Manufacturing In the United States

Hi great article,

I have one quibble with the author’s quote of “ Look, I don’t work in manufacturing (actually very few people in the US still do, but that’s beside the point).” Plenty of people in the US still work in manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs are treated as statistics.

Rapid prototyping is actually more of an R&D tool before a company moves to scaling at production. 3D printing was originally called rapid prototyping because it costs an enormous amount of money to have an injection mold machined.

I suppose what your manager means by “rapid prototyping” is just wanting something that is working to achieve what they might consider a minimum viable product. Maybe they haven’t read the Lean Startup — they should. It would be interesting if you corrected them and the results of that correction.

Hope you have a wonderful day.