wheelinsupial

> Foreman had to keep a quota.

I have worked on production lines and I’ve worked in the manufacturing and quality engineering side of things.

I know a lot of companies do have that old school production at all cost approach, but the better places I’ve worked at have put quality metrics ahead of productivity metrics.

Usually the metrics are safety, quality, delivery, and cost in that priority.

I know Goodhart’s law, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure,” gets quoted a bunch on HN, but then nothing else is offered up. In my opinion, having these additional metrics with their own targets serves to balance out and constrain a single metric screwing things up. For example, if productivity is going up by producing lower quality parts, this will be shown in either the quality metrics (e.g., scrap rate, yield) or the cost metrics (e.g., material costs have increased, rework costs have increased).

The other component of it all is that the operators can only produce to the level of the systems they have. They can make some small, point improvements to help, but generally there need to be larger process or system level changes supported to make significant improvements.

In my observation, there are a lot of unaccounted for and unintended issues that can arise from this.

Where I live, we are going through a lot of this right now (98+% of population growth is from immigration).

Immigrants have more kids than the non-immigrant population, but they do not actually have above replacement rate amounts of kids, so they are going to require more immigrants to take care of them later on. Also, the children of immigrants have non-immigrant level fertility rates. So, it's not a long term, sustainable way to "replace the aging population."

On top of this, immigrants often want to bring their elderly relatives with them when they are possible. I know there are some ways to try to mitigate this (e.g., immigration limits, charging them extra fees on immigration), but at some point there becomes a large enough immigrant voting bloc that this changes. Now you have extra, unaccounted for elderly people that are required to be looked after.

I have no idea what the solutions are, but if we are trying to plug the gap through immigration, it'll require perpetual immigration. Most countries globally are now at below replacement fertility rates, so this opens up a huge can of worms. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem like anything other than a quick band-aid or a solution that's doing anything other than adding "debt" to the issue.

It's going to come across very naive and dumb, but I believe we can and people just aren't aware of or they simply aren't implementing the basics.

Harvard Business Review and probably hundreds of other online content providers provide some simple rules for meetings yet people don't even do these.

1. Have a purpose / objective for the meeting. I consider meetings to fall into one of three broad categories information distribution, problem solving, decision making. Knowing this will allow the meeting to go a lot smoother or even be moved to something like an email and be done with it.

2. Have an agenda for the meeting. Put the agenda in the meeting invite.

3. If there are any pieces of pre-reading or related material to be reviewed, attach it and call it out in the invite. (But it's very difficult to get people to spend the time preparing for a meeting.)

4. Take notes during the meeting and identify any action items and who will do them (preferably with an initial estimate). Review these action items and people responsible in the last couple of minutes of the meeting.

5. Send out the notes and action items.

Why aren't we doing these things? I don't know, but I think if everyone followed these for meetings of 3+ people, we'd probably see better meetings.

Depending on what you're looking for in industrial engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled, also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on applications of operations research to industry.

In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.

Which proof assistant did you use?

In case you’re not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica Livingston and Carolyn Levy called “The Social Radars” that interviews founders.

Do you mind elaborating on the definition of "cross functional team" here? It seems either non-standard or something that may differ by industry.

Where I've worked, a cross functional team is one made up of functional experts from different groups. A team where everyone could do the work of everyone else was a team that was cross trained.

Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear. I 100% agree with definitions, theorems, counterexamples, and proof techniques being incredibly important. Those are the "warm ups" or "scales" or things that need to be repeatedly drilled in my mind before trying to jump into the "game," which, to me, is solving problems.

For what little it’s worth, the thing that finally made it click for me was a series of comments on HN that were discussing musical scales.

I don’t have any musical training, but I related it back to the practice and warm up sessions we had before we’d play an actual game in the sports I played as a kid.

Perhaps some explanation like that will get it to click with someone.

I also learned of the existence of soft question tags on Math Overflow and Math Stack Exchange that contained an incredible amount of guidance that I think was never possible in lectures. Sharing links to those websites in the syllabus may be helpful for the odd student that actually looks at the syllabus.

When I was doing an associate's in engineering, our calculus and differential equations courses were like this. We'd learn some math, do some problems by hand, then we'd have a lab component where we were introduced to either methods in a computer algebra system or some numerical methods. The problems we solved there were word problems that had the higher level physics already set up for us, so that we ended up just having to solve the calculus or differential equation portion of the problem.

The calculus books we used were not set up like this and the books that focused on learning the CAS or numerical methods weren't structured any better. I think this only worked because it was a small program aimed at technical education with a faculty that cared about developing a unified curriculum.

When I transferred to a different university to finish a degree as a stats major, all of our courses and most of the textbooks were structured in a way to use R. We did some problems on simple linear regression by hand, but very quickly it becomes impractical do to it any other way. This seemed very natural to me, but apparently it was not the typical experience of studying statistics.

Perhaps there are some calculus books out there that do a good job of both teaching calculus concepts and using CAS / numerical methods, but my narrow minded view is that calculus is a tool for physics, engineering, or other applications, and you'll be bogged down in teaching the relevant domain knowledge to get interesting examples. If you're looking for your own examples, perhaps this could be done purely through the differential calculus topics of related rates and optimization or the integral calculus topics of simple ordinary differential equations.