Monday, April 30, 2007
Nobody Makes Anything Any More
A magazine called Business 2.0 has listed the the job categories in which pay rates are rising most rapidly. Only one of these categories - engineering - involves actually making anything. In the pictures only the engineers have their backs turned to the camera; presumably they are dismayed to find themselves in the company of such frothy career options as webmaster or call centre manager. The 'Administrative Support' people are the most troubling, I think they're going to kill that woman, and the beaming hotel staff in 'Hospitality' just make me want to complain. To be honest, I don't make anything either, but I have always consoled myself with the thought that most other people do. Evidently, this is either not true or their wages are falling.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
In both manufacturing and services you take a variety of inputs to deliver a finished product. The only relevant question is how useful the finished product is.
ReplyDeleteYou produce thoughts and ideas, Bryan. You also make other people think and have ideas. Very important work. Where would we be without the humble thought? And as you know, thoughts and ideas can take on a life of their own. Didn't Dawkins have something to say about this? Mmmm. Eh. mmm. Eh. Oh, I can't think what it was.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Neil, but it qould be quite nice if ideas could be made out of girders, rivets and stuff.
ReplyDeleteBut Bryan, there's nothing stopping you. Couldn't you whip up a nice Conservatory against your house, knock down one or two walls ... ?
ReplyDeleteI remember spell-checking an essay a few years ago and for Heidegger it suggested headgear. How apt! Sitting down with some philosphers/thinkers is like going onto a building site. There are health and safety considerations. Beware!
ReplyDeleteBryan, if you adopt my metaphysical scheme - things are ideas - you can perhaps give some sense to the claim that ideas can be made out of girders, rivets, and stuff. So c'mon, adopt my way of thinking and you can be as manual as you like.
ReplyDeleteI've been telling people for yonks that they should philosophize with a hammer. That's a bit like what you do Bryan - carving away at the human soul with this amazing blog. They dint have blogs in my time alas.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually quite a rivet and girder type thing to have commenters called George and Fred.
ReplyDeleteIt is a conundrum. Nobody seems to make anything, and yet there's so much stuff everywhere.
ReplyDeleteThe answer, presumably, is that literally everything is now made by the Chinese. The crisis will come when the Chinese get tired of making things and all want to be Webmasters too.
I've determined that the most important job description for the world economy is consumer. Pretty soon robots will be making everything. Industry is getting so efficient that putting people in the loop just slows things down, adds costs and liabilities, and negatively impacts quality. The only part of the production loop where people are still necessary is consuming the product. At some point companies will start paying people to consume. It'll be the only way to keep them out of the workforce.
ReplyDeleteYes I can relate to this. My camera ceased to work last week, so I took it back to the shop where I bought it from about 3 years ago. Yes I know, it's unheard of nowadays! But I hate this throwaway society. They told me it'd cost £45 an hour to repair plus a little extra to send it to the manufacturers! What I think she meant to say was "We have no idea how to fix it as robots made it. You'll have to buy a new one, preferably from this shop (which will be out of date and incompatible with everything in approximately 2 weeks)!"
ReplyDeleteWe make big happy shiney flickering big happy remote controlled happy shiney flickering people products.
ReplyDeleteRiveting stuff! Except for the comments of those two shallow pates, Fred and George.
ReplyDeleteHmm...reappearance of word "riveting" in Neil F's comment suggestive of link between Neil entity and George & Fred rolled up sleeves people. Them not so flickering happy remote controlled shiney people so much. Should subscribe to SKY to raise Shiney Flickering Remote Controlled Happy Happy level.
ReplyDeleteRe #10: What the heck is a sales engineer? Or has the time finally come for me to just go home and die?
ReplyDeleteDon't do that, Peter, we have the Controller at hand to sort things out.
ReplyDeleteYes, Peter, we have human software engineers expertly skilled in curing Go Home & Die Syndrome.
ReplyDeletePeter,
ReplyDeleteA sales engineer is undoubtedly a professional with a strong background in applied psychology whose job is to engineer schemes to make people buy stuff. Do you know that certain scents put people into a buying mood?
I imagine this is is a job category that many unemployed KGB operatives entered after the fall of the evil empire.
Isn't it charming how effortlessly the evil empire's operatives morphed into obedient servants of our good empire? How could they make such a giant transformation with so little effort.
ReplyDeleteThe list is a bit daft in that, while apparently the salaries of those jobs are most-rapidly rising, the listed sums that one can make were sometimes a bit on the low side.
ReplyDeleteIn America, $ 40,000 is a living wage, (in most but not all places), but few aspire to top out there.