'Big Short' investor says white-collar jobs bubble is 'bursting'
This dude and this article are really not making a great case here.<p>The last sentence of the tweet is a dead giveaway of the archaic thinking. Why is WFH going to be blamed again? It feels like it&#x27;s yet another manager&#x27;s plea for employees to come back to the office and get micromanaged.<p>The article tries to answer my question:<p>&gt; Work from home. The work from home trend is threatening office jobs because it reduces the need for many traditional office roles like secretaries and receptionists.<p>In what world are secretaries and receptionists a prevalent job title in the first place? Is the author of this article retired or something? The first wave of computing already shifted those roles. Executive assistants to the SLT are not just answering phones and twiddling thumbs. On top of that, in the modern world receptionists are one of the most minimally staffed parts of a company already. My last 1,000 employee in-person company had no more than two or three receptionists and they were contracted out to a vendor.<p>You know what is expanding post-pandemic? Co-working spaces. [1] Technology and the pandemic aren&#x27;t eliminating offices, they&#x27;re changing them. Many employees want a separate space to work, or a place to collaborate in person, but they don&#x27;t want to be forced to go in daily. Companies don&#x27;t want to have to make long-term lease commitments and dedicate one seat per employee.<p>Guess who has receptionists? Coworking spaces. But again they aren&#x27;t sitting there twiddling their thumbs. WeWork and the rest of the modern coworking spaces are highly automated. You can&#x27;t just ask the reception desk to fix something or make a change to your office, you have to put in a ticket. These receptionists wear many hats: they&#x27;re salespeople, they set up events, they communicate with tenants, they do light cleaning. Their tasks are too varied to be replaced by an automation, and their salaries aren&#x27;t that expensive.<p>&gt; In contrast, the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed by office professionals is now being performed by software.<p>Automation is driving new business ventures for precisely the reasons the article brings up. Thousands of businesses exist today that couldn&#x27;t possibly exist because computing wasn&#x27;t powerful enough. As soon as you automate an enterprise task it opens up more opportunity to provide more complex business products and invite new ventures into the mix making products that didn&#x27;t exist in the past.<p>Being able to do more things with less money is basically always a net positive.<p>&gt; Furthermore, while restaurant, retail, and even factory workers are all expected to be ultimately replaced by robots that tech companies like Tesla (TSLA) are producing, this technology is even further away from being widely deployed, with some predicting these machines to not be meaningfully impactful until the end of this decade.<p>Not 100% related to my argument, but this quote above is one of the dumbest things this article claims. Anyone who thinks that retail and hospitality workers are going to straight up be replaced by robots is delusional, especially with the timeframe of &quot;the end of this decade.&quot;<p>It costs something like $20&#x2F;hour to hire a line cook, less in low cost of living areas. Certainly, the future of hospitality has fewer workers per customer, but that&#x27;s just normal labor optimization. There won&#x27;t be a fully automated McDonald&#x27;s, but McDonald&#x27;s employees work with a lot of automated devices. The dexterity and intelligence of a human is very difficult to replace entirely. Robots aren&#x27;t going to be talking to customers at the Apple Store, the whole reason people are there is to talk to a person, and retail salaries are already quite low.<p>And why is Tesla in this discussion? Tesla doesn&#x27;t produce factory automation robots. They purchase plain jane factory robotics that have been part of the auto industry for decades. It&#x27;s like the article just wanted to bring up Tesla for no reason.<p>&gt; As a third strike against the safety of white collar jobs at the moment, most companies have already more than fully recovered their number of white collar jobs from before the COVID-19 outbreak.<p>The article from this point on is basically talking about the normal boom&#x2F;bust cycle of business, even though the beginning of the article and Burry&#x27;s tweet are talking about permanent decline.<p>I&#x27;d say that this part of the article unintentionally makes the opposite argument it&#x27;s trying to make. It is directly stating that blue collar job demand is worse, and white collar jobs recovered almost immediately.<p>What is the actual structural reason why companies won&#x27;t hire more white collar workers? You can&#x27;t just spew out &quot;automation&quot; because the past 20 years or so has shown us the opposite trend in relation to automation. White collar workers are the foundation of automation companies.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;05&#x2F;17&#x2F;technology&#x2F;coworking-spaces-wework.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;05&#x2F;17&#x2F;technology&#x2F;coworking-spac...</a>