Jobs Market isChanging

[Hay Dude]

Don’t forget the impacts of robotics.
Increased population plus all the new machinery in everything from agriculture to banking has reduced the number of employees required to run a business.

 

[airbiscuit]

Yep, that's why you have to keep your skills current. You can't count on working where your old man worked, and his old man before him. Technology is disruptive, for better or worse.

 

[hiddentacocatneddih]

..

 

[MossRoad]

goes both way. Issue i see is in heavy industry we are still using technology (PLC's) from 1992 that only a few people left alive can work on.

Support went out 20 years ago. No younger guys have learned it because there are only a dozen left in exsistance. And its not exactly easy to pick up.

PLCs are a piece of cake if you can find some old geezer that'll finally give up on job protectionism and actually teach a kid how to do it.

I was fortunate. My old geezer liked to teach.

 

[MossRoad]

Don’t forget the impacts of robotics.
Increased population plus all the new machinery in everything from agriculture to banking has reduced the number of employees required to run a business.

Automation in general, not just robotics.

I had to automate tasks that people used to do by hand. We had a program that would capture keystrokes. So, you start the program, have the person do their job, stop the program and that's about that. Once you have the basic job captured, you then have to write for anomalies. If you follow someone through their business cycle, be it a day, a week, a quarter, or year end, you end up catching most of those "odd" occurrences, and then a human is no longer needed to do that task repetatively.

Then you throw that task on a $1000 PC that you don't have to pay a salary or benefits.

I'm fairly certain I automated myself out of a job as well.

We were fortunate in that all of the people that we ended up replacing left through attrition. Retirements, buyouts, etc. So no one suffered immediately. However, none of those jobs are ever going to be there again.

That's the case with most industries. Peope are almost always your biggest expense. You want as few as possible.

So what are people supposed to do for employment in the future? Best advice is to be adaptable, but even with that, there are only so many new technologies that create physical jobs.

 

[hiddentacocatneddih]

.

 

[airbiscuit]

I knew a maintenance tech that worked at a place whose operating methodology was "Whatever it is, run it wide open until it quits.". Those old DOS machines are fully depreciated, so they get used to the bitter end. When the end comes, they get replaced by newer and better technology. The circle of life.

 

[hiddentacocatneddih]

.

 

[plowhog]

PLCs are easy. I moved on deeper into programming

Some of this depends on your orientation. I can program in a few structured languages. But a while ago, I had to step in and create/fix something running on a PLC using ladder logic. The instruction set was quite simple, but even so, I was all thumbs.

My orientation is around lines of code that execute one at a time, in sequence. Very, very fast of course. The ladder logic had all instructions execute at once, simultaneously, each cycle. I had a difficult time adapting to that.

 

[5030]

He seems to be doing okay ....

View attachment 771034

Warren is very diversified why I hold his stock.