“The robots are stealing our jobs! 😱”
The threat of technology stealing our livelihoods is as old as the perceived menace of foreigners marrying our daughters. We are experiencing a wave of Automation, fuelled by the digital transformation.
Yes, your CURRENT job is probably going away. What can you do about it?
This is not new.
When you think about important industries today, the textile industry is probably not the top of your mind.
In the 18th century, it was a big deal. It was so crucial for India that they have a weaver’s spinning wheel on their flag to this day.
“The hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society,”
Karl Marx
And then the industrial revolution introduced a Mechanical Loom and Sewing Machines. People in UK previously employed in the textile industry started burning textile mills and factories, fearing for their futures. This has given birth to the term Luddite.
Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry. Over time, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialization, automation, computerization, or new technologies in general.
„Luddite” on Wikipedia
Fast Forward: The No-Code tools
Journalism, as it existed in the 20th century, is indeed going away. Social Media companies like Facebook and the democratization of publishing brought forward by WordPress.com, Medium, Substack, etc is molding the entire publishing industry into a different form.
(That form, of course, has troubling aspects on the social front – mainly the outrage epidemic, clickbait, and fake news., but this is a topic for some other day).
Career journalists take some solace in pointing out that the programmers face the same threat. No-Code tools and AI are going to take over, and nobody will be safe from disruption.
No-Code tools like Zapier, Webflow, Airtable, and others are meant to reduce your friendly neighborhood programmer into a drag & drop interface.
This is a very poetic vision: The harbingers of the technology snake will themselves face the doom of being made irrelevant.
People losing jobs in numbers is of course, something to avoid. As the weavers in the 18th century and the Horse Manure transporters in the 19th century, overly specialized programmers MAY lose jobs to no-code.
What always struck me in discussions about „jobs going away” is that jobs are ultimately… work. And there is always more work.
This is not even a good thing! Productivity increases in the industrial revolution, and the information society gains could have introduced shorter workweeks and more leisure time.
Instead, they produced more bureaucracy and gadgets. Humanity will always find more work, to a fault.
How can YOU thrive?
The fact that there will always be work to be done does little for your quality of life, does it?
If you have just been disrupted by the advent of new technology, you want to have food on the table, ideally, keep your living standards or improve them. You want a good job.
Generalist skills and Narrow focus is Antifragile.
„Jack of All Trades, master of none” is a shaming scheme developed by factory owners to keep their workers dependant.
An often recommended career trick is to combine two broader disciplines. Most skills can be synergistically combined to create more value. For example, mix Marketing with Computer Science or Sales with basically anything to unlock enormous potential. Warren Buffet recommends combining Public Speaking with any skill under the sun. Writing is another high-leverage skill (see David Perrell or Patrick Collison – Stripe CEO).
A journalist might apply his writing workshop to a new, niche field. Whatever future the new managing technology will bring, analysis, commentary, and explanation will always be needed. It may not look like old-school journalism, but the function will be the same.
Despite being somewhat knowledgeable about WordPress and payments systems, I also paint my job in very broad strokes. I am an Engineer that combines tools to solve problems. If these tools are no-code tools instead of programming languages – that only makes my job easier. Thinking in terms of systems interacting with each other and how they handle data is what Computer Science is about. Not coding in any specific language. Patrick McKenzie explains it beautifully in an essay ‘don’t call yourself a programmer’.
The ultimate power move is to apply this broad identity to a narrow field – something very niche and overlooked, where you can:
- Quickly become an expert, by virtue of no competition
- Be able to quickly move into and profit from that niche using your broader skill set.
Ben Thompson from Stratechery.com has explored it from a journalist angle in his essay „Never Ending Niches”:
What is important to note, though, is that while quality is relatively binary, the number of ways to be focused — that is, the number of niches in the world — are effectively infinite; success, in other words, is about delivering superior quality in your niche — the former is defined by the latter.
There will always be more work and more niches. The same disruptive force that disrupts the establishment also creates new job titles.
The trick is to be flexible enough to be able to move into those niches once they appear.