Consolation

 Microsoft's Brad Smith made a blog post today about responding to concerns, especially from young people, about generative automation and the possible impacts on employment.

It's a very cromulent bit of corporation-speak, designed to convey to readers that Microsoft isn't so wealthy, powerful or distant that it doesn't care about people's worries concerning technology. And Mr. Smith is willing to say some things that other corporate executives have been less willing to; he notes that there has been "corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures," rather than pretending that job cuts were the result of generative automation being able to do the work better. I think I still fault him for making this admission only after that reality had become public knowledge, but honesty is honesty.

But as I read it, I kept being drawn back to the Copilot Super Bowl ad (since removed from YouTube) that aired in 2024. For all that Mr. Smith says that the goal of generative automation is to help people do better work, rather than replace them, the promise of that initial advertisement was that people could be "soloprenuers" by letting Copilot do the things they would hire other people to do. And I said at the time: "If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring." I would liked to have seen Mr. Smith acknowledge that there are people who are afraid because Microsoft's messaging gave them reason to be afraid.

Mr. Smith notes that in their book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman note five "soft skills that are uniquely human," namely: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. Which is all fine and good. But these are not traits that are in short supply. If the majority of people thought that the demand for these skills were high enough to keep the job market afloat, there wouldn't be so much worry about a jobpocalypse on the horizon.

If widespread adoption of generative automation by businesses is inevitable, and the jobs shed to free up budget for capital expenditures aren't coming back, the technology is going to have to create demand for human labor somewhere else. And "human observation and insight" aren't going to be that demand unless, somehow, the percentage of returns going to labor increases markedly, such that demand for automation-produced goods and services really skyrockets. And that's not a prediction that technology industry analysts seem to be making at this point.

To the degree that progress can be described as a process of creative destruction, I suspect that the public at large is better off when creativity drives destruction, rather than destruction demanding sudden creativity. But the public at large isn't calling the shots. It's the investor class, in search of returns on their investments. And as a high-ranking executive at a publicly-traded company, it's not difficult to tell which of those groups Mr. Smith is more immediately answerable to. And so I wonder about the motivation of this post, from a public relations standpoint. Is this honestly what the leadership of the company is thinking, or is it being conciliatory in an attempt to head off anger that may impact profitability and investor confidence?

Vector

There is a type of fraud, perpetrated against job seekers, termed a "Contagious Interview." The tactic has been around for a few years now, and like many fraud tactics, has been evolving and spreading. Originally, it was targeted at developers: a fraudster would ask a job seeker to clone and execute code from code hosting platforms, like GitHub. The code package would have a malicious payload attached to it, and if it was run in an insecure environment, that payload would be installed on the target's computer/network.

It's taken a while, but the technique is now being deployed against other job seekers. Some examples I've heard of are people being asked to record videos of themselves for verification purposes or even something as simple as being sent a Zoom link. In each case, the target is presented with an error message or dialog box that informs them that a driver, or their Zoom installation, is out-of-date and that specific commands need to be run in the Terminal to address this and continue.

Of course, updating camera drivers or video conferencing software doesn't require Terminal commands; this fraud depends on targets following instructions, even when they don't understand precisely what they are doing. And that relies, at least in part, on a certain amount of anxiety. And there's no shortage of anxiety among job seekers today. Someone flustered by a potential roadblock between them and an interview is much more likely to follow dodgy instructions than someone feeling more secure in their situation.

And, of course, someone stressed from being unemployed will find being stolen from via malicious software running on their computer to be a bigger blow than someone with a steady income. But money is money, and the fact that a dollar, pound or euro goes a fairly long way in a poor or developing nation means that people there will continue to target people in wealthy nations who are looking for work. It's a form of resource curse unto itself, and one that will keep evolving, so long as the world's poor have easy access to websites and people's inboxes.

Bounced

While we're on the topic of job searches, I was scrolling through LinkedIn today, and came across a post from someone who said that they were "85% to 90% qualified for." They'd tailored their résumé for the position, and "had a decent feeling that [they] would be called back for an interview."

They weren't. Instead "Not even 24 hours later, [they] received an email that basically said that [their] qualifications were impressive, but [the company] decided to go with a different candidate." The poster claimed to be "baffled" by this, and concluded: "The ATS screening likely didn’t see direct industry language and automatically rejected me, even though I do the job they described, just in a different industry."

Or, someone (or more likely, multiple someones) who was (were) 90%+ qualified and had same industry experience applied, and interview queue was filled before anyone got to their résumé. While I'm not a betting man, if I had to put money on it, one way or the other, I suspect I know which one I would go for. Because the unemployment rate in the industries that are most represented on LinkedIn is fairly high. It's not rocket science; if companies can receive 200+ résumés in 24 hours for an open position, their chances of finding someone who's more or less a 100% match is fairly good, unless they've been thoughtless about their qualifications or job descriptions. (Companies looking for 5+ years of experience on technologies that are not yet 5 years old still abound.)

Applicant Tracking Systems, especially those that have generative automation baked into them, are common bogeymen in today's employment market. It's easy to point to examples of people receiving rejection letters on very short turnaround and complain that no actual human beings ever look at most résumés. But in an environment where a company can be flooded with applications in short order, of course most résumés will never be reviewed by a human being... no-one's in the business of hiring armies of people just to read résumés.

Known Quantity

Back in 2020, I'd made a note to myself of the following:

According to Lee Hecht Harrison, there are three basic ways in which people obtain new roles:

Created Position: 5%
Known Candidate: 70%
Applicant Pool: 25%

In effect, in 80% of hires, the new hire is a known quantity.

I wonder if the numbers have changed, and if so, what they are now. The current employers' market in the technology industries has been driving a lot of angst, but, at least in the circles I move in, I've been seeing a lot of people looking to crack the Applicant Pool section of things.

Perhaps one of the good things about having been in the labor force for as long as I have is that I'm known to a lot of people. I've put quite a bit of effort into leaving positive impressions, and it's paid off on a couple of occasions.

Back in the day, I tended to view such networking as akin to cheating; but I like to think that I've matured in the interim.

Menswork

So there's an article on NPR that notes a growing sex disparity in new jobs and employment. As manufacturing continues to contract, and health care grows, women are finding it easier to land these roles than men. And the experts that NPR spoke with have some ideas on changing that.

 "If Trump really wants to get more Americans working," Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a December 2016 op-ed, "he'll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men." She notes in the NPR piece that there are ways of framing what had been seen as feminine roles, like nursing and preschool teachers, in more stereotypically masculine ways, such as emphasizing the need to lift people, or being able to engage in rough and tumble play.

But as someone who started their working life in a female-dominated profession, residential child and youth care, the problem wasn't that I felt that didn't belong in the job. It's that a lot of other people, regardless of gender, didn't feel that I belonged there. I still remember being at a party, back when I was in my twenties, where we were talking about my job, and a latecomer to the conversation was appalled that adult men were allowed to work with children. Surely, she reasoned, the only reason why a man would want to be around children was grooming. She was suitably embarrassed to be informed that it was me she was talking about, but that's different than rethinking the position.

[Richard] Reeves[, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men] notes that for years, the country has embraced policies and programs aimed at getting more women into science, technology, engineering and math, and the share of women in STEM jobs has grown.

I think that this is, in large part, because STEM jobs come with two things that people want: greater status, and higher pay. Healthcare and children's education come with neither. And it's unlikely that the people who currently have high status and well-paying jobs are going to want to share them.

And reducing the expectation, across society, that men are going to have to start moving into work that offers lower pay and status en masse, is going to be heavier lift than I suspect it's given credit for. Not to mention just the idea many families are going to have to get by with lower incomes across both partners. I've noted before that "I've come to understand that 'traditional masculinity' is a box, and any attempt to leave it is punishable." Attempting to show how what are widely considered "girly jobs" have somehow become more masculine is about piling more things into the box, when the box itself is the problem.

Guess Which

Given that the presumed goal of generative automation is to render large swathes of the public unemployed, there have been a number of recent articles on whether this or that career path will be the thing that saves the economies of industrialized nations from the collapse of discretionary spending by the affluent, but not wealthy, segments of their populations.

Whether it's healthcare, services or blue-collar work like the skilled trades, news outlets are starting to run articles, centered around an individual and their story, designed to show people that there are well-paying occupations out there that people have been ignoring in their rush for soon-to-be-worthless college degrees designed to lead to knowledge work. And, of course, they're quick to note the low six-figure salaries that go along with them.

What's less apparent is what does the demand for these roles look like, especially if they're intended to be lifelines for millions of un- and/or underemployed people. Or, to be more precise, how elastic that demand is. To use a common example, take people who harvest foods. That demand is relatively inelastic... food isn't thrown away or allowed to rot by producers because there are literally no people available who could be employed to harvest it... it's that their margins don't make spending more on payroll worthwhile; the added costs needed to recover more of the produced food mean the math doesn't pencil out.

When the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined: Nursing Is the Surefire New Path to American Prosperity, the article opens with a nurse practitioner who now makes $120,000 annually and talks about how her and her husband are doing. But, being a WSJ piece, it's only available to subscribers, so I didn't read the bulk of it. But baked into that is the idea that "plentiful" jobs equals enough jobs for the people who might decide to enter the occupation. But how many nurse practitioners does the nation really need? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections by 2034, the number of nurse practitioners is slated to rise by about 40% from 2024 numbers. And I think that this is what's driving the enthusiasm. When one looks at the data, nurse practitioners are high on the table of Fastest Growing Occupations, and they're the first occupation to crack six figures in salary. But it's worth noting that they're farther down the list when it comes to the Occupations With the Most Job Growth (the difference being percentages for Fastest Growing and raw numbers for Most Job Growth). The BLS estimates that there will be more Software Developers added than Nurse Practitioners.

And if that sounds a little off, that's the problem with taking and (or even only some) these projections as givens. If one presumes that the BLS has guessed the factors affecting occupational utilization for software developers incorrectly, where does a confidence that they've called it correctly for nurse practitioners come from?

The problem with casting any job as a "surefire" bet is that it presumes to know the choices that people will make concerning those jobs. Will it so happen that "nurse practitioners are increasingly employed in team-based models of care, taking on tasks previously performed by physicians." and "Expanding practice authority [...] support[s] employment demand further?" The BLS expects the United States labor force to grow by 3.1% by 2034, when compared to 2024 numbers. Is that going to match increases in population growth? Will their general outlook on expanding and contracting occupations bear out?

But perhaps the bigger question is whether the expected transitions, assuming they happen in the way the BLS predicts, are efficient. An old contact of mine on LinkedIn asked whether nursing was "another option for would-be or laid off engineers." Maybe, but there isn't a lot of crossover there. How much of the time spend pursuing a Computer Science degree would really be useful if one made the switch to Nursing? And how many laid-off developers could really afford to return to college full-time to get the Masters of Nursing degree needed to be an NP? And if there's a rush to enter the nursing occupations, and they become oversubscribed, what happens then?

The problem that I've always had with career planning is an inability to see the future. And that's led me to commit to things that turned out to be less than expected. If we're really going to see a seismic shakeup of the employment market in the United States, expecting everyone to figure that out for themselves, based on whichever news articles they happen to come across is a bad idea. I would expect that there needs to be a plan that helps match people with jobs when they're selecting their educational paths. This, of course, is going to be freighted... there simply isn't enough trust that the United States will actually look out for the thriving of the citizenry at large, as opposed to the people who write the biggest checks to Congressional and Presidential campaigns. Which means that it's unlikely to happen. Hopefully what comes out of it won't be wasteful enough that it becomes clear that something better was needed.

Shifting

I was looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections, and the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report, both of which were updated/released last year. Both of them had software developers on their lists of the fastest-growing jobs. The WEF predicted that Software and Applications Developers would see Global Net Growth of 57% between 2025 and 2030, while the BLS predicted that Software Developers would grow by 15.8% between 2024 and 2034.

It's easy to look at the numbers of layoff notices that have rocked the technology industry in the United States and decide, on that basis, that bureaucrats don't know anything, but of course they couldn't have known what choices people were actually going to make. One can fill out a survey or answer a questionnaire, and then have other factors come into play that result in different decisions being made. And, whether we like those decisions (or their impacts on our lives) or not, people are remunerated quite handsomely to make them.

And that's what came to mind when I saw this chart, in the Future of Jobs Report. It predicts that the share of work done by people, without recourse to automation or some sort of automated enhancement, will drop from 47% in 2025  to 33% in 2030, while the share of work done solely by automation grows from 22% to 34%.

And it's with these numbers in mind, I suspect, that people proclaim dire warning of what will happen to people who don't pivot into the jobs of the future (many of which pay less than the jobs of today). But this decline is no more a given than the increase in software development jobs was. This, too, is something that's going to be driven by the choices that people make. And maybe what's needed is for more people to be involved in those choices.

Now, Dario Amodei may be correct, and what he terms “powerful AI”  may indeed create a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” that's just better at everything we do than we are. But until that comes about (and, given human history, likely even when it does) we have choices as to what we value. There's no reason to presume that it's impossible to direct where the future is going to go by adding some intentional design to the mix. I've said before that a question that bears answering is what new demand for human labor generative automation is going to create. But that buys into the hostile framing that posits that valuable work for humans will be relegated to the leftovers that automation, even if otherwise ubiquitous can't do. Maybe, as people, we'd all be better off if there was an active effort to find/create and then nurture roles that lie outside of the capacity of machines to do, and to start moving towards them now. (Normally, I go out of my way to avoid using the word "we," since it tends to be something of a weasel word, but here, maybe, enough of humanity is in the same boat that "we" makes sense.)

Because if it's undesirable that the World Economic Forum's prediction that out of every 100 workers, some "11 would be unlikely to receive the reskilling or upkskilling needed, leaving their employment prospects increasingly at risk," turns out to be true, perhaps the onus is to come up with something that those 11 can do that makes good use of the skills they already have.

Passively accepting the idea that automation is a bear coming for the job market, and so people's primary goal should be running faster than enough other people that the beast is satiated before it gets to them, is a recipe for disaster. The people the bear seeks to eat are unlikely to go down without a fight, and the conflict could wind up doing much more injury to the collective than the bear ever could. Here in the highly individualistic United States, this may be something of a heresy, but perhaps it's time that people decide to hang together before technology, and the incentive structures behind it, hang everyone separately.
 

Unquiet

 <rant>

And here I thought the quiet part was that companies openly discriminate in their recruiting based on factors completely unrelated to job performance.

One can blame this on some sort of biological imperative to discount that which is more easily available (unless, it seems that money is involved; people always seemingly grab the easy bucks), but maybe what it's really about is feeling justified in one's prejudices, and the willingness of, well, many of us, to bow to that.

Being Black, I've been told to not have a profile picture on LinkedIn. Being a Gen Xer, I've been told to expunge my early work history from my profile and résumé. I know people who profiles photos are black-and-white so that they appear to be fair-haired, rather than gray. People use different names in in order to seem more employable. And now there's an endless line of people telling us that the green "Open to Work" banner is really an enormous red flag.

Not because these things are somehow disqualifying; none of them are supposed to matter once one makes it to an interview. But because the gatekeepers of the employment world are supposedly graded (by themselves or others) on how well they make the process of recruiting new employees into a status game.

Prospective employees are treated like Labubus, Stanley tumblers or the Power Nine. If they don't lend the company an air of exclusivity, or make it feel somehow special, the fact that they can do the work, and do it well, doesn't matter. But when was the last time you saw a company crowing about how awesome and unique their new Product Manager was? When was the last time anyone made a purchasing decision based on how much work the seller's Talent Acquisition people needed to do to hire a middle manager from another company?

This would make sense if it showed up in the bottom line, or in stock prices. But literally no-one cares if someone builds a team by hiring a dozen long-term unemployed people. There's absolutely zero riding on this.

But we play the game anyway. Well, I do, at least. There are jobs that I've done, and done well, but there are no traces of in my professional history, because I'm supposed to be pretending that I'm younger than I am until I get in front of someone who can afford not to care.

It's a strange game, because no-one receives anything for winning. It's a pretense that often simply adds work to the process for everyone involved, supposedly because the appearance of doing more work is the valuable part.

</rant>

Got It Dave; I Can Do That

While it strikes me as a little late to the party, the New York Times has picked up on the trend of "prompt injection" into résumés. The idea is, put simply, that job seekers are placing generative automation prompts into their résumés, hiding them by using white fonts on white backgrounds. When an employer's applicant tracking system (ATS) reads the document, it encounters the prompt, and acts on it.

I'm going go out on a limb here (although I'm convinced it's a very sturdy one, and say that this doesn't actually work, and hasn't for some time, if it ever did (which, honestly, I'm dubious about). It's always being presented as a clever job application hack, but in reality, it would be an enormous security flaw.

In the New York Times article, no-one in recruiting comes out and says that their generative automation systems had ever been successfully controlled by an injected prompt... the anecdotes all come from job seekers who claim to have landed interviews by having done it, or are simply counts of attempts. There are no quotes from engineers or the ATS companies. So this is really a story about people's perceptions of what's going on in systems. And that's worth keeping in mind.

Because if someone could hide a prompt in a random document and have a reasonable expectation that a system would act on that, it would be threat actor heaven. Why bother with social engineering or doing the work to find zero-day exploits when spamming a company with résumés could reliably result in an applicant tracking system opening a back door, exfiltrating data on all of the other applicants or sending over login credentials? It's worth understanding that not all of these systems are home-grown. If companies were selling systems this easily controlled by outside actors, there would have been highly-publicized lawsuits by now, especially considering these attacks have been talked about for months already.

And if this sort of thing worked, "A.I. poisoning" (mention of which is conspicuously absent) would be trivially easy, because it's not hard to hide messages in various forms of media. Steganography goes back to 400 B.C.; hiding machine-readable messages in files is nothing new, given that the bulk of most computer documents is machine-readable code that most human users never see. Sanitizing inputs is not something companies are just now figuring out.

These stories peddle a message of hope (There are jobs out there, and you can get them if you're smart!) and affirmation (You're cleverer than the idiots in corporate HR departments.), and play on people's suspicions that "A.I." is not all it's cracked up to be. But by focusing tightly on job seekers, and not potential threat actors, articles like this New York Times piece ignore the fact that if this has been taking place since "the first half of the year" it would no longer be a zero-day exploit. It would have been patched by now. Technology stories that avoid educating people on how technology actually works don't do anyone any good.

1B or not 1B

The numbers tell the story: Indians still account for 70% of H-1B recipients, but only three of the top 10 H-1B employers had ties to India in 2023, down from six in 2016, according to Pew Research.
Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa shock: Why US may lose more than India

This somewhat undersells things. This story, from Al Jazeera, makes the change plainer (it shows head to head numbers from 2014 and 2024). But the BBC does nod to it: "Indian outsourcing giants such as TCS and Infosys have long prepared for this by building local workforces and shifting delivery offshore." And raises a question. If TCS and Infosys have been scaling back their use of H-1B visas to bring workers into the United States, and we're not hearing about their businesses suffering, what was up with all of those workers they were importing? If Tata Consulting and Infosys could start hiring domestic labor once they saw the writing on the wall, what was stopping them previously?

There's an unspoken assumption in the H-1B visa debate, when it comes to supporters of the program, that the skills that the United States was importing simply weren't otherwise available. But what is India providing graduates that the United States is not? Not much other than a willingness to work for lower wages, as far as many Americans are concerned. As far back as 2013, Rutgers University put out a paper questioning the persistent complaints from business leaders about a talent shortage.

According to [the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology's] analysis of the engineering workforce, the nation is currently graduating about 25,000 more engineers every year than find work in that field.

They also noted that in 2011, when Steve Jobs told President Obama that the primary obstacle to employing 700,000 Americans in manufacturing was an inability to find workers, at going labor rates, that many domestic hires would have zeroed out pretty much all of Apple's net profit for the year. And this is what leads to the widespread skepticism about the H-1B visa program (and outsourcing, for that matter) among Americans of many political persuasions... the suspicion that it's just a way to lower labor costs at their direct expense. And so more and more American workers feel that their incomes are being sacrificed in the name of corporate profits, and that credulous politicians (like President Obama) were buying into cynical corporate misinformation. And while some Americans are cheap enough to look the other way when people a few towns over are rendered unemployed, there's a certain self-importance that tends to to awaken when unemployment comes for them, personally.

The idea that the main reason that Indian companies like Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys and Wipro led the list of H-1B visa utilization in 2014 (and three of those companies are still in the top ten) is that they were Indian companies, preferring to hire Indian nationals (rather than Americans) to work in the United States, became pretty well entrenched. And the boosters of the guest worker program tend to avoid addressing that, instead turning to the tried-and-mostly-sucessful playbook of claiming that labor is the one commodity that somehow avoids having its price drop with greater availability.

There are, of course, all sorts of predictions that the United States labor market will fall apart without the approximately 100,000 annual entrants that the various H-1B programs allow. But if, as the Rutgers paper suggests, part of the reason that Americans were avoiding STEM fields was that the degrees were expensive and competition from guest workers made the return on that investment uncertain, in a handful of years, the shortfall would be made up.

The problem with the Trumpist way of doing things, though, is that it's not likely to stick. Students who suspect that the next President won't continue the policy are likely to go into other fields, not wanting to face a sudden influx of guest workers showing up just in time for them to graduate. The President's open nativism doesn't help, either, as it taints the entire exercise with a whiff of racism that people who would otherwise support the change want no part of.

Shareholder primacy and profiteering, abetted by a political class who feel they need piles of money to get their messages to a passive public, are starting to drive more and more conflict between the business class, who are seen as the haves, and general public, who view themselves as the have-nots. The ghost of President Reagan's trickle-down theories of economics still haunts Washington D.C. (not to mention many state capitals), and politicians seem to constantly buy into empty promises that corporate welfare will turn into corporate largess for the population at large.

President Trump understands this, and is tapping into it. It's remarkable that he's managed to play a fairly strong hand so poorly.

Pithos

There is a quiet conflict taking place on LinkedIn, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's spilled over onto other social media sites as well. The belligerents are, on the one hand, people claiming that "artificial intelligence" has been added to applicant tracking systems (ATS) in order to speed the rejection of supposedly unsuitable candidates, and on the other, people who work as recruiters, who spend their time debunking such claims and explaining how things actually work.

While I suspect that, from the point of view of the recruitment professionals, their opposite numbers (some of whom claim to be recruiters themselves) are sowing incorrect information, for me as a bystander, I think what they're offering are measures of hope and/or control. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking site; I know a few people who work blue-collar jobs, but they tend to be former white-collar workers who have made career shifts along the way. And this year has been a rough one for professionals, especially in the technology industry, President Trump may claim that weak hiring numbers for the past two months are falsified, but the long-term unemployed would likely beg to differ.

The contention that "the problem with the job market" lies with poorly-implemented generative automation or some secret ATS programming that a "quick hack" will bypass is designed to tell people that the more likely explanation, namely that Western societies are in a mode where they're better at economizing labor than in finding new, high-value, uses for it, is wrong. And that's why it has such staying power; a message of hope, even if that hope comes with a price tag, tends to win out over a bleak-seeming reality.

And so in this conflict, the recruitment professionals are on the defensive, as they have nothing comparable to offer. While never stated is as many words, their narrative is that there just aren't enough jobs to go around, and in this high-stakes came of musical chairs, some people are going to be left without a place. That's never going to be a welcome message; accordingly, there will always be a strong market for alternatives.

Yells at Cloud

 Found on LinkedIn today:

"We're not Luddites screaming at the sky that time is moving too fast."

The Luddites wouldn't have seen themselves that way, either. Technological advance produces winners and losers. The Luddites were on the losing end, and history, as they say, is written by the winners; which is why "Luddite" is such a pejorative that even people who are basically making the same argument the historical Luddites were run away from the label.

I wonder if the problem that opponents of today's technological advances have is that the evolution of "Luddite" into a pejorative has resulted in a loss of historical memory. The Luddites have come to be seen not as people who fought to maintain standards of worker pay and quality of output, but as technophobic simpletons, seeking to hold back a tide that would lead to better lives for literally everyone. Much like many people who object to the use of generative automation are today. To be sure, there is a certain amount of self-interest on the line here, on either side.

The American public, broadly speaking, has a habit of expecting sacrifices for the good of the collective. The rub tends to be that the people calling for the sacrifices aren't in the position to make them themselves. The person looking to generative automation to lower prices for them isn't expecting their job to be one that goes away, any more than the person looking to end fossil fuel usage thinks that they're the one who will be looking for a new line of work.

The understanding that these people are somehow backwards tends to paper over the very real crises that they're facing; one that they understand is likely to be ignored if it comes to pass. 

I Spy?

Came across this while browsing through Reddit yesterday evening. It's something that doesn't come up much in the debate (shouting match, really) on remote work; the difficulties that can be encountered in knowing that people are who they say they are.

Presuming that this person was recounting the offer being made to them accurately, a company is promising to create an entire fake identity for them to assume while working. Truth be told, it seems weird to me... it's possible that it's just about price; they'd charge the client $10,000+ a month when someone legitimately in the US or EU would ask for more, but I thought this is what outsourcing to south and southeast Asia was for...

Which is where a corporate espionage angle may come in... if the company offering the placement controls the VPN that the "employee" is using to fake their presence in the US/EU, I would think they can use that to eavesdrop on the connection. Or it could be something as simple as using the credentials the "employee" is provided to access company systems, disappear and then put the blame on whomever is being impersonated.

The fact that the poster realized that something didn't add up, but seemed open to giving it a shot (Why else ask about whether they'll actually be paid or the consequences of detection?) could speak to there being a lot more people being made offers like this, but who don't decide to ask the Internet for advice.

In the end, this is simply a random anecdote, but it answers, at least for me, why companies can appear to be so reticent to hire remotely. A person who's local may not be the best available person for the job, but at least they aren't potentially an overseas threat actor.

Is a Magic Number

There have been a number of layoffs in various sectors of the tech industry over the past couple of years or so. Some people managed to land on their feet within a fairly short period of time, some dropped out of the labor force entirely and some entered the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Which is never a good place to be. Especially in a society that doesn't come across as a fan of the social safety net.

A lot of job seekers feel hard done by, whether it's the impression that generative automation attached to applicant tracking systems are rejecting their applications out of hand, companies appearing to use the hiring process to mine for free work or simply having to go through multiple rounds of interviews only to have the process dropped without any word. And it makes sense that applicants would find the process obnoxious, because for most roles, there isn't anyone who's accountable for the experience of applicants.

And because no-one's being graded on it, no-one's paying attention to it. I've sat through my share of business reviews, and our HR partner was constantly being asked about the size of the hiring funnel and time to fill roles. There wasn't a word about the experience of applying to the company, even for the people who were hired. The people who didn't pass the various gates of the process weren't even a consideration.

In an environment where applicants for open roles are plentiful, there's no need to conserve or recycle them. So employers don't feel a need to ensure that the process works well for applicants; if someone had a bad experience with applying and never seeks to work for that company again, well, there are plenty of other fish in the sea. And applicants tend not to want to burn bridges with potential future employers so while they might complain about being ghosted or having to do an excessive amount of homework as part of the process, they're unlikely to name names... and so even if other people were prepared to take their business elsewhere due to how a company treats applicants, they wouldn't know who to punish.

To me, all of this is obvious. Which, as my father would always remind me, means that I'm the only person who sees it. I suspect that it would be worthwhile to change that. The employment market tends to be very much opaque, and so a certain amount of conjecture and deduction is a necessary component to talking about it. Maybe it should be less opaque. Given businesses' incentives to treat everything as a trade secret, more information is unlikely to be forthcoming, but there would be value in people who used to be on the inside sharing some of their knowledge. The most difficult part of job hunting is always knowing which haystack the needle might be in; better information could have benefits all around.

(This, by the way, is post three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three. Hence the title.)

Buying Safety

I saw a LinkedIn post not too long ago, about a guy who offered a referral bonus to help his wife land a job. It's not a new idea, I've tried it a couple of times, but it seems to be making some waves these days; Business Insider had an article recently on two engineers who were each offering a cool $10K for referrals to land them their next job. It turns out that one was contacted by a hiring manager, and the other didn't land a full-time role, but that's beside the point for this post.

It occurred to me that if you could get a dozen or so people together, one might have the funds to start something. I wonder if the current economic situation is pushing people more towards job hunting than entrepreneurship. When people have low confidence in the economy as whole, the added risk that being in business for oneself involves becomes unpalatable. I know that there are other measures of employment risk taking that are taken into account (like the quits rate), but I wonder if there's an eye on the rate of business formation; or where the capital that could start businesses is being funneled, instead.

Person to Person

Recently, LinkedIn has been alive with sentiments like the following:

• "People will always look for human connections."
• "With AI, automation and robots replacing humans, niches will emerge where human interaction will become the next premium service."
• "Although AI might predict outcomes, only human personalities can genuinely connect on an emotional level, using empathy to navigate life's complexities."
• "In the future, people will pay to simply take a walk with another person."
• "We’re living in an age of automation, acceleration, and endless information. We scroll, we work, we survive. Some of us even thrive. But beneath the surface, there’s a hunger. For presence. For people. For something that can’t be outsourced or automated. Something like real, human connection."

And because for some people, simple aphorisms are always better coming from someone famous, this Mark Cuban quote has been making the rounds:

The AI irony is beautiful: The more artificial our world becomes, the more valuable real human interaction gets.

As with anything, not everyone is on board with this, and there has been a level of pushback to the whole situation. One poster went to far as to call it "a failure of critical thinking."

I'll admit to being something of a skeptic, myself. After all, I have a degree in Psychology, and no-one is breaking down my door to recruit me for a "real human interaction" job. Still, I think that I'd be inclined to be somewhat more charitable (I'm going soft in my old age), and instead of chalking it up to a lack of critical thinking, attribute it to grasping at hope.

A lot of people are (or at least believe they are) staring down the barrel of generative automation reducing their employability (and thus, their incomes) to, if not near (or absolute) zero, well below what they need to sustain themselves. And if artificial "general intelligence" ever comes on line, that will only make matters worse. If all people feel they have to offer others is their "real human interaction," they're going to cling the idea that this will somehow save them from job-market irrelevance, and thus, destitution. (Which I suppose is better than bitterness, guns, antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-trade sentiment.)

Because, as it has proven time and again, the population at large will dispassionately watch people beg in the streets for a 5% reduction in the Consumer Price Index. And if generative automation raises the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment above its current rate of about 4%, the United States government, at least, will dutifully adjust its definition of "full employment," decree that the extra people out of work are necessary to keep inflation under control and turn its attention elsewhere.

For the person whose one remaining viable tool is a hammer, nails are all they have to hold on to. Because it's true that hope is not a strategy; when it's all people have left, it's the strategy.

P.S.: But, for the sake of argument, let's say that Mr. Cuban and company are correct, and "real human interaction" does become more valuable. If it's all that most people can bring to the table, the supply will still far outstrip the demand. Not to mention that fact that taking a walk with another person is unskilled labor.

Into the Pool

One concept that I hear a lot is that a 4% unemployment rate is "full employment." And I always wondered why that was, since one person out of every 25 not being able to find a job doesn't quite seem "full" to me. Today I did some digging, and came across the concept of "Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment," or "NAIRU." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Newer concepts of full employment require some unemployment to temper inflation," and that "some" is represented by the NAIRU, which comes out to be 4%. The logic is simple, once the unemployment rate starts to dip below the magic 4% number, workers start becoming hard enough to come by that employers are forced to increase pay in order to attract and retain workers, and those cost increases are promptly passed on to customers in the form of higher prices.

Straightforward enough. But it raised a question for me: If there must be a certain level of unemployment at all times, where unemployment is defined as people who want work, but can't get it, does this explain why the "safety net" in the United States is generally considered garbage? After all, social programs robust enough to mean that certain people didn't have to work in order to scrape by would mean that people could opt out of particularly nasty job markets, pushing things back towards an older understanding of "full employment," which was basically that the only people who weren't working were in the process of changing jobs.

It also gives a more economically sound (depending on one's understanding of economics) for seeking ways to push people into the labor pool than conceptualizations of "dignity" or concerns about "moral hazard." In situations where labor is scarce, workers have a decent number of options for putting pressure on businesses to shift some of the profitability of the business from shareholders to themselves. It would also, I expect, go some way towards eroding the idea of an "underclass." After all, work that wasn't valuable enough to entice people away from either benefits programs or other jobs would simply cease to exist, as happened here in the Seattle area a few years after I arrived. With technology companies hard up enough for workers that they were willing to train (in order to get around what it called "structural unemployment"), in addition to paying decent salaries, jobs that people took because they needed them tended to lose people. More than a few local restaurants closed because human resources people recruited away the wait staff during lunches. There was a local Burger King that resorted to offering $500 signing bonuses in order to attract applicants, and they likely had to slip some cash to the people they already had while they were at it.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the current unemployment rate is just about 4.2%, there doesn't seem to be much sign that the United States is on the verge of having prices take off in an effort to keep up with worker expectations of more money. Likely because of the fact that nearly a quarter of those people out of work, and looking, have been unemployed for longer than six months. (But it seems that the percentage of long-term unemployed can be inversely correlated with unemployment more generally; the number jumps when unemployment is low and drops like a stone when the broader unemployment rate climbs.) I know people who have been looking for a year and half at this point; mainly because the gaming sector is, as one person I know put it, a landfill fire, and the skillset doesn't exactly transfer over into other industries. I suspect that enough people are in "take what they can get" mode, that pushing up inflation is the last thing on their minds. So perhaps, as people were pointing out before the turn of the century, it's time to adopt a new way of thinking about the issue.

Fraudspotting

Employment frauds are rife when the number of job seekers is high. The more people need to find work, the more it's possible that they'll take chances on people and companies that they aren't familiar with. And so one sees things like this, where someone has created a profile pretending to be someone else, looking to lure people in. (It's since been taken down.) It's not an exact copy, by any means, but if one hadn't interacted with the real profile, it could be convincing. But, there are some telltales, which I've outlined with a red box. And since knowing what one should be looking for can help combat a more generalized suspicion, consider this a public service announcement.

Name redacted.

When looking at a LinkedIn profile, the number of connections a person has is only a link in two circumstances that I've been able to find. 1) A person is looking at their own profile. 2) A person is looking at a profile of someone who is a) a first-level (or direct) contact of theirs, and b) that person has enabled allowing others to see their direct connections. I'm not directly connected to the real person being impersonated here, so there shouldn't have been a link there.

And note the little box with the diagonal arrow pointing up and away; which indicates that the link goes to an external website... if there is a link for a contact, it will always be an internal LinkedIn link (it's a search that returns that person's direct contacts), so that marker, which is an explicit indicator that following it will take you to a different site, will not be there. Also, as 500 > 1, "connections" should be plural. The singular in the link gives away that something is amiss, along with the fact that while the link claims "500+ connection," the text below it very clearly says: "1 connection."

While the faked profile page is mostly a copy of the real thing, these telltales make it stand out as not genuine. Often the difference between being taken in and not is understanding the little things to look for.

Room For One More

Some job market clichés:

“Just work at Starbucks.”
“McDonald’s is always hiring.”
“You can always get a job at Walmart.”

These come around a lot during difficult economic times, mainly because they are lobbed by the securely employed at those people unfortunate enough to be in need (sometimes dire) of work. I tend have a question for people who make these statements, that I ask with the false innocence of someone who understands that they're being provocative.

"Just what business are Starbucks, McDonald's or Wal-mart in that they have an infinite need for labor?"

Because that's really the implication of these statements, when made to job seekers. That these low-wage service roles need literally any and everyone with a pulse that they can get their hands on. Along with the bottomless revenue needed to pay a salary to literally anyone who walks in the door wanting one.

There has not been a business yet, of any size, that has mastered the fine art of taking human labor and unerringly converting it into profits. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as an unemployment rate, because everyone who wanted a workable job would have one. It's something of a truism, but labor does not, in and of itself, produce demand for the output of that labor. It is a side effect of efficiency. A lot has been said recently about the "Jevons Paradox," which posits that gains in efficiency don't always reduce the overall demand for a resource. But it's important to note that in order for the paradox to kick in, demand has to rise. And the more efficient use of labor hasn't always created greater demand for labor.

And so, there isn't an infinite demand for baristas or shelf stockers that would make coffee houses and national retail chains sure-fire employers of last resort. And that allows, or maybe even requires them to be more selective than casual advice would indicate. A McDonald's manager has an idea of what a good hire or a bad hire looks like; and they're often inclined to see displaced technology, or other high-skill, workers as bad hires. In part because people who do hiring for fast-food restaurants understand (and maybe even share) the impression that these jobs are low-status. And they definitely understand that the jobs are considered low-skill; there's a reason why they tend to be effectively reserved for the less-educated. They're unlikely to be convinced that someone who, some months before, was pulling down a salary decently into the six figures, is going to stay in a (near) minimum wage role a moment longer than they have to. And the world might not take much time to learn, but training new people is still a task that makes the work less efficient than it already is, and so is to be avoided.

But I think that most people understand that. I know in my own experience, I have yet to meet anyone who said the unemployed could always find low-wage retail work who had actually every taken such work as a survival job. Like a lot of platitudes, "Just work at Starbucks" is a way of believing that the individual is in control of everything around them. The things that people say to comfort themselves need not be true as stated.

Question Carefully

So LinkedIn invited me to view a "collaborative article," where the topic was: "Your external vendor misses a crucial deadline. How can you ensure program delivery stays on track?" The feedback request says: "We created this article with the help of AI. What do you think of it?" And the options are "It's great," or "It's not so great."

"It's not so great," is actually intended to mean "It's actively bad," because the reasons you have to choose from are things like "It’s not on a professional topic" or "It contains stereotypes or bias." But I thought the question was "not so great," not because it was actively bad, but because it's the wrong question. (And it is a bit unclear; what "on track" means, for instance, is left to the reader.)

By the time an external vendor actually misses a crucial deadline, the remediation plan should likely have already been initiated. Because: "The external vendor providing Deliverable X will miss their delivery date," is a foreseeable risk. The number of things that can blow up a delivery is infinite. And the vendor's project plan should have the reasonable ones noted, and the vendor PM should be communicating status of active risks with in-house program management. Especially when an entire program is riding on that delivery. The missed deadline may be a disappointment, but it shouldn't be a surprise, especially if it's "crucial."

These sorts of questions, that ask about recovering from problems rather than preventing or mitigating them, are common. I encountered one when I took my first manager training class, about a quarter century ago (and I still remember it quite clearly). So I'm not surprised that an LLM trained on the contents of the Internet would ask one. And, to be sure, there's value in knowing what to do when the unexpected happens. But the quick recap of advice that is presented covers things that should have already been done, like "Assess the impact and scope of the delay" and "Develop contingency plans." And activities like "Communicate with the vendor to understand the reasons for the miss" should be part of the postmortem/lessons learned, not the immediate risk response (what I would want to know in the moment are what obstacles to delivery they still face). It was advice that indicated that this wasn't something that had been planned for, as opposed to something that hadn't gone according to plan.

I don't know who looked at the question before it was put out there. But this goes back to one of the problems with LLMs; if one doesn't know the subject matter, it's often difficult to assess an LLM's output. The question, as asked, is reasonable on its face, but strikes me as wonky, because the LLM has simulated expertise in language, but not so much in Program Management. It can't ask questions about questions in the same way that people can.