Car Mechanics Are Better Paid Than Programmers

Well at least they cost more! A 17 year old kid, fresh from school can cost me £90/hr to fix my car. A 22 year old graduate won't command that rate until they have many years of experience.

You think that 17 year old kid gets all that money? Welcome to the machine

When I worked as a car mechanic in the early to mid 80s, I was being paid 25% of the shop rate. The best paid mechanics I knew made 30%. My shop (a Toyota dealership) charged ~$48./hr at the time. No 17 year old kids worked as mechanics in our shop. Everyone had several years experience at least. So divide that 90 pounds by 4 or more. (That is still 22.50/hr if you think about it -- in many companies, that still is more than most programmers make. At least here in USA.)

Multiple mistakes there: you're assuming the shop rate percentage in the UK is the same as in the US, and also that programmer wages in the UK are the same as in the US. The best one could do given these data is note that in the early to mid '80s, mechanics grossed $12.00 to $14.40 an hour, and compare that with programmer salaries from the same period--which is going to tell you nothing about the relationship between mechanics and programmers today (given the intervening years).

In the meantime, it's been argued before that average programmers are overpaid, too (for example, in ThePragmaticProgrammer).

I suppose what was trying to be said was that given the education, training and experience the difference in rates charged for a programmer and car mechanic is out of proportion.

The ratio of that fee that goes to the individual is also out of proportion; are the overheads of a car workshop signifantly higher than that of a software house?

I cannot compare dollar for dollar, but many of the fixtures found in a professional garage--hydraulic jacks, machine tools, etc. can get rather expensive--especially for professional grade tools which are designed to last. Plus, garages need to maintain inventories of parts and fluids, etc. And unless the garage bays are full, the shop doesn't earn revenue--the mechanic is paid whether or not he is working on a car, cleaning up the shop floor, or reading magazines while waiting for customers.

Incorrect. Pretty much all "real" mechanics get paid a flat rate per job. That means a given job is worth a certain number of hours. This doesn't include non-mechanics such as the kids who work for quick-lube places changing your oil.. No work = no pay.
ItDepends. Dealer mechanics don't always work this way (at least mine didn't when I used to be naive enough to take my car back to the original dealer, just on principle), but I think all the mechanics at the big "chain" garages do. Supposedly, it cuts down on customer gouging, but it does screw the mechanic who runs into problems that take him over the "customary" hour allotment for a job, and health care is moving toward this model as well. Of course, independent mechanics generally don't work this way, either.
- Of course, the hours the customer is billed for and the hours the mechanic is paid for need not have anything to do with each other. Though it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the shop manager tell the mechanics "look, since we only can bill the customer X hours for job Y, that's all you get paid for"...

One can easily do high-quality software development on a budget. If one uses FreeSoftware for everything, the primary non-labor expense becomes purchasing computer systems. And those are probably less expensive than the fixtures found in a competent garage.

Of course, one can always spend lots of money buying cool tools for the programmers...

I am not sure why but this just feels wrong.

The last thing I want to do is pay a kid top-rate for misaligning my steering wheel (which he did).

This is a growing trend when a person takes an automobile into the shop for alignment. They purposely misalign the steering wheel, then tell you afterwards that unless you pay for their premium alignment service, they do not guarantee an aligned steering wheel only the front wheels. I stomp on shops like this real hard, and I show them no mercy.
- Stomp on them in what way? Are you able to prove that this was done? Or do you just pay with your VISA card, and then refuse the charges?
- I've never heard of this.. usually a mis-aligned steering wheel is just plain sloppiness. Any decent shop would apologise, and fix it for free. If a shop told me that, I would indeed ask for a refund and/or badmouth them to anyone I happened to talk to. Find another shop!!! Additionally, a reputable shop would have one of their most experienced people doing alignments, not a kid. Choose a repair shop carefully.

A non-car driver asks, what is this "alignment" of which you write?

Generally, wheels can be adjusted on three axes: toe-in (inward or outward deflection with respect to the long axis of the car), camber (inward or outward deflection of the tires with respect to the vertical axis of the car), and caster (forward or backward deflection of the steering column linkage with respect to the vertical axis of the car).

Alignment means adjusting these values for the front wheels and sometimes the rear on cars that have those adjustments. The method of adjustment varies: on my 1949 Chevrolet pickup, for example, this entails strapping chains around the 2" thick steel I-beam of a front axle and using hydraulic jacks to bend it into proper specifications. More modern cars have nut and bolt adjustments that sometimes involve shims.

An automobile which is out of alignment will handle poorly (sometimes even to the point of danger), develop vibrations or "shimmies" at highway speeds (which can lead to other mechanical failures like loose screws and clips, or in my case, a broken exhaust pipe), and experience greater tire wear.

From a driver's perspective, it's not hard to tell when a car is generally out of alignment, but unless a problem is obvious, there isn't any way to reliably check some of the individual parameters without jacking the car up and taking measurements. Therefore, much of the expense in performing an alignment is incurred in determining what parameters are out of alignment.

Unfortunately, that makes unnecessary and/or poorly done alignments an easy way for bad mechanics to cost you money, or for unscrupulous mechanics to rip off customers. Some unscrupulous garages will even--as noted above--misalign cars intentionally (when doing something else) and then attempt to sell additional services to correct the problem.

Another great target for dirty garages is transmissions, simply because it's labor intensive to tear down a transmission to fix a problem, and once it's torn down, you can't just drive to another mechanic if you suspect shenanigans when they call you and inform you there are bigger, more expensive problems. Just tearing it down and putting it back together involves replacing parts.