This is only mildly related to the article, but does anyone else have difficulty imagining what others' jobs are? For example, I'm just young enough to remember a time when I thought a programmer was someone who hid in a closet to slam at a keyboard for nine hours a day, but that notion was only corrected by entering the workforce. What about my other misconceptions? There's no way to learn about all of them firsthand. I figure plumbers just travel between job sites to hit pipes for nine hours a day, managers just scream into phones and reply to emails for nine hours a day, and literary theorists ... sit ... in their offices ... for nine hours ...
That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.
So many people have this question early in their careers, it really seems like something is wrong. Perhaps we need a serious/mandatory/formal job-shadowing program for teens and college students.
This is a stunning book. 15 years ago, when I first came to this country from India, a classmate gave me a copy of this book. I guess he wanted me to understand America or Americans or whatever. It definitely affected me at some deep level. I still have my copy, and I read it everytime something upsets me about my job & I get those "maybe I should just switch to something else..." feeling.
Its not "by Study Terkel" because he didn't really write this book....I mean, its his book, but he basically ran into all these chaps, and let them do all the talking. And they talk and talk and talk. He prompts them from time to time, but mostly, its a book by these people. And their stories and lives are super compelling. I often used to wonder why people do dead-end jobs like parking cars in a building, or store clerk etc. Here, those people tell you why. There is this hooker who tells you how she got into the business, how she turns tricks, dealing with cops, offering freebies to pimps,the whole thing is simultaneously amazing and sordid and just puts everything into perspective. It taught me that America is a hard country. Its not some first world paradise. America is like, seriously fucked up. I mean, all these people, they were here long before I got here, and they have friends & families & homes & connections, and yet their lives are so hard and messed up and its not all whining & complaining, but I did get the impression things are very hard out here for the blue collar guy. Ofcourse had Turkel gone to Sand Hill road & bumped into a hundred VCs, that would be a very different book. It a definite must-read, especially if you are an immigrant.
Like apprenticeships? Man, what an outdated idea. They did that in the Dark Ages, for goodness sake! /s
We have a strong push towards internships, it seems odd that students aren't taking advantage of this hands-on experience in a field that interests them. Of course, missing out on a paid job for the (most likely unpaid) internship is probably a factor.
Well, an apprenticeship is far more of a commitment than what is needed here. Rather young people are looking for a survey of what specific careers really look like. Might be impossible, but job-shadowing might be the best answer. I shadowed a judge for a morning as a high schooler, and it was tremendously enlightening, but it could have been a lot better if he did it frequently and if I had a chance to shadow other professions for longer periods.
...but... that's what literary theorists literally do, isn't it? Read books and articles and write about them, and attend meetings. Having spent a reasonably long time in the University system (as a student, mind), I have a general idea of what everyone does and why.
On the other hand, I really don't understand what a lot people in the tech industry do. I have a friend who works for some kind of 'data analysis' company. He makes $80K a year, and he tells me on a bad day he has to do 2 hours of 'real' work: the rest of the time is spent on reddit or taking classes. It's gotten so bad (or good) for him that he is taking 3 evening classes in the University he graduated from while working full-time. He says he spends most of his worktime doing assignments and readings anyway, so he's more prepared for classes than he was ever in college.
I understand why a game company might need 50+ developers working on the same game. I understand why Google might need all those engineers. I really don't understand what 50+ 'data engineer's at what is essentially an SEO company with 100+ employees do... Like you say, I am really confused : is the market REALLY that bad at finding exploitable niches?
And then there's another friend of mine, who says the most difficult part of his Google engineering job by far was getting it. Go figure!
They do exactly what you think they do - they help CRUD - create, read, update and delete information.
Combined with engineering, there's some very interesting ways to do all those things. For example statistics on such a big scale were very hard until the internet became so widespread.
The folks who brag and tell you they make great money and don't do shit all - it's just ego tripping. Really, I've seen it a thousand times - somebody of moderate intelligence and no desire or ability to do anything creative or interesting, will sweat his/her way through university and then gloat over what an awesome position in company X he/she now has.
Really, it can be frustrating if you are in financial difficulty but rest assured, those who do the real work and are savvy enough to not get taken advantage of, will come out on top. The fella bragging about not doing much is going to continue not doing much and best case scenario - he/she cruises through life with a nice salary, having done the bare minimum.
Any large corporation is filled with busy work (~80%), which you can get out of.
It's up to the employee to find their way to that 20% that's real work. If wanted it's definitely possible to find that 20% and be /truly/ worked to the max. But it doesn't just happen.
Maybe also a good question is "what should they do". A lot of jobs are rubbish. That opinion rubs people the wrong way for totally acceptable reasons, but only a hundred years ago, around 90% of people were farmers. Today it's 2%. I think it's fair to say that the cataclysmic effect that our human economy is having on the planet can not last in it's current configuration. Most people should be employed in building and maintaining the planetary biome... in other words, they should be: farmers, only a sort of high-tech, hi-fi, scientific mercenary warrior type of farmer. A plumber for example - the world will always need those - ought to be primarily concerned with diverting waste as a source feed for soil, in a clean and efficient way: a hero. But most jobs exist under a 100 year old paradigm which will change rather quickly. You might say they are "soon to be farmers" - that's the best case scenario. Other's would have us all be mercenaries and go out in a blaze of glory. Not me.
I think you're ignoring the possibility of technical progress. Who says we will even need food in 100 years? Eating dying plants and dead animal bodies is, on the whole, a very, very inefficient way of getting energy from the sun.
Reminds me of this talk https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg and also happens to be my current mid-range goal. I've worked on a farm, gardened, and raised chickens growing up and I'm dead set on doing it again, the amount of work that goes into it vs. the amount of food and enjoyment that you get out of it makes it a no brainer if you can take the leap and buy a plot. Construction begins this summer and I couldn't be happier.
Lawyers are probably a big one. Most people think they spend all day in the courtroom, but many lawyers never set foot in a courtroom. Instead, their days are spent meeting with clients and preparing documents: their job is to translate the plain-English requirements of what the clients want to agree upon into legalese that has specific meaning in court.
For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.
Except that very little of the code (e.g. contracts) that get written ever run and the people who debug the code (litigators) aren't the same people who wrote it in the first place. Also the people who wanted the code written in the first place have never actually read it are convinced it says something different to what it actually does say....
It would be an interesting project to create an artificial court/judge into which you feed a contract and an argument and get a response out.
My last startup did something like that - we interviewed close to a hundred people to figure out what they really did in their jobs. It was targeted towards undergrads, as a form of career guidance, but it turns out to be very hard to get people to pay attention to career guidance that doesn't directly lead to getting a job. We also tried refocusing toward older young professionals (late-20s), but that had the same problem: it's much easier to sell a service that's task-focused than one that's discovery-focused.
My sense is that there's probably not a viable business there but it may make an interesting hobby blog-series, if you can get people to participate.
