16 ms·

The White-Collar Job Apocalypse That Didn’t Happen

83 points by johnny313 7y ago

planetzero 7y ago
The reason it didn't happen is because many white-collar jobs require a good understanding of our culture and language, which isn't required for factory jobs.
- bumby 7y ago
  Can you elaborate your point? I'm curious because I've spent time in a plant formerly shared by American/Japanese corporations concurrently
  - planetzero 7y ago
    My point is that in factory jobs, the end result is usually just to get the job done, whatever that may be (building parts of a car, etc). As long as the workers can understand you and you can communicate what needs to be done, it can work. White collar jobs usually involve more meetings, knowledge of business culture and language. This is much more difficult to outsource to countries that don't share any of the same culture and language. This is also why outsourcing development jobs has been mostly a disaster for US companies.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      >outsourcing development jobs Outsourcing in the sense of sending to offshore body shops. Somewhat true. But a lot of companies distribute development around the world in various ways. It's not only about taking advantage of lower costs, but some of it is.
habnds 7y ago
paging Mr. Yang...
mikestew 7y ago
Wow, to think it's been almost 30 years since I wasted money on Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. Too bad it was the first Yourdon book I'd read, because it was also the last.
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Yourdon, you’re done
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  He wrote a sequel The Rise and Resurrection Of The American Programmer not that long after. Its worth checking out if you can find a copy. A real snapshot of history and insight into the culture of the time.
  - chengiz 7y ago
    Hey he may not be a good predictor but he's a good businessman, covering both ends of the spectrum!
dvdhnt 7y ago
Ah, corporate apologia. > Companies did move millions of office jobs to India, the Philippines and other places where they could pay workers less. But those job losses were more than balanced by growth elsewhere in the economy. That's like saying there will be an apple shortage but ignoring it because we grew more oranges. > But many companies discovered that labor savings were offset by other factors: time differences, language barriers, legal hurdles and the simple challenge of coordinating work half a world away. In some cases, companies decided they were better off moving jobs to less expensive parts of the United States rather than out of the country. The thing is, rents and expenses continued to grow where these jobs used to be but wages stagnated. Offshoring is a contributor to wage stagnation, which would be acceptable if rents and expenses ebbed and flowed at the same pace. But wealth inequality and rent-seekers continue to squeeze the average person. The result is people who are underemployed or working multiple jobs. > Ms. Lund said she saw parallels between offshoring and automation: Both trends threaten one set of jobs but should make the overall American economy more productive, creating new job opportunities, albeit ones requiring different skills. And she said the pace of change should allow workers, companies and governments to adapt. Learning new skills isn't free. It will harm workers who have their jobs automated. Our employment system isn't worker-friendly in this instance. Those displaced workers will still need to pay rent and buy food ALONG with buying new skills. They will probably end up underemployed.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Exactly. Cost of living goes up, you cant save your way to retirement. Thats the wests biggest problem. All we got in exchange for the average citizen is cheaper flatscreens and shittier toys. But sure those of us in tech are good.
  - anovikov 7y ago
    People could never save for retirement. Never. Not a single generation did it yet. Just the scale of the problem is now bigger because as the population stopped growing fast enough, we suddenly have a lot of people going to retire.
    - 7y ago
Merrill 7y ago
A good strategy is to off-shore jobs in a function that is to be eliminated. When it comes time to close the operation down, there isn't as much mid-level management inside the company opposing the closure. It also minimizes community and political backlash.
Animats 7y ago
I'd been expecting "peak office". "Peak factory worker" was in the 1970s in the US. I'd expected that, with everything being computerized, total office employment would decline as well. Didn't happen. Why is an interesting question.
- sct202 7y ago
  I suspect some of is due to how amorphous the term white collar is. The BLS has job projections, https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-largest-job-declines.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-largest-job-decli... , and they forecast large declines in admins and clerk-type office jobs that you would expect. The fastest growing list on the other hand, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm , has some office jobs, but it's dominated by healthcare jobs that some of which are kind of office-like. There's also some weirdness, with Computer Programmer listed on the decline list, while Software developers, applications is on the fastest growing list.
  - duderific 7y ago
    That's probably just a reflection of the job title changing, rather than the number of jobs available. Computer Programmer is an "old-school" title while Software Developer is more up to date.
    - swagtricker 7y ago
      If you look at the description, I believe part of the problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has always been under the delusion that "Computer Programmers" were little more than typists who understood programming syntax. There's an assumption that some sort of all important _DESIGN_ work was done by analysts or other so-called experts perhaps the almighty "Software Developer". Could it be Computer Programmers just type what they're told, and perhaps Software Developers do the important work;) https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
barbecue_sauce 7y ago
That didn't happen yet. I think the biggest takeaway from gig economy "gig brokerage" platforms is that many people would rather take direction from an app than a human manager (conjecturally, for psychological reasons). If more traditional companies (retailers, businesses with other large output-oriented workforces, etc.) figured out a way to introduce this sort of algorithmic management model that works for them to either hide or replace management while also augmenting it, I feel like a great deal of middle-management bureaucracy could end up eliminated.
- blitmap 7y ago
  Game'ified performance appraisals or records/statistics that you can cite/link for getting work outside the app-job. Unlocking raises with hours invested or good reviews earned or a combination of metrics. Making in-app purchases to join a union or buy into additional benefits. Integrating these gig economy apps with places like LinkedIn (shudder) to help you find temporary work quickly without ever talking to a human.
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    World of WorkCraft
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    I'm guessing you're trying to sketch a dystopian scenario but that sounds pretty appealing to me!
    - blitmap 7y ago
      The only part I disliked was LinkedIn - #introvertsunite
- narrator 7y ago
  Sounds like the Manna novel: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
thrower123 7y ago
The impedance mismatch is just too high. I haven't been doing this that long, and I've already seen multiple cycles of outsourcing functions, dissatisfaction with the quality, speed, and communication overhead of the outsourced services, then bringing the functions back in-house locally. Then a year or two passes, new directors or VPs come in, and the cycle begins again. It's a lot of churn. One result is that I see with my enterprise customers is that they end up with a lot of the more expensive, experienced people getting thinned out in each of these cycles - IBM is one that is somewhat infamous for this. The other that I see is a death of specialization. There aren't really dedicated network engineers, or ops specialists, or DBAs, or security experts in most companies anymore; everybody is a short-timer that is thrown into the mix and making things up on the fly. And these are Fortune 500 companies, not fly-by-night SMBs.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Long-term institutional knowledge is criminally undervalued.
bloopernova 7y ago
Hey I work for Nexient. Kind of cool to be in an article in the NY Times, less so perhaps for the ire directed at outsourcing. I'm just a devops person. Would it be considered a majorly huge faux pas if I mentioned any details about Nexient's careers? If so, I'll edit and remove that previous sentence.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ArtDev 7y ago
Except.. it did happen.
dehrmann 7y ago
I went on a date with a girl who does accounting for a VC firm in Menlo Park. She got career advice in ~2002 not to study CS because it would all be in India by 2015. My lucky-best decision was studying CS in 2002 right after the bubble burst, everyone was worried about outsourcing, and the smartphone revolution that led to 2009-present growth in tech hadn't started. Talk about buying low. I was recently talking to an Uber driver from Kenya who was saying rents in Nairobi, an African tech hub, aren't that much cheaper than, say, Cleveland. So we're past outsourcing...but Cleveland...
- asdfman123 7y ago
  I graduated from high school in 2005 and was choosing between science and CS. I chose science because a lot of ideas from the prior tech bubble burst and offshoring craze were floating around in my head. I wish I had just majored in CS instead...
- groby_b 7y ago
  I was advised in 1989 that I shouldn't study CS because it'd be outsourced/replaced by AI. What did happen were waves of outsourcing, followed by insourcing. My theory is that whenever there's a new generation of managers, we flip around, because they haven't learned from the previous one.
  - foobiekr 7y ago
    A somewhat related story. My first degree was in a foreign language; I was taking it for my own reasons but one of the professors I was close to knew I was very involved in technology and linguistics. She asked in, maybe in 1992, whether I thought computers would eliminate the jobs of translators "soon." I remember looking at her and saying that no, not until the mid-2000s or so, because of the twin problems of voice recognition and OCR: in both cases, you need both a corpus for translation and to build it you need to get the data into machine form. I was off by maybe 6-10 years but machine translation really did start making inroads for professional writing around then (and maybe a little sooner). Now, though, the job is totally transformed. Live translation is still a real job but a hard one to land and with fewer opportunities, and media translation while it is still a career (especially for science and technology papers, etc.) it is dramatically changed and is now more of an editing job than a translation job. That happened in a few years, tops, once the tools arrived. So .. maybe we're whistling in the dark. A lot of what we do cannot really ever be practically done by AI, but I think a lot could be. The demise of the CASE market probably delayed a lot of what's coming for a long time, and a lot of things likely will be automated. I think UI design is ripe since so many UIs basically look exactly the same.
tempsy 7y ago
I've always been irked by the assumption that more jobs = good when most people, especially white collar workers, go to work everyday knowing that their job is almost certainly replaceable or one that probably doesn't actually need to exist in the first place e.g. a "bullshit job".

83 points by johnny313 7y ago

The reason it didn't happen is because many white-collar jobs require a good understanding of our culture and language, which isn't required for factory jobs.

bumby 7y ago
Can you elaborate your point? I'm curious because I've spent time in a plant formerly shared by American/Japanese corporations concurrently
- planetzero 7y ago
  My point is that in factory jobs, the end result is usually just to get the job done, whatever that may be (building parts of a car, etc). As long as the workers can understand you and you can communicate what needs to be done, it can work. White collar jobs usually involve more meetings, knowledge of business culture and language. This is much more difficult to outsource to countries that don't share any of the same culture and language. This is also why outsourcing development jobs has been mostly a disaster for US companies.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >outsourcing development jobs Outsourcing in the sense of sending to offshore body shops. Somewhat true. But a lot of companies distribute development around the world in various ways. It's not only about taking advantage of lower costs, but some of it is.

habnds 7y ago

paging Mr. Yang...

mikestew 7y ago

Wow, to think it's been almost 30 years since I wasted money on Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. Too bad it was the first Yourdon book I'd read, because it was also the last.

IggleSniggle 7y ago
Yourdon, you’re done
goatinaboat 7y ago
He wrote a sequel The Rise and Resurrection Of The American Programmer not that long after. Its worth checking out if you can find a copy. A real snapshot of history and insight into the culture of the time.
- chengiz 7y ago
  Hey he may not be a good predictor but he's a good businessman, covering both ends of the spectrum!

dvdhnt 7y ago

Ah, corporate apologia. > Companies did move millions of office jobs to India, the Philippines and other places where they could pay workers less. But those job losses were more than balanced by growth elsewhere in the economy. That's like saying there will be an apple shortage but ignoring it because we grew more oranges. > But many companies discovered that labor savings were offset by other factors: time differences, language barriers, legal hurdles and the simple challenge of coordinating work half a world away. In some cases, companies decided they were better off moving jobs to less expensive parts of the United States rather than out of the country. The thing is, rents and expenses continued to grow where these jobs used to be but wages stagnated. Offshoring is a contributor to wage stagnation, which would be acceptable if rents and expenses ebbed and flowed at the same pace. But wealth inequality and rent-seekers continue to squeeze the average person. The result is people who are underemployed or working multiple jobs. > Ms. Lund said she saw parallels between offshoring and automation: Both trends threaten one set of jobs but should make the overall American economy more productive, creating new job opportunities, albeit ones requiring different skills. And she said the pace of change should allow workers, companies and governments to adapt. Learning new skills isn't free. It will harm workers who have their jobs automated. Our employment system isn't worker-friendly in this instance. Those displaced workers will still need to pay rent and buy food ALONG with buying new skills. They will probably end up underemployed.

ThomPete 7y ago
Exactly. Cost of living goes up, you cant save your way to retirement. Thats the wests biggest problem. All we got in exchange for the average citizen is cheaper flatscreens and shittier toys. But sure those of us in tech are good.
- anovikov 7y ago
  People could never save for retirement. Never. Not a single generation did it yet. Just the scale of the problem is now bigger because as the population stopped growing fast enough, we suddenly have a lot of people going to retire.
  - 7y ago

Merrill 7y ago

A good strategy is to off-shore jobs in a function that is to be eliminated. When it comes time to close the operation down, there isn't as much mid-level management inside the company opposing the closure. It also minimizes community and political backlash.

Animats 7y ago

I'd been expecting "peak office". "Peak factory worker" was in the 1970s in the US. I'd expected that, with everything being computerized, total office employment would decline as well. Didn't happen. Why is an interesting question.

sct202 7y ago
I suspect some of is due to how amorphous the term white collar is. The BLS has job projections, https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-largest-job-declines.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-largest-job-decli... , and they forecast large declines in admins and clerk-type office jobs that you would expect. The fastest growing list on the other hand, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm , has some office jobs, but it's dominated by healthcare jobs that some of which are kind of office-like. There's also some weirdness, with Computer Programmer listed on the decline list, while Software developers, applications is on the fastest growing list.
- duderific 7y ago
  That's probably just a reflection of the job title changing, rather than the number of jobs available. Computer Programmer is an "old-school" title while Software Developer is more up to date.
  - swagtricker 7y ago
    If you look at the description, I believe part of the problem is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has always been under the delusion that "Computer Programmers" were little more than typists who understood programming syntax. There's an assumption that some sort of all important _DESIGN_ work was done by analysts or other so-called experts perhaps the almighty "Software Developer". Could it be Computer Programmers just type what they're told, and perhaps Software Developers do the important work;) https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-programmers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

barbecue_sauce 7y ago

That didn't happen yet. I think the biggest takeaway from gig economy "gig brokerage" platforms is that many people would rather take direction from an app than a human manager (conjecturally, for psychological reasons). If more traditional companies (retailers, businesses with other large output-oriented workforces, etc.) figured out a way to introduce this sort of algorithmic management model that works for them to either hide or replace management while also augmenting it, I feel like a great deal of middle-management bureaucracy could end up eliminated.

blitmap 7y ago
Game'ified performance appraisals or records/statistics that you can cite/link for getting work outside the app-job. Unlocking raises with hours invested or good reviews earned or a combination of metrics. Making in-app purchases to join a union or buy into additional benefits. Integrating these gig economy apps with places like LinkedIn (shudder) to help you find temporary work quickly without ever talking to a human.
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  World of WorkCraft
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  I'm guessing you're trying to sketch a dystopian scenario but that sounds pretty appealing to me!
  - blitmap 7y ago
    The only part I disliked was LinkedIn - #introvertsunite
narrator 7y ago
Sounds like the Manna novel: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

thrower123 7y ago

The impedance mismatch is just too high. I haven't been doing this that long, and I've already seen multiple cycles of outsourcing functions, dissatisfaction with the quality, speed, and communication overhead of the outsourced services, then bringing the functions back in-house locally. Then a year or two passes, new directors or VPs come in, and the cycle begins again. It's a lot of churn. One result is that I see with my enterprise customers is that they end up with a lot of the more expensive, experienced people getting thinned out in each of these cycles - IBM is one that is somewhat infamous for this. The other that I see is a death of specialization. There aren't really dedicated network engineers, or ops specialists, or DBAs, or security experts in most companies anymore; everybody is a short-timer that is thrown into the mix and making things up on the fly. And these are Fortune 500 companies, not fly-by-night SMBs.

asdfman123 7y ago
Long-term institutional knowledge is criminally undervalued.

bloopernova 7y ago

Hey I work for Nexient. Kind of cool to be in an article in the NY Times, less so perhaps for the ire directed at outsourcing. I'm just a devops person. Would it be considered a majorly huge faux pas if I mentioned any details about Nexient's careers? If so, I'll edit and remove that previous sentence.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ArtDev 7y ago

Except.. it did happen.

dehrmann 7y ago

I went on a date with a girl who does accounting for a VC firm in Menlo Park. She got career advice in ~2002 not to study CS because it would all be in India by 2015. My lucky-best decision was studying CS in 2002 right after the bubble burst, everyone was worried about outsourcing, and the smartphone revolution that led to 2009-present growth in tech hadn't started. Talk about buying low. I was recently talking to an Uber driver from Kenya who was saying rents in Nairobi, an African tech hub, aren't that much cheaper than, say, Cleveland. So we're past outsourcing...but Cleveland...

asdfman123 7y ago
I graduated from high school in 2005 and was choosing between science and CS. I chose science because a lot of ideas from the prior tech bubble burst and offshoring craze were floating around in my head. I wish I had just majored in CS instead...
groby_b 7y ago
I was advised in 1989 that I shouldn't study CS because it'd be outsourced/replaced by AI. What did happen were waves of outsourcing, followed by insourcing. My theory is that whenever there's a new generation of managers, we flip around, because they haven't learned from the previous one.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  A somewhat related story. My first degree was in a foreign language; I was taking it for my own reasons but one of the professors I was close to knew I was very involved in technology and linguistics. She asked in, maybe in 1992, whether I thought computers would eliminate the jobs of translators "soon." I remember looking at her and saying that no, not until the mid-2000s or so, because of the twin problems of voice recognition and OCR: in both cases, you need both a corpus for translation and to build it you need to get the data into machine form. I was off by maybe 6-10 years but machine translation really did start making inroads for professional writing around then (and maybe a little sooner). Now, though, the job is totally transformed. Live translation is still a real job but a hard one to land and with fewer opportunities, and media translation while it is still a career (especially for science and technology papers, etc.) it is dramatically changed and is now more of an editing job than a translation job. That happened in a few years, tops, once the tools arrived. So .. maybe we're whistling in the dark. A lot of what we do cannot really ever be practically done by AI, but I think a lot could be. The demise of the CASE market probably delayed a lot of what's coming for a long time, and a lot of things likely will be automated. I think UI design is ripe since so many UIs basically look exactly the same.

tempsy 7y ago

I've always been irked by the assumption that more jobs = good when most people, especially white collar workers, go to work everyday knowing that their job is almost certainly replaceable or one that probably doesn't actually need to exist in the first place e.g. a "bullshit job".