"Peak White-Collar Work."

The LinkedIn News Right Rail, which one had an article about Will Ferrell vs. Kevin Hart — top of mind for all CFOs, naturally — has some new drivel about the end of white-collar jobs. But wait, what if it’s not drivel?

That report, about a year ago on this here site, was tied to then-reporting from The Wall Street Journal .

First, there is a macro level. No one is sure if we are in a recession right now, although it seems we are indeed. People are sure about inflation, and while every guy at the country club has a theory about the Fed, no one really knows, and the fact is that without free money or the illusion of free money, the American economy doesn’t work well. It’s all boom and bust. So what’s happening is that investors are clenching their a**holes and taking less meetings, which means some people who had completely-unvetted business models six years ago now either to make revenue, find an exit, or “tighten belts” in some way. What’s the easiest thing to do to tighten belts? Cut people.

But now, we have this whole automation concept out there and everyone is discussing that. People are optimizing their lives with ChatGPT! People are working three or four jobs and no one can tell! We’re all going to be so over-optimized! Yippee!

(Is the goal of life “optimization,” or is it quality time with good people?)

So, also at the macro level, there’s a belief that white-collar can be kinda pushed out, because — as I believe some dude from Indeed said in one of these articles — “the middle got too fat.” That’s absolutely true in most places I’ve seen, where a bunch of (mostly) men command $105,000/year salaries to essentially answer emails, micromanage, and walk into different conference rooms looking confused for 42 hours/week. They have no output aside from making those above them feel better, and making those below them feel worse. These people suck the life out of humanity, and also — the economy!

So now we’re coming for them, which is why “the white-collar job is dying off.” It will still take a few years, but again, the middle is fat, and middle managers are the most ripe for automation, but everyone is running from that reality in a general sense and rationalizing their importance. But if interest rates stay high and investors stay clenched, Marty Middle Manager is out on his keyster.

That’s all macro level.

At the micro-level, the reality is that a lot of “knowledge work” is complete and utter garbage and doesn’t need to exist. A lot of white-collar jobs involve these things:

• Sitting around waiting for someone to approve something
• Helping two people speak who could easily just speak themselves
• Managing a document that no one with power ever looks at
• Mindlessly updating stuff that no one will ever use for decisions
• Doing something that SaaS could do in 1/12th the time with less errors
• Writing memos, emails, etc. that fill a digital void of sorts
• Talking in circles about a topic that isn’t important (meetings)

A lot of people know their job is worthless and could be eliminated or automated, but they need the job for income and relevance and so their parents (if alive) don’t think they’re a bum, so they cling to its importance to convince themselves of a grandoise lie that “career development” even exists and isn’t just the professional equivalent of watching a drunk stumble out of a bar and somehow make it into the right Uber.

So much like executives dig automation because it’s a solid cost-cutting, fat-middle-eliminating play, peon employees realize automation may come for their incomes.

Again, this all may take a decade to fully play out. What I currently love is all the Wall Street Journal articles claiming we can all be “violinists” once automation scales. OK, awesome! What happens to the tax base and the idea of “consumers” when we’re all violinists? Can our collective violin aptitude pay for widgets to help the remaining companies grow?

There’s a reality to all this stuff that, while far away, also can’t be completely ignored.

The problem inside most organizations is that hiring is done for the wrong reasons: it’s usually done to (a) show growth to an investor or (b) because a middle manager feels overburdened in some way. It’s almost never, or at least that I’ve seen, done because a company truly needed a specific role filled by a person who would be a good fit there. It’s often rushed and the role was created essentially out of whole cloth to begin with. Aside from Teach for America and ESPN, every job I’ve ever had — including many contract ones — already had people successfully doing the job I was hired for and feeling fine about it, but some middle manager had lost their gourd one week and needed “headcount,” and an executive salivated because that created an illusion of growth.

High inflation and unstable economic times and at-scale automation threatens this whole mirage, and that’s where we are right now. Question is: will we keep living the lie, or turn into the skid and admit that a lot of jobs are pointless excuses in keeping you a consumer, and just re-envision what “work” is?