Factories are just rooms

I find it interesting how far we've come so far from the mindset of "You can do that." There was a hilariously funny reddit post about someone who discovered that you could just blend peanuts and it would make peanut butter. But there was sadness there too. All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work. But I've always augmented that with "okay and this is how we'd make something like that." As a result my kids, now adults, always start with the mindset of "Somebody made this, so I could too if I had to." and that really unlimits the kinds of self constraints people put on themselves. When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles. And when I see someone building tools out of the abundance of capabilities that are out there I say, "Yup, they get it." 3D printing, inexpensive miniature milling machines and lathes, libraries full of books about making stuff. Its all doable, you don't have to buy it from a store and the one you make yourself will work exactly the way you want it to.

I worked for a company whose factory really was just a room - the company was a machine-builder, a B2B manufacturer of custom production equipment, but with very little investment in special-purpose machinery for its facilities or even machine tools, just an attitude that the company is the people and we can do or buy anything that our customers need.

In some ways that attitude seemed admirable, but ultimately it didn't help the company win or keep consistent business. You'd have gaggles of smart people building custom prototypes but nothing scaled up. The customers couldn't see the vision of scaling their production there, or just saw that they could get better pricing going to factory which had already invested in the right special-purpose machinery.

That's what a factory is to me - ideally reconfigurable, but a place with capital investment for production. It's good to show kids what's behind the curtain but don't get it mixed up with a prototype shop.

I setup and ran a small (10 people) factory many years ago in the UK. Hand assembly and a bit of soldering. It was the most enjoyable work I’ve ever done. I built custom jigs, worked with my team to improve the process, managed inventory, line balancing, work in progress, dispatching, deliveries, built palette racking, learned about kanban and buffers, wrote software to manage it, all working with a team of great people.

If anyone has the opportunity to work in manufacture or adjacent to it I highly recommend.

I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.

We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.

It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.

Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.

I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.

See "Maker Movement", 2005-1018.

Here's a practice factory that GM operates to train new employees to work on an assembly line.[1] There are plywood mockups of cars rolling on conveyors, and the new employees bolt things on.

A useful lesson for kids to get is how you make a hundred of something. The difference between making one and making many is not something most people get. Make something on a 3D printer. Then, for comparison, make a mold, and resin cast a batch of them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b12sOQ2hOF4

I agree that awe and accessibility are often opposed, and that children are easily inspired by things that feel tractable but not boring

I like the idea that we can teach children to feel inspiration instead of intimidation when learning how things work

This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.

Great stuff! Great! However, the issue is not, and has likely never been, that young people aren't willing to believe "they can do that". It's that most people, of necessity, are not good at both inventing, manufacturing (how to efficiently make that invention many times), and sales (how to get someone to buy it). Therefore, they will need to find someone willing to hire them to do one part of that process. And the modern labor market is not interested in training people on the job, they want someone who's already done the job somewhere else.

Not saying you shouldn't go tell kids about how things work! Just that the reason kids don't do that as much, is not primarily anything to do with education or the kids, but rather because the modern labor market has done its best to avoid ever having to give anybody a chance to do something they haven't already done many times before.

I don't think awe demoralizes children the same way it does adults. Kids want to be an astronaut, president of the United States, et cetera. They're still dreamers.

If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.

Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.

It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.

This is from someone that has observed Shenzen. A location where much is made in garage sized factories (usually literally a garage space at ground level where people will bang out products by hand).

You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.

The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.

The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.

> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.

Thank you for going into the classroom and offering the kids a glimpse into the world that makes our world tick.

I am the odd one out at HN since I run after school programs. Yet I remember my past and I am constantly looking for ways to shoehorn enrichment activities into the program, things that expand the child's world view beyond what the see at home or are exposed to in the classroom. Things like: this is the infrastructure that makes society work. It is encouraging to hear about parents stepping up to the plate and helping out with those efforts!

Neat, but sort of ironic their main product is an "AI clock" that takes an intrinsically human act, writing a poem, and pulls the human out of the loop.

It's nice that they explained the process to a bunch of kids, helping to de-mystify something quite abstract to many of us (where does all the stuff come from?).

I just think that perhaps we have over-indexed on STEM and this is a prime example of that. The article mentions talking about industrial designers, which is cool.

> I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest.

but what about the poets?

It's the sort of thinking that I've seen all over tech, where people are so focused on/obsessed with using technology to solve problems they seem to forget and lose appreciation for all the people that make their lives possible and enjoyable.

Anyway, cool article but don't buy the slop-flinging e-waste please.

First line of the blog the author states they spoke to the "year group" - what is that? I'm not familiar with the term.

I do think that this blog post is quaint and I find it hard to hate on a guy showing up at his kid's school and giving a talk—oh boy, remember when your parents came to school? Or anyone's parents. Especially a dad? Woowee.

The cynic in me can't resist remarks like "the children yearn for the mines".

Then another part of me thinks...how much of a factory is "just a room" to the people who are not its engineers, designers and owners.

Does the sweaty work in a factory net you the same sort of socioeconomic leverage that it used to? The other day I had a thought that a lot of 2000s sitcoms had dads who managed factories. George Lopez. Damon Wayans. Jim Belushi? Doug Heffernan drove for UPS.

You know, just think, in about 20 years some of these kids in that classroom may just be supervising the young adults of today who failed to make the right pivot in the labor market. The Lindy effect suggests that this blog will be around long enough to show those old guys this post to see if they agree.

Will future sweaty factory work be any good?

A word I heard a lot some decade ago but never anymore: social construction.

But I think it fits incredibly well here. A factory is just a social constructions. A room where everyone agrees something is produced.

That's a great post.

I like the spirit of it.

Even though I am no longer involved in hardware manufacturing, the same thing applies to software development.

I shared it with some friends that own/run factories.

I think it's appreciation of the world and people to look and think, "some people did that". So many people working together globally to produce anything you see, sometimes over decades and many lives.

There is extraordinary in the ordinary.

Follow me to read my next insights: Books are just letters. Rockets are just metal pieces.

I disabled quiet mode and I don't know what is revealed.

Servers used to be rooms as well. But they are now submarines.

Gonna be a bit of a downer and say, "The kids who need to hear what this guy was saying aren't in school with the kids whose parents are engineers." (Well, not all of them.)

so what is a software factory then?

Sometimes, a factory is just smoke and mirrors.

https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...

Now do factory farming. Just another room, right?

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