Mar­ket­place has a brief, but intrigu­ing story about how com­put­ing is trans­form­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing in the United States. As they explain, machin­ists used to work with their hands, phys­i­cally manip­u­lat­ing mechan­i­cal machines to shape and shred metal and other mate­ri­als into the basic com­po­nents of all kinds of engi­neered mate­ri­als, from small plas­tic trin­kets to air­plane parts.

Today, how­ever, machin­ing is less about oper­at­ing machines, and more about writ­ing code that oper­ates machines (CNC machines, in par­tic­u­lar, stand­ing for com­puter numer­i­cally con­trolled). To learn the CNC pro­gram­ming lan­guage, work­ers typ­i­cally take an 18-week course before their ready to oper­ate CNC machines, but then they can make a rea­son­able man­u­fac­tur­ing wage with­out get­ting their hands dirty or risk­ing injury. This is a clas­sic exam­ple of end-user pro­gram­ming, where some­one has to write code as a means to an end (a phys­i­cal object).

What’s even more fas­ci­nat­ing is the eco­nomic dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing this jobs. Appar­ently, the prob­lem isn’t train­ing the machin­ists, but find­ing peo­ple who want to be trained. The Man­u­fac­tur­ing Insti­tute found in a sur­vey that there are as many 600,000 man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs going unfilled, the major­ity of which are jobs that require these kinds of tech­ni­cal com­put­ing skills. This is there­fore as much a train­ing prob­lem as it is a recruit­ing problem.