I was recently asked:
What will work be like 30 years in the future?
I'll be speaking on it at UCSD! I go once a year or so to my graduate alma mater and talk jobs (or do mock interviews), but the most recent invitation had a really intriguing premise.
The talk hasn't happened yet, but I'm super excited to have been invited to this one by my dear friend Tina.
So as a means of preparation, let's talk about it! Here are some thoughts that may or may not find their way into the talk later:
Change will be driven by the private sector
Working practices evolve in the private sector first, then trickle to non-profit and public. In the long run, it affects everyone.
In the US, government will fail to protect workers. China and Japan never had the pretense of doing so. Europe will probably be the sole major economic region to protect or advance workers' interests.
However, regulation is not the only way in which the world improves. Private companies' competition for labor will affect your ways of working.
Software is Eating the World
That phrase is primarily an investment thesis written in 2011. I have many, many thoughts about that essay and why it's close to the point but fails to hit the nail squarely. (Worse, the examples touted have not aged well. Zynga was never going to replace Nintendo or Sony, Shutterfly was never going to replace the printed photo shop at your local pharmacy when cloud storage already was going to, and Groupon was never destined to be the world's biggest direct marketer. But that's Silicon Valley hyperbole for you.)
But the fundamental wisdom - that software will inevitably and inextricably get involved in all facets of life and work - is correct. Amazon was software eating WalMart. Uber is software eating taxi hailing. Tesla is software eating automotive design. Software eating manufacturing is also known as automation, which is already the bogeyman ending the blue collar labor class in the OECD countries. 30 years hence, that work will be done.
You will be a knowledge worker.
You know that Japanese phrase "monozukuri," pastorally referring to making things with your bare hands? Like the 12th generation sake maker, still doing it the old fashioned way?
Yeah, that's not you.
It's beautiful, but that's not your future.
We are in the midst of an industrial revolution centered on software.
Software is already pivotal to virtually all jobs, regardless of field. Any professional uses software as a tool to accelerate their productivity, and the alternative is a stark idea.
- Business practitioners spend their days in Microsoft Office rather than typewriting memos that get hand-delivered and generating their own forecasts by hand.
- Scientists spend their days in R or Python, regardless whether the science is hard or soft, rather than doing their own statistics by hand, bringing predictive rigor to everything from physics to political science.
- The creative class - artists, designers, or musicians - are on their computers all day, rather than doing their work on fragile paper in ways that are extremely difficult to tweak, reproduce or mass produce.
In most of these cases, these professionals aren't programming and don't have to know how. They simply have fluent usage of a tool. Look now at any job description, and odds are you'll find at least one requirement (or desired skill) to use a piece of software effectively.
So if software is eating the entire world, whether you're doing business, working at an ad agency, manufacturing industrial equipment, or managing distribution of donors' money at sites across Southeast Asia, that creates an unbelievable demand for the creation of software to do all these tasks. That in turn creates unbelievable demand for people who can create software - and that's why those people are wealthy.
And it's not just programmers or engineers who are cashing in. People who are collaboratively part of a controlled business process by which good software is made for ordinary people are also involved. These people have titles like Designer, or Product Manager, or Producer.
The software industry is special in historical terms. Generally, there is no prior point in history at which one could freely join the economic upper class of the world's most civilized societies, without regard for birth, using knowledge that is freely available on a black mirror anywhere in the world. In the past, you had to be born into the correct social class, or have the ability to attend a university (which was a tall order in most of the world for centuries prior to the late 20th century) to gain expensive knowledge, or be able to behaviorally signal identification with the upper class (which meant your family sent you to the Ivy League).
The software industry is also special because it leads the way with regard to changing work practices. The software industry invents tools and is summarily the first to put them to use (Slack, for example). If the software hipsters are doing something right now, it's on the bleeding edge and you'll see early-adopter companies get involved in a few years. In recent years, distributed companies (made entirely of remote workers) come to mind.
Speaking of...
Remote work will be OK.
The pieces are already in place. All that remains is for work cultures to catch on.
Companies are finding it rational to pay less, accept workers' geographic constraints, and conduct business over email, Webex and Slack.
There are so many reasons why companies will pursue the trend:
- Lowers real estate costs
- Can pay workers less (market salary in virtually any other city is less than that of San Francisco or Seattle, and those savings are magnified when you take into account taxes on those wages, cheaper insurance costs, and so on)
- Already plays more nicely with whatever flexibility employees want, whether maternity/paternity, elder care, child care, or something else
- Might lower risk of sexual harassment incidents (I look forward to someone studying this)
Life will get better for workers thanks to better information.
It's not a Marxist revolution, but Glassdoor or a service like it will democratize knowledge on the workers' side. Workers will learn to avoid bad employers thanks to review info, and the labor market will increasingly behave like a market - that is, workers in demand will command good prices and bad ones will not. Aside from salaries, improved benefits such as health insurance and maternity/paternity leaves come to mind.
Inequality will worsen. Make sure you win.
The incentives are already established for some benefits, such as remote work or parental leave. However, there is nothing here that suggests a lean toward greater egalitarianism.
"Good" workers will be more and more skilled. It's commonly said that a bachelor's degree will no longer be an entryway to a career, but a Master's degree is. In the future, a "good" worker will have some skillset, and some light MBA-like business knowledge, and a healthy sprinkling of technical/computer/software ability, regardless of the field. The extra knowledge will likely come in a new form, such as online learning courses, university certificate programs, or "nanodegrees." That's a heck of a skillset, and it's hard to obtain.
Those people will command crazy high salaries, and the rest will founder in jobs with lesser advancement trajectories. The result, at scale, is higher inequality.
It is highly unlikely that you individually can resist this trend.
Just Maybe...
Those things I feel pretty good about. Now let's engage in a little speculation. These things are each somewhat less likely. With my favorite UCSD grad school era vocabulary word stochasticity in mind, some of these things will happen:
You will be surveilled at work.
Alexa devices will be around every office and every meeting room, probably as soon as Amazon announces a super-easy way to project your screen and/or connect to conference calls. Using office phones, or company-paid cell phones, will result in all communications logged, including audio calls. You'll be able to be "fingerprinted," even when you think you can't. Microphones picking up your voice will feed into AI systems that can recognize your voice uniquely. Facial recognition, integrated into all your devices, will be the norm, so your device will know without a doubt it's you. (So will your usage logs, and the law..)
This will probably come into wide usage by a combination of user convenience, IT admin convenience, and publicized corporate scandal. The surveillance will keep your corporate behavior in check - say, don't start any Office Space-esque schemes to embezzle - and it may also muzzle other behaviors resulting in out-of-office friend-making, dating, or #MeToo material.
Companies that act in a mature fashion, who trust their workers, will use surveillance only in compliance cases. The vast majority of companies who act with less scruples will use technology to micromanage workers in dystopian fashion. This is already happening to Amazon warehouse pickers and other low-skilled workers. Surveillance cameras combined with facial recognition will replace the time card. Companies will also execute against that desire poorly - think of a simple keystroke logger deciding whether or not you are "productive" - with soul-crushing consequences.
In the long run, you'll have long stints at jobs.
"Job-hopping millennials" is not caused by millennials somehow being sensitive snowflakes. It's a response to the labor market. We had crappy jobs in the Recession with high incentive to leave, and the current job-hoppers in peak conditions making the rounds on Marketplace are not professionals like you. They're service industry and construction workers.
In knowledge work, institutional knowledge (the knowledge that isn't trained, such as which people can actually get things done) carries high leverage. The value of this knowledge will comparatively increase as companies decrease their investments in training, and instead of investing in training, companies will be motivated to fear your departure. They'll choose to be incentivized by the fear of your departure, not the opportunity of training, and will spend more on your quality of life after you prove yourself.
The greatest new ideas will continue to come from the US.
For the US's many, many, many faults - this country invented the Internet, invented the smartphone, and invented every great service that runs on top of them. As long as the US culturally teaches the value of questioning what is taught, and other countries fail to do so, it will continue to have the best ideas and capture the most value.
...but the Chinese will censor you anyway.
This one has lower odds, but fittingly a higher impact if it happens. The possibility is that you, as a worker at a Western company, may have to pay attention to what offends the Chinese government, and may either self-censor or be censored.
The most direct possibility is that Chinese ownership of international companies will continue to expand, those executives will be controlled by the Party, and the executives' control will mean that things which are offensive to the Party in mainland China will also not happen overseas.
I'll remind the UCSD audience that on-campus students produced a lot of noise about the Dalai Lama as a commencement speaker.
There are indirect possibilities, which are embodied by the game publisher Ubisoft. They have been producing two versions of a popular game, one Western and one, slightly modified, that would pass muster with Chinese censors. They announced that they'd make the Chinese version universal, so as to simplify their work. In this case, the Chinese government didn't exercise explicit control, but rather a Western company made a rational business decision that had a side effect of giving the Chinese government veto power over a game played by people outside China.
That was the first, and Ubisoft rolled it back after an outcry, but that very possibly the future as more companies begin to have exposure to a Chinese customer base.
The US is generally hands-off about business, but it is an extremely xenophobic country, and is likely to pass regulations that would protect companies from Chinese political influence. But given the economic power that comes with 20% of the world's population and tight control, this may be a point of strategic conflict played out over a long time.
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I'm giving this talk in about a month and excited to hear your thoughts.