> No but my naivety thought there would be more automation in place to reduce walking, sorting and picking up heavy things.
Having worked in a non-Amazon fulfillment center, I’m amazed at the automation they do have.
Picking and packing product once it’s in a warehouse isn’t the difficult part. Unloading and loading the shipping containers, in my experience, is far more difficult.
To maximize space in shipping containers they can be packed floor to ceiling. I think about 22kg was the maximum weight of product I was unloading. Picture beverages stacked floor to ceiling in a 50 foot trailer. The optimal lifting position will happen for a small percentage of the boxes moved. You’re on your toes trying to pull product from above your head, then you’ll be bending over to pick product off the ground.
Palletizing the product for transportation within the warehouse also puts you in disadvantaged positions.
There will be some token training on how to lift correctly, but you will quickly be falling behind on productivity.
To achieve your targets there will be times when you’ll be lifting two boxes together. Or stacking them to be more efficient.
If you’re lucky and they see you working hard, they may give you a rest day by putting you on light duty once every two weeks. If you piss off the scheduler, enjoy your heavy rotations.
It’s probably a good thing to reduce the human element assigning this kind of work.
Also don’t forget not all product (e.g., heavy exercise equipment) arrives with intact packaging. Sometimes you’ll have to move this out by hand when a box falls apart and then repackage the material.
When you’re picking product there is often powered pallet jacks to get from point a to point b, but you end up taking short cuts and jumping off before the machine has reached a complete stop.
This work is still better than doing rebar or construction. At least you get a roof overhead and stay out of the elements.
People who are young and need a job will do dumb things to stay employed.
> Does this lead to the same sort of problems with the development of physical systems?
I would argue that physical systems aren’t developed in a “waterfall” method.
In mechanical design classes in engineering school, we learned to start with low fidelity sketches to capture customer intent. We come up with several options, build those into increasingly higher fidelity 3D models, use simulation to refine, take a few candidates and get physical prototypes, do physical testing (strength, endurance, integration, etc.), determine the best one, then go into limited production to prove out and establish the production process, then go into full production.
We are taught (and in the automotive industry it’s a requirement) to have cross functional teams involved in the design stages of both the item and the manufacturing process.
To your point about inadequate spec: My opinion is there are so many different backgrounds coming into software that there is no common language or background.
I think everyone thinks their way is better and it’s hard to communicate technical ideas when you need to constantly recreate and translate between terminology and documentation methods. This lack of convergence and common knowledge is what I think results in poor specs.
I guess it depends on how much leeway you can be given for using “almost nothing” and “remotest connection to anything technical”, but Wikipedia says Ford Motor Company was incorporated in 1903 and the first assembly line dates to 1913.
Engine blocks are still cast, sheet metal is still bent, pressed, and rolled so I think there is a lot of the original years still around. Yes, I’ll give you that there have been huge advances in sophistication, but it seems to me the early years are still present.
Not personally, but I worked in manufacturing and the company bought them.
The company is required to adhere to ISO and other certifications specified by the customer. In order to adhere to the standards, you need to have the current revision of the standards. If in your annual audit it's determined that you don't have the current revision, that's a non-conformance. Correct it by purchasing the new version.
Also, you need to pay for the "official training" before you start to get certified. And you need to pay for "internal auditor training" as part of the requirements.
ISO 9000 series, IATF 16949 series, ISO 14000 series, some welding ones, painting ones, ASME standards for drawings, Y14, IIRC.
And the Automotive Industry Action Group's (AIAG) "Core Tools" series of books. I don't think they are standards, but they are "customer requirements", which means you can't be certified without them. They are used for new product introduction, so you can't pass new part submission without following the rules in them.
> Technicians (also called technologists in Canada)
Nitpick: technicians and technologists are distinct in Canada. They operate at different levels in the stack as shown in [1].
[2] has some requirements for becoming certified as a technologist or a technician.
I agree with the rest of what you’re saying. However, this system has limitations (moving up in levels) that should be improved on before this model is adopted or imitated.
> What would be the purpose of loading disintegrating box anyway?
Sometimes you're unloading or on the receiving end of disintegrating boxes, and you need to unload the container the freight came in. This is to receive in the damaged product to your warehouse before you can claim it.
Two examples I from bring on the receiving end:
- ocean freight were water gets in through holes / damaged parts of the container that cause all the packaging material to breakdown
- beverages being punctured or otherwise leaking causing all packaging material to be damaged
In an ideal state, you don't have damaged packaging because you can use clamps, slips, or other specially designed conveyance equipment.
Wow, I keep hearing people like Tim Ferris and Dr. Peter Attia talking about using Metformin. I had no idea it is a diabetes medication. From what I keep hearing on random SV related podcasts, it's some anti-aging drug [1].
The article is talking about detached housing. In Vancouver I keep seeing the trend of several detached houses in a row being bought, bulldozed, and converted to low-rise condos or townhouses.
The supply of housing (condos, townhouses, duplexes) is increasing, it’s just people aren’t too happy with “lowering their living standards” by having to live in a condo or townhouse, or having to move out of their neighborhood to a suburb.
Land is an issue in Vancouver. We have mountains to the North, ocean to the West, and farm land to the East and South.
What little land is available does get converted to “dense” accommodations, but it could be more dense. For example, in my area 10 years ago there were maybe 3 or 4 detached houses on the land. Now there are 450 condo and townhouse units. This could be significantly more dense by building a high-rise (6+ floors I think) instead of the low-rise (5 or fewer floors). However, we don’t really have the correct road infrastructure to accommodate huge density increases. Pre-pandemic a 20-25 minute drive to work already takes around 1.5-2 hours during the weekday.
The detached housing that remains detached is converted from, for example, a 3bed 2 bath rancher to some sort of luxury home with 6 bed 4.5 bath. Doubling or tripling of value is not uncommon.
I can’t find it right now, but articles in the local papers have talked about changing communities from being all single family detached to a mix of condos, townhouses, detached. This way new buyers can start at a condo, move to a townhouse, then upgrade to a detached house as equity builds up, the family increases their income, and the family expands.
The problem with this is the people who own the detached houses don’t downsize when their kids leave, so these rarely come on the market, or people are buying more house than they need at that point in their life to counteract rising house prices.
Yes, people have expanded outwards. For example, my mom and step-dad moved approximately 1.5 hours East of their last house (now a 20 minute commute for my stepdad instead of the previous 60-70 minute commute). The problem here is that the house prices have risen here too for detached houses. Places on my parents street are 650-800k. Go over one block to the next cul-de-sac/ street and they go for 800k - 1.2 million. These are all new detached houses built [edit: on previously vacant land] in the last 3-5 years. Spreading out hasn’t actually caused prices to drop. Spreading out has done the opposite. They call it half-doubling or something here. Half the price for double the house if you move outwards.
Judging by partlysean’s response, “our industrial design team would use Rhino and then hand it off to the mechanical engineers to rebuild it in Solidworks.” I would think Rhino lacks the entire Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) capabilities that Solidworks has.
The Wikipedia page for Rhino says it’s a CAD tool, but Solidworks says CAD and CAE. So Rhino has a subset of Solidworks’ capabilities.
Engineers use CAE to help with determining how the materials, dimensions, and other engineering choices will be have under loads. So these have some similarities in that Solidworks can also do 3D modeling, which is used as an input to performing CAE.
Having worked in a non-Amazon fulfillment center, I’m amazed at the automation they do have.
Picking and packing product once it’s in a warehouse isn’t the difficult part. Unloading and loading the shipping containers, in my experience, is far more difficult.
To maximize space in shipping containers they can be packed floor to ceiling. I think about 22kg was the maximum weight of product I was unloading. Picture beverages stacked floor to ceiling in a 50 foot trailer. The optimal lifting position will happen for a small percentage of the boxes moved. You’re on your toes trying to pull product from above your head, then you’ll be bending over to pick product off the ground.
Palletizing the product for transportation within the warehouse also puts you in disadvantaged positions.
There will be some token training on how to lift correctly, but you will quickly be falling behind on productivity.
To achieve your targets there will be times when you’ll be lifting two boxes together. Or stacking them to be more efficient.
If you’re lucky and they see you working hard, they may give you a rest day by putting you on light duty once every two weeks. If you piss off the scheduler, enjoy your heavy rotations.
It’s probably a good thing to reduce the human element assigning this kind of work.
Also don’t forget not all product (e.g., heavy exercise equipment) arrives with intact packaging. Sometimes you’ll have to move this out by hand when a box falls apart and then repackage the material.
When you’re picking product there is often powered pallet jacks to get from point a to point b, but you end up taking short cuts and jumping off before the machine has reached a complete stop.
This work is still better than doing rebar or construction. At least you get a roof overhead and stay out of the elements.
People who are young and need a job will do dumb things to stay employed.