4 ms·
That's not actually what has happened. Roll back 100 odd years, the average age of entry into the work force would be around 14 for males (very useful in coal m
by neffy 5y ago
That's not actually what has happened. Roll back 100 odd years, the average age of entry into the work force would be around 14 for males (very useful in coal mines for the narrow bits), retirement was 65, but most people didn't make it that far. The typical working week was 6 days. Now we have a significant percentage of the population studying into their twenties, and at the other end retired and living into their eighties or nineties.
That's the predicted "unemployment". There are probably significantly fewer managers per se, than there used to be - companies like GE used to have hierarchies 40 or more levels deep.
- temp10298385 5y agoI'm really curious how a managerial hierarchy of 40 works in practice. If a manager is responsible for a headcount of 2 then GE would have 2^40 = ~1 trillion employees. Since this is obviously not possible then what does the org chart of a firm with 40 levels of hierarchy look like.
- jrockway 5y agoIt's not necessarily a balanced tree. One path can have length 40, while another could be 2. I think at megacompanies, the hierarchy can be pretty deep before you get into what is normal for medium sized companies. Global -> Region ("Americas") -> Country ("USA") -> Region ("Northeast") -> State ("New York") and then you just have a company with a CEO (called something else at this level), SVPs, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, Shift Supervisors, etc.
- crazygringo 5y agoDo you have a source for that regarding GE? That seems incredibly implausible. I'm moderately familiar with the history of corporate organization, and never heard of anything even remotely close to a hierarchy of 40 levels -- not even when combining reporting chains of conglomerates, regions, and local management.