And why the reference to Geordies - natives of Newcastle - when the plant is in Sunderland?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motor_Manufacturing_U...
Google maps tells me those two places are only 14.3 miles away. So 1) that's pretty understandable to conflate and 2) a lot of people from Newcastle probably commute there.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne%E2%80%93Wear_derby
EDIT: Please forgive me for bringing this up. I appreciate it's not particularly relevant to moomin's comment about the culture of the Nissan plant, which I agree with aside from my nitpicks, nor to the original video.
Have a look at Greek and Turkey for example. Even their cuisine is nearly identical.
Or look at the adherents of the major parties in many countries around the world.
To avoid an American example: if you put a member of the British Tories or Labour into Japan, they will pretty much be seen as just some Brits.
Are you American? That's a long way in terms of cultural differences in the UK.
Why would you assume that?
That's a long way in terms of cultural differences in the UK.
Sure, but it's pretty insignificant to someone not in or familiar with the UK. Which is the vast majority of planet earth.
I didn't assume it - I asked.
> Sure, but it's pretty insignificant to someone not in or familiar with the UK. Which is the vast majority of planet earth.
Yeah... which is why I explained it to you, since it's unfamiliar to so many people.
Did you not want it explained to you?
In Britain, people from both places will leave their shoes on indoors at home, praise the NHS, watch football and think the queen is fine.
This is by no means a universal thing here!
And yes, even the queen is not universally accepted. Famously, the Labour party used to be republican, but seems to have mostly given up on that plank of policy.
In any case, my main point was that intense local rivalries exist, but actual differences between neighbouring places are typically fairly minor.
This can go very deep because as you know (but may be surprising to our American friends) in Europe we have much less cultural uniformity.
For example, in the two towns in Central Italy that I'm thinking about, which are only 15 km apart, people speak completely different dialects that are only partially intelligible one another.
A fun fact is that now I live in Australia which is one of the countries in the world with the least variance in accent. You can't tell Sydney and Perth accents apart, even though the two cities are thousands of kms apart.
just look at football rivalries to get the idea.
And I’m loving the extremely detailed Tyneside vs Sunderland debate you managed to kick off.
Toyota is the one of largest employers of Americans in the auto industry today: https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/car-manufac...
Look at Intel. It's a western company, but it famously fell behind its competitors due to offering comparatively shit pay and conditions to its staff, so the best people left. The problem is hardware company culture, not Asian company culture.
Apple's M1 is an example of what a company that compensates its staff fairly can achieve in hardware. Hardware companies need to get the idea out of their head that they can pay people shit (even when they've got huge monopoly profits like Intel had) and still expect to remain competitive.
As far as I know, working in a non-chip part of Intel in the 90s, the place was always an abusive sweatshop except maybe for some top people. And Intel isn't some failed from the start enterprise - they're currently third or so in a long, long competition among fabs, chip-makers and etc. They had a long, long successful run while being awful.
Essentially, model the of gaslighting, abusing and discarding people works great as long as a company can keep their employee's illusions alive and/or trapping them so they have no choices regardless.
As far as I know, Apple pays well compared to the US median for a job but poorly relative to other FANG companies. Plenty of tales of abuse and secrecy exist in Apple but plenty of people assert the virtues of working there and show great loyalty.
Which is to say these practices are very common in globally competitive markets. A company that pays well and inspires great loyalty and hard work from it's employees can always be undercut by a company that pays shit and still inspires great loyalty and hard work from it's employees. And if the model falls-apart, it can be rebuilt elsewhere (this is the problem/challenge of markets that are truly global).
However, the tools suck more than the English language has good words to describe, so it's hard for an engineer to be productive. And the products are complex, so you need a lot of engineers. And you're manufacturing physical products, so most of that huge dollar amount in the industry is trapped in manufacturing, not design. So even if you were the cream of the crop engineer, it's hard to extract much of that value for yourself.
On the other hand, webdev has extremely low capital overhead, and improvements in tools can go directly into developer productivity, which can immediately be realized as value (which gives you resources to improve even more).
So even if Verilog developers made the same money as JS developers today, in ten years, I'd expect the JS developers to make more.
One lesson here is that if you want your designs to improve rapidly, decouple them from the manufacturing business as much as you can. And you'll probably be able to pay better and attract better talent in the proces, which is a not insignificant benefit. Perhaps the rise of fabless semiconductor companies is understood even better in this light?
In my country there are probably 2? 3? serious semico companies
And shitton of JS-using companies
Maybe this explains why embedded/hardware/firmware devs are underpaid?
If the pay is so low, it’s kind of curious that the supply doesn’t drop.
I am entirely unqualified to judge cultural advantages/disadvantages in the manufacturing industry.
I think general mismanagement explains Intel's decline more than money or working conditions. TSMC pays embarrassing low, which is why a lot of engineers end up being poached by China.
This is backwards; M1 is not merely an implementation of an efficient ISA, Apple sponsored the design of the ISA in order to create M1 with it. That's why ARMv8 is significantly different from v7.
ISA doesn't matter that much though and it is well designed besides that.
The issue is that the Asian work culture in the tech industry is not sustainable, as seen from their demographic replacement rates. They are burning too hot and the culture will change or they will disappear.
In Taiwan, for instance, the working age population peaked just five years ago[1], so I doubt that the fact that their worker shortage is permanent and going to get worse has yet sunk in the brains of the management and political class in Taiwan.
Give it ten years, they might start understanding what's going on. Based on China's and Japan's responses, they'll have no idea what to do.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-64...
It is akin to assuming that you can import soil after you have depleted your own. Human ecology matters as much as soil ecology does.
I want sustainable to be sustainable. Responsible societies should be able to maintain and improve the people that they have. Any people imported should be a supplementary augmentation, calculated for sustainable growth and improvement of the society as a whole. An augmentation, a supplement, is very different from a replacement. A replacement is what happens when you have the irresponsible depletion of human capital, and frankly, any immigrant should not want to go to a place where human capital is unsustainably depleted in such a way, as their own offspring are likely to receive the same treatment.
Which is not to say American's can't make chips, perhaps with less efficiency. Which ultimately doesn't matter because semi is being elevated to critical strategic industry and the governemnt's money printer is going to keep US fabs open regardless of how competitive US fabs are.
Besides, this discussion is not about their respective cultures in general, but about manufacturing styles and working conditions, which are indeed, and even by necessity, similar.
Not that they don't also have shared history, interactions and cultural exchanges going back thousands of years. So, yeah, even that would be more like comparing Argentina and Uruguay, or comparing US and Canada, or France and Belgium, and so on, than some unfathomable comparison.
Sure, that's how the world knows how to make chips now, but given the varying laws between those two places, and the varying workforce cultures, I think it's safe to say that adaptations will be made to the experience to suit American workers, and those adaptations won't result in meaningful drop offs in quality or execution.
As an outsider, it seems pretty clear that the rejection to the industry is more about the cultural mismatch than it is to the actual work needing to be executed.
It's just weird to me that people really believe nothing about the job will change, and all of the Asian cultural aspects of the way the job is currently executed would be dropped on American workers with zero adjustments.