You do realise the main reason the things were so expensive initially was the labour cost (including repairing what came off the production line DOA) was so high?
We improved on this rapidly to the point we can get a far superior bit of kit for 1/100th of the cost
That kind of crafting women find second nature, that is why you find so many women on small part assembly lines, putting together things like electrical wiring accessories, MCB part assemblies etc. Its the muscle memory that allows them to do so without apparently paying that much attention to what they are doing, while busy chatting among themselves. It never ceased to amaze me or my customers when I would take a group of my consultants upto Walsall and later Ulverston in Cumbria and take them on a factory tour to see how things were made and demonstrate the 100% testing procedures. It never failed to impress new consultants and win more specifications on projects that included the products within them.
Personally, I know that I could never ever do that type of work, it would drive me stir crazy doing the same thing 100's if not 1,000's a day, 5 days a week so I would always give those ladies a big for their patience, putting up with bringing people round who would stand and stare at them working, a big box of chocolates always helped out there. As a side note, it also never ceased to amaze me at the huge number of families that all worked within these factories and the number of what was reputed to be arranged marriages, makes the mind boggle at what some of them got upto at breaktimes
If only. I worked for a large production line. Firstly the families in the factory had two massive problems : nepotism and politics. What they did at lunch time was back stab each other and smoke a lot.
Secondly the robot humans were employed were utterly shit if there was one tiny little problem or intelligence was required. One input protection diode on a board got soldered in the wrong way round in every board made for an entire day. Someone was running the lead former and stuffing the parts in foam for the stuffers decided to put the foam piece on in a parts tub a different way round. Of course the person just pulled them off the foam and stuffed them without even looking at the mark on the package or the board because they'd just always done it that way. Next person stuffs the next part in etc, frame pushed up the line. Then goes into the wave soldering machine, is inspected (missing this of course), cleaned, then another line to the parts that couldn't be wave soldered, then fitting with fuses. Eventually it gets to the bed of nails test fixture at the end. Fuse goes bang straight away, no power, goes onto the debug rack. Rinse, repeat. Until there are no working boards. No one calls ahead to stop production and dig a production engineer up. They literally emptied the entire line until it was broken and fucked off home.
During the investigation that ensued, it was everyone else's fault. The only truth was it was everyone's fault
Thanks fuck for SMD pick'n'place. Less humans involved in anything the better.
My mother and father were both in the same job at one time or another and had the same thing to report.
All I see is some very rose tinted glasses.
And me, I went into software. What the hell was I thinking?!?!?! It's even worse
Edit: this also reminds me of a little story I read once about someone working in a USB stick factory. Basically they'd buy flash chips that higher vendors discarded as "outside parameters", grade and test them separately, mount them on a PCB with a USB connector, set up a controller and throw it out the door by the sack full with a vendor's name on it. Well it turned out that there was a 5% failure rate in the field which was much higher than anticipated and their good yield was higher than expected too. So they investigated. Turned out that some of the flash was completely DOA. Reason? Turns out that some of the Flash sticks were never actually tested because one of the test robot humans couldn't always work out which way to plug the USB stick in to the test fixture and just swept them into the good bag
Anyway rant over. That was a long one