Manufacturing Myths

According to Laura D'Andrea's Ideas Viewpoint article on December 12, 2005 issue of Business Week, even though the US economy was recovering since 2001 recession into 2005 for almost 5 years, yet manufacturing employment was still down 10%, or 1.6 million jobs, which would mean there were 16 million manufacturing jobs in 2001 and only 14.4 million manufacturing jobs in 2005.

She argues that the job loss is not due to the long believed offshoring of goods and jobs to low wage countries, but a 50 year tendency to reduce manufacturing jobs from 35% of the total jobs in 1950 to 13% today. This means machines are taking the role of humans, which is also referred to as "productivity growth". Cool! More automation means more software development jobs.

Or another possibility is that people are moving into sales.

She also argues that exporting more goods would not necessarily mean more jobs. She compares the US with Germany. While the US is the biggest producer of manufactures goods, Germany is the biggest exporter. (How did they measure this? Counting the amount of goods or adding their prices? If it is because of the price, I bet it has to do with how expensive a Mercedes is, compared to say a Chevrolet Corsa).

Anyways, she continues to argue that since Germany has bigger unemployment than the US, even though Germany is a high wage countries, it sells high priced products (calling them high value added sounds better, but the price is what we can measure, not the added value).

Therefore the conclusion, at least to me, is that the more industrialized a country is, the more automated their jobs are, and therefore, you can expect high unemployment. This means that people should be free to study and return to higher paying jobs, improving the economy and themselves. The question is how can a person study while having a job? He has no time to study. Now imagine the same person without a job, he has the time, but no money.

Therefore a very good way to motivate people into studying would be so that the government pays for their education while they are at a job, they would simply take some "education leave", and be paid their full salary by the government, for let's say one or two months each year. The government would have to pay the full tuition too.

Also for the unemployed, the government could pay up to six months of education every year. The rest of the time people should actually try to find a job or start a company.

It may seem bizarre for some people, but having lived in Chile, the US and France, the most striking difference is that in developed countries there are no people living on the streets. You may think I didn't search enough. But my point is that in Chile you don't have to search, we are all sorrounded by people who are living on the street.

Even people who have jobs are very reluctant to do their jobs, because they know they are being underpaid. They are underpaid because there are so many people looking for jobs, people who do not have the necessary qualifications. Yet most companies are packed with this people. It is as if it were too expensive to filter people. Or as if the actual result of the job didn't matter.

Ok, now you probably think I'm describing your office, but there are orders of magnitude of difference. I mean I had to recruit 15 developers last year and I interviewed 3 to 10 persons a week during 3 months. That's at least 36 and at most 120 different interviews, probably I was going to interview 90 or so. They were supposed to be engineers with at least 6 months hand-on Java experience.

10 of them, realizing that I was going to ask them to code, remembered they had a sick relative to look after them, or found another complling reason to leave. I'm glad they decided to leave and didn't make me loose more time on them. That would leave 80.

Half of them didn't know how to reverse a String. That would leave 40.

A fourth of the rest didn't know how to reverse a String recursively. That would leave 30.

A third of the rest didn't know how to search a binary tree. That would leave 20.

A fourth of the rest didn't know how to use a HashMap. That would leave 15.

And with just 15 people we impemented this whole huge system with 250 use cases and 400 different screens (combined together they form a lot more, we just haven't count all those pssible combinations), in just 6 months.

What we are doing is to industrialize software production. We are still at a stage in which most of the knowledge is art. But eventually we will have created all the meaningful code. Eventually the system will just be configurable and be able to do whatever the user expects, without developers intervention.