Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <profession>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <profession> for cheap".
Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <profession>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <profession> for cheap".
Generally true, but not always! There are often very real bottlenecks on education too. We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
Pay is part of it, but for most skilled professions there's big bottlenecks on the training for the skills.
Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
Or doctors, there's a massive shortage because there aren't enough residency spots, something controlled by the AMA. Pay is amazing (hours suck) and there are people clamoring to do it, but the bottleneck is structural, not because of pay.
I'd argue that the "structural" bottleneck is actually just the same "pay" bottleneck.
This was the whole issue with allowing guilds in the first place... If you only allow a guild to do a job (legally) and the guild also controls how many members they train and accept... The end result is a labor shortage.
Because it's better for the existing members of the guild.
If they train a large number of new members... they spend time and money on training, and they've increased their competition during bidding which drives down rates.
So instead you train the bare minimum for replacements. This keeps your members' rates high and competition low.
---
Any time the "pay is great" but the "process to get it sucks!"... you're seeing this in action. It's not that the process really needs to suck, it's that the process roadblocks are there to maintain high pay for the existing trained members.
If there's one thing monopolies don't like... it's competition. And legally enforced certifications are wonderful monopoly creators if you don't manage them carefully.
That's one of the reasons US-trained doctors are in such short supply. The government controls the number of slots in medical schools, and from what I can tell the government does pretty much whatever the AMA wants.
Communists don't like competition, capitalists don't like competition either, what does that leave us with?
Where are the free market advocates that aren't just phonies?
I'd argue that without competition, it isn't capitalism, and before someone "no true Scotsman"'s me, Adam Smith wrote about the dangers of monopolies in The Weath of Nations. Where Scotsman isn't a well defined term, and neither is capitalism, coloquially anyway, maybe, but a free market would have rival trade unions with different certification processes and employers would decide which certification was preferable.
"Neoliberalism" became a dirty word for lots of reasons (mainly because it caused a ton of people in developed nations to lose their jobs, as manufacturing capacity shifted to developing nations and developed nations leaned into the information economy), but there was a time when the word wasn't tainted and the pro-market Democrats of the Clinton era absolutely self-identified as Neoliberals.
They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.
pro-communists want a system without competition. Pro-capitalists do want competition or at least no restrictions. People who are practicing capitalists would love to not have competition.
Think of a prize race. The people organizing the race and the audience want a highly competitive race. But the racers, if they are in it for the prize, would love to have little to no competition.
Artificial restrictions on who can do a thing is not good and it is violence behind, whether it is government or not.
Anarcho-capitalists are the true expression of the ideology of free markets.
I prefer 90% free 10% preventing monopolies, myself.
Its not that there is not enough education, its that there is too many regulatory barriers preventing licensing. It should be more like the DMV where anyone can take a test and get licensed if they pass. Forced experience and education requirements are touted as essential but are truly nothing more than regulatory moat building.
Maybe a test should be sufficient, but that test should be comprehensive, i.e., passing it should mean you had to do the education (formally or informally).
(Would you want someone performing surgery on you who "passed a test" but didn't have any formal education or training experience?)
I don't know about "not ... not enough education". Have a look at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/us/politics/army-recruiti...
Would you consider the lack of offering apprenticeships to get your trade license or on the job training as more structural or financial?
If there is a shortage of something, I would expect these trade companies to backfill with apprentices who will then grow into their roles.
If there's too high a risk that someone won't be worth the investment, then that seems entirely financial to me.
I'm using the term "structural" here without any clear definition, to be honest. By it I mean that it's about the structure of society, the relationships that are in place, the difficulty of setting up a new school, the resistance of the AMA to open up more residency spots, etc. Points in the process where there's high friction for changing the system to a better "structure", whether or not the change requires financial incentives.
But I don't know if that meaning is shared by anyone else in the world! Thanks for asking for clarification, I'm interested in how you'd communicate that idea.
Police officers in SF make $103k per year.
Making less than $105k per year in SF is considered low income.
The pay is quite a bit higher especially when you count overtime. https://careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=Q002
And they get a kickass pension which is worth a lot
> Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
As it should be. I’m tired of dumb roughnecks attending a 6-week course and then getting the ability to legally beat people up. It should be difficult to become a police officer, we should hold them to a high standard, especially if we’re gonna pay them so much.
While I agree that police should be held to a high standard and trained well, is this the actual case in SF? Or is it bureaucratic hoops leading to long wait times and/or duplication of effort?
Is their training rigorous or is it just difficult to get hired?
> We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
This got solved in tech 20 years ago. You don't look at credentials and instead design a very arduous interviewing process that selects for both high IQ and people who are willing to study/work at it.
Then you provide lots of training. 20 years ago at Google (or Apple etc) there were tons of well educated non CS hires who were given good training and became exceptional software engineers.
Google spends a shitton on their employees. A large majority of that is on training. And of that, a large amount of that is because what you know about computers from the outside world isn't useful at Google. At the lowest level, Google's computers are still the same as everyone else's, but because of all the layers of automation that have been built up around them, you need to learn all the Google systems on how you interact with them, especially at Google scale. Some of that training is applicable elsewhere, but the trope in our industry is (and I'm as guilty of this as the next Xoogler, try as I might to not do this) "well at Google we did..." and for it to not be useful in the current job's context because the current job isn't Google and doesn't have that kind of resources or culture.
Their "solution" rides on an unfathomably large tsunami of money. Which is great for them (and by extension, my bank account while I was there), but how do we accomplish that when there isn't one?
>but how do we accomplish that when there isn't one?
I worked for a small (~300 engineers) well run org in Verizon before I went to Google, and I was surprised at how well their training was, even with smaller budgets, and a tier below compensation wise and interviewing rigor.
This org supported being deliberate about hires, getting people who were experts and liked coaching/training along with those who were newbies with aptitude and desire. There was good documentation, good shared culture, and lots of safeguards like linting, excessive testing, example projects, if not quite the full fledged codelabs google has.
But part of it, both for Verizon and Google, was signaling that "good people work here and are well rewarded" (comparatively).
Hire, then train them for a long period of time? That is an apprenticeship. It's what they do in the trades already. There aren't enough slots (union or not).
e.g. http://www.calapprenticeship.org/programs/electrician_appren...
You need a diploma, a smattering of algebra, a driver's license, and the physical ability to do the work. Everything else you will be taught on the job, while being paid.
You think a year is a lot? In my country it takes a bachelor of 3 years to become a police officer.
And rightfully so, the cops here are fantastic.
We do have lower level “enforcement officers” though, but they also take 2.4 to 3 years. Just not a bachelors
If these jobs you describe had higher pay rates, then all those bottlenecks you describe will magically go away.
I reckon the San Francisco PD salaries are not really all that "fantastic".
Gatekeepers and rent-seekers are holding everyone else back.
[dead]
While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
While reading the article, the now-less-common business of vacuum and TV repair came to mind. I imagine it's easier than ever to repair vacuums, with improved tools and free internet repositories of schematics. But I only know of one store still doing this within 5 miles of my house. I haven't asked former vacuum repairmen, but my guess as to the reasons:
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
I think even the parts availability argument starts to fall apart with scales of economy in manufacturing. I can walk into Best Buy today and walk out with a brand new 65" QLED 4k TV for $299 + tax. How much money is someone willing to spend to fix a $300 item? Even if the parts are free, you're better off replacing it if it's going to take more than an hour to fix. Keep in mind the overhead of finding a repair shop, scheduling a drop off, dropping off the TV, waiting for the TV to be repaired, picking up the TV again and remounting it. You can cut more than half of those steps out by buying a new one and it'll be available within the hour. At the rate of progression, it may even be an upgrade!
Most of the time the failed part is either the power supply board or a backlight and they’re usually available as aftermarket if you can’t be bothered to isolate the failed micro component or LED “bulb” and solder one in from a donor. Or a flex cable that just needs reseating.
PS is probably harder nowadays since it might be more integrated but not 10+ years ago.
It's really amazing how I quoted a repair shop owner saying the problem is parts availability and got two responses basically saying "nuh uh."
I have a more recent personal experience. My parents refrigerator went out. The repair man came out and diagnosed it as a bad inverter board and he'd get the part and come back in a few days. Great! The next day he calls my dad and tells him the part isn't available from the manufacturer so he can't actually fix it.
So I helped my dad go on an internet search and we eventually found an aftermarket (counterfeit?) board and installed it ourselves. My parents were thrilled they didn't have to buy a new refrigerator, but the repair guy got paid for the diagnosis but didn't make any money for the repair. I don't know if that's a long term sustainable business.
This is why when I replaced my appliances I chose GE/Hotpoint. GE does their own in house parts and service, and in particular Hotpoint is easy to fix with a screwdriver.
Tv repair made a lot more sense in the days of tubes which wore out quick but were easy to replace. Solid state generally lasts much longer and the parts that fail are not worth repairing.
This isn't true at all. Capacitors commonly blow on modern TVs and are cheap and easy to replace if you have the repair data.
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
Could you please go in to a bit more detail on how you set that up, how you handle issues, etc? I'm a member of a makerspace, and there's been discussions about doing something similar. There's just not a consensus about how to go about it.
Reach out here: https://dallasmakerspace.org/faq/ (I'm not finding a good link for https://thelab.ms/ - another Dallas makerspace), but I'd suggest reaching out.
...generally I've seen weekly/monthly "fix-it" workshops as a kindof open-house / membership drive.
Probably best to 1) have people sign safety waivers, especially if they're not members 2) have people sign a "we can offer to help you try, but your widget might end up worse than before" waiver 3) run it as a volunteer outreach event with a focus on getting membership rather than a transactional "fix my ____ for free" outcome
We have one here in town maybe twice a year; I wish it was a monthly thing.
great idea. I get a "coming soon" type message for my town and search does not say where the next nearest is.
I used the map and found the two nearest I quite far. plenty where I used to live, and a lot in other parts of the UK. Good to see.
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
I really like the idea of adding taxes (or subsidies) to make repairing things more economical than replacing them, when this is not the case already. It seems difficult to fairly decide how to do this, but charging by rubbish weight is at least objective and easily measurable.
It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
TVs and vacuum cleaners are now a lot cheaper AND more reliable then they used to be.
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
TVs are definitely more reliable, but vacuum cleaners? I had a Dyson a few years ago and it didn't take long before plastic parts started to snap off. Meanwhile my mother in law's Electrolux or whatever is indestructible with occasional maintenance.
Also, new stuff just isn't designed to be opened up.
I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.
It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
> While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
Not just market rate, but being totally wrong! My read of that article is that it's not gonna take 40 minutes to do the job, but because Ford says it'll take that long, that's what they're getting paid for. It seems like the bigger issue is that Ford gets to say how long it will take and what they say isn't remotely right. There's similar weirdness with flight attendants and how they get paid, because they don't get paid if they're not in the air, or something like that. If you zoom out, it's about not being willing to pay enough money, and at that level you'd be right. But if we zoom in a little, the ways in which they're not getting paid enough is also relevant. If I want to get paid for a honest days worth of work, everyone else all the way to the top better also be honest. It sucks when they're not, but as long as my paycheck cashes, I've got better things on my plate to contend with.
It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says. Not being willing to pay the wages necessary to hire someone is pretty much exactly what they're saying as well.
The implied criticism in the original comment is that companies should pay more. They ignore that in a lot of cases it doesn't make structural sense for a role to exist above a given price.
> It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
The auto repair business is still pretty fragmented in most areas so as a practical matter employers can't really pressure wages. Mechanics change jobs all the time to get a raise. The industry has a relatively high annual employee turnover rate.
They agree that corporations don't do things that aren't profitable, their implied disagreement is whether this is greedy/bad or merely rational/amoral.
In other words, the existence of a minimum wage implies there is also a minimum job, a job which if it were any less valuable to the company they wouldn’t pay anyone to do it.
> since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price
In your example there would still be people willing to do it, but the government doesn't allow it?
If the demand doesn't reach the minimum wage, is that even a shortage?
I'm not going to pay someone to punch me in the face but I wouldn't call that a shortage.
That doesnt make sense to me.
Seems like theres either a demand for something or there isnt.
And the amount of demand sets the rate of pay.
The invisible hand.
Demand is a function of price. At any given price there is a quantity demanded. To know the price you also need to know the supply function. There is a demand for socks but if no one is will to supply socks for less a million dollars, the quantity demanded of socks at that price could be 0.
In most markets seems like commodity level items and services like baggers and socks would have plenty of supply.
In a free market, commodity-level jobs will only happen at commodity-level wages. But it's not a free market, because of minimum wage laws. If you set the minimum wage too high, the number of baggers may go to zero, not because of supply but because of demand - the price is higher than any grocery store is willing to pay.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
The demand curve might not be gradual, there might be demand for e.g. 1 million jobs at $15 but 100 at $16
In some countries there's something called a "minimum wage" that sets the minimum value of a job that is allowed to exist, and any job that isn't worth that amount ceases to exist, or has fewer people doing it, or has partial or full automation doing it.
There’s a demand, but the price we want to pay for “grocery baggers” is usually less than minimum wage, so the job usually can’t (legally) exist. The cost (wage) is fixed higher than the value added.
Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <goods>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <good> for cheap".
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
Technically true. I think a "shortage" is technically defined in terms of price. But the example of housing is a hint at the limitations of this rule. Sure, we'd like houses to be cheaper, but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more. So what do we actually do about it? Increase supply, yeah, but why is the supply limited? Well, it's various weird, annoying restrictions on housing that you don't see unless you dig past "lol they want it cheap".
> Sure, we'd like houses to be cheaper
People that can't achieve home ownership right now want houses to be cheaper.
People that already got theirs don't. Yeah, supply is a problem but it's more than that. Housing cannot both be an investment and broadly affordable, those two goals are in conflict.
We need to change the way we treat housing so that it cannot be used to both store and generate wealth.
Yep, that's a good pointer to why those annoying restrictions survive.
>but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more.
You can argue the same for labor as well. Everything from off-shore competition to strained government budgets are excuses for why employers "don't have the option to just pay more".
Sure, some of those might be worth looking into. But also, we can be a lot more cavalier about saying a company that can't pay its workers should go out of business than we are about saying that a family that can't afford housing should just live on the street. I think the latter case is more worth attacking directly.
The point is, shortages being a price phenomenon is not all that actionable. You can't avoid digging in to the details.
We keep making the argument that supply is limited, ignoring corporate housing buyers, foreign investment (buying a house abroad might yield a visa), and people holding too much property. Limit these 3 and suddenly there's a lot more affordable housing on the market.
This logic assumes something is always available for sale somewhere at some price. It shouldn't hold when something is actually short to the point of rarity. If someone is unwilling to sell something that you can't buy elsewhere, this reasoning will conclude that its price is infinite.
Is there a difference between people and goods?
Of course not. That would ruin their analogy!
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
Not really, when you consider both the interests of the buyer or the seller. The buyer of course would rather like goods and services be cheaper. It might be tempting to say that "people" deserve special consideration over "goods", it breaks down when you consider that goods are also made by people. Moreover gatekeeping whether you can use the characterization of "we can't get ... for cheap" depending on whether the seller is sympathetic or not (ie. "people" vs "goods") is a blatant way of smuggling in a conclusion via wording, similar to "terrorists" vs "freedom fighters".
I don't think this is correct. The reasons economists separate capital and labor is that they do have different characteristics. Labor has skill, capital can have technology. Assets exist regardless of utilization, labor cannot be stored up in an inventory since labor is time which flows inexorably onwards.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
They're different for good reasons.
>A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels [...] OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?
>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
A shortage exists at a point in time, propensity to pay to make the asset may react to the demand for the asset, but there is no guarantee that supply of labor and capital meet at an efficient point. (art is a great example where the overlap between supply and demand may have no overlap at all for certain pieces).
Lack of demand for labor and skill can produce an asset shortage, but in an economy where supply and demand float, the theory is that shortages reflect supply-demand failures, and the degree to which supply of labor is invoked to solve shortages for goods depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply.
But assets and technology itself is ultimately created by labour.
There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.
Also if you sideline too many goods, the goods can't rise up and force a new economy.
Someone here posted that the balance was better in the west in the past because the Soviet Union was sitting there on the sidelines like a boogy many to capitalists waiting if they pushed people too far.
You’re right, although the mechanic’s claim here was more complicated and interesting than just “we’re getting underpaid”.
It was a good view into what exactly the car companies are doing, but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
> but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps
Oh, yeah, it's definitely them getting underpaid—but in a way that I wasn't expecting and was surprised to learn about.
I think part of this may be that some of the market is buying EVs now. The amount of car repair necessary per person is decreasing overtime.
Very highly paid executive complains because the peasants aren't willing to work for nearly nothing. Where have I heard that before. But Ivanovko brings up a great point: manufacturers are making their products difficult to repair, for a variety of reasons. In this case saving manufacturing costs increases profits, but at the cost to the owner of greater repair costs. Even for simple repairs. (And collision repair costs, ugh!) And that in turn drives up insurance costs. I'm amazed that people can afford today's vehicles.
Sometimes, but I’m intimately familiar with a business that pays people like $20/hr while they’re training them (9mos) - then the pay goes to like $30/hr, and after a few years most of them are making like $90k+/year. No one wants the job because they don’t want to put in the time, and it takes a 2-5 years to for someone to be good at it. My point being is that there are a ton of people that have super short term thinking when it comes to this stuff (like next month not next five year)
The price will go up as the availability goes down. If you have a shortage of mechanics, each mechanic can raise his/her labor price. So, while you're saying "we can't get <profession> for cheap" this implies a lack of professionals or a structural problem increasing costs in a given industry, or both.
In the case of doctors and electricians, you have structural problems in both, but also a true shortage of individuals in electrician work (could be in the medical field too, but I can't speak to that).
Mechanics are one of the few professions in the US where corporate wage suppression is allowed by law. So it actually is a case of having a shortage because they can just move to another industry.
Agreed. It kinda worked for software for a bit since it was such a new field, so there could’ve been some truth to it just as a matter of time to get the systems in place to educate people.
Skilled labor (such as mechanics) require training and apprenticeship pipelines. If those pipelines don’t exist or are starved of people it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay right now. Long term sure you can make that career path more appealing but it can and often is absolutely the case that companies would pay out the nose for employees with particular skills and are unable to find anyone. But sure let’s go with the standard Reddit pablum, why give it more thought than that?
That's what a shortage is, a short-term undersupply. Market forces will eventually correct the problem if allowed to operate normally (e.g. prices spike, incentivizing more supply), but like you said that takes time. If it's a shortage of goods it can take a while to ramp up production. If it's a shortage of skilled labor it can take a while for people to learn those skills. Either way it's fundamentally the same type of problem.
The market alone doesn’t work well with things like training that had feedback loops of several years. In German there is the term “Schweinezyklus”. It goes like this:
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
* more people start training
* after a few years companies complain about too many workers and don’t hire them
* people stop training
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
I was part of this in the 90s in mechanical engineering. When I started studying the job market was great. When I finished there were no jobs. Luckily I could jump to programming.
I think we are seeing the same with CS now. Too many people jumped into it.
Predicting the future is indeed famously difficult, which is why even markets have a hard time with forecasting and responding to demand years into the future. I don't think such over corrections are a market failure, just a lack of omniscience.
The reason those pipelines dry up is because pay is too low.
Or we outsourced the juniors to India or replaced them with AI
Trying to move everyone up the value chain leaves a vacuum in the pipeline
OMG yes. So many people miss this, and many companies don't understand this.
Ya, and then people wonder why cars are so expensive to repair these days also. The market is at a breaking point, efficiency has to go along with the higher pay or it just won’t work out.
I recently acquired a new (to me) 2017 vehicle and took it to my independent mechanic who has been working on my cars for years. He is registered with the mfg. and has access to many of their proprietary diagnostics and tools, but warned me that there is very little he can do on the latest models. They are basically 'return to dealer' because of 'software'.
It's always been that way with new stuff though. Between exclusivity agreements and whatnot it takes time for the documentation and supplies to be available outside the dealership service supply chain.
Used to be most dealership software tools would work offline because of the global nature of vehicles. Therefore the software tools would leak to the public. Now it’s moving “to the cloud” and that’s getting more complicated.