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.

 

[5030]

The biggest killer for the RV industry is the high price of fuel. The RV industry went downhill several years ago also when the fuel price went sky high.

Of course. RV's are blue ribbon fuel guzzlers. We have one and it's parked in the barn for now.

 

[hiddentacocatneddih]

,

 

[5030]

Because of the rapid increase in demand, RV companies hired many people to meet the demand. BUT, now there is an excess of 1 to 2 year old “used” RV’s on the market as people decided RVing is not their thing

I would never buy a used RV. We bought ours new, in fact this is our 3rd and they have all been new.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

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.

But even with that automation. If no one is left who knows how it was set up and works, the day will come when will hit the fan.

Reminds me of my first job, upper management decided to downsize and offered retirement incentives to get the older higher paid people to go. Then suddenly, the fan got hit. Upper management blamed middle management for letting the expertise leave. But most of middle management was new, because a lot of them had left also. They dug their own hole, but would never admit it. They preach accountability but are never held accountable themselves. They just pat themselves on the back and give themselves nice bonuses for reducing payroll. Didn’t take long for the new guy to figure things out.

 

[Oaktree]

The biggest killer for the RV industry is the high price of fuel. The RV industry went downhill several years ago also when the fuel price went sky high.

I also suspect that the fact that once the novelty of owning an RV wears off buyers remorse sets in. They're expensive to own/operate/repair, difficult to maneuver and a lot of people realize that lifestyle isn't as much fun as it first seems. Fuel prices are just one factor.
Nothing that appeals to me in the slightest.

 

[Oaktree]

I'll say it again. The labor shortage caused by a receding work ethic started with professional sports paying 6 figures, then millions. Kids saw ordinary people play ball for multi million dollar pay. Then they watched entrepreneurs and influencers on you tube getting rich fast doing fun stuff. It's no wonder they shied away from physical labor as a way to support themselves. Stock market champions and more get rich quick options...
Who do you think is going to fill these labor jobs? Certainly not young middle class america.
AI better advance fast to fill the labor shortage.

And who raised these young adults to have a poor work ethic? I'm a boomer, and while I have no kids of my own (that I know of), I look at how permissive as parents most of my friends were. Almost never made them do anything they didn't want to do for fear that their kids might not like them. Yeah, it's easy to just pass it off as "kids these days", but they didn't get that way by themselves.

I agree that mature skill sets are important, but 21st century shill sets are important too. It will be important for all generations to upskill to stay relevant in the ever changing career landscape.

21st century skills are more important than "mature" skills (whatever that means). If you want to be an auto mechanic today, knowing how a carburetor works is pretty useless in modern computerized vehicles.
I feel bad for people in their 50s who lose their job, especially in dying industries. Too young to retire, but their skillsets to a great degree have little demand in modern industry. Tough to pick up a new trade at that age.

 

[5030]

Like I said before, if there is no one that can fix the robots and they fail, they are SOL.

 

[MossRoad]

...
I feel bad for people in their 50s who lose their job, especially in dying industries. Too young to retire, but their skillsets to a great degree have little demand in modern industry. Tough to pick up a new trade at that age.

That's what I thought when I thought I was going to lose my job of 27 years at age 53. Turns out everyone in the company knew I was valuable, easily trained, and reliable. I stepped over from a primarily I.T. position into a maintenance tech position at the same company. Right before that happened, I poked around and found I was in high demand for just about any job opening in the area. Seems they like to see people with a long, stable work history, adult mentality, etc. They won't have to baby-sit me.

After 3 years, that job got outsourced, and I had a new job lined up 2 hours after the announcement. They let me delay 6 weeks so I could fulfill my severance requirements.

It's a really good feeling to know you can make a major career change if you have to. Of course, it's better to do it out of want then to be forced into it, but it's very doable. Don't underestimate your own abilities to adapt and learn a new trade at a later age.

 

[Hay Dude]

And who raised these young adults to have a poor work ethic? I'm a boomer, and while I have no kids of my own (that I know of), I look at how permissive as parents most of my friends were. Almost never made them do anything they didn't want to do for fear that their kids might not like them. Yeah, it's easy to just pass it off as "kids these days", but they didn't get that way by themselves.

21st century skills are more important than "mature" skills (whatever that means). If you want to be an auto mechanic today, knowing how a carburetor works is pretty useless in modern computerized vehicles.
I feel bad for people in their 50s who lose their job, especially in dying industries. Too young to retire, but their skillsets to a great degree have little demand in modern industry. Tough to pick up a new trade at that age.

Its real easy to hypothesize that, but when you really are a parent of children, its a MUCH more difficult balancing act than you have said.

One way to turn off a group of parents is to try to tell them what parenting is like when you have no children of your own.

It ain’t easy. In fact, it is one of my most difficult undertakings of my life.

 

[MossRoad]

We used to shake our heads about how people were raising their children when we didn't have children of our own....

Then we had our own. YIKES! Turns out a lot of them were right.

The first one is your experimental baby. The second one eats mud pies.