Over at Exponential Industry we are working on making manufacturing cool again too! We seek to inspire manufacturing leaders by demonstrating the technological transformation ongoing within factories through videos, podcasts, and high-quality articles. Within the manufacturing industry, software, data, and AI skill sets are converging within factories which will re-ignite co-localization due to necessity of influencing product design and improving manufacturability. Industrial goods are becoming internet connected products and with that the margins are improving and (should) increase salaries in a way that is similar to the Big Tech companies.
Finally a detailed article on one of our current times most pressing problem. If we like it or not, the world seems to be unwinding globalization at least to a degree. The natural consequence is to bring manufacturing back to the US. Fully agree that we need to make manufacturing cool again, would just add that there is a technological answer to that as well. For those jung people that compare the tools to teach robots and program PLCs (old fashioned Windows applications) to modern software tools to build software in the cloud, there is mostly no question where they want to spend the majority of their waking hours. The vendor's of industrial automation need to also step-up, invest and move industry to the 21st century. Thankfully there is a few startups that tackle the challenge: Software Defined Automation Inc. , Full Speed Automation Inc. and Copia Inc. - still we need much more to tackle this challenge as a socienty.
Thanks for the comment! How do you see software's role in this? Could software enabled automation deliver the productivity improvements we need even with a dearth of manufacturing skilled labor?
Exactly along those lines. As a very concrete example one of our customers is able to schedule PLC updates that will take minutes instead of manually patching every PLC, which in this case would take hours. We take away the the heavy lifting and shifting. Being able to "script" factory behaviour the automation engineers get into a different job category - comparable to an Ops Engineer in software company - completely transforming the job.
Mar 20, 2023·edited Mar 20, 2023Liked by Sam Flamini
Woah -- this was an amazing piece of writing. As an Ivy League student from a big East Coast city, I am so ashamed and angered that we're not having more of these conversations in American colleges. Our future *literally* depends on it. The pipeline to finance and big tech is so real and heartbreaking. Thank you so much for writing this. Thought you might like this article: https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-never-worked/ Another related topic I'd love to hear your thoughts on is whether the American Dream is still alive and how attainable it is compared to the past. I was recently yelled at for saying I believe in the American Dream by an economist who said social mobility is so much harder than it used to be.
Also, I'm working on an urban studies-meets-CS project soon and will be heavily referring people to your work. I was curious if you've received any answers/gotten more info regarding the talent/career path questions you posed in the article since posting this?
Btw my Twitter handle used to be part-time tech optimist, haha, so I love the name of this.
Hey Urszula, thanks for reading this and for the thoughtful comment.
The response to this has been multi fold:
1-Some people questioned the premise of the argument and cited that market forces should prevail and that there really is no “shortage” if wages for mfg work are so much lower than big tech/finance wages
2-Others provided some variant of the “Americans just don’t want to work any more” argument and just kind of gave a general impression that this is a losing battle in its entirety
3-A third group (like yourself) really resonated with the ideas here and felt like this is a problem we should be taking seriously.
I do believe that it’s *real* that our ability to build in the physical world is declining and that it *is* a problem. Our path to this state of affairs has so many components: foreign & domestic policy, economics, culture, and even technology had a role in leading us here.
In terms of a “solution” to this set of problems that we find ourselves with today, I don’t have any clear answer. But I want to surface them, and I currently am trying to just *understand* them.
Step 1 was this piece which highlighted cultural forces pushing young Americans away from an industry that needs more attention. And the next step will be a more comprehensive post that I’ll be releasing soon on the economic & policy dynamics that led us here in the first place
Hmm - group one is an interesting take. If only more people realized how small-medium businesses (though not necessarily mfg) CAN make up for lower wages with higher quality lifestyle. Perhaps the rise of cities like Charlotte (and eventually Austin) are evidence of this starting. Looking forward to that next post! Thank you!
There's a surprising correlation (rather than tradeoff) between compensation and your work environment (good manager, competent colleagues, better tools). So workers rightly believe that when they take a pay-cut and a prestige-cut, they will also take a happiness-cut. This means that the solution cannot involve big old-fashioned companies like US Steel doing a PR campaign to attract smart, young, ambitious talent. It will require that VCs fund manufacturing startups which have "good work environment DNA" (and competitive-ish compensation) from conception. There are still, of course, difficulties with this: the YCombinator model probably won't work for manufacturing. Therefore, this might require more of the Flagship Pioneering-style VC-led model, where the VC firm would recruit mechanical engineering PhD students to commercialize their research.
I generally agree that 'big, old fashioned' companies are unlikely to be the leaders here, but I'm not sure that the startup ecosystem in its current state will either. As you mentioned, the YC model isn't great for this. YC (and almost all of the SV ethos) is built around creating software companies. Software is what venture funds know best, and to be fair, it has a lot of qualities that make it an attractive investment class: capital light, infinite scale, easy to pivot, etc.
The hard part about mfg startups is that they break the lean startup mold: iteration takes a long time, and more decisions are irreversible. Scaling a hardware co also requires much more than hiring additional sales reps and provisioning more AWS capacity. Leaders at these companies need to have really good judgement, or the company dies quickly.
In the end, it will take more than just financing for this sector to really thrive - it takes a new tradition of knowledge. You can see this being developed at places like SpaceX, where a ton of ex employees have gone on to build co's that have an impact in the physical world. We need 10 more SpaceX-like companies, and a generation of VCs who understand what it takes to build these sort of companies.
Great work, Sam!
Over at Exponential Industry we are working on making manufacturing cool again too! We seek to inspire manufacturing leaders by demonstrating the technological transformation ongoing within factories through videos, podcasts, and high-quality articles. Within the manufacturing industry, software, data, and AI skill sets are converging within factories which will re-ignite co-localization due to necessity of influencing product design and improving manufacturability. Industrial goods are becoming internet connected products and with that the margins are improving and (should) increase salaries in a way that is similar to the Big Tech companies.
very cool! I'll check it out
Finally a detailed article on one of our current times most pressing problem. If we like it or not, the world seems to be unwinding globalization at least to a degree. The natural consequence is to bring manufacturing back to the US. Fully agree that we need to make manufacturing cool again, would just add that there is a technological answer to that as well. For those jung people that compare the tools to teach robots and program PLCs (old fashioned Windows applications) to modern software tools to build software in the cloud, there is mostly no question where they want to spend the majority of their waking hours. The vendor's of industrial automation need to also step-up, invest and move industry to the 21st century. Thankfully there is a few startups that tackle the challenge: Software Defined Automation Inc. , Full Speed Automation Inc. and Copia Inc. - still we need much more to tackle this challenge as a socienty.
Thanks for the comment! How do you see software's role in this? Could software enabled automation deliver the productivity improvements we need even with a dearth of manufacturing skilled labor?
Exactly along those lines. As a very concrete example one of our customers is able to schedule PLC updates that will take minutes instead of manually patching every PLC, which in this case would take hours. We take away the the heavy lifting and shifting. Being able to "script" factory behaviour the automation engineers get into a different job category - comparable to an Ops Engineer in software company - completely transforming the job.
Woah -- this was an amazing piece of writing. As an Ivy League student from a big East Coast city, I am so ashamed and angered that we're not having more of these conversations in American colleges. Our future *literally* depends on it. The pipeline to finance and big tech is so real and heartbreaking. Thank you so much for writing this. Thought you might like this article: https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-never-worked/ Another related topic I'd love to hear your thoughts on is whether the American Dream is still alive and how attainable it is compared to the past. I was recently yelled at for saying I believe in the American Dream by an economist who said social mobility is so much harder than it used to be.
Also, I'm working on an urban studies-meets-CS project soon and will be heavily referring people to your work. I was curious if you've received any answers/gotten more info regarding the talent/career path questions you posed in the article since posting this?
Btw my Twitter handle used to be part-time tech optimist, haha, so I love the name of this.
On the American Dream.
This is a topic worthy of an entire post. However, it is something I think about a lot.
Hey Urszula, thanks for reading this and for the thoughtful comment.
The response to this has been multi fold:
1-Some people questioned the premise of the argument and cited that market forces should prevail and that there really is no “shortage” if wages for mfg work are so much lower than big tech/finance wages
2-Others provided some variant of the “Americans just don’t want to work any more” argument and just kind of gave a general impression that this is a losing battle in its entirety
3-A third group (like yourself) really resonated with the ideas here and felt like this is a problem we should be taking seriously.
I do believe that it’s *real* that our ability to build in the physical world is declining and that it *is* a problem. Our path to this state of affairs has so many components: foreign & domestic policy, economics, culture, and even technology had a role in leading us here.
In terms of a “solution” to this set of problems that we find ourselves with today, I don’t have any clear answer. But I want to surface them, and I currently am trying to just *understand* them.
Step 1 was this piece which highlighted cultural forces pushing young Americans away from an industry that needs more attention. And the next step will be a more comprehensive post that I’ll be releasing soon on the economic & policy dynamics that led us here in the first place
Hmm - group one is an interesting take. If only more people realized how small-medium businesses (though not necessarily mfg) CAN make up for lower wages with higher quality lifestyle. Perhaps the rise of cities like Charlotte (and eventually Austin) are evidence of this starting. Looking forward to that next post! Thank you!
There's a surprising correlation (rather than tradeoff) between compensation and your work environment (good manager, competent colleagues, better tools). So workers rightly believe that when they take a pay-cut and a prestige-cut, they will also take a happiness-cut. This means that the solution cannot involve big old-fashioned companies like US Steel doing a PR campaign to attract smart, young, ambitious talent. It will require that VCs fund manufacturing startups which have "good work environment DNA" (and competitive-ish compensation) from conception. There are still, of course, difficulties with this: the YCombinator model probably won't work for manufacturing. Therefore, this might require more of the Flagship Pioneering-style VC-led model, where the VC firm would recruit mechanical engineering PhD students to commercialize their research.
Hey Calvin - thanks for this comment.
I generally agree that 'big, old fashioned' companies are unlikely to be the leaders here, but I'm not sure that the startup ecosystem in its current state will either. As you mentioned, the YC model isn't great for this. YC (and almost all of the SV ethos) is built around creating software companies. Software is what venture funds know best, and to be fair, it has a lot of qualities that make it an attractive investment class: capital light, infinite scale, easy to pivot, etc.
The hard part about mfg startups is that they break the lean startup mold: iteration takes a long time, and more decisions are irreversible. Scaling a hardware co also requires much more than hiring additional sales reps and provisioning more AWS capacity. Leaders at these companies need to have really good judgement, or the company dies quickly.
In the end, it will take more than just financing for this sector to really thrive - it takes a new tradition of knowledge. You can see this being developed at places like SpaceX, where a ton of ex employees have gone on to build co's that have an impact in the physical world. We need 10 more SpaceX-like companies, and a generation of VCs who understand what it takes to build these sort of companies.