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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

(www.molsonhart.com)
842 points putzdown | 2 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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NoTeslaThrow ◴[16 Apr 25 15:02 UTC] No.43706451[source]▶
We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people.

> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.

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glitchc ◴[16 Apr 25 15:09 UTC] No.43706516[source]▶
Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

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1. apercu ◴[17 Apr 25 10:39 UTC] No.43715014[source]▶
> Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work.

Maybe only tangentially related to your post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately. After many years of doing all kinds of tech and business consulting gigs, I decided to somewhat specialize over the last 3 years and have been spending some time on LinkedIn this year.

What I can't figure out is how (arbitrary percentage) 30% of the people I follow do any work when they are on LinkedIn posting/commenting on posts _all_ day.

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2. hattmall ◴[17 Apr 25 13:55 UTC] No.43716918[source]▶
The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual business. It's typically something like the business hires a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company. The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-english speaking coders locally.

It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.