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The Factory of the World - Documentary On Manufacturing In Shenzhen
szczys writes: This Hackaday documentary (video) looks at the changing ecosystem of manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta (Shenzhen, China) through interviews with product engineers involved with the MIT Media Lab manufacturing program, Finance professionals in Hong Kong, and notables in the Maker Industry. Worth checking out for anyone thinking of a hardware startup or just interested in how hardware gets made.
This video was remarkably consistent with Hackaday's web presence. They took some excellent starting material and then screwed it up in an effort to be "cool". The ridiculous audio drone is perfectly analogous to the "super cool" black background that visually obfuscates the Hackaday webpages.
The Hackaday project pages also demonstrate a resemblance to the video. The information in the video was interesting, but there was no underlying development of an idea. Likewise the Hackaday project pages take lots of great information and dump it onto a template that often obscures the excellent work being done.
I actually visit Hackaday regularly because they offer the meat and potatoes that I crave. It's just too bad that they drown it in all their special sauce.
I was there last week, is that recent enough for you?
I visited 6 different factories / suppliers during my stay.
The factories that have difficulty with high turnover of workers are the ones that can not provide 2-3 hours overtime per day during weekdays, normal workday on saturdays and free sundays + national holidays. The workers expect it and as he said, they are highly mobile.
I don't know what you were doing in Shenzhen, but visiting factories probably wasn't it.