused on consumer duty cycles.

It's not a conspiracy when a product that is somewhat more expensive but lasts much longer per dollar doesn't sell well, but it is a market failure.

I think it if was clear at a glance that such a product lasts much longer, there'd be enough buyers to avoid the low-volume costs. At least in many markets for many kinds of product.

The 15% number was in a different context in a different thread: "walking up to someone" in public, which presumably wouldn't be about an appliance because people keep those in their homes and don't walk around on the street with one. In that context I was thinking potentially a clothing accessory or something. Either way, the point in that thread didn't matter, because it wasn't about the number but about the socioeconomic impact of immediacy on quality of life. Doesn't matter if it was 10% or 1000%.

> And you also said that the difference between a 5 year washing machine and a 30 year washing machine is probably "a matter of tens of dollars". Why is it suddenly multiplicatively or exponentially more expensive?

You're conflating my statements about BOM costs and the final price of the product, which are two entirely different things. Demand is not a constant for your product at any price (because the market is likely elastic, and you have competitors). Demand will go down as price increases, often sharply. If you add tens of dollars in BOM cost, your product sells fewer units as a result, and now you have fewer units to spread the (potentially significant) fixed costs across. So, unfortunately the tens of dollars in BOM cost might mean hundreds in cost to the end consumer.

I think if there was a way to see the quality the sales would not drop like that.

But if you insist they would, then we can talk about a world where that level of quality is the minimum. Somehow. I don't really care how. It would be better, yeah?

If you really care, you can still get an excellently-engineered $300 toaster today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAbz9mfaj0

> I realize ethics are no longer understood by much of Western society because the culture teaches transactionality, worships trickle-down economics and greed, and hyperindividualism.

You realise incorrectly, I would say. It's very defensible to claim that Western society has the most - by a giant margin - social, economic and technological advances in history, and to boil it down to this is just a bit silly, in my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com