Can we still call it a job?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, work, futuristics

Three trends of twenty:

• CEO's job description will include "avid blogger".
• Lifelong learning will be a requirement to get and keep a job.
• You will elect your leader(s).

Five generations of workers:

• Traditionalists: Those old enough to be a WW2 veteran.
• Boomers: Their children.
• X Generation: Those who came of age after Woodstock.
• Millennials: Graduated high school in 2000 or after.
• 2020 Generation: That's when they'll be entering the work force.
  

By the year 2020, there will still be a few Traditionalists at work; they'll be age 75 or older. My father finally retired at age 75, so people like him who stay healthy into advanced age, and enjoy their work, will have little desire to enter the rocking-chair brigades.

Every day, about 10,000 Boomers reach age 65. This number will grow. Every day, about 7,000 Boomers retire. This number may not grow much. The gap between these numbers shows that some Boomers will work even longer than their elders.

Generation X is in mid-career now: settled enough to be putting kids through college or trade school, lots of them own homes. They are becoming "in charge" as Boomers retire.

Millennials have hit the job market like a ton of bricks. Their preferences drive companies like Google and W.L. Gore. The job market needs to absorb tens of millions of them in the next decade.

The youngest generation, 2020, is composed of those in Middle School (Jr Hi) or younger. Those that take up a trade will begin working in 5-8 years, and those who attend college will begin graduating in large numbers by 2018.

The message of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today, by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd, brings all these ingredients together to advise companies large and small about the kinds of people they'll have working for them by the end of the decade, and what they'll need to do to stay competitive, both as a company and as an employer.

A few trends are evident:

• The younger the worker, the more he or she lives amidst technology, but the smaller physical footprint that technology takes up. For many of the very young, a smart phone may be the only device they feel a need for.
• Older workers tend to be more loyal to a company, a particular manager, or a brand. Each successive generation is more likely to job shop and hop.
• Younger workers are more likely to "put their money where their mouth is" about the integrity and morality of the company they work for, and pass up lucrative "Enron" opportunities for lower-paying but more sustainably-based enterprises.
  

The book uses a definition of the five generations listed above based on Bureau of Labor Statistics publications, but to me they are fatally flawed. Cutoffs of 1945, 1964, 1976, and 1997 produce three middle "generations" that cover 19, 12, and 21 years. That produces a skewed view of the Millennials, which it seems to me, ought to cover more than twelve years. I prefer cutoffs of 1945, 1964, 1982, and 2000, for generations of 19, 18, and 18 years. This accords better with the population pyramid, such that the X Generation is smaller than both the Boomers and the Millennials; the 2020 Generation started with a few years of lower numbers, but promises to outnumber the Millennials.

It is not only our under-30 set that is highly tech-savvy or über-connected. The lady in the next office has a father like mine: both men are about 90, both love using Skype to video chat with their offspring and friends both near and far, both read a few blogs and news feeds, both use lots of e-mail and know how to manage their Spam filters, and at least my father has asked me to show him how to start a blog. They aren't on FaceBook, but I am, as is my manager and his manager. I am 63, and the managers are late 40s, on the cusp between Boomer and Gen X. We are also all three on LinkedIn.

What is the fastest-growing tool for recruiting new employees? Second Life, closely followed by Twitter. My son got his most recent job from Craigslist. I'm on the search committee for a nonprofit looking for a new director; I've put out a call for suggestions on FaceBook and LinkedIn. I don't Tweet, 'cause I haven't the time. All my cousins do, though, plus their children and a grandchild or two.

One trend discussed by the authors that really resonated with me is that "reputation capital" will become increasingly important, and a big facet of that will be the quality, more than the quantity, of one's FaceBook Friend list.

But now it is wet-blanket time. Much small retailing, skilled and semi-skilled trades, and factory floors seem to be exempt from all this. Yeah, when my plumber shows up, he (or she) prints the estimate or receipt from a laptop, only getting out a pen for my signature. But recruiting for the job continues as it has since the apprentice-journeyman system was set up about the time piping was invented. One of my good friends works in a steel-making plant. He has about as much need for a smart phone in his workplace as the average giraffe. The only concession to 2010-era technology is that the plant recruits via a web site (last updated in 2006) when "putting out the word" among the workers fails to scare up any job seekers.

Not everyone goes to college. In my son's high school class, 65% of freshmen went on to graduate, about 60% of the graduates started college, and about 40% of those graduated. That is just over 15%, or less than 60 out of 380+ who started with him. The advice in 2020 Workplace is directed an those 60 and the companies that will seek to employ them. What do we do for the rest? How will they make a living? My brother in California informed me that the state has closed all the public vocational schools. They simply dropped support for programs that helped more than half their young people qualify for non-college jobs.

When my son graduated from Rutgers a few months ago, we heard Toni Morrison, the keynote speaker, say, "100 years from now … will people ask, 'Is it true that you had to pay your own way through the process of becoming a skilled, useful citizen?'?" She asked when people would realize that an educated populace is a productive populace, and that supporting education at every level ensures the prosperity of society. Of course, for that to happen, we'll have to end the practice of paying a "tenured" professor a quarter million dollars a year to teach one class per semester. If you want to know why college tuition is growing at five times the inflation rate, look no further, but that's grist for another rant.

The central theme of the book is clear, however: the expectations of the generation now growing up are going to drive the way companies do business, recruit workers, and care for their careers throughout their working life. When continuous education becomes the requirement for keeping a job, it will soon become "company supported life-long learning", for workers will flock to the companies that first adopt this as a perk. By 2020 this may be no perk, but an expected benefit, even if company-paid health care has been given over to a Federal program.

My generation and the next need to keep our wits about us! The Millennials and their children are coming!! The slogan of the 80's was Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way. Retro!

More mileage per milestone

kw: business, work

I've just finished a week-long slog through a file of more than 600 documents that needed to be quickly indexed. It was one of those projects than a former supervisor was talking about when she said, "You don't have to like it, you just have to do it."

I am blessed with a job that is usually enjoyable. That generally includes the indexing. There is always something interesting to read along the way, for the reports I index are usually a result of hot research projects. From time to time, however, there isn't the luxury of time for a report-by-report, detailed analysis. When we get a whole slug of related reports, such as from a technical conference, or when a collection is to be archived, bulk techniques are needed. Clicking along at ten or twenty reports per day won't do.

This week was such a case: the collected proceedings of a technical conference. The authors had been required to add a list of suggested key terms to their abstracts. A few of them are familiar with our controlled vocabulary for indexing, but most just put whatever was meaningful to them. It was my job to turn these into "official" terms, plus pick a term or two from the title or abstract that the author may have passed over, but that we IS folks prefer to capture.

One helpful technique was to sort the suggested keyterms into unique strings. That reduced 2,880 items to 1,850. A check using various stemming techniques against the official concept list netted 400 hits, so I only had to run through 1,450 "by hand". Four days. Then a day spent running through the abstracts for "missed" terms, sorting everything back in, and I am done. This'll get my numbers up for the month! I'm going home for a nap.

Roving eye at work?

kw: dating, work, policy

I just got an e-mail from Monster.com that refers to this article about office romances. The title in the e-mail was "Office romance: Five reasons not". From a practical point of view, dating or marrying a co-worker, one who is in the same administrative unit, is forbidden by all large and most smaller corporations. Why? To avoid conflict of interest. A romance that a couple tries to keep hidden, when it is found out, will result in this choice: one of you quit, or end the relationship.

There is a second reason office affairs are proscribed. A person with poor self-control is an inferior worker. Over the years, I've known several people who were fired for this reason. Their managers were unhappy with mediocre performance to start with, and the romance simply gave them cause for termination.

I do have colleagues who dated and married, but they were in different organizations, and they both talked to their management before letting the relationship get too far. Since no affair can be kept secret for long, daylight is the best option.

An extra Saturday

kw: musings, work

Labor Day has come, and nearly gone. Other than re-seeding the lawn, I did little this weekend.

The day has great significance for a few, and is just an extra day off for most. When I was very young, there were Labor Day parades and parties in the park. By the time I was working for a living (late 1960s), organized labor had gone too far and was becoming unpopular, even viewed with horror, by those who weren't union members already, and by many in the unions: union membership dropped by half in a decade. Unions had such a bad name, and often deservedly so, that I quit more than one job just prior to the "you gotta join or leave" date (I didn't live in a "right to work" state).

Now union membership has dropped by half again, but is on the rise, a little. The disastrous policies of the "Stimulus package" are making jobs at anything close to a living wage so scarce that joining a union is often the only way to find work. Working "on call" part time at $18/hr is usually better than full time at minimum wage, particularly when the unemployment "insurance" runs out (It hasn't been run as an insurance program for about a generation now). Fortunately, many unions have cleaned up their act, so the pendulum will continue to sway in their favor for a while, maybe a decade or so, if they remember why they were humbled.

Get a trade, son

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, work, philosophy

From time to time I have the chance either to address a group of young people (grades 7-12), or to chat with a few who are wondering about "careers". I can summarize my remarks in two points:

• Learn both a trade and a profession. One of them will pay off.
• Make sure both are something you like doing; you'll be doing it for decades.
  

This is advice I gave myself, after developing it over quite a long time. I aimed twice at a career as a professional Geologist, and washed out both times. Fortunately, my trade of computer programming has usually paid the bills since 1968. So computer work is my "paying hobby" and Geology—really rockhounding—is my "real" hobby. I marvel at my good fortune sometimes.

My "next brother" (son #2 of 4; I am #1) went to a college that allowed one to design one's own curriculum, and finished with a BS degree in "Physics and Art History". Sometimes Physics paid the bills, but he was the proverbial struggling artist for 20+ years, then got a PhD and became an Archaeologist. He still makes a fair bit of cash illustrating books. Bro #3 is actually working his profession of Mechanical Engineer, while Bro #4 sometimes works gainfully as a Management Consultant, but usually can make a better living as a handyman and odd-job Carpenter.

I think I can say with some confidence that if computers had never been invented I'd be the poorest of the four. I don't have good mechanical or laboratory skills, so I'd probably be on some geological field team, logging mud or core for an oil drilling crew, living in a tent about half the time. Maybe I could be happy doing that, and I know folks who are. But I know I am delighted with my current trade/profession.

The computer business is a funny one. It is the youngest profession, but I've learned that much of it is not really a profession at all, in the sense that being a Physician or Lawyer are professions. Writing programs is a lot like carpentry: there is a limited set of "shapes" you can put together in a great number of ways. Two academics who consider programming as a craft or trade are Donald E. Knuth and John C. Reynolds.

Matthew B. Crawford is one who takes a broad view that coincides with my own. As he relates in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work, his PhD in Political Philosophy was not so helpful at first, in gaining him a profession that he could stomach. He worked at a "think tank" for a few months before opening a motorcycle maintenance shop.

The philosopher at his workplace. In the absence of an author photo in the book, I found this image at his website.

Though his tone and voice are quite different, I have a gut reaction to his writing that I had upon reading Eric Hoffer's writing. Hoffer, the longshoreman-philosopher now a quarter century dead, chose gainful employment just a bit more strenuous even than wrestling with balky 'cycles. But I have the same reaction: "Here is a guy who knows what he is about."

As I wrote a few days ago, I had a stressful day repairing my oven. But I am gratified that it is working again (and quite well), and that I know a lot more about what makes it tick. I have to admit I am not a highly skilled home maintenance man, but I am at least persistent enough to do quite a lot of home fixing.

Surprisingly, after an opening chapter that dwells a bit on the rapidly shrinking number of "Shop" classes being offered in Secondary schools, Dr. Crawford's book doesn't mention the subject again. Instead it covers, at length, the relationship between white- and blue-collar work. Both "classes" are continually being dumbed down into routine task-mongering. But you can't dumb down the repair of a carburetor, the replacement of a faucet, or the exact diameter of a machined part.

One of the radio telescopes pictured here has my name on it…or rather in it. After getting my first degree in Geology, I was in the midst of a recession and poor job market, but managed to land a job as a trainee in the machine shop at Cal Tech. I made parts for a prototype of a high-precision radio telescope, which is in use as part of this array at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory. I scratched my initials into one of the aluminum panels before it was glued (scratched side down) into place as part of the curved reflecting surface.

Crawford writes of the satisfaction of getting a motorcycle that arrived on a truck back into working order, and firing it up. When we first assembled the prototype radio telescope and got it working, the satisfaction was immense. And when a computer program one has slaved at for some days, weeks or months "goes" for the first time, the high is the same.

Shop Class ends with a survey, a plea really, for a more ideal society in which jobs that have to be done "where you are" are seen as intrinsically valuable, where the genuine intellectual gifts of the skilled mechanician are not slighted in favor of those of the smooth-handed academic. In other words, it is a plea for a genuine meritocracy.

No gut, no nose

kw: work, musings

This is a pre-review riff; I've been reading Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. He worked for a year, between getting his MA and his PhD, as an Indexer and Abstractor. It happens that half of my work is as an Indexer and Abstractor, but in a somewhat different setting than his:

• He worked for a company that sold the abstracts and indexes. I work for an internal unit of a corporation, producing the metadata used for searching a large corpus of technical reports and related documents.
• He worked with both business reports (his expertise) and technical/scientific documents (way, way outside his field of expertise). I work with strictly technical and scientific documents, which are right up my alley: My expertise is in all the hard sciences plus computer science. (Yes, all as in ALL: that's why I am a polymath)
• He wrote a fresh abstract for every document, ignoring any abstract written by its author. I place great reliance on the author's abstract, figuring he or she has some idea of the substance of the document!
  
• He had a quota of 28 documents per day. I work under a loose expectation of 100-200 documents per month, but can take a full day on one complex report if needed. For some, I can complete the work in "reading time plus ten minutes".
  

Such work is not unlike that of Scribes, who also had deadlines and quotas. One needs a certain kind of personality to work in a Scriptorium.

By the way, the monk in this image should be facing the window, so the light would be raking the page upon which he writes. A stylus was previously used to incise faint scratches in the page to guide the lines of text and outline any illumination. You can see the lines in raking light, but they are not visible by normal illumination (and by "normal" I mean light striking the page at nearly a right angle).

Dr. Crawford writes of the subversive hi-jinks some of his fellow "knowledge workers" engaged in, things like putting ridiculous text into an abstract. They were compensated only for productivity, with no measure of "quality" defined, and the pace of the work kept them bored out of their minds. In my work environment, we get constant, often blunt, feedback about quality, because our work is immediately exposed to the entire research community.

Crawford's stories add a dimension to an ongoing debate in my workplace. Some among us expect automated methods to soon replace human indexing and abstracting. Already, many of our clients are using full text searching to find the documents they need, making little use of the indexing terms that have been applied to a quarter-million documents' metadata over the past fifty years. But for documents older than ten years, only the abstract may be automatically searched, so they are still dependent on some amount of quality abstracting.

Will the day come that abstracting can be done automatically? I use one of the best "gist" software packages around for some of my work, named Copernic. The best it can do is gather selected sentences from a document. It cannot condense those sentences into the crisp format a good abstract demands. I used Copernic to condense The Prince by Machiavelli to 10% of its size. I could then read the book at a sitting (I was already familiar with its content). This Gist of the book is not too bad (damning with faint praise, here), but it does miss a lot. Sometimes it does well, and gets the sentence with "the point", leaving out the discursive examples, but sometimes it snatches a sentence from the middle of such an example, leaving a dangling thought.

In a recent discussion about automated "knowledge work", I told a colleague that, where we have aphorisms such as "Go with your gut" or "That has to pass the smell test", we don't expect computer software to have the emotional equipment such proverbs imply. A computer has no gut, no nose. Can computers ever gain either gut or nose?

I read last year that simulation software running on a modern 2-core microprocessor can now simulate, in real time, the activity of a single neuron, or with minor simplifications, a few interacting neurons (3 or 4). That means, positing appropriate software, that a supercomputer in the building where I work, which contains 16,384 microprocessors, could just about manage to model the behavior of a flatworm, which as a few thousand neurons.

The neuron evolved a billion years ago; flatworms have been with us 600 million years or more. The human brain has ten billion neurons, and about a quarter billion of these extend into the body; the brain also contains 100 billion glia, supporting cells that modify the behavior of the neurons. The total computing capacity of all the microprocessors on earth is not yet equal to one human brain.

But before there were neurons, there was a chemical signaling system, which is present in single celled critters also. This is the basis of emotions, including our "nose" and our "gut". It is faster and more specific than the cognitive reactions of the brain. To be human is to be both intelligent and emotional, and many of the things we do without thinking, such as turn a corner without hitting the wall while walking, are still very, very hard to do in the purely cognitive way that computers work.

We understand enough about cognition to do, by brute force, some remarkable things, such as build a computer that can beat a grand master at Chess. But it is like the "general" method for working a Rubik's Cube. My son and all his friends can unscramble a Cube in about one hundred moves. But some people can look at the cube and unscramble it in 15 or fewer moves. Seven moves are all it takes to scramble a cube so that either 15 or 100 moves is needed to restore it. Cognition has its limits. I suppose an appropriate computer method could grind for a moment, then display the seven moves needed to restore a Cube, but it might use many thousands of moves in its own memory to back-calculate what those seven moves were.

Back to Indexing. Copernic and a number of similar programs can gather key terms from a document using statistical methods. But the program has no sense of "aboutness". For example, in the document base I shepherd, there may be hundreds of documents containing terms such as "rust", "oxidation", "scaling" and "corrosion". Only for one in ten has the indexing term CORROSION been applied. Only for those was it deemed that CORROSION is an important concept, that the document is in some measure "about" corrosion (and some that use "rust" are about crop diseases, so indexed thusly). For the rest, it is an incidental concept. That is why we don't call ourselves just Indexers, but Conceptual Analysts.

I think it will be a while, perhaps decades, before any software method can perform decent Conceptual Analysis.