mazzi Chart Czar posted:

It's not a problem with the people doing the job.

It's a problem with the people who buy the items.

You may not eat fast food, But millions of people do every day because it's fast, easy, cheap enough, and addictive.
It's the same with cars, utensils, phones, pens, shoes, exercise equipment. A lot of the current entire culture is based upon a "use it once and throw it away" mentality. Landfills are filling up with trash. Nobody cares if they have a bad crappy part, they have enough money to toss it away and buy another in few months when it breaks.

Switchback posted:

Ok I'm going to focus on practical actions that can help you find some peace with your job, because obviously telling you "yup, it sucks, that's capitalism!" isn't the answer you want to hear.


Ok you're talking about managing down, that you're in charge of how people use the defective parts. You need to be managing up. Is every instance of a defective part getting emailed to every senior manager in your company, every time? People don't fix problems that aren't a blaring siren in their face, are you being that siren? Closed mouths don't get fed.

Obviously yelling at us is a total waste of effort, what are we going to do? Not sure if you're in this boat, but my experience working is that most employees bitch to the wrong people who can't do anything to solve the problem.


Make the consequence of failure be having to deal with your (OP's) shitfit. Escalate. Put the people who made this decision on blast so they look bad to the people above them (always with an economic argument and zero emotion, which is not how you've presented your case in this thread).

And if you can't make a strong economic argument that $XX is saved by using higher-quality manufacturer, well sorry then you have no case. The idea that one american manufacturer doesn't even bid because they can't do the full scope in-house means you need to write different scopes and manage more than one subcon. If that means YOU re-writing the scope and sending it back to your tender team, DO IT. People, generally, are pretty keen to accept work that's already done for them.

I know it's weirdly satisfying to be angry and rage at the internet about the larger framework of our economy, (and I'm sure I'm assuming you're able to employ more agency at work than you actually can) but you could use that emotion in more effective ways. Like, the world sucks, you're not going to change the entire short-term-profits-and-growth economic system by screaming at Something Awful Dot Com Goons, but getting your company to switch manufacturers because your existing supplier keeps providing defective parts should be a pretty clear-cut economic decision.


Countries that manufacture higher quality goods than America: Germany, Switzerland, EU (which is 27 different countries!), UK, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Japan and France. America # 8! (or like #35 if you count European countries separately)

American Exceptionalism is such a weird attitude.




Also maybe just wait, you don't think after coronavirus there will be dramatic shifts in our economy and supply lines?

Shadow0 posted:

Lol, I thought the same thing.

Page 1:
OP: ""
SP: ""
OP: "You clown, you fool, you utter baffoon!"

Every other post:
Everyone: ""
OP: "Hmm, yes, thAt's True."

Hearing about people's jobs is genuinely one of the best parts of SA.

What I'm curious about is how you need to be always ordering these novel parts? I would have thought by now you would have your trusted suppliers and you'd be all set to go. Are you constantly changing what you build? Or do you just occasionally need new people to supply the same parts? Or is it just people up top switching things up to try to save money?

JK Fresco posted:

They're straight up threatening us with this

Nastyman posted:

Time_pants posted:

This is the sort of thinking that gets a CEO bounced by the board of directors. The only thing that matters to shareholders is the next quarter. "This part costs $5 million and will last one year, and that part costs $20 million and lasts 10 years? Why'd you waste my time telling me about the second one? Give me the $5 million part! Gotta make this quarter's earnings call look good!"

Long-term thinking is not only discouraged, it is scorned and outright punished. The only time anyone in a position to meaningfully make these decisions doesn't give a poo poo about the cheap, shoddily manufactured part until it fails and results in enough deaths that can't quietly be settled out of court and they have to appear in front of the press to speak in platitudes, feign contrition, make empty promises, and offer vague assurances that they will "do better going forward so this will Never Happen Again" while secretly hoping that the share price won't dip low enough that they won't be able to afford a personal jet this year just kidding, they'll just lay off some employees to make up the difference and then use the savings from their "difficult decision" to justify a huge bonus for themselves and then roll up their sleeves, laying low, keeping quiet, do everything possible short of actually fixing the problem to fly under the press' radar until the news cycles.

Switchback posted:

Countries that manufacture higher quality goods than America: Germany, Switzerland, EU (which is 27 different countries!), UK, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Japan and France. America # 8! (or like #35 if you count European countries separately)

American Exceptionalism is such a weird attitude.




Also maybe just wait, you don't think after coronavirus there will be dramatic shifts in our economy and supply lines?

Methanar posted:

those chinamen just can't do as good of a job as a real AMERICAN

JK Fresco posted:

The crazy thing is that the dynastic conglomerates in places like Japan are actually less prone to this so long as the founding family is still in charge since they have a vested interest in the long term health of the company.

Some guy becoming CEO because he's the son of thr current CEO might actually work better than the current system

bluewolf78 posted:

I till tell you that some of the motors we built in this shop still last today

Time_pants posted:

Tarkus posted:

IT

Tarkus posted:

North American manufacturing has taken a hit in a couple ways.

The obvious one. it's cheaper to send poo poo overseas and inspect it here. For example, I had to have an injection mold made. We shopped around for local suppliers who all charged $25k to $35k which was well out of my budget. Plus, parts made with it were in the 2-3$ range in a quantity of 1000. I found a supplier in China who would do it for $5500 and the finished parts were about $1.50 at the same quantity. I was unsure but went with it anyways. The mold and the finished parts were excellent and all of the tolerances were met. We like to make fun of China and their quality but don't forget that we used to say the same thing about Japan. They just have to get over their culture of 'barely good enough' and they'll be kicking everyone's rear end.

A lack of tradespeople in North America. I remember being told in the 80's and 90's that if we didn't do well in school that we'd have to be tradespeople. This was a common thread throughout the educational system and culture in general. We were told that having a trade was for stupid people. Hence why we have everybody and their dog is going into business and IT, regardless of whether or not it suits their abilities. We've made the concept of being a trades-person unappealing thus we have far fewer machinists to train up and all of the older machinists are retiring.

When it comes to pricing and lead times, I think that we could be competitive here in North America but we've gotten lazy and complacent culturally. Many companies have so many layers of bureaucracy and overhead that it's impossible to compete with the smaller hungrier companies overseas.

We can rebuild manufacturing, but people are going to have to be willing to pay the price.

Time_pants posted:

Even something that virtually every other country has, such as paid maternity/parental leave, elicits such howling anger from an enormous segment of the population. And what is invariably the very first argument against requiring all employers to make maternity/parental leave available? "Wouldn't people just X, Y, and Z to take advantage of it?" Because that's how loving deep the poison has seeped into the American culture's veins: instinctually, our brains immediately track to how to exploit a system that should exist for the public good for personal gain.

I do not know how you even begin to try and mend what a culture so broken? How do you even begin to address a people with psychological scars that deep?

I dunno. They'll probably feel better if we announce a dividend for shareholders. That'll cheer everybody up.

Khorne posted:

IT is a trade lol. Most of it at least. And most workers are no different from tradesmen. The majority just do the thing they were trained to do in the first way they learned it. Over and over, even when it's not the best approach.

GATES FOUNDATION posted:

America closest in domestic social welfare to other settler countries that had huge numbers of slaves, like Brazil.

To answer the question, this country has garbage infrastructure and is set up inefficiently for manufacturing. Additionally, there's a huge mismatch between the kind of people needed for manufacturing vs. what the US trains. Something like 40% of chinese college graduates and 26% of german grads are engineers, while that number in the US is 3.5%. Business is the most popular major in the US, not engineering like in manufacturing-oriented nations.

Tarkus posted:

North American manufacturing has taken a hit in a couple ways.

The obvious one. it's cheaper to send poo poo overseas and inspect it here. For example, I had to have an injection mold made. We shopped around for local suppliers who all charged $25k to $35k which was well out of my budget. Plus, parts made with it were in the 2-3$ range in a quantity of 1000. I found a supplier in China who would do it for $5500 and the finished parts were about $1.50 at the same quantity. I was unsure but went with it anyways. The mold and the finished parts were excellent and all of the tolerances were met. We like to make fun of China and their quality but don't forget that we used to say the same thing about Japan. They just have to get over their culture of 'barely good enough' and they'll be kicking everyone's rear end.

A lack of tradespeople in North America. I remember being told in the 80's and 90's that if we didn't do well in school that we'd have to be tradespeople. This was a common thread throughout the educational system and culture in general. We were told that having a trade was for stupid people. Hence why we have everybody and their dog is going into business and IT, regardless of whether or not it suits their abilities. We've made the concept of being a trades-person unappealing thus we have far fewer machinists to train up and all of the older machinists are retiring.

When it comes to pricing and lead times, I think that we could be competitive here in North America but we've gotten lazy and complacent culturally. Many companies have so many layers of bureaucracy and overhead that it's impossible to compete with the smaller hungrier companies overseas.

We can rebuild manufacturing, but people are going to have to be willing to pay the price.

JK Fresco posted:

So if you're a white guy ehy wouldn't you skip the work and just get paid more to do less?

GATES FOUNDATION posted:

America closest in domestic social welfare to other settler countries that had huge numbers of slaves, like Brazil.

To answer the question, this country has garbage infrastructure and is set up inefficiently for manufacturing. Additionally, there's a huge mismatch between the kind of people needed for manufacturing vs. what the US trains. Something like 40% of chinese college graduates and 26% of german grads are engineers, while that number in the US is 3.5%. Business is the most popular major in the US, not engineering like in manufacturing-oriented nations.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

A lot about America makes sense realising that it never really got over chattel slavery.

Noblesse Obliged posted:

We’re finding the opposite with our molds. The prices are becoming similar to North America and we spent so much time fixing the ones we bought that we are pulling production back and now Eastern Europe is our new best friend.

That and China was jailing our citizens because they are mad about that telecom exec lady.

Tarkus posted:

Yeah, it should be said that I bought the molds 8 years ago. Prices in China have been going up across the board. That said, I wouldn't order anything from India yet. I've received crates of all manner of garbage that have had to be reworked or outright scrapped because the material was too poor or it was just hosed beyond belief.