Ford can't find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade
65 comments
·November 18, 2025t-writescode
mhb
We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math. Maybe what we used to do would be more palatable if we weren't pissing away money on dysfunctional public education.
germinalphrase
Alternatively, we have decades of credentials inflation such that our high school graduates can indeed do math - but we choose to pretend they can’t and instead insist that an expensive undergraduate degree is required for entry level work.
rahimnathwani
8.5% of UC Davis freshmen start the year without having mastered high school math.
See page 11 of this report: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
I'm guessing if we were to take a random sample of high school graduates, the % would be much worse.
JumpCrisscross
> we have decades of credentials inflation such that our high school graduates can indeed do math
PISA math scores for Americna students fell over the last two decades [1].
[1] https://www.exploringtheproblemspace.com/new-blog/2025/1/23/...
xp84
I feel like you and GP are both right.
A ton of high school graduates can't do basic math (which also explains their economic illiteracy, like believing that just taxing billionaires more would fix everything[1]).
And also at the same time, we demand college degrees for white-collar jobs that anyone who completed the alleged requirements to graduate high school could totally do. I think this stems from an outdated belief that college is difficult and challenging, and therefore getting through it proves you're exceptionally clever. A notion that has been a joke for at least 15 years if not 20.
So everything is fake. The diplomas are fake, the degrees are fake, and the job requirements are fake. All of it is being used to come up with legal and justifiable ways to pick the people with sufficient brain cells to be entrusted with job responsibilities.
[1] Most college graduates would likely get this question orders of magnitude wrong: If you could split the full net worth of the top 10 billionaires equally among every man, woman, and child in America how big would each one's check be? Correct answer: Just over $6,000. (Of course, we'll ignore how to deal with the market crash caused by forcing the sudden liquidation of their 2 trillion dollars in assets.)
shtzvhdx
Unlike the humanities, it is trivially easy to test if high school grads are just as good at math. Test them on the same questions.
In fact, doesn't the SAT purposely include recycled problems to measure capability drift vs time?
SonOfKyuss
There are plenty of high school and college graduates that can do elementary school math. They are just going into more lucrative fields. If Ford wants those candidates, they need to offer more competitive salaries.
SoftTalker
I mean, I’ve been in tech for over 30 years and I don’t make $120k. SV salaries are outlandish compared to many parts of the country.
paulpauper
From what I have read online, failing high school is almost impossible. GPAs inflated to the point of useless.
SonOfKyuss
> From what I have read online...
Don't believe everything you read online.
My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.
cpursley
My wife was a Title I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
tw04
Ahh, yes the key to mathematics being an issue is public education. We should privatize it so that half the population goes from under educated to completely uneducated.
Or maybe we could go with the coal town model and have children accrue debt to a major corporation that they can literally never pay off in exchange for an education!
MBCook
I don’t see GP proposing privatizating.
SilentM68
I agree with your statement, for the most part. Investing in community college programs is one route since they are essentially a business. The main problem with the CCs is that they are very corrupt, have been issuing students worthless degrees. Essentially, the graduates don't have marketable skills. The colleges' goal is reaching a "graduation quota," and not "employability."
Another way to go is adult and high school education, i.e. the old auto shop classes that are currently very hard to find. This goes for any other trade, such as Drafting, Welding, as well not just auto shop.
So, yea, companies should pay more and invest in education, rather than bitch and complain about the lack of fully train workers.
Sol Roth
darth_avocado
Another thing I’ve heard is that Ford is terrible at designing maintainable cars and mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something. It was akin to replacing the gasket requires them to pick the engine apart and rebuild it, while Ford only pays them for an hour of labor. I can’t find the exact video at the moment but the reality is that even if Ford paid $120k, you’d probably be working 80 hours a week.
GenerWork
>mechanics lose money working on them because Ford doesn’t accurately represent the time it takes to fix something
I believe this is mainly for warranty or recall work. If it's out of warranty, then the charges can be much higher. It also depends on the difficulty of the work being done. I had my Mustangs rear diff seal replaced under warranty, and I guarantee you that doing that wasn't that bad in terms of pay or time taken.
bagacrap
Where do you find the pay for [Ford] auto mechanics in 1995?
theideaofcoffee
“We can’t possibly afford to do this. It doesn’t make sense! What if we pay for all of this training and they leave?”
“What if you don’t and they stay?”
These companies think they can just reap all of the rewards without any investment, it’s stupid. I definitely agree with you saying that there needs to be a return to these places taking more care and investing in long-term people. Like you said, invest in them and they’ll invest in you.
2OEH8eoCRo0
How come Henry Ford could do this but modern companies cannot?
I've only seen Electric Boat do this (defense contractor) and it's likely because the govt pays for it!
fooker
Because it takes a lot more education to work at a modern factory than what it took in 1930.
The rest of the world has kept up. Even if you could hypothetically cram 12 years of education into six months of training, the kind of mental effort required to go through that training would be quite impossible for the average person.
But why do that when it’s so much easier to blame AI or immigration, or whatever the new boogeyman of the day is.
paulpauper
Why not pay them 300k/year? 500k? It has to be viable or worthwhile for both parties
mapontosevenths
> Why not pay them 300k/year? 500k?
That's a great idea! We could take the difference from the CEO's pay.
vitaflo
Congrats you just bought yourself 10 mechanics.
solomonb
They (and everyone else) should be paid the maximum amount the company can afford to pay while still being sustainable.
vineyardmike
And if that’s too little, the company should go under and make room for a company with the cash flow to pay people a salary high enough to accept the job offer.
NoMoreNicksLeft
You raise a valid point that doesn't deserve the downvoting...
But have you considered it fully? We're in a heap of shit if the pay that employers can truly afford is lower than the pay that employees require to earn the minimal livelihood. If there is really realsy no overlap there, then you need to stock up on canned food and shotgun shells.
Sevii
Just amazing that people keep letting the Ford CEO get away with this fake $120k claim.
fooker
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.
MBCook
Can you provide a link debunking it?
1v1id
I'm no expert, but from a quick Google search that looks to be twice the median income for a mechanic. If they can't find workers at that income level, it seems to me that they are either filtering based on another criteria (more than just trade school, as the article suggests) or Ford must be such an awful place to work that nobody applies.
pbnjeh
Mechanics are a "cost center". Modern "Management" does not like paying for "cost centers".
The rest is atmospherics.
(The US has, in general, taken a similar attitude towards public education, while simultaneously making it responsible for "everything" regarding children's upbringing. Compounding the problem.)
drweevil
>Farley complained that "we don't have trade schools anymore," reports Avi Zilber in the New York Post.
Who, exactly, is this "we"? Capitalists talk up The Market, but are unwilling to pay market-driven wages and salaries, and expect others, usually the government, to foot the bill for training their skilled workers.
It would also help if Ford and other vehicle manufacturers put some thought into incorporating maintainability into their designs. Their newest offerings are a hot mess in this respect.
asciimov
Ford needs to step up, if it can’t find mechanics.
Pay is too low for entry level people, at maybe $14 an hour. That’s before the Snap-on Truck comes by and saddles that tech with $40k of debt.
Give entry level workers a living wage, and give them tools to use (and keep after investing 3 years in the business). Have an actual pipeline for certification and training and remove the gate keeping of many dealers that prevent good techs from becoming better mechanics. Do better at engineering vehicles so they are easier to work on.
As this CEO knows, doing the right thing is harder than complaining.
RegW
Is this some obscure hint that there will be well paid skilled jobs to replace those taken away by AI?
I'm sure I've previously heard it implied that all the grooms who lost their jobs to motor cars became mechanics and chauffeurs. Surely this would be just too poetic.
rawgabbit
I find this hard to believe. How did they screen applicants?
tclancy
As an old, I feel for the author. Her bio suggests she is or was sympathetic to the working class, but she done got old and moved to Silicon Valley so I wonder.
“The Ford CEO's grandfather was one of the company's early employees, hired to work on the Model T.”
Yeah, and one of my grandfathers was a cop and the other a foreman on a jewelry shop floor. Both of which have as much to do with my coding career as the square root of sweet Fanny Adams. My dad put himself through college by working in a garage. I will admit the math in the 50s or so was more rigorous than what I had in the 80s, but the idea anyone interested in working on cars can’t be taught from almost scratch seems like a strong take. Whether you paid attention in pre-algebra or not is going to have little to do with your ability to balance four tires as a system or clean a carb or set engine timing via a computer.
somanyphotons
$company can't find high skilled people willing to work for low wages
bgwalter
The first comment on the website says that $120K is a lie.
Then of course, why would you specialize in the F150 if they add new electronic BS every 2 years, the car will perhaps be obsolete in 7 years or all tariffs on BYD are lifted in 8 years.
Maybe keep cars general and don't make them proprietary, then people will learn general skills.
kayodelycaon
I saw the management my parents and grandparents had to deal with. I saw the hours they worked. I saw how little they were appreciated. I saw how companies screwed over people who had worked for decades.
They haven’t changed one bit.
They’re lying about how much they’re paying people. That’s a maximum you can earn working 70 hours per week, not the base.
I am completely unsurprised they can’t find anybody to work for them.
Do what we used to do.
Pay them more. 120k is like 60k in mid 1990s money.
And, pay for their education. Invest in local colleges to help guide curriculum in what you need. That’s what defense contractors and mega corps do / have done.
Stop complaining and be stewards of your community. Like Henry Ford argued back in the day, “I want my employees to be able to buy a Ford”. Invest and the people will invest back.