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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

You could try to start a manufacturing business and see how it goes. It’s pretty dire.

Check out the ‘Smarter Everyday’ YouTube video for what it took to get people to design and manufacture a simple grill scrubber in the US.

They could find exactly one old retired guy with the knowledge and experience to make a mold, across several states.

You can get this done and delivered in 20 minutes in Shenzhen, and talk to an expert over a storefront countertop by walking over a few hundred feet from your business.

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> They could find exactly one old retired guy with the knowledge and experience to make a mold, across several states.

Have you considered the issue being no company is willing to do on-the-job training ?

I hardly can believe that retired guy had everything figured out prior to starting his first day of work.

You can not replace 12 years of education with 'on the job training'.

You could 50 years ago. You still can, for some aspects of software engineering, which makes tech people believe that it can be done for everything.

But no, you are not going to teach someone modern chemistry, electronics, and general wetlab work with 'on the job training'.

Yes, there is a lack of people with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a mass manufacturing business of parts everyone can get in China for a tenth of the cost.

There is not a lack of mechanics who can assemble Fords on a factory line from pre-built components with instructions. FFS.

Yes, America has a serious problem. No, the Ford CEO is not actually pointing it out. He's fucking lying so he can justify using what amounts to slave labor in other countries while also touting "patriotism" branding while also refusing to do even the tiniest possible to alleviate the problem via training.

> assemble Fords on a factory line

This job is very different from your great grandfathers Ford factory job. Go tour a modern car factory.

The concept of a line worker is on its way out. The work is more on the side of maintaining the contraptions that make the car and retooling/tweaking it on a regular basis.

I’m not a native English speaker and I have a hard time figuring out what is behind the term "mechanics" here. What I find online seems to point to working in a garage and knowing how to do repairs, not being a line worker or technician in a factory doing maintenance on machinery like you say. In the article it’s confusing, they talk about servicing and trades school, so not really factory work. Maybe I’m lost in translation but it looks like even English speakers are not using a vague term to talk about different things here? What does is 120k job really about, working in a Ford garage fixing cars or being a factory technician?

> being a factory technician?

This one.

> working in a Ford garage fixing cars

In general (except for Tesla), there are no $Company garages in the US like the rest of the world, all repair work is handled by privately owned dealerships, whose existence is mandated by the government in most states. Experienced mechanics make about 40$ per hour at these, with juniors about half that. You'd not have trouble finding a mechanic for this rate, it being slightly above the median income.

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