Jim Farley has a problem that would make most CEOs envious. The Ford Motor Company chief executive has 5,000 jobs available right now.
The positions pay $120,000 a year—nearly double what the median American worker earns. Yet despite offering salaries that rival those of software engineers and management consultants, Farley can’t find enough people to fill them.
The jobs? Automotive mechanics.
“We have 5,000 open mechanic jobs at our dealerships right now,” Farley lamented on a recent podcast. “These aren’t simple positions.
It takes about five years to fully train someone to do this work—removing diesel engines from Super Duty trucks, diagnosing complex electrical systems, understanding modern automotive technology.”
It’s a stunning admission. But what makes it truly remarkable is the timing. While Ford desperately hunts for skilled workers, the tech industry—long held up as the aspirational destination for America’s best and brightest—is in the midst of a brutal contraction.
Over 112,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2025 alone, spanning more than 230 companies. Microsoft, Google, Intel, Tesla, and countless startups have shed thousands of high-paid knowledge workers in what industry observers are calling an AI-driven restructuring.
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We’re witnessing something extraordinary: an economy where college-educated professionals are flooding the unemployment line while six-figure trade jobs go begging. It’s a paradox that reveals uncomfortable truths about how America thinks about work, education, and value.
The Prestige Problem
For decades, American society has operated under a simple equation: college degree equals success, trade work equals settling.
We’ve funneled generations of students toward universities, sold them on the promise of air-conditioned offices and stock options, while quietly dismantling the vocational training infrastructure that once produced skilled craftspeople.
The results are now undeniable. Farley points out that the shortage extends far beyond automotive mechanics.
There are over a million openings in critical manual labor positions across the country—emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, and other tradesmen.
The National Automobile Dealers Association reports an annual shortfall of approximately 37,000 trained automotive technicians, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting nearly 68,000 mechanic openings each year through 2033.
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Meanwhile, computer science graduates who were promised the world are discovering that their newly minted degrees may not guarantee the career trajectory they expected.
The tech layoffs aren’t just affecting middle managers and sales teams. Engineers, data scientists, and product designers—roles that commanded premium salaries and fierce competition just two years ago—are being eliminated in waves.
The Automation Irony
There’s a bitter irony embedded in this labor market whiplash. Many tech companies justify their layoffs by citing investments in artificial intelligence and automation. The implicit promise: AI will do more with less, making human workers redundant.
Yet the jobs being automated away are precisely the ones that required expensive educations and were marketed as “future-proof.”
The jobs going unfilled—the ones involving diesel engines, electrical systems, and physical problem-solving—are largely immune to AI disruption. You can’t ask ChatGPT to replace a transmission or diagnose why a truck won’t start in sub-zero temperatures.
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The skilled trades offer something increasingly rare in modern employment: work that requires human judgment, physical presence, and expertise that can’t be easily replicated or offshored.
A mechanic troubleshooting a complex engine problem is doing something that resists commodification. They’re not competing with workers in Bangalore or algorithms in the cloud.
The Math Doesn’t Lie
Let’s talk numbers. A Ford mechanic making $120,000 a year earns more than many software developers, especially outside major tech hubs.
They likely graduated high school, completed a vocational program or apprenticeship, and started earning while their college-bound peers accumulated debt.
Compare that to a computer science graduate from a mid-tier university who spent four years and perhaps $100,000 or more on their education, only to enter a job market where entry-level positions are vanishing and competition is fiercer than ever.
The laid-off tech worker faces not just unemployment but the psychological blow of having followed “the right path” only to find it doesn’t lead where promised.
Yet cultural perceptions lag behind economic reality. Parents still push their children toward college and away from trade schools.
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High schools have largely eliminated shop classes and vocational tracks. We’ve created an education system optimized for producing knowledge workers in an economy that desperately needs skilled tradespeople.
The Five-Year Problem
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this paradox is its persistence. Farley noted that becoming a fully trained mechanic requires approximately five years.
That means even if we magically convinced thousands of people to enter the trades tomorrow, we’d still face critical shortages for half a decade.
The tech sector, by contrast, moves at algorithmic speed. Those 112,000 laid-off workers hit the unemployment line almost overnight.
Companies that were hiring aggressively in 2022 have reversed course entirely. The adjustment is brutal and immediate.
This temporal mismatch creates real human costs. The laid-off tech worker needs income now, not in five years. Retraining for a trade job—even a lucrative one—requires both time and a psychological leap that decades of cultural conditioning have made difficult.
Rethinking Value
The great labor paradox forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about how we value different types of work.
Why have we elevated abstract knowledge work above skilled manual labor? Why do we consider it more prestigious to write code that might be obsolete in three years than to master a craft that will remain essential indefinitely?
Farley attributes the shortage partly to insufficient investment in trade education and a lack of trade schools.
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He’s right, but the problem goes deeper than infrastructure. It’s cultural. We’ve taught multiple generations that working with your hands is what you do if you can’t work with your mind—as if the two were mutually exclusive, as if a master mechanic doesn’t need to be brilliant.
The labor market is now sending a clear signal: that hierarchy is backwards. The economy needs skilled tradespeople more desperately than it needs another cohort of software engineers. It’s willing to pay accordingly.
The question is whether our educational institutions, cultural values, and career counseling will catch up to reality—or whether Ford will still be looking for those 5,000 mechanics five years from now.
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