6 ms·
Ill bite. What jobs have disappeared in the last ten, twenty and thirty years?
by Teichopsia 7y ago
Ill bite. What jobs have disappeared in the last ten, twenty and thirty years?
- chillwaves 7y agoAccountants have massively changed. Excel can do what it took a room of accountants before. Tools that can mupliply the output of one perosn are "replacing" jobs.
- toyg 7y agoAnd still most accountants will have no trouble whatsoever finding a job.
- jerrysievert 7y agonot OP, but off the top of my head: * mainframe administrators * cobol developers * punchcard operators * manufacturing (in the united states) * car mechanics (huge decline as car quality has gone up) * mining (in the united states) * farmer that's without thinking too deeply about it ... i could think of more if you want. note that a lot of these are declines, as opposed to eliminations.
- jdjjdjjd 7y agoThere ares still jobs for cobol devs just like there are jobs for VB developers just a lot less COBOL jobs actually pay quite a bit
- docbrown 7y agoManufacturing jobs may have become less in numbers but they are no way near gone. So i’m not sure that really counts as a valid answer. Same with mechanics. These jobs are not gone but possibly shrunk in total # of jobs. Quality may have gone up but so has complexity of repairs. Now, farmers. Again, these jobs may have shrunk but the jobs are still there. I could count on both hands of families I know living in proximity to me that run family farms for business. You can drive 30 miles from me and go through three towns that are maintained because of farm land. edit: on mobile so didn’t see your decline != elimination note at first
- astazangasta 7y agoNo job ever goes away entirely. There are still farriers out there.
- jerrysievert 7y ago> Manufacturing jobs may have become less in numbers but they are no way near gone. So i’m not sure that really counts as a valid answer. so, a large shrinkage of jobs isn't a decline? if the definition of jobs disappearing is the whole profession being eliminated then you'll never have any jobs "disappear" ... there will always be artisans in any field: look at blacksmiths for instance. so i'm not sure how these wouldn't be valid. same goes for mechanics, and farmers. the number of jobs have shrunk - those jobs have disappeared. for farmers it's due to an increase in factory farms and labor saving devices, sure there are still farmers (and quite a few where i live, where locally grown food is sought after), but for the most part those jobs have disappeared. unless we're operating on a different definition of "disappear"? if 100 people have a job that is now being done by 25 people due to either decline of need or mechanization, then those 75 jobs have disappeared.
- noobermin 7y agoFarmers? Have you eaten in the last couple of days? Not to mention mining and manufacturing. OECD is a global organization looking at world wide changes, movement of jobs elsewhere doesn't mean they've disappeared.
- onion2k 7y agoAgriculture is quite automated these days. Self-driving harvesters have been around for a couple of years.
- friedman23 7y agosecretary is probably the biggest one
- foobiekr 7y agoAdmins and secretaries are largely indistinguishable beyond the reduction in some stupid tasks (now delegated to office managers or workplace resources).
- toyg 7y agoTheir numbers have shrunk, though. There used to be a 1-1 relationship between middle-managers and secretaries, now you have a PA for the boss and maybe a couple admins every hundred people or so (hr, facilities).
- Waterluvian 7y agoAppliance repair.
- Scoundreller 7y agoMaybe the professionals, but not the concept. I feel like appliances have gotten more numerous and crappier, but spare parts and repair videos/instructions are easier to find than ever. Often the failure modes are so common for a single model over enough time (e.g. whenever X is the symptom for Y, it's typically an issue with Z).
- village-idiot 7y agoYou do need to define “disappear” very carefully. It’s quite rare for jobs to truly disappear, but they can effectively disappear. Example: there are still horse drawn carriage drivers, but as a percentage of the labor force it has disappeared. Now to answer your question: farmers.
- asaph 7y ago> there are still horse drawn carriage drivers Only as a quaint novelty.
- village-idiot 7y ago... duh? That was kind of my point.
- AmVess 7y agoNot vanished, but close. Telephone operators. I worked at a company that had an entire floor of telephone operators. Now they have none. I wouldn't be surprised if they are all gone from this company in the entire USA. On site techs? Also all gone. Replaced by commodity equipment and installed by people making $12 an hour.
- majewsky 7y agoYou still had telephone operators 10 or 20 years ago? The earliest telephone backbones that didn't require operators anymore are from the 1920s. Operators were still used for international calls, but definitely not after ~1990. Source: There is a telecommunications museum across the street from my workplace.
- patrickg_zill 7y agoCheck processing went from a building of 700 people to almost none, in one place that I know of. This was driven by the move to imaging checks electronically which I believe is called electronic presentment.
- monk_e_boy 7y agoWebsite devs, what took 15 - 20 devs now takes 5
- onion2k 7y agoThere are far more than 4* the number of websites though, so it's likely there are more web devs now.
- kochikame 7y agoWhich is the upside of automation and AI "taking jobs away from people"; the adoption of new technologies makes things cheaper, easier and more accessible, so more people do it than before, resulting in a bigger market and more net economic activity in that space, and maybe even more of the people who carry out that role, not fewer.
- gopher2 7y agoMost jobs don't disappear entirely, but they disappear in a horse & buggy sense. See travel agents.
- futureastronaut 7y agoWhile databases are still administered, DBA as a title has largely disappeared over the past 15 years.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoShe said 14% of jobs, not 14% of job titles. I assume that automation will hollow out some job titles, and then maybe totally kill them, and others it will just whittle down, with an increasing speed of the whittling over the coming decades. Other people have provided some interesting job titles that have, if not been totally deleted, at least depleted to such a degree as to be slightly anachronistic.
- unixhero 7y agoVideo rental clerks
- ghufran_syed 7y agoFax machine support engineer
- MR4D 7y agoCoal miner.