Notes on the future of work

This morning, we learn from Kevin Kelly in Why can't a machine do this?

If there is pressure to increase the productivity of human workers, the serious question to ask is, why can't a machine do this? The fact that a task is routine enough to be measured suggests that it is routine enough to go to the robots. In my opinion, many of the jobs that are being fought over by unions today are jobs that will be outlawed within several generations as inhumane. (His emphasis)

Of course, robots in the workplace aren't new. We're seeing a lot of robot news stories. Increasingly, those stories are written by robots. (The stories are written by computer programs, which are not literally robots. See the next paragraph.) A Chicago company is using algorithms to write news stories, starting with the sports. It pretty much works, right up to and including the expected cliches. Read more (written by an alleged human) at Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?.

Robots are also reading and grading school papers. According to Michael Weinerip, in his NYT piece, Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously, these robotic reviews aren't very good at picking up grammatically correct, but factually flawed sentences. Then again, neither is the typical George Will reader.

And, then, well, er, um, here's this news: Researchers Claim Sex Robots Will Be Future Of Sex Tourism. The researchers are Australian, but the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas picked up the story. Dennis Hof, owner of the Bunny Ranch, doesn't think that robots will put his employees out of business. He told the TV station,, that a man mostly wants attention from a woman. "He wants to tell her stories, wants her to listen, wants her to act like she cares – a robot’s not going to do that.”

Meanwhile, over on Shiny Shiny, we learn that Panasonic wants to replace your hairdresser with a robot:



This seems like a good time to be nearer the end of a career than the beginning. It'll be good to get away from the increasingly robotic world and onto a retirement filled with hobbies and friends and memories and, oh, snap.


GeckoSystems CareBot™ helps to alleviate caregiver shortage for Japanese elderly.

More on law schools and job prospects

The latest in the War on Law Schools comes in the form of a Tennessee student who said that her law school was negligent because they admitted her to the school. Because she hadn't completed her undergraduate work, she won't be eligible to take the bar exam, get a job as a lawyer, and eventually shed nearly $80K in student loans.

A few thoughts on this:

• Law students have been suing their schools for misrepresenting career prospects. Simply put, there are too many law school graduates chasing too few jobs.


• As we see in ‘Students Employed As Strippers’ Should Be Part Of A Law School’s Ranking, jobs for law school students aren't always what you'd expect.


• Many of jobs available for lawyers (URL may be NSFW)  not only won't pay for a three-piece suit; you might not even be able to pay for a three-piece KFC dinner.

Further, claiming that you aren't qualified and that it's your school's fault may not be a great career-building strategy. 

Dress for success in the 21st century

Older workers, take note. A lifetime of gravitational effects makes us shorter. That may have an effect on your income. What medicine can't correct can be helped by fashion.

The correlation between height and income has been known for a long time, although a U.S. study suggests that the correlation only works for aggregate numbers, not for individuals. If you chart the height of 1000 people, for example, the income distribution curve will match the height distribution curve. If you compare two individuals, however, too many other factors come into play to make the height difference significant.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="303" caption="via Statistics Say These High Heels Will Get You A Pay Raise"][/caption]

That distinction, however, isn't stopping a German shoe company from running a series of ads suggesting that this set of bright red high heels would do wonders for your income.
The ads show a closeup of the heels, with headlines such as "Men over 180 cm earn 10% more money" and "80% of top managers are over 180 cm tall."

So, if you see me in a pair of these shoes, know that it's only for the money.

More on work

My Linkedin connections have ratcheted up their activity level since the start of the new year. At last count, my associates collectively posted more than 750 status updates. Most of the activity is the result of people making new connections.
When one person shows a lot of new connections, it's often an indicator that the person has or is about to lose a job. When there's a squall like this, from people at different companies, something else is going on. I suspect, but can't confirm yet, that this is a good sign. People who have jobs are looking for better jobs or at least are thinking about it. They're wondering who among their connections is doing what.
People aren't finding the kinds of steady jobs of old. Those jobs and the expectations for same ended probably 20 years ago. Tom Peters predicted it in the 80s and has ridden the wave of New Work for a pretty good career. He used to say that your career was your Rolodex (back when folks knew what one was), that you always needed to be thinking about how you'd be assembling a job based on your personal connections. Companies, too, would be developing virtual, ad hoc teams that would come together for quick projects and dissemble with no hard feelings.

Of course, lots of people have made a living with all kinds for a long time. Recently, a guy has received a lot of attention for admitting that he wrote college papers for pay. (These folks have an, um, interesting name for their company in this line of business.) Some 40 years ago, I did the same. I didn't write many and probably made only a few hundred bucks. I did  guarantee a B. My big advantage was that I could type, making it easier for the customer who didn't have to recopy the text into his (it was all guys) handwriting. It might be the only typewritten paper that the student ever handed in, but in a big school, no one noticed.
Funny thing. I was bombing out of my own courses even as I wrote B papers in sociology, English, and history. Karma generally finds you, eh?

More on work and jobs

The flurry of new connections on LinkedIn indicated that there was churn in the workforce. Then,  we received word from former co-workers that there was a recent round of layoffs at our former company. More people are now looking for work. Some are finding jobs, temporary, mostly.
It was just about a year ago that Sandra got word that her work would be going away. She had a choice: accept a severance package or follow the work to India. She chose the former and is now retired. (We may not be done with work for pay, but careers as we knew them are pretty much done.)
We now get to watch the world of work from a different vantage. Here are some items of note:

• Remember the opportunity to follow the work to India? It turns out that some people are seeing this as a viable option. You can live cheaply and find plenty of opportunities for career development and advancement. via No work in the US? Move to India - Boing Boing.
• I don't know many people who use a pencil these days. (I carry a mechanical pencil and use it rarely.) Apparently, there are a few folks left and, among them, are those who take their pencils really seriously. Cartoonist David Rees Launches 'Artisanal Pencil Sharpening Service'. You can get your pencils sharpened manually.
  Quote of the day:
  "Just because something makes you smile or laugh ... doesn't mean it's a joke."  via Artisanal Pencil Sharpening.
• Don't know what kind of work you should be doing? Your brain can tell you. Brain scans may help guide career choice.
• Some people like the excitement, challenge, and risk of working for a small startup company. If you do, here's a cautionary tale about bailing out too soon. The third co-founder of Apple Computer, Ron Wayne, designed the original logo and wrote the first manual. He decided that the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) were too unfocused and unrealistic and so he sold back his 10% stake in the company for $800. It would now be worth north of $22 billion.
• If you're young, smart, and female, you can make some decent money selling your eggs. Good SAT Scores Lead To Higher Egg Donor Prices.

Toward a kinder, gentler workforce

Saw this job listing recently:

via Job Opportunity: Lead Nurturing Specialist
The job description calls for someone who can, well, lead "analytical conception, layout and execution of custom activity nurturing campaigns."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics includes the word nurture in three job descriptions, that of Child Care Workers, Educational Services, and Teachers—Preschool, Except Special Education. Salary.com comes up empty with titles containing the word nurturing.
So, for a while, it'll be work as usual, with few to nurture us as we try to spot a psychopath at work.

More on work and jobs and #li

The flurry of activity on LinkedIn, as folks made a batch of new connections, gave a clue that there was news. Later, the Alliance@IBM/CWA web site started reporting that a IBM was going through a series of layoffs. "Resource action" is the neologism that's used to when they're trying to get you to believe that it's about something more important than the fact that you're losing your job.

via Catch-22

Yesterday, I received a note from a friend who'd said that the Dark Angel of Unemployment had visited her office area, but had spared her.
Stateside IBM job cuts may be the result of a continuing trend to move work to other countries, something that's not new for IBM. The company, from the selection of its name back in the 20s (after an antecedent part of the company in Canada initially adopted the name). Again, that's probably more interesting to those who didn't lose their jobs this week.
Of course, anyone who's working knows that you always need to be prepared to look for a job. Even when you've landed one, it's only a matter of time before you'll want to or have to start looking again. That's why sites such as LinkedIn have become so popular. It's a way to stay connected with people, to find out about new companies, and see what kinds of work people are finding. Some former co-workers tend to seek and find work in the same general areas of business and technology. Others have left all that to start quilting, antique, or arts and crafts businesses. A few try to stay low and hope not to be noticed.

The advantage in these times generally rests with the person offering the job.  For a variety of reasons, such the volume of resumes received, automated systems that you use to apply for a job, or just a lack of courtesy, most people or companies offering jobs don't even acknowledge your application, let alone inform you that you didn't get the job. A few might make some public comment, such as this post on the Greater Grafton site, How not to apply for a job.
There's a lot of things at odds today - job seekers who are intellectually lazy (see Seth Godin's repost of On self determination), hiring managers who forget that they'll likely have to ask someone they fired for a job some day, executives at corporations who send people to the unemployment office by changing a number in a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, a government that tells us that tells us that the unemployment rate stays the same when 36K jobs go away as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.
If I could make sense of it, I'd probably be rich. 

As the title of this journal says, ...

On Friday afternoon, I received a note from a friend, alerting me to job that would be a good match for me.

It's a part-time job, working from home on projects related to technical documentation standards, requiring a particular software configuration and broadband access. I have good setup for working from home, along with the other software and such.

So, on Saturday, I reviewed my resume with the plan to highlight my experience in these particular areas. In the process, I discovered a couple of grammatical and typographical errors. They weren't errors of fact, but errors in presentation.
You know the old joke, about to celebrate its centenary, "What worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm in an apple?"
I'd recently sent my resume in response to a few job postings and those copies had these errors.
I know how it happened. Each time I make changes to my resume, I wind up needing to tweak it in several places to keep it within the two-page limit. Adding working experience with a certain content management system or with PHP or Flash or Twitter means that something else has to come out.
For a while, I've used a functional resume that puts more emphasis on skills and experience and less on chronology. Age discrimination is a real presence in the job market. It's a challenge to show that one has 25 years of experience with UNIX without saying that one has been working with UNIX for 25 years.
Recently, however, I had a conversation with a trusted recruiter who said that most employers still want to see a work history.
As a result, in the process trimming this, adding that, and moving these items to the first page, it's pretty much guaranteed that there will be a few slips of the keyboard. No excuses, but it happens..5
Rule #1 of any kind of writing, of course, is using the spell-checker. The errors that I found, however, were things that a spell-checker wouldn't have caught.
No excuses, though.
This evening, I received a robo-rejection email regarding one of the jobs I'd sought. I can't be sure if the rejection was due to the flawed resume, my age, or, most likely, another candidate who was better than me. I get to learn something from each reason. And, as we know, learning life's lessons is just so much fun.

Would there be enough money?

OK, so the news that Red Sox agree to deal with Adrian Beltre is encouraging for fans of the Olde Towne Team. Beltre is a good ballplayer by modern standards. He's had some very good years, including Golden Glove awards.
Still, $9 million a year for a lifetime .270 hitter?
Yes, I know that they played in different eras and all that. Nevertheless, let's take a look at Beltre's stats along with those of Ted Williams and Willie Mays. They ask yourself how much you'd have to pay The Kid or the Say Hey Kid. You'd probably need at least one extra zero.

via Adrian Beltre Stats, Bio, Photos, Highlights | MLB.com: Team

via Ted Williams Stats, Bio, Photos, Highlights | MLB.com: Team

via Willie Mays Stats, Bio, Photos, Highlights | MLB.com: Team

And, by the way, here's the salary range for a Paramedic in the Worcester area.

via Paramedic - Worcester, MA 01608