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The problem seems to be that there are a large number of jobs that just don’t need skilled staff. How much training do you really need for a lot of jobs? The a

The problem seems to be that there are a large number of jobs that just don’t need skilled staff. How much training do you really need for a lot of jobs? The answer is that these low skilled jobs should be eliminated by more automation - which is great - but then you need to find a lot more higher skilled jobs for everyone to do.

Spooky23 4y ago
When it’s time for employee development, you hear that argument. When it’s time to hire, you want someone with 40 years of rust experience, who is under 30, and is a 20x rockstar.
chank 4y ago
Yes, but they're also trying to eliminate the need for high skilled jobs as well or at least send them to countries where they can pay less.
dan-robertson 4y ago
I think it basically has to go the other way around: somehow demand for the labour of the people currently doing this low-skill has to go up, pushing the cost up, incentivising automation. This argument somewhat assumes that automation isn’t currently incentivised much, but I think that’s false; I guess there must be other reasons for more automation not happening… The price of low skill labour in the US has been increasing, I think. I don’t know if that’s because of increased demand or reduced supply or something else though.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  One problem with automation is that the people in upper management themselves rely on having lots of people to manage. Getting rid of those people puts their own position and standing at risk. Also, we don't yet have humanoid robots with full feature-parity to actual humans, so automating some jobs might require a change of process to convert it to one that is amenable to automation - in doing so, it may arise that the entire process is pointless and this would obsolete the jobs of a lot of paper-pushers, raise an uncomfortable question and ultimately be a politically unpopular move. A second problem is that non-tech companies lacking competent in-house technical expertise will always choose to outsource it to a shitty consultancy which will take advantage of them, waste years and not deliver anything viable or cost-effective in the end.
- iamflimflam1 4y ago
  I think an issue may be that a lot of the easy wins for automation have been done. There are many things that are seen as “low skilled” but very hard to actually automate.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Isn’t it trivially true that the things that are more worthwhile to automate have been automated and the things that are less worthwhile to automate haven’t been automated yet? I think that’s not actually true because people have incomplete information. I think it’s also not static – for example it’s much easier to automate ordering of your product, arranging payment, etc, now than it was 20 years ago, even though the technology for forms/payments over the Internet still existed back then. To be clear, when I write automation, I don’t really mean automating whole jobs but rather automating the bits of jobs where people don’t add value so that they may spend more of their time doing the things that add value.
roundandround 4y ago
Looking at Spain verse the UK in their graph. There is a lot of unskilled low paid work in places like Spain (offshore manufacturing) that feeds high paid unskilled work in the UK (brand and simple financial management.) I think the UK has ceased investing as much in skills because every upskilling in office work or having more workers with the necessary degree is largely net zero competitions between marketing departments that will most likely all be in the UK. For countries that were not traditionally on top and running the industry consortiums they have a small chance of pulling the income from countries like the UK.. But mostly their workers just end up over skilled for the work available for countries like Spain.

Spooky23 4y ago

When it’s time for employee development, you hear that argument. When it’s time to hire, you want someone with 40 years of rust experience, who is under 30, and is a 20x rockstar.

chank 4y ago

Yes, but they're also trying to eliminate the need for high skilled jobs as well or at least send them to countries where they can pay less.

dan-robertson 4y ago

I think it basically has to go the other way around: somehow demand for the labour of the people currently doing this low-skill has to go up, pushing the cost up, incentivising automation. This argument somewhat assumes that automation isn’t currently incentivised much, but I think that’s false; I guess there must be other reasons for more automation not happening… The price of low skill labour in the US has been increasing, I think. I don’t know if that’s because of increased demand or reduced supply or something else though.

Nextgrid 4y ago
One problem with automation is that the people in upper management themselves rely on having lots of people to manage. Getting rid of those people puts their own position and standing at risk. Also, we don't yet have humanoid robots with full feature-parity to actual humans, so automating some jobs might require a change of process to convert it to one that is amenable to automation - in doing so, it may arise that the entire process is pointless and this would obsolete the jobs of a lot of paper-pushers, raise an uncomfortable question and ultimately be a politically unpopular move. A second problem is that non-tech companies lacking competent in-house technical expertise will always choose to outsource it to a shitty consultancy which will take advantage of them, waste years and not deliver anything viable or cost-effective in the end.
iamflimflam1 4y ago
I think an issue may be that a lot of the easy wins for automation have been done. There are many things that are seen as “low skilled” but very hard to actually automate.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Isn’t it trivially true that the things that are more worthwhile to automate have been automated and the things that are less worthwhile to automate haven’t been automated yet? I think that’s not actually true because people have incomplete information. I think it’s also not static – for example it’s much easier to automate ordering of your product, arranging payment, etc, now than it was 20 years ago, even though the technology for forms/payments over the Internet still existed back then. To be clear, when I write automation, I don’t really mean automating whole jobs but rather automating the bits of jobs where people don’t add value so that they may spend more of their time doing the things that add value.

roundandround 4y ago

Looking at Spain verse the UK in their graph. There is a lot of unskilled low paid work in places like Spain (offshore manufacturing) that feeds high paid unskilled work in the UK (brand and simple financial management.) I think the UK has ceased investing as much in skills because every upskilling in office work or having more workers with the necessary degree is largely net zero competitions between marketing departments that will most likely all be in the UK. For countries that were not traditionally on top and running the industry consortiums they have a small chance of pulling the income from countries like the UK.. But mostly their workers just end up over skilled for the work available for countries like Spain.