[galadriel]

From my experience of college level instrumentation design, if one want to design parts and run CNC to its full potential, he/she should be decently proficient in curve drawing, understanding gear design, etc, and the math required for it can be quite involved. This is after you know the broad design detail. Some difficult things involve how to best approximate a curve on given CNC constraints, figuring out best fit for parts, etc; and then write appropriate programs for it. IMO, there are only a very few people who would have skill set like these, but not enough to move on to higher level engineering jobs.

Although, a lot of this thing is getting automated, and there is a huge push towards figuring out how you can feed a CAD design directly to CNC and let it figure out best way to implement it.

PS: I cannot expect that you can ever hire enough good people in this category for $10 an hour. They would probably be writing VB scripts and earning more money. Working in a fast food chain would be totally a waste of potential of decently skilled workers.