De-cluttering the Hype Around Job Losses

In my blog post earlier I had written about how the automation tiger is not really as "terrifying" as it seems.   Read it here. Let me continue the argument around this

In recent 30 to 40  years computer controlled equipment has substituted wide range of routine work including jobs of book keeping, booking clerks, telephone operators, librarians and at the same time created jobs needing cognitive skills such as computer programming, software engineering.

Generally technology alters the tasks that people do and as a result there is a shift in demand for skills performed.   When washing machines became popular in India since 1980's the jobs of washer-men was at stake.  But today the difficult job has been sculpted out and numerous laundromats and premium service home delivery laundry services abound.  The washer man's job in the earlier form still exists but the "hardship" factor goes on increasing and the "returns" one can get keep decreasing year on year. So it makes practical and economic sense to shift to something different learn a new skill and expand. 

I met some of the washer folks at DhobiGhat (Near Mahalakshmi Railway Station at Mumbai) and found that they have expanded into dyeing of textiles, subcontracting several hundreds of dyeing jobs every day to make their livelihood easier.  The art of dyeing cloth needed them to re skill themselves and take up the new work.

Thus we see that as technology can shift work from hard work (hand washing by washer-men) to something done much easier through laundromats and large scale automated washers.   This happens due to more and more people willing to pay for more expensive services as society progresses. In short it can happen as the economy grows and people become well off and improved standards of living are evident.

Take another example from IT sector.   
COBOL as a programming language has been around since the time computers evolved (1960's) and the focus was to automate business.  Over the 80's and 90's the shift was towards desktop power and Database (SQL) and Visual Basic became popular,  in the 1990's and 2000's internet became popular and shift was on internet / browser related  technologies and so languages like Java,  ASP.net became more popular... Similarly the years after 2000 saw a thrust on business agility and Service Oriented Architecture started becoming key technologies....Now since last decade we are in the world of mobility and now programming languages like Python, Ruby, Java Scripts are the in thing.  

During each shift that the IT industry experienced new technologies replaced part of the demand for older skills. As the shift occurred people had to re-skill themselves, reorient their thinking.  (E.g. Shift from procedural programming languages like C or FORTRAN to an Object Oriented Programming Language like Java needed not just a new skill to be learnt but rather a completely new way of thinking about programming) to survive in the long run. 

While a new technology continues to expand it does not mean the old simply vanishes overnight.   For e.g. COBOL which is no longer taught in colleges today still dominates the world of business computing as there are many systems which still run on COBOL.  But the growth of demand for such skills is almost down to a trickle and hence only the best will survive in this technical expertise.  This is another reason for those who wish to survive to either be the "Super Guys" or "Super Gals" in their field or shift to something different.

So what this means for those in the corporate world is to understand the evolution of skills in your domain. Look for what is changing, learn and update yourself and continue to stay relevant

I always advise business leaders to ensure that everyone in their teams stays relevant. One of the ways they can do it is to ensure that everyone on their teams has either upgraded at least one level of proficiency on their current skills every 18 to 24 months or added a new skill to their repertoire. Of course 18 to 24 months is more from the tech industry perspective and this time frame varies across industries.

If they haven't either upgraded or moved to a new skill they are likely to face a redundancy sooner or later.   So the bottom line is that "Be Relevant to Just Stay Afloat, After that invest in self progress"


Technology changes should not ruffle us but should propel us to newer pathways.

Automation Tiger : Overhyped Or Real

People are said to  fear and shiver when they hear about the roaring "automation tiger".  Every journal, newspaper, television channel or blog of these times speaks about how jobs will be non existent or how people will be victims of progress and so on and so forth

Let me give you a reality check.  I will take a few examples in the next few blogs to counter that view.  Let me take you to mid 1980s.  Anyone who was familiar with the banking sector know that computerization was spreading it's wings in the banking industry

There was great resistance from the bank unions and they were raising issues about job losses, the bane on humanity due to computerization spreading its tentacles and how it was not right for machines to take over jobs of people.

Looking back and now looking at where we are in 2017 gives us the right picture.  Lets take the employment data of banks which are published on the RBI website

1995 -  Employment 9.9 Lakh
1999 -  Employment 10.17 Lakh
2005 -  Employment 8.58 Lakh
2016 -  Employment 12.6 Lakh

Now let me give a overall picture.  What is show is direct employment by banks.  In 2004-05 the banking sector saw a impact of sudden appearance of online banking and resultant drop in direct employment.   Add up the indirect employment due to spiralling number of ATM's  and the outsourced jobs due to automation and servers and systems being developed by third party vendors and the cash management juggernaut that manages ATM's and so on the employment opportunities only have increased.

Has the banking sector vanished today?  Absolutely not.  Today we have more banks, more branches and even more ATM’s than we ever thought.  Digital Banking, Net Banking and Phone Banking are prevalent like never before.   Unlike earlier days when banks hardly had products beyond savings accounts, current accounts, recurring deposits, fixed deposits and a few others… today banks are overflowing with hundreds of financial services and offerings.  

So jobs are not disappearing but shifting.As society becomes more progressive economically disposable income rises,  spending on leisure goods goes up,  alternative services come up and more jobs are created.  

So the example of banking industry shows us the fact that automation is here to stay and not here to kill jobs alone. Automation and technology shifts help progress and the progress creates alternative job opportunities than what existed.  There are few more examples that we will consider in coming posts.  We can decide for ourselves if the automation tiger is hype or reality.

Technology Pushing Us to Think Less, Interact Less in Person?

What strange times we live in...? Technology has so come to influence every moment of our waking lives and takes over even when we are sleeping,  thereby making it unnecessarily easy for our brains. (you don't need to think, just leave it to technology).  Yes !!  Our brain is supposed to be altering its wiring in response to the technologies that we deal with.

Are these things familiar....

We are given suggestions by Facebook...... On whom to make friends with and lo you click on.

Our calendars on Outlook ......  Remind us of our next meeting with our friends and colleagues

We wake up to wish our spouses and kids for their birthday..... Using Auto Birthday reminder on Facebook and Orkut

Reminded which program to watch by the Auto Timer on the Television

Get suggestions on Amazon.Com as to which book we should be reading.

Attend parties where everyone's posting updates on fB on how they're enjoying every moment .... never once having spoken to the person sitting beside

Take a ride in a bus with children but stay glued right through the journey to the screen on the device in our palms.

Use a packaged predictive model to tell us which employees will leave us and when..

Subscribe to online news updates to summarize the key events of the day.

GPS Navigator on the dashboard tells us the route map and where all to turn to reach my destination. 


According to Prof Susan Greenfield of Oxford University modern technology including social networking and video games may have a detrimental effect on development of children. Further  our modern brains are also having to adapt to other 21st century intrusions, some of which, such as prescribed drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, are supposed to be of benefit, and some of which, such as widely available illegal drugs like cannabis and heroin, are not. Electronic devices and pharmaceutical drugs all have an impact on the micro- cellular structure and complex biochemistry of our brains. And that, in turn, affects our personality, our behavior and our characteristics. In short, the modern world could well be altering our human identity.

Recently I came across a quote attributed to the greatest thinker of  last century Albert Einstein.   It goes thus.....“I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”

Is his foresight coming true in today's times is something for us to prove wrong.  Otherwise it can become an observable law.   

We need to be aware of how these devices and technologies  are overpowering us and changing the way we behave, relate, communicate and interact with people around us.  It is time to reflect.    What does it mean for us?

Below are some tips to avoid being victims of too much digital influence.  Have picked them from my earlier Blog.  Read here Urgent Versus Important.

a) Distance Yourself  from Those Digital Distractions: You need to put away these distractions like the SMS to waiting to be read, the latest Tweet from your rock star hero or the latest update on weather, or the email from office  all arriving incessantly into the digital device.  Keep a time window for such activity and stick to it.  If you follow that routine then it starts getting ingrained in your mind, in a few days the sub conscious sub system of the mind learns to rewire our brain circuit

b) Make Time for Reflection:  In the hurry and pace of daily life we rarely stop to look back on the day gone by.  It would be a good idea to look at how you had done on the things you did each day.  You would need not more than 5 to 8 minutes and this exercise also helps you to identify any priority items that you may have to focus on the next day.   The human mind has a uncanny ability to tune out what is not in focus and one could easily avoid missing out something which might fall between the no light hours that separate the two days.

c) What Are the Other Distractions:  Do you have too many things going on at the same time.  It is said that human's multitasking are more likely to make mistakes.  This is due to context switching leading to reduced attention.  However it is not impossible and people can be trained and become better at multitasking but that is only after training.  Otherwise several studies do show the down side of effectiveness while multitasking. So try to focus on the tasks one at a time as the brain needs to refocus as you switch between tasks making use of mental energy.   So this goes back to making a priority lists as in point a and re-look at what's important, whats not before you race ahead.   Some of us think we are experts at multitasking then you need to have a shared understanding - it is about doing two unrelated tasks.  Second the brain has an ability to switch rapidly between one and the other task so we should not confuse that with multitasking.