As a kid I used to substitute in an injection molding plant. We worked for four hours, pause, four hours. The plant ran three shifts, 7 days a week.
I worked in a big hall with two rows of molding machines. Each one had a pole with a yellow beacon light at the top.
The machines had fixed cycle times and the operator had to repeat the same steps every cycle. For example on one machine I had to put four small metal cylinders into the mould, close the door, wait, open the door and remove the finished parts. Cycle time was only a couple of seconds usually, with the shortest one I remember being 8 seconds. If you were too slow the machine stopped and the yellow light went on.
You also could stop the machine on purpose. There was a field with 3 by 6 buttons or something with different stopping reasons, toilet break being one of them.
So far, this probably doesn't sound too bad, but to complete picture you have to know two things:
1. Every restart meant throwing away the first one or two minutes of production
2. Foreman had to keep a quota.
That meant, yellow light, foreman came and shouted at you. The buttons were never used. You spent four hours straight doing the same routine every couple of seconds without skipping a beat.
Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have.
> Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have.
I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!
I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The greasy aroma of kitchen fryers had nothing on this.
* Unloading fish on a wharf during a violent snowstorm, at night.
* Doing the stop/go signs on roadworks for 12 hours in the rain.
* Carrying heavy boxes of government records up 5 flights of stairs from a basement for eight hours, and the next day, carrying them up 2 flights of stairs to their new home - blew out the medial meniscus in my right knee doing that
* Carrying what Americans call drywall, but like the kind with noise deadening material in it that makes it heavier, non-stop for three weeks during the construction of an art gallery. Ever had that thing where your body just says "no" because you've been pushing your muscles too hard and your fingers go nerveless and involuntarily release? I got a written warning for that because I dropped the expensive drywall. Only kind of drywall that was worse was the drywall used to line X-ray rooms in medical centres.
* Working the recycling trucks - the bins we emptied into the sorting tray had drainage holes in the bottom, and you had to lift them above your head to tip them into the sorting tray, so when you did, a lovely mixture of coagulating milk / wine / beer / whatever other fluids came from unclean recycling would run down your arm and until I learned to tape up the cuffs of my overalls, inside your overalls. And when we went to offload, rubbish dump dust would stick to your sweat / recycling juice, so every day ended up stinking and filthy.
* Kitchenhand in an airport kitchen so poorly managed I was the longest serving dishpig they'd ever had when I stayed there six months. I outlasted about 8 cooks, I suppose they had options.
* Case worker in social security - understaffed, pressured to achieve unrealistic numbers, and often directed by policy to not help people who needed help.
* Oh, and roguing for wild oats in wheat fields in near 100°F heat.
Those jobs really help me appreciate how privileged and lucky I am to be a developer.
Semiconductor manufacturing takes this to the next level with techniques like statistical process control. Units of capacity or work can take themselves offline automatically if something falls too far out of range. Waiting for a human operator is not really feasible when the facility is mostly automated and the feature sizes are atomic scale. There are also concerns with wafers that must be processed at their next step promptly or they will become guaranteed scrap. Human judgement is too slow to sort all of this out on the inner loop.
The ability for one person to stop the entire factory on purpose is not desirable in these facilities. At least not without a quick meeting first. There isn't an actual "stop line" button anywhere. Investors and customers like Apple and Nvidia would never permit this. The best someone could do (without using a fire axe in the datacenter) is to manually whack the EMO button on all the tools in a certain area (e.g. photo) which would effectively stop the line. By the time the 2nd photo tool goes offline, half of manufacturing leads would have their pagers beeping and security would be well on their way. You could try doing this through the information systems, but they likely didn't grant you permissions to flip status flags on 400 million dollar EUV tools at your leisure.
In theory a good escalation system. In practice there must be strong guarantees and trust that there are no repercussions for triggering. Otherwise management will tell you over and over to "pull the andon cord / escalate earle & often" but really no one does.
Not only must there be trust, but there must also be a resolve to make deeper fixes to problems surfaced through the andon system. It's a typical mistake to forget that part. If the response to a problem is patching over the immediate symptom, then the cord will keep being pulled for the same reasons so often no work will end up getting done.
Then the andon system is abandoned as "didn't work for our organisation".
Workers should pull the andon cord (and thus stop the entire production line!) when they need to go to the bathroom, for example. The solution is not to sternly tell the worker to hold it for longer, nor to have a replacement worker come over, but to review scheduling and include more appropriate bathroom breaks between shifts at the line. (Or, if the problem affects one worker disproportionately, figure out some alternative way for that worker to contribute.)
It's not just resolve, either. The org must recognize the problem in the first place, which isn't a given. Especially in smaller/govt orgs. Often, recognition of the problem is wrongly tied to how difficult the foremost suggestion is to implement.
And there are orgs for whom any suggestion can itself be so encumbered by uncontrolled red tape and social costs that relatively minor changes become a project.
Maybe it works for small stuff like running out of bolts in a production line but not something high level like the owner is an idiot and made a massive mistake. I sometimes think about the high profile Amazon Fire Phone and why nobody involved in building the Amazon fire phone say at any point that this thing was destined to fail. I'm sure Amazon dot com had highly intelligent workers and managers who saw what was coming but never spoke up.
I have never ever heard from any Amazon employee I've met in person tell me of any instance where they told their manager or supervisor something and had the superior "disagree and commit". It always goes in one direction, down unlike what they say in their HR material.
I don't think this is a solved problem at all, short of making it very inexpensive to pull that proverbial cord as a worker AND making it very expensive to ignore such cord pulling as management. I don't know if it is possible to have that with our management system today. These two properties — cheap to pull and expensive to ignore — are intertwined. It means management giving up a lot, perhaps almost all, of its power to the workers. If you follow through with this, you also need to share more information because if the workers are actually empowered to decide, they should have the information necessary to make such decisions.
It requires someone with power to consistently and deliberately eschew this power which isn't sustainable because at some point in the management chain you will come across someone who will not.
Even at Toyota, I don't think you can pull the Andon cord on hydrogen fuel cell to switch to electric vehicles because at this point you are not just up against management, you are up against national energy policy.
One interesting thing you learn over the years is there's a million ways to improve process, and a million ways to avoid it. Virtually every improvement is unlikely; either it's difficult to understand, or difficult to get approval/consensus for, or difficult to implement. If it was easy you'd have done it already. Process won't improve until a motivation arrives that pushes past the difficulties.
Trader Joe's cashier bells have entered the chat.
Ironically, the "request assistance" button and accompanying blinking light on top of your stand at self-checkout are the "self-managing" version of that where you as the customer are partly an employee. oh well
I was at a Safeway last month, and I asked the overseer guy what the lamps meant on top of the self-check machines, and he said he honestly didn’t know.
I worked in a big hall with two rows of molding machines. Each one had a pole with a yellow beacon light at the top.
The machines had fixed cycle times and the operator had to repeat the same steps every cycle. For example on one machine I had to put four small metal cylinders into the mould, close the door, wait, open the door and remove the finished parts. Cycle time was only a couple of seconds usually, with the shortest one I remember being 8 seconds. If you were too slow the machine stopped and the yellow light went on.
You also could stop the machine on purpose. There was a field with 3 by 6 buttons or something with different stopping reasons, toilet break being one of them.
So far, this probably doesn't sound too bad, but to complete picture you have to know two things:
1. Every restart meant throwing away the first one or two minutes of production
2. Foreman had to keep a quota.
That meant, yellow light, foreman came and shouted at you. The buttons were never used. You spent four hours straight doing the same routine every couple of seconds without skipping a beat.
Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have.
I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!
I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The greasy aroma of kitchen fryers had nothing on this.
* Unloading fish on a wharf during a violent snowstorm, at night.
* Doing the stop/go signs on roadworks for 12 hours in the rain.
* Carrying heavy boxes of government records up 5 flights of stairs from a basement for eight hours, and the next day, carrying them up 2 flights of stairs to their new home - blew out the medial meniscus in my right knee doing that
* Carrying what Americans call drywall, but like the kind with noise deadening material in it that makes it heavier, non-stop for three weeks during the construction of an art gallery. Ever had that thing where your body just says "no" because you've been pushing your muscles too hard and your fingers go nerveless and involuntarily release? I got a written warning for that because I dropped the expensive drywall. Only kind of drywall that was worse was the drywall used to line X-ray rooms in medical centres.
* Working the recycling trucks - the bins we emptied into the sorting tray had drainage holes in the bottom, and you had to lift them above your head to tip them into the sorting tray, so when you did, a lovely mixture of coagulating milk / wine / beer / whatever other fluids came from unclean recycling would run down your arm and until I learned to tape up the cuffs of my overalls, inside your overalls. And when we went to offload, rubbish dump dust would stick to your sweat / recycling juice, so every day ended up stinking and filthy.
* Kitchenhand in an airport kitchen so poorly managed I was the longest serving dishpig they'd ever had when I stayed there six months. I outlasted about 8 cooks, I suppose they had options.
* Case worker in social security - understaffed, pressured to achieve unrealistic numbers, and often directed by policy to not help people who needed help.
* Oh, and roguing for wild oats in wheat fields in near 100°F heat.
Those jobs really help me appreciate how privileged and lucky I am to be a developer.
The ability for one person to stop the entire factory on purpose is not desirable in these facilities. At least not without a quick meeting first. There isn't an actual "stop line" button anywhere. Investors and customers like Apple and Nvidia would never permit this. The best someone could do (without using a fire axe in the datacenter) is to manually whack the EMO button on all the tools in a certain area (e.g. photo) which would effectively stop the line. By the time the 2nd photo tool goes offline, half of manufacturing leads would have their pagers beeping and security would be well on their way. You could try doing this through the information systems, but they likely didn't grant you permissions to flip status flags on 400 million dollar EUV tools at your leisure.
Then the andon system is abandoned as "didn't work for our organisation".
Workers should pull the andon cord (and thus stop the entire production line!) when they need to go to the bathroom, for example. The solution is not to sternly tell the worker to hold it for longer, nor to have a replacement worker come over, but to review scheduling and include more appropriate bathroom breaks between shifts at the line. (Or, if the problem affects one worker disproportionately, figure out some alternative way for that worker to contribute.)
And there are orgs for whom any suggestion can itself be so encumbered by uncontrolled red tape and social costs that relatively minor changes become a project.
EDIT: Found it: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-japanese-companies-do-so-many
Search for “Ford plant”, second occurrence for that particular bit. The article made rounds on HN a couple months ago.
I have never ever heard from any Amazon employee I've met in person tell me of any instance where they told their manager or supervisor something and had the superior "disagree and commit". It always goes in one direction, down unlike what they say in their HR material.
I don't think this is a solved problem at all, short of making it very inexpensive to pull that proverbial cord as a worker AND making it very expensive to ignore such cord pulling as management. I don't know if it is possible to have that with our management system today. These two properties — cheap to pull and expensive to ignore — are intertwined. It means management giving up a lot, perhaps almost all, of its power to the workers. If you follow through with this, you also need to share more information because if the workers are actually empowered to decide, they should have the information necessary to make such decisions.
It requires someone with power to consistently and deliberately eschew this power which isn't sustainable because at some point in the management chain you will come across someone who will not.
Even at Toyota, I don't think you can pull the Andon cord on hydrogen fuel cell to switch to electric vehicles because at this point you are not just up against management, you are up against national energy policy.