Comment by xboxnolifes

Start by asking yourself "manufacturing what?" and go from there. I've worked at companies that did some form of manufacturing my entire career. "Manufacturing" covers even more ground than "software" does. e.g., textile manufacturing has a completely different set of concerns than manufacturing airplane parts does.

3d printers start around 250 USD. Filament's at 15 USD/kg.

You can get familiar with gcode, with CAD software, making parameterized models, etc.

Something like pcbway allows you to prototype a lot of stuffs, cnc and sheetmetal forming iirc