How are these jobs perceived in America?

I've found that if people even have any idea about what e.g. a machinist does, they tend to see it as a dirty low-paying blue collar job for dumb people. Which can be true, but it doesn't have to be this way. The problem in .fi is the divide between smart students (who go to high school and then pursue higher education, which means no skilled trades) and vocational education which is for the rest of the students, who don't get good grades or just don't care about studying, etc.

But there's a lot of cool tech involved in machining & fabrication, and if there was a programme that maintained the academic level suitable for the better students and combined the trade with e.g. mechanical engineering or mechatronics, I'd see a lot more people getting into it. I've also heard that in some countries there are high schools during which you also learn a vocation or two.

I think I lived through high school without ever hearing the word "machinist" or even knowing what it really meant. And I suspect this is the case for the other students I knew.

Today, I'm going to spend around seven hours playing with a CNC lathe. In the evening, I'll be attending another school to study machine & fab tech (it's an engineering degree). So far, I'm loving it :-)

I got thrown into a machine shop as part of my engineering degree at a university-in-name-but-practically-a-polytechnic in Canada and in retrospect I am super glad. It was an excellent widening of perspective and gave me appreciation for physical side of the work (feasibility, implementability, etc). It is true I didn't give it much thought before.

Agreed 100% perception is a "big issue". At my engineering program we had the "ITLL" (Integrated Technology Learning Lab) which had a cross-discipline set of tools and laboratories (Machine shop, 3d Printers, Fluids Lab, Electronic workbenches, etc.)

Pretty much the only thing it lacked that I thought it should have had was a bio-engineering and/or chemistry laboratory, but there were those in the specific programs.

Even doing Computer Science, the exposure to using an a lathe and a 3D printer, was very eye-opening, and fortunately for the engineers, and imop one of the most useful learning tools at the entire major university.

It was the first time I actually felt like my engineering degree (or any 4-year degree from my University) was actually touching the real-world. It's a shame only a small subset of disciplines in engineering spent any real time there (and it was mostly introductory classes)

I grew up in Milwaukee, and my mother worked at the local technical college, so I heard about tool-and-die making and machining and so on growing up.

But the last 30 years or so haven't been kind to skilled manufacturing workers in the Upper Midwest, and on account of that I think most people who had other options avoided the field. I know one classmate's older brother became a welder, and he's spent a lot of time unemployed in the past few years.

Practical skills are certainly seen as seperate from design. It is amazing how many engineers can't even use AutoCAD! What this article is saying is that in Shenzhen people with practical skills can also be creative.

Yes, being here in Hong Kong now, I'm going to try to find an opportunity to spent some more time in Shenzhen and def. want to look into some of these exploratory incubators!