Although I never went, my company got a contract to do some automation work in Kuala Lumpur at an automotive parts assembly plant. My partner went there for a few months before they/he pulled the plug on it. Our contract was to improve overall efficiency with automation, so my partner (a PE in Mech. and Elec.) did the first visit just to observe and come up with a plan. One of the first things he observed was that their components were delivered to work stations by little old ladies with shopping carts reading from paper parts orders generated by shop floor supervisors with a pencil and a pad of paper. So one of the first things he suggested was a bar code scanner and automated parts delivery system using pneumatic tubes from the store rooms. They rejected it because they had a "full employment" law stating that any efficiency improvements that were planning on replacing people had to include something for those people to do. That began to pervade everything he came up with to the point of him just giving up in frustration and coming back home. That was a $1.4 million contract that he walked away from, but he said he couldn't take the restrictions they kept putting on him.
That was 1996 and at that time, they were still using British Standards by the way. While he was there, I was boning up on them, they are not all that different.
Interesting - all of it - but in particular the part about replacing jobs that have been replaced by automation with some other form of manual labor. Not to get political. But I think it is an interesting question to ask, what will happen when Amazon not only owes everything but also has all the robots and all the software to do everything. And it’s not beyond my imagination that the algorythms could be created for a pretty damn good electrical engineer,
But I digress. So we’ve ruled out degreed engineers on the PE path. Road blocs all along the way from 2 or 3 years of experience (and I’m not interested in degreed with zero experience and all the way through until they get the PE at which point they all want to be PM’s; Don’t know why they want to torment themselves with that. But I imagine its all about class and status..
So, I thought, how about a designer. Someone bright enough to have gone to school if he could have afforded it and someone looking for a way to get ahead via an alternative path all others being closed to him for want ot that degree. If you can find that person, you could pay him better than the engineers easily and he’d be well incentivised indeed,. I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m guessing there is an equal pay law I will run a fowl of. And what will happen when the engineers get wind of it? My next plan involves suitcases full of Malaysian cash. But that too requires connections To the right kind of people. By which I mean, the wrong kind of people.
