"Googlers" on Jobs, Technology and the Future of Work

One in a series of articles on career management based on interviews with 75+ current and former Google leaders and staff (all with 20+ years of work experience). All opinions shared are mine and those of my interviewees and not necessarily those of Google or Alphabet.

Arguably, Google has been as big an agent of change in the workplace as any company in the history of the world. By providing widespread access to information via Search and YouTube and to tools such as Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar and Hangouts, Google has made the workplace dramatically more productive and collaborative. These same technologies have enabled tasks that were formerly largely concentrated in companies’ headquarters to be effectively performed anywhere in the world. And Google is developing simpler programming tools and is on the forefront of artificial intelligence and machine learning — all of which will deliver great value and great change in many ways, likely including automation of many of these same tasks. 

Over the last several months, I’ve interviewed nearly 75 current and former Google leaders and staff for their experiences and advice on managing one’s career. My interviewees have included some of the most thoughtful and impactful creators and visionaries in the technology world.  A topic I’ve raised in most of these interviews has been career management and career longevity in a time when technology is disrupting the workplace so dramatically — and promises to do so endlessly into the future. How should we prepare for such a time? What skills and behaviors should we embrace to have a greater ability to navigate this new working world effectively? What specific careers and industries are most promising?

While they certainly don’t have all of the answers, my interviewees offered a number of valuable insights and suggestions. In this first part of a two-part article, I’ll share interviewees’ thoughts on changes that technology is bringing to our jobs and to company/worker relationships. The second part, to be published shortly, will address “Googlers’” suggestions for navigating these changes.

Regarding emerging and probable changes in the workplace, key take-aways from Googlers were as follows:

1. Technology is going to impact every part of our lives.

“Everything that you see around you here [he motioned to the room we were sitting in], if it is not yet touched by computing, it will eventually be touched by computing. Whether it's the vent upstairs or the light, how hot it is, what the carpets do, the doors - all of them will be transformed eventually by computing.”

So says Sridhar Ramaswamy. Sridhar leads all of Google’s engineering and product management efforts around Google’s advertising and commerce products. Not surprisingly, he is very bullish in his vision for how pervasive he expects technology to be in our daily lives.

2. With lifespans and the pace of technological change both increasing, people will need to prepare to have multiple careers. This will require a fundamental change in our system of education.

Vint Cerf has long been thinking and writing about the changes that technology is bringing to the world. More importantly, Vint is a leader in making revolutionary technological change. Vint is known as a “father of the Internet” having developed its original architecture and protocols. Currently, he is Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist.

Vint expects lives and careers of this century to be markedly different from those of the past:

“People are living longer and the working career is going to be much longer than it used to be — maybe double or triple what it used to be. In the early twentieth century, your working career might have been 25 or 30 years. Now it’s potentially 60 or 70 years. This has an impact on education because you're not going to learn enough in 4 years or 8 years of college, or 20 years at the beginning of your life and career to sustain you in working successfully for another 60 or 70 years. This longevity is going to induce a big change. People are going to have two or even three different careers and that will be perfectly normal, as opposed to growing in a single career.

We are going to have to help people get access to education, information and training even while they're working.

The book, ‘Disrupting Unemployment’, that David Nordfors and I edited recently, gets at some of these notions. The point we make in the book is that while innovation has always destroyed jobs, it has also created jobs. The problem is that the people whose jobs have been destroyed may not be capable of doing the jobs that have been created. So now we have to help them get past that. We have to have training programs. We have to have new education, and given the rate at which innovation is happening, all of us are going to have to embrace this new requirement. Indeed, I am going to have to learn new stuff in order to continue to be productive.”

3. All types of jobs — blue collar and white collar — will increasingly be outsourced or automated. 

Three observations in the last few years have shaped Jim Marocco’s forecast for the future of work. Jim is a VP of Finance at Google and has spent his entire career in the tech industry. 

“At the end of 2010, we outsourced some of our accounting work for the first time. It was eye-opening to see that a lot of our work could be done just fine by people in other countries at a lower cost. Not exactly apples to apples (i.e. work done remotely versus on-site) but still effective.

And, of course, other companies were doing the same thing with similar results — and a meaningful impact on local employment. Right around the time that we were completing our outsourcing, I saw a segment on ‘60 Minutes’ about workers in their 50s who were left behind by the great recession. Where did they go to profile? San Jose, California [i.e., the ‘epicenter’ of the Silicon Valley]. There were 50 to 60 people in the room who had lost their jobs.

At one point they showed the whole room and asked how many in the room had a college degree. Everyone in the room raised their hands. They then asked how many of these people had advanced degrees. 20 people raised their hands. This was a well-educated population all struggling to find jobs.

I remember thinking then that it isn’t a matter of if outsourcing is going to happen to the rest of our jobs — it’s a matter of when. It's going to happen to all of us working in certain types of jobs. There's a lot of smart, motivated people in other countries who want your job and they're going to do everything they can to demonstrate it can be done well from other countries.   

And, of course, automation is never far behind. It occurred to me that even the nuts-and-bolts accounting stuff that we were outsourcing would soon be automated. I remember holding up an accounting manual at one of my team meetings and saying, ‘What you guys see is an accounting manual. You see years of subject matter expertise. Well, you know what an engineer sees? They see a set of rules that can be automated, a bunch of if/then statements. That's going to happen. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to sit here and wait for it to happen? What are we going to do differently?’”

4. Jobs that remain after outsourcing and automation will be more interesting and more highly compensated. They will also require a broader set of skills and will be less specialized. 

Jim Marocco continued his comments, now specifically addressing the probable roles of workers that are able to successfully navigate the changes brought about technology:

“Right around that same time, I came to a view about the nature of the jobs that will likely remain after the initial waves of outsourcing and automation. My view was formed by an article I read in the San Jose Mercury News combined with my own observations of what was actually happening in Silicon Valley.

The article described changes in the employment picture in the Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2010. It identified the big employers in the Valley that had declined dramatically as well as the employers (e.g., Google) that had expanded dramatically. The first category generally included companies that focused more heavily on manufacturing and process work while the second category was predominately companies with ‘knowledge workers’ (i.e., employees with non-routine jobs that are employed to problem-solve, e.g., software engineers).

The article also happened to note that the total number of employees in the Silicon Valley was roughly the same at the beginning and end of this 15-year period. That was interesting because it felt pretty clear to me that wealth and the standard of living in aggregate had increased in Silicon Valley in 2010 versus 1995.

I concluded one big thing from this. That the jobs in Silicon Valley now are different — and in some ways, better — jobs than those that were here in 1995. They are more impactful, they pay more money and they are more interesting. But they also demand a broader and more well-rounded set of skills.

In my finance world, I see a clear distinction between the ‘20th century accountant’ and the ‘21st century accountant’. The 20th century accountant comes in, closes the books, and goes home. In the 21st century, that's done by people in India or it's automated. The 21st century accountant has good accounting subject matter expertise but it's how they apply it. They also have process management skills, they have project management skills, they have vendor management skills. They have good soft skills, they have some good technical skills, system skills, technical accounting skills. They're pulling all that stuff together to solve higher order problems.

I think we’ll see this need for a broader set of skills in many of 21st century jobs.”

Jim’s notion that most jobs in the near-future will be fundamentally broader in scope is also shared by Keval Desai. Keval was a brilliant and demanding Product Manager at Google with whom I worked 10+ years ago. He is now a partner at the venture capital firm, InterWest Partners. 

Keval expanded on Jim’s thoughts:

“I think the idea that somebody's an engineer or somebody's a marketing person is going to change quite a bit. My basic observation is that as we get more technology, we actually get more entrepreneurship in the sense that each function becomes a more holistic function. We move away from specialization because the specialized stuff is done by the robots. Technology does the specialized stuff and the integration, the holistic stuff, is done by humans.

I actually think that we're going to go back to the Renaissance era where everybody did a bit of everything. People were multi-talented. The same guy who was an artist did the carpentry and drove the buggy.  I think we're going to go back to that. I think that every person will have a job that's about solving for something. It's going to either be providing a service or solving a problem and you will have a lot of robots and automation at your disposal. It's going to be like a Lego thing.

For example, you could be a nurse practitioner and you're going to provide health care. Or you're going to provide financial services, you're going to invest, you're going to do travel, whatever it is. You're going to have all the robots and machine learning to help you. But you're going to need to assemble it all together and give something to somebody. I think that job is going to be there. There will be fewer job functions and titles, but each person is going to have to know a lot and they're going to have to be holistic thinkers. I think it will be more about holistic versus specialized.”

5. Traditional employer/employee relationships will decline while one-off contracting relationships will grow

I’ll conclude Part 1 of this article by discussing Stacy Brown-Philpot’s views on the future of work and company/worker relationships. Stacy is a former senior leader at Google and is currently the CEO of TaskRabbit. Fast Company recently named TaskRabbit “One of the Most Innovative Companies of 2017”. 

Stacy’s views are particularly interesting and important because TaskRabbit is among the leaders in an emerging contracting model know as the “gig economy”. “Gig economy” companies typically leverage technical platforms to enable individuals or organizations to connect with independent workers for short-term engagements. 

Stacy foresees gig economy-type independent contracting, whether for short-term or long-term engagements, as one of the dominant models for all types of work in the 21st century:

“I believe that the traditional form of work, which is a W-2 job where you go in and spend 40 hours a week in an office and someone takes care of you, is going to disappear. 

Therefore, how you own your assets -- your brain and your talent -- has to be on you as an individual and not dependent on any company. Plan your life and your future because it is your responsibility to take care of yourself as you move into a world where you may wish to stop working someday.”

I would expand on Stacy’s last comment above just a bit and note that where we go from here is both an individual and a collective responsibility. 

As individuals, we need to anticipate changes in the working world, take full responsibility and make plans and adjustments to be prepared.  In Part 2 of this article, I’ll share the many insightful recommendations that “Googlers” offer to enable people to make this transition.

And if Googlers are correct in their predictions, we also have much to plan for as a society — to ensure availability of adequate training/re-training resources, adequate worker protections, adequate social services, etc..

Fortunately, technology from Google and other companies will not only be a source of worker disruption but will certainly also offer solutions as well. As we become ever-more connected and ever-more aware of each other’s wants and needs and conditions, we’ll also become ever-more able to help each other and shape our futures together. 

We live in exciting times. Stay tuned for Part 2, which will provide thoughts for navigating them.

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