You must log in or register to comment.
- yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
unskilled warehouse workers.
It’s ironic to call them unskilled in an article describing how their skills are beyond billion-dollar robots.
- cloudshouter@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
Unskilled, but none of the managers I had (not WM, mid size mail order company) could keep up. All of them had broken racking, run the forks through walls, and/or torn dock doors off. They were slow, and would put bad pallets in the racks.
So the company liked doing cutting edge corporate stuff and reading books about various CEOs. One time they had us take skill surveys (thinly veiled IQ tests) to optimize new hires. The first batch was based off the high performance people and all quit after two weeks because they were smart enough to know bullshit. The second group was based off the long timers and also didn’t last because they were dumb as rocks. After that they went back to shotgunning everyone at it and seeing what sticks. Open interviews, always posted.
- 30 days
“Unskilled” meaning you can teach someone to do the job reasonably well off the street in a few hours. Unfortunately robots are not humans and thus need to be meticulously designed while a guy just needs a decent paycheck and benefits.
- Brimstone@lemmy.mlEnglish29 days
Unskilled means can get someone to do it for minimum wage 🫢
It doesn’t mean it’s only worth minimum wage to the company.
- chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish30 days
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. All labor requires myriad skills. At best, some jobs are easier than others, for some people.
All references to “skilled” labor are somber reminders of centuries worth of capitalist propaganda implemented solely to underpay workers.
The length of training required for a job is irrelevant. Some jobs may require years of training for a repeatable mechanical task, like watchmaking. Others may let the worker pop off on day one with virtually no guardrails or training, like landscaping. Both (all) jobs are difficult, and both (all) workers deserve respect.
Do not call work skilled or unskilled, because it is not true, and such labels accomplish nothing other than forwarding bourgeoise interests.
- Cosmonauticus@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
100% agree. I work in the nuclear sector and jobs can literally be walk around and make sure nothing is on fire but its considered “skilled labor.”
29 daysWalmart is technically competent, but more pragmatic than adventurous. In the past, it has often favored proven systems that deliver reliable returns over expensive, leading-edge alternatives. That has been a smart business strategy for them for the most part, even if they are sometimes late to the party when it comes to innovation.
Amazon has made robotics a core part of its fulfillment model. Ocado designed its grocery fulfillment operation around automation from the outset. This meant major investment in infrastructure, software, and process redesign.
Walmart has invested heavily in robotics, too, but its approach has been more incremental and constrained by the need to modernize an enormous existing network. A bolt-on, if you will.
So I suspect Walmart’s problems are partly about its approach and baggage, not the state of robotics. They’ll figure it out eventually.
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
I work in this field and can speak to these systems.
These systems tend to perform quite well as their primary selling point is not necessarily cost reduction, flat, but rather increased revenue through higher and more reliable throughput. The trade off is that these systems are quite complex and normally require a great deal of coordination between the customer who may or may not operate the product and the OEM that builds and maintains it.
In my experience the biggest challenge is defining those responsibilities such that throughput is maintained. These systems are like high performance sports cars, they work well if taken care of and operated skillfully but can degrade faster as a result of lack of experience. Some of our customers permit us (the OEM) to operate and maintain to a greater extent then others. Given we have a greater deal of experience with the tool those customers tend to have measurably better performance.
To give an idea of why this particular industry has a harder time building the talent pool I’m referring to consider the domains that need to be covered.
Electrical engineering, instrumentation and control equipment, autonomous multi-robot systems, PLC programming, ABB robot programming, Linux system administration, Windows administration, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB, ability to read and modify Python, C# and Rust. These are expected skills for one person to have.
I commonly deal with issues that cover several of those areas simultaneously. E.g. robot communications are slowing down due to full RabbitMQ queue which is determined to be caused by a faulty motor causing slippage which leads to a large number of messaged being generated that fill the queue and cause other bots to begin making pathing errors due to communication timeouts.
EDIT: Removed PII
While I know you wanna stand up for your employer: don’t.
Quite literally for your job safety you should delete this post unless you’re literally PR and speaking in a way your employer would be fine with.
Most corporate training modules involve clear information you should never post like this because you’ll almost certainly get fired.
If you want to share things, post it more as “I work for a company that makes robots like this. The problem with our biggest warehouse clients is X, where our smaller ones is Y, so that’s probably the case here too.” Never directly show your employer like this.
- technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish30 days
Username says they run rum. I think the robot stuff is just a hobby.
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
Probably right lol, edited to remove identifying information.
- HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgEnglish30 days
These systems are MASSIVELY complicated and require quite a bit of technical know-how.
You named one main problem here.
The other ist cost. How much does a system cost that replaces one worker cost? INCLUDING the required technically skilled service staff?
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
As I replied to others, in systems like this it’s not as simple as cost savings. The selling point is increased throughput. The system costs more upfront and factoring future gains from increased throughput you end up making more money than if you had kept the cheaper manual workforce.
- Frenchgeek@lemmy.mlEnglish30 days
So. The usual “Management trying to save a insignificant amount by making a stupid decision on a system they don’t understand for a job they don’t know”…
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
Ummm, no?
The system is way more expensive than the workers were. By like, orders of magnitude. They buy it because you can basically 10x a warehouses throughput using it.
Don’t get me wrong, after accounting for increased throughput and the gains by automation you end up with a bigger margin than by having a swarm of workers in a dusty warehouse but it necessitates hiring a ton of technical professionals that you generally have to pay more. Additionally this whole space is really hard for AI to touch because it’s very cross domain and real time. For reference. My role is considered “entry level” and I get 6 figures.
All that being said this isn’t so much managers being idiots (though there’s plenty of that) so much as “our core competencies built from the ways we did warehouses before do not translate to how we do them now and friction is being generated as a result of that transition.”
There are technical issues with the system. It’s largely built to integrate with legacy industrial tech which ties it into the windows space, this has led to a lot of decisions about tooling that degrades performance and leads to memory leaks.
- mirshafie@europe.pubEnglish30 days
Sounds like they might be learning from their mistakes though? If so, they’re smarter than most businesses.
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
The industry is still in its infancy, not just warehouse automation but robotics and fleetops in general.
There’s a lot of growing pains as we figure out the best ways to manipulate autonomous robot swarms that can number in the thousands.
One of the big issues is just training personnel for all this. It’s quite rare to find people with a background in both hardware and software and who can speak both fluently.
- LePoisson@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
For reference. My role is considered “entry level” and I get 6 figures.
Please give me a job, thank you good sir or madam.
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
This is actually a good time to get into the space. There’s not a ton of companies competing over a now growing market and the work is weird enough that AI hasn’t fully eaten it.
Downside, see my other posts, the field wants to pull people who have a pretty diverse skill set. I would be prepared to discuss RAFT consensus in the same conversation as PID tuning and control theory.
Checkout companies like Symbotic, Boston Dynamics, or robotics integrators like ABB
- 30 days
Job sounds interesting. Several questions if u don’t mind me asking because I’m thinking to do small career change.
- What’s the job title I should look for?
- Do you think it’s possible to transfer from software developer? I have engineering background so I think I should be able to pick things up
- Is ageism real in your industry? I’m in 30s so ain’t young so worried about applying to entry level positions
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
Unfortunately we don’t have standardized roles in this industry.
Jobs like these tend to touch one of a couple spaces.
- Controls engineering: PLC programming and traditional robotics
- Fleetops, application engineer, or operations engineer: I’ve seen these show up at places like Boston dynamics
- Technical support: look for ones that mention wanting like a EE and knowing stuff about control systems.
- SCADA engineer: Especially at tech startups.
In general you’re looking for jobs that reference a mixture of networking, control systems, SCADA, DCS, PLC, IT infra, and of course robotics.
My entire team is 30+, hard to find people with a diverse background that are also 22.
Ah yes, the gotta get your SLA to PMS the PLC on your ABBs
Walmart spent billions replacing warehouse workers with robots, only to discover the robots can’t lift dog food and the engineers cost more than the workers did. Apparently the automation revolution has reached its greatest technical challenge yet: doing the job it was supposed to automate. Somewhere, a PowerPoint deck is quietly being deleted.
- ToaLanjiao@lemmy.worldEnglish1 month
The system designers get tripped up by the strangest things. I once worked in a factory that uses copper bars of varying lengths, and the designer didn’t expect the bars to ‘sag’ when picked up flatwise from the middle. So I can imagine picking up a bag of dog food would do that.
- toiletobserver@lemmy.worldEnglish1 month
That’s a bad engineer problem. Tasks must be reduced to absolute minimums, and operating scenarios must be maximized. Otherwise failure conditions will win.
- DrunkenPirate@feddit.orgEnglish1 month
They might have underestimated the mix of items. From bagged dog food with 20kg, boxes of all shapes down to small poly‘s is hard to handle. For picking robots as well as the sorting AGV‘s.
Amazon didn’t robotize its entire item spectrum yet, as far as I know. It focus on robotizable items.
If such a heavy dog food bag brakes, all the small pieces lie on the floor that those dumb AGV‘s drive upon. That’s immediately causing clogged wheels and even more. And to clean the mess up, one has to stop the entire AGV area as it’s not safe for humans to enter. One broken dog food bag can cause some expensive maintenance and drives operational costs up. 1 broken bag per month can likely kill your business case.
- reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish1 month
Robots can work well in warehouses. Amazon’s have been a success, for example. This just sounds like whomever WalMart hired to design this didn’t know what they were doing and Walmart got screwed. Maybe they tried to automate the wrong tasks, or leaned too heavily on the sales pitch of “AI magic” rather than understanding what they were buying.
The article also mentions Kroger’s failed dive into automation. From what I can find online, the automation worked, but it was a flop because it was expensive and underutilized — it wasn’t worth the money spent because it was focused on filling online orders that dried up.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-warehouse-robots-automation-942b814
https://retailboss.substack.com/p/krogers-350-million-lesson-why-big
- Traister101@lemmy.todayEnglish1 month
I work at a Kroger owned store. For whatever reason they decided to give that another try at my store and another one in the same division. We’re all very sceptical… since you know it already failed before but it’s better than the robot “Tally” which drives around and checks for empty spots on shelves. The poor grocery guys are supposed to then go around and face em despite already being tight on people
The same items at my local Ralphs (Kroger) are constantly (like 4+ years) out of stock because they just face over the holes. Whoever is putting inventory into the computer must absolutely suck too because this shouldn’t even be happening; but having worked at Walmart I’ve seen firsthand how people roll their eyes when the numbers are off.
- Traister101@lemmy.todayEnglish29 days
I’ve been told that it’s mostly automated. IE the Point Of Sale tells the system what items were sold and it subtracts from whatever total it has. The produce guys have said that because of this system some things like bananas are almost always screwed up, cause the barcode and the PLU (the numbers) aren’t actually the same item. Namely sometimes when the banana suppler changes they don’t get automatically ordered cause the system thinks we’re selling the old ones which “don’t exist anymore”. I’d expect similar things happen to grocery and home but to a much less extent, probably from people just tossing stuff out instead of scanning it out and then still just tossing it. Yay food waste.
- 28 days
They do quarter, semi annually, or anual inventories to true up the numbers
- 29 days
“We’ll pay billions in trying to automate things to avoid paying a few million for human employees.”
- 30 days
Robots are more expensive and are less capable than people? What a surprise! Not. I saw that coming years ago… 🙄
- Fredselfish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish30 days
Especially at Walmart when loading a truck means throwing the shit inside and as fast as possible. Used to unload Walmart trucks. Wish had pics (this was wat before smartphones) You open back doors and the boxes would just spill out. There was always breakage. But Walmart didn’t care. It fuck up way Walmart does business and they are shady as fuck. But allows them to not care about the products. But yeah robots are slow and no way can work at the speeds required at a Walmart distribution facility.
- duckshuffgoose@lemmy.mlEnglish30 days
There’s lot of types of warehouse automation outside of a robot skating on the ground picking up pallets or cases or anything. As in, there are certainly automation systems that work alongside people or other different bots that absolutely thrash the throughput of a typical warehouse operation
Walmart merely made a number of very stupid decisions when entering the automation game, but to them its drops in a bucket. They’ll just move on to the next one
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
Unfortunately the robots are substantially faster and more effective than humans. Can you run at ~45 mph?
The issue is complexity and that’s something that’s getting better over time.
- 30 days
My stand up Jack can go just as fast. The problem isn’t top speed, it’s acceleration and breaking. It’s being able to rip around a warehouse building orders quickly and efficiently. A dude with a stand up Jack and a voxcoder can beat most robots.
Ever notice that the top end speed of the non riding ones, the ones that you walk behind, us just a little beyond a comfortable walking pace? Always found that curious. Not quite running, but certainly not walking either. Hips would hurt at the end of a shift.
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish30 days
Expensive isn’t really an issue though is it?
If I can guarantee you quadruple your revenue by doubling your expense, you’d take the deal no? That’s basically what these things do.
- VAK@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
To be a bit more precise, is it about throughput or lead time? Because for throughput I imagine you can just have more workers, but for quicker shipping you need to do pick and pack in less time, rather than do a lot of them in a given time.
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish29 days
Throughput primarily, the bottleneck is still shipping. These systems do allow for picking/packing faster as well but from a logistics standpoint if you want more output you just need more trucks.
- VAK@lemmy.worldEnglish29 days
How does it help in getting more revenue then? Demand wouldn’t change, right?
- RumRunningDevil@lemmy.zipEnglish29 days
Businesses tend to bank on demand for products being functionally infinite over the long term. Because of this it tends to be a safe bet that you’ll make more money the quicker, and cheaper, you can get products on shelves.
This has held pretty true thus far, though personally I have to wonder if there’s an upper limit. Human’s have to have a upper tolerance for buying junk right?
- HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgEnglish30 days
Wait, you don’t know all the facts yet! We have a free trial for you of our fully automated hairdresser! You will be stunned how a whirlwind of blades trims the stuff growing out of your head in a mere minute! Without boring human conversations! For a little fee of 200 dollar per trail!
- mirshafie@europe.pubEnglish30 days
We had our super-intelligent robot hairdresser clone the voice of your old human hairdresser. It knows all the gossip, remembers the names of your grandchildren and can even tell you jokes and riddles! You should feel safe spilling your secrets to Carina the RoboBarber.
- 30 days
So much of automation is trying to put robots in places humans were ment to be instead of designing processes that are for robots not people.
It’s no wonder to me there is often issues
- automattable@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
I’ll never understand takes like this. You think humans are meant to be shuffling around a warehouse picking and packing orders mindlessly?
I get being annoyed at corporations for greedily trying to save money at the expense of workers, but ultimately, I can’t be that upset over shit jobs going away.
In my view, we have to be focused on how to help The displaced workers which we have historically done a terrible job of. It only becomes more important as we are able to automate more and more tasks that previously required a person. Automation absolutely can be a tide that raises all boats; we just have to demand that it be so. Otherwise, all the benefit will go to the oligarchs instead of the people.
- 29 days
No, they aren’t saying that “humans are meant to be shuffling around a warehouse picking and packing orders mindlessly.”
The point is that the processes are designed around human operators with specific considerations for the abilities and constraints of an average human. Dropping a robot into a process without updating said process around the abilities and constraints of the robot creates new problems. Humans and robots work in different ways and cannot be substituted 1:1 without creating problems.
- shiroininja@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
As a forklift monkey: I hate my job and feel that humans weren’t meant for this monotonous kind of work. Like boomers who screwed in one nut on an assembly line who made enough to provide a family of 4, I’d blow my brains out before I’d do that. So fuck these jobs.
Yeah, the problem isn’t automation, it’s billionaires pocketing all of the proceeds.
- 29 days
Anyone who has tried to automate anything beyond the most basic step quickly finds out how difficult it is to truly do it with all of the boundary conditions, bad inputs, breaking conditions, etc.
- TheStaffmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
Remember when the disclaimer “please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery” was practically ubiquitous on mail order packages? It’s almost like that was a SANE way to run a logistics network!
- suitmangray@lemmy.worldEnglish30 days
We don’t send pieces of paper back and forth with days long transit time to complete an order anymore.
