Then look at the Japanese brands. Most of them are reproducing 501s from various eras. FWIW, I like TCB (https://tcbjeans.myshopify.com/) - the price/value ratio is superb, the quality is better than LVC and retail is cheaper. Their 40s and 50s jeans are both brilliant and they age amazingly.

Hope that helps!

My understanding is that this isn't tied to Amazon or any specific retailer. But rather the cutting process for the fabric. They'll cut large stacks of denim cloth in a single go, and that's not an exact process. And that's why you can buy multiple supposedly identical pairs and notice differences.

Obligatory link to Hillel Wayne's Crossover Project [0]. The short version is that of 17 "real" engineers he interviewed who switched to software engineering, 15 said they consider software engineering to be an engineering discipline. Over the three blog posts he reviews the supposed differences between fields and finds that the crossovers don't agree with most of the stereotypical differences software people believe are there.

There are real differences that they identify, but they're not any more significant than the differences between traditional engineering fields, which are vast. But yes, one of the differences that they do point out is that software is not constrained by the physical world in any meaningful way.

[0] https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/

What you certainly cannot do is sample people who have only experienced one field.

But yes, it's not meant to be a quantitative study, but there are a lot of very valuable insights in the blog posts.

And the jump from building academic programs in C/Matlab to building commercial software products is much smaller than the jump from having never used Fusion 360 to designing a commercial product.

Plus, there are many more resources out there for switching careers into software engineering. With CAD, you're kind of stuck with YouTube videos and the odd online course for foundational material.

Coding is 100% an engineering endeavor. And just like any other one, a particular project may not be following engineering best practices and that project may be producing some dangerous garbage as a result, but I'm actually fairly satisfied with my engineering practices, as engineering practices, what with my automated testing, automated acceptance criteria, automated security checking, automated style checking, integrated peer-review practices, performance testing practices, engineering for redundancy and resiliance. If $YOU're thinking the coding world is awfully cowboy maybe that's a sign that $YOU need to up your game with the already-existing and well-documented best practices in our industry. To be honest most other "real engineers" would be green with envy at what we have available to us!

Latency is the first to come to mind. The realities of how systems are designed and how permanent the storage in question is translate to latency and thus frequently performance bottlenecks.

Data durability is another thing to consider. Though frequently that's mostly abstracted away in the lower layers of hardware, system composition, and operating system / file system / libraries generally.

Limitations also exist in raw hardware performance (state machine speed, how parallel the computation can be, how parallel the desired process can be made) and capacity, for processing, temporary memory (RAM), and long term storage. Thermal considerations might also be a factor, but those are usually managed by lower layers and present as capacity limitations to typical software.

Software as a domain for achieving goals does offer an unusually wide degree of flexibility in approach. Today we also stand on the shoulders of many giants, with relatively easy access to extremely powerful systems that can obscure many sins for 'reasonable' workloads.

I’m not asking to criticize. I’m genuinely curious.

Not even all electronic products always feel the same in one’s hands like iPhones of the same model do. For example I remember back in the day my Xbox controllers would feel different from my friend’s Xbox controllers even though they were the same model and supposedly manufactured the same.

Apple is willing to pay the cost to minimize the margin-of-error at every step.

Another approach to keeping yield high (at the possible risk of hurting your brand) is to do what Intel did with their Celeron line. The equivalent for Apple would be a "value iPhone" which would not come with the same set of expectations from customers.

It is also easy to make thousands of identical items when your build material is solid and can’t be stretched

As for the Xbox controllers, it could be a lot of differences. Microsoft does not feel the need to keep different runs exactly the same. They may be more willing to buy different types of plastic depending on what's cheapest this quarter.

Or it could be much simpler, maybe iPhones do feel different. How much time do you actually spend interacting with someone else's phone (Have you ever even actually touched another person's phone, or just their case?), vs how much time did you spend with your buddy's Xbox controllers?

Hard materials are easier than soft materials in some ways. If you lay a soft fabric out before cutting, is it slightly folded, perfectly flat, taut? It will all make a difference.

Moulding plastic or cutting a hard material like aluminium is more amenable to tight tolerances since you can use the same mould over and over, use the same cutter and the material doesn't flex, stretch or change in any significant way.

It probably wouldn't be if human beings had to drill holes in the PCB by hand, place and solder components by hand, and hand-machine the case.

different from my friend’s Xbox controllers even though they were the same model and supposedly manufactured the same.

This could be things like slight changes in the sourcing of, say, springs for an analog stick, composition of rubber used under other buttons, and actual wear on components of the assembly line, like the molds used for injection molding of something with a pebble texture. Not to mention, obviously, that each controller will break down differently over time depending on use.

Make a bunch of them with the same process then bin them based on the variability.

At least for Amazon, keep in mind that they’re likely not put back into normal circulation if you return them so you’re creating waste where there doesn’t have to be.

Amazon absolutely resells returned items when possible. And if it's not through Amazon Resale, it's by reselling them in bulk lots to people who then make money listing the items on eBay.

Yes some of the absolute cheapest stuff gets tossed because it's not profitable to resell. But in many cases you're not even asked to return -- just keep it and get refunded. (As long as you don't have a history of abusing that.)

Levi's are absolutely going to be resold. Amazon is a business. They're not going to eat a loss when they don't have to.

Amazon routinely destroy returned items, see the investigation for yourself: https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millio...

> Undercover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”.

And you think they'll keep a pair of shoddy trousers? I'm sorry to disappoint you but that's unlikely...

And I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the very article you linked to clearly states it has nothing to do with returns. Rather:

> Many vendors choose to house their products in Amazon’s vast warehouses. But the longer the goods remain unsold, the more a company is charged to store them. It is eventually cheaper to dispose of the goods, especially stock from overseas, than to continue storing the stock.

It is about vendors who remove their merchandise from stock because nobody will buy it.

And what are you talking about "shoddy trousers"? It's a pair of Levi's. Why wouldn't they resell them? They already sell them in the first place. It's profit. Amazon isn't exactly in the business of not making profit.

Honestly, even in the store, that's been a thing forever. You'd have to go to the department or mall store and try on a whole bunch.

Lately I've switched to a brand that has stretchier fabric (so small variations in size matter less) and more long-leg sizes (my size is 31 or 32/34 and difficult to find in department stores) and been content.

It’s crazy.

I only wear Oxfords and casual button down shirts, and found that I only ever like the ones made in Bangladesh because of fit and material. I could talk your ear off for 20 minutes about how clothes from X feel cheap, clothes from Y have nice materials but don't fit right, etc.

I just checked my closet, and every single shirt I regularly wear across three brands is made in Bangladesh!

The brands I typically wear are Izod, RL Chaps, US Polo(not RL Polo), and lately some from Kingsize. The latter fit nicely but I find a lot of styles a bit wonky or dated.

Still, I rarely wear those for that reason. They also look like crap at the end of the day from sitting in cars or padded chairs.

I am talking about in normal, everyday (for me) circumstances, this would likely not apply in dire circumstances

I don't say that to be critical if wearing previously worn clothing bothers you. I just bring it up because sometimes things stop bothering me once I realize that they are fairly common experiences.

Here's a quick shot of what the cutting machine looks like: https://youtu.be/oBt85Jgjvng?si=UAU0Jj4q_Vztmi5K&t=680