The Great Resignation or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love No Job

While people are leaving their jobs, they’re not quitting work altogether. Unemployment has been decreasing and the labor force participation rate has been increasing steadily for the last 6 months, at least.

That aside, companies forcing people back into their office when they’ve proven they can work from home is the dumbest thing ever. I’m slowly entering the job hunt, and remote work flexibility will be at the top of the list of things I care about.

Bump.

 

One of my current projects is working with a top-10 manufacturer in the world developing their "adaptive manufacturing innovation lab", where we're building out a sandbox manufacturing line, while creating digital twins that simulate the automated manufacturing floor. We're talking 100% automated, with optimization analysis (AI/ML) that leads to dynamic, on the fly line reconfiguration. In the event something goes wrong, there's a robot in the closet that comes to life and lets a remote tech walk out to the busted robot and fix shit, right down to replacing PLC's, controller boards, etc.

It's pretty fucking crazy... but it will put about 15k workers who run the same process 90% manually now out of work over the next 3 years.

 

What jobs do we think the future holds? Who will be in-demand and earning, say, six figures?

 

Process engineers. Any kind of development or tech around automation. The "unskilled" masses may lose a few jobs, but that automation doesn't happen by magic. Nor does it maintain itself magically.

 

I work in software R&D. We've seen some of the increased mobility of engineers (more jobs, more of them are remote, and the pay has increased) but nothing like some of the incredible churn that has been seen in other companies and other industries. A friend of mine who also works in software R&D said that they've seen a ~20% turnover in the last 18 months. About half of it came when his employer said they were mandating a return to the office.

Our office will probably implement some kind of mandate eventually, but a few of the more senior people (including me) have already put a bug in the ear of our managers and said nope, not happening, not ever, and so far the managers have been okay with that. A couple managers have just shrugged and started hiring remote candidates. I don't see this returning to normal; the businesses have proven they can operate remotely, and the employees have proven that they will tell the businesses to go fuck themselves if they aren't happy.

I had a whole piece written about the automation discussion here but the post was turning into a novel. Suffice it to say, despite the decades of joking that the robots are coming for our jobs, the robots really are coming for our jobs. I don't think an economy built on workers who can easily be automated is going to be sustainable for the next generation. I don't know what those workers do, frankly, but I think people like Yang definitely have a strong point. If we, say, destroy the entire small-parts-assembly industry with cheap and efficient robots, you can't just shrug off those workers as needing new skills.

 

"Learn CAD" or "be the one who builds the robots" is fine individual advice for a given person who is looking to develop skills.

It's not an actual solution to the problem of displaced workers, though. If you needed a CAD designer or robot machinist for every displaced line worker, it wouldn't be cost effective.

 

Part of me is really worried that, in the future, a job will be a luxury. It will be something only the top 20% of people have.

What hasn't been mentioned much (that I've heard) is the role that IQ and an individual's capacity plays in all of this. And it plays a huge part, because we aren't on a level playing field and we aren't all created equal. Learning to code, learning to build robots, designing in CAD, etc...these are all extremely niche things that require a high degree of intelligence. Despite the name of this board, we aren't broadly representative of the demographic. Intelligence is a bell curve, and even the US military - you know, the people who need guys to just paint ships or chisel barnacles off of propellers - have determined that anyone with an IQ of less than something like 85 is not fit for military service. Which is something around 7-10% of the population. 30 million people lack the intelligence required to essentially break rocks. Even people of average intelligence (someone who can drive a car, read at a sixth grade level, learn new skills, do basic math, hold down a job that's either upper blue collar or lower white collar)...that's 50% of the people. In the US, that's 150M people. In Canada, somewhere close to 20M. Most probably those folks lack the intelligence or the capacity to learn how to design a multi-faceted automated system or build the robots that it uses.

So if the only jobs available that need humans are things like doctors, lawyers, advanced IT, project managers, etc...IE jobs that require an IQ of over 120...what exactly do we do with everyone else?

Something like 25% of the population can't follow a multi-plot line cable television show. Those folks aren't learning to code. They sit there on welfare? They rise up and eat the rich?

 

125 years ago, there were a lot more blacksmiths than there are now. What happened? Cars did. Where did the blacksmiths go? Many of them were absorbed into the auto-industry helping to build assembly line components. Some left the labor pool as they rotated into retirement. Now today you may have a very difficult time making a living as a blacksmith, but how many jobs did the car industry create that didn't exist before? Over a long enough period of time the market tends to course correct. There will probably be jobs that we haven't considered yet. I think some (not all) of the stuff people like Andrew Yang pump out regarding automation permanently eating the job market is a scare tactic used to promote his policy agenda. Sure, some (or many) jobs will be gone forever and people will be working less. People are also working many hours less per week than they did 125 years ago, but this isn't going to happen overnight.

 

These are great points, and I like the optimism that the market will correct for parts of this.

Looking at it objectively, the Industrial Revolution - our first kick at automation - raised more people out of poverty than any era before or since. And as time progresses, less and less people are living with abject poverty. I suppose my concern stems from the fact that the jobs aren't all changing, they're being phased out entirely. Like, the goal is to have as few humans as possible and anything menial or repetitive is handled by a robot. One could argue that the IR took people away from subsistence living and stuffed them into rote, repetitive jobs. Now we have a whole class of people who don't have a broad skill set or vast intelligence to pull from, and we're telling them there's nothing rote or menial left for them to do.