The Most Common Job in Each State 1978-2014
apps.npr.org
apps.npr.org
However, they separate Primary School teacher from just teacher and Primary School teacher still shows up.
An underlying assumption, which we can make because the consequences of being wrong are so low (god forbid we be entertained by an inaccurate infographic!), is that all occupations will lose some people that should be counted with them, and gained others they don't deserve, and that this will balance out.
It would be interesting to learn if there is some sort of systemic bias, say jobs commonly held by women were more or less likely to be lumped together, or jobs with more itinerant workforces weren't counted well.
If you define an arbitrary worker type 1 as X, and then graph the % of the workforce, average hours, or change in pay you can see meaningful trends.
However, if you create arbitrary category's and then just look for the largest group or average salary etc. then how you define each group becomes extremely important.
IE: Heart Surgeon with GP ends up an average that nobody really fits.
That doesn't mean their distinctions make sense, but at least they're openly available and documented.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...
I assume the only reason for the teacher split is tthat they didn't want it to be the top job of every position.
Analogy: Front end developer, back-end developer, and full-stack developer. It's really just a focus, they are all developers.
RN = registered nurse. To be an RN you have to pass nursing boards, and then you are registered to practice nursing in the state(s) you work in.
There are two year and four year programs to get your RN - the two year programs are an associates degree, 4 years are a bachelor's (BSN - bachelor's of science in nursing).
Most hospitals are trying or would like to try to phase out hiring nurses who only have associate's degrees, but supply and demand (and maybe unions in some states) have prevented that from getting too far.
Of course, on top of this, some areas also have LPNs (licensed practical nurses). These people usually also have an associates degree, but they haven't taken the RN boards. They are closer to RNs than aides or CNAs, but don't have quite the same scope of practice as an RN.
And then you have DNPs (doctors of nursing practice) who are similar but not equivalent to PAs :)
The set of regulations around different healthcare professions is really quite interesting. You have some relatively standard set of professions, but each state does licensure and scope of practice a little differently, so you end up with a huge matrix of what you can and can't do depending on your title and location. Unions will sometimes add their own restrictions on top of this.
Pretty different from the world of software engineering, where there's no real licensure or certification and anything goes.
If all of this is self reported and free form (write in categories), this could just be more of an exercise in language then in actual profession.
Also does this include part time work or those with jobs who are also students?
Which is a project to, among other things, "Harmonize [Current Population Survey] data to be compatible over time".
The Current Population Survey is run by professional statisticians and well documented:
http://www.census.gov/cps/methodology/ioclassification.html
The classifications have some amount of subjectivity, but they probably aren't wildly arbitrary.
Think of it as a Level 1/2 support person in an IT environment compared to a software or infrastructure engineer.
Sure we can still glean some information from it. But the "most common job" is simply the largest bin for which nobody found it necessary to subdivide it further.
What if we lumped "customer-facing jobs in brick and mortar stores" together. Cashier, waiter, retail salesperson etc. etc. Suddenly that might be largest bin.
What if we subdivided urban truck (small truck?), medium, long haul? And split off agricultural use (tractor) too. Maybe it suddenly won't be largest bin anymore. For the purpose of the automated driving discussion urban settings are probably going to be automated much later due to the difficulty of navigating pedestrian zones and things like that.
>urban settings are probably going to be automated much later due to the difficulty of navigating pedestrian zones and things like that.
For those who haven't seen a recent Mobileye presentation[1], they're already well along on this problem with a BoM of only a couple grand in cameras and microchips. At that cost point and safety gain it won't take long for the regulators to just mandate it.
[1] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3ik5f3-2c, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhpkvuPYfn8
And thus there would be a valid reason to split the bin for the purpose of that discussion. Which in turn would alter the results of those statistics.
(1) The disappearance of factory jobs (machine operator, assembler of electrical equipment). The overseas flight of US manufacturing as a consequence of free trade agreements is real; the causes, consequences, and whether it's good or bad is a topic for another post.
(2) How common truck drivers are. I realized some years ago that it's one of the few jobs left that lets people earn a decent income without much education. Also, the job is a prime candidate to be replaced by automation (self driving vehicles) and the economic displacement of all sorts of driving jobs could possibly lead to social/political turmoil.
2) Living in MN, I was surprised by truck driver being on top since I only know one actual OTR driver. However, this is a very agricultural state, and I suspect that the majority those truck drivers are farmers who make most of their money driving trucks commercially. A lot of farmers need a CDL by necessity.
It's even more simple than that - the long description is "Truck, delivery, and tractor drivers", a category it wouldn't take much imagination to stick a lot of agricultural employees in.
Do you have any data on this? Personally I would lean more towards poor trade policies and imbalances but would be curious to see some numbers on automation.
I'd suggest google, but that sounds rude.
Relevant quote "I don't want to leave you with a facile explanation, but for the purposes of space, I think it's acceptable to say that as manufacturing and agriculture got more efficient, they required fewer American workers, "
"Truck driver" covers a lot more than OTR. The guy that drives the Budweiser truck to your local grocery store. The Pepsi truck driver that restocks your local 7-11. I dunno, does "Snap-On truck driver" count, even though he's really a small business person selling tools to professional mechanics? UPS driver falls into that category, I'll bet. Friend of mine used to own his own dump truck, hauling for construction jobs. And so on.
I'd be willing to bet my soul to the devil that this is where the long con is in the automation deal. The first trillionaire in commerce is going to be the entity that owns this.
"It puts the lotion in the basket, and it drives itself to the appropriate shop"
Nursing and healthcare jobs in particular will clearly be in higher demand with aging population in all developed countries (and several developing ones).
Many of these jobs require moderate formal education and average cognitive skills, but also a certain set of aptitude (e.g., empathy, communication, cooperation) best inculcated at home and in one's culture. If more analysis shows that they are indeed the most available jobs in the future, perhaps we should start preparing the youths now (especially since these skills are themselves valuable in life and in most other careers).
2014: mostly truck drivers. To be replaced by computers by 2034?
He left them up for a about a minute, looked at all of us, said "All of your actions have consequences, some of them unintended." and moved on with the lecture for the day.
A whole lot more stuff is being delivered to people's doors today than twenty years ago.
I would expect that anyone who's worked on enterprise software has been to client meetings where ROI is expressed in terms of human resources.
It's part of advancement that certain jobs will no longer be viable for people. People will train for other work instead.
It's not like suddenly, with no warning, 100s of thousands of drivers around the world will need to find new jobs. But in the very long term, fewer drivers will be needed. People who would have, at one time, become drivers, will do other work.
And folks out of work are finding it harder and harder to find word. Automation's ultimate goal is putting us all out of work. We're in a transition, and admitting that will help guide policy from here on.
Isn't that exactly the case? (Except that are tens of millions.)
Why not, are those people warned?
I certainly won't be overnight. But you are assuming current truck drivers will have time to migrate to new jobs as those appear - I really doubt two decades is "gradual" by that measure. Yet, I can not see how it could take that long.
No, and I'm not even assuming that new jobs will appear.
That there will be warning and that there will be much that can be done with the warning are very different ideas; OTOH...
> I really doubt two decades is "gradual" by that measure.
Two decades is enough time for people who are mid- (and often even early, though not quite at the beginning) of a career to retire and not need to worry about a new job, so its potentially gradual enough.
Its amusing to think that some people think of themselves as above the economic fray. Sorry, but we're all in this together.
But the real problem, I think, lies somewhere in your interpretation of of the the goals of pointing such things out. I'm sure "Mr. Professor" is more than capable of recognizing that kids in schools aren't political leaders. "Mr. Professor" is pointing this out, not because they fancy themselves above the economic fray, but precisely because we're all in this together.
That, in fact, is the actual message being conveyed by what you perceive as "liberal guilting".
If you're looking for people who act above the economic fray, a far better source of those sorts of airy pronouncements would be, for instance, David Brooks or Tom Friedman, for whom massive economic dislocation tends to be a "to be sure" or "perhaps" tacked on to the end of a column about how great disruptive innovation is.
Of course, self-driving trucks could help with truck fuel efficiency by driving at a more fuel-efficient speed, and they may be deemed safe enough to haul more trailers behind a single truck. Though whether or not human drivers (even if their cars drive themselves) will put up with a 4 trailer 40mph truck on the freeway is a different question.
Repacking your cargo from one container to another sucks for a lot of reasons: cost, time, theft, damage, etc.
There's also a latency and performance improvement if you can go door to door with a truck, vs. do intermodal with a train in the middle. Unless you're moving a bulk commodity to a high-volume location, it's unlikely they have rail directly to the destination. (Coal power plants do; lots of modern light industrial manufacturing sites do not.)
Optimizing air vs. truck vs. rail vs. ship across your whole supply chain is an interesting problem.
Another fun thing: with robo drivers, you could go essentially non-stop (except for fueling) door to door. Otherwise, you need a team driver or relay concept (usually you carry 2-3 drivers and swap them enroute; you could also do something with depots where you swap out drivers while retaining the vehicle, which I think is done for some high security convoy operations.) That makes the truck vs. rail advantage even greater.
The main reason had to do with how our rails are setup in an inefficient way and that all freight currently has to stop route through Chicago (iirc). This is a manual process where cars are manually moved, counted and routed.
Many former railways I know have actually been abandoned as I have an uncle who worked for Rails for Trails converting them into bike paths.
Rail freight is also quite a bit larger than truck freight in the USA. A lot of things are railed across in an intermodal and then hitched onto a truck for regional delivery. [2]
In short, rail freight is massive in the USA and our primary mode of goods transportation.
[1]https://www.aar.org/BackgroundPapers/Cost%20Effectiveness%20...
We (the USA) as a country should begin thinking about the ramifications of this and how we might need to change to preserve not the economy, but society.
It was intensely discussed on HN as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555295
edited for spelling
If a farmer could simultaneously monitor just 4 tractors, you could make tractors half the size while having twice the work done. This would double the number of sold tractors, which gives economy of scale. While also making assembly lines lot smaller and simplifying logistics.
Trucks don't scale in similar fashion. Inter-modal containers are lot bigger than ploughs.
There's not much opportunity to steal stuff from a truck except when it's being loaded/unloaded. That doesn't change whether or not it's driverless. If you're planning on hijacking it enroute, then whether or not there's a driver makes little difference. cf, carjackers.
Scenario today: truck stops at rest stop, driver gets out, truck is stolen.
Alternate: truck stops at rest stop or for traffic light, driver does not get out. Robber gets in passenger side, points gun at driver's head and tells him to GTFO. Drives off about as fast as a loaded semi can, which is not very.
Scenario with automated truck: truck never needs to stop at rest stop except for fuel and will need a human attendant (unless we also automated those away). Odds are, there are no windows or steering wheel/human controls anyway since it's automated. Now the robber needs to unload a trailer onto another, waiting truck which is a time consuming operation. And take off with that one. All the while the automated truck is reporting its location, and that it's being tampered with.
So yeah, I don't think crime will change much. It will still be far, far easier to steal stuff from the truck when it's being unloaded. And that has nothing to do with a driver being present or not.
Of-course it will probably detect you doing that and call for help complete with its GPS position.
I also expect some enterprising think-outside-the-box robbers will temporarily come up with some creative way round this. (Will phone jammers stop the truck calling for help?)
It'll be interesting when it happens.
So while Secretary/Admin Assistants haven't disappeared completely, there aren't as many as there used to be.
Some secretarial tasks much less common these days and/or mostly automated so primary worker does them themselves.
Typing, retyping, dictating, managing calendars, meeting scheduling, appointments, taking voice messages, dealing with mail(physical opening/organizing), internal memos, filing, searching for stuff in those files, copying, faxing.
What office floor use to look like https://themalcolmauldblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/secre...
For the very high end employees, sectaries morphed into admin assistants. Executives and other other very high level people still get a single assistant.
But the junior executives and middle management don't have a designated assistants. They may share one with many other employees. But most of them just do a lot of the work themselves or have underlings do it in addition to their other work.
I work in the legal field, one of the few that still has secretaries. Our office space is set up with a secretary desk right outside each attorney office. But now I share my secretary with NINE other attorneys.
My mom is a secretary. She's gone from working for one executive to essentially being the secretary for the entire staff.
So yes, the title and role changed. But there still has been a massive reduction.
Sucks for farmers, tho.
The road I live on had 13 farms when I was a kid. My brother was the last. Now he works in town and rents the land to a corporation.
Subsidizing farmers so heavily that even our socialist welfare pales in comparison. Here 50% of farms make 80% of produce. The rest just keep the land from accommodating wildlife.
URL: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and...
And for the sociology: what percentage of the population are responsible enough to take the now necessary dietary supplements to maintain a healthy, productive physiology?
Although, a real problem with the current GMO tech is the diminished nutritional value of the foodstock produced relative to historic produce. But that, of course, is due in part to depleted soil.
Honestly, I wish there was a way to tell Android Chrome to ignore the html tag that blocks zooming - using it is a moronic act of hubris and it frustrates me every time.
AI as a field plateaued somewhere in the 1970's. Much of the recent innovation has come from applying existing, understood techniques to ever more amounts of data (enabled by faster processors, and data sources like GPS and digitized map data). But it's possible that AI that can code programs will require fundamental leaps in the field. In fact it's quite probable--we don't even really understand what such an AI would look like. At least with things like fusion or hypersonic commuter travel, which are still far away, we understand roughly what the solution would look like, we just face massive engineering challenges.
In 30 years, those of us left will efficiently train computers to take over our jobs.
In the cloud!
Across the board, we get better and better at developing software.
As a software developer, the job has changed from being good at writing software to being good at putting lego pieces together.
It takes less people now to build: a simple video game, a SaaS web app, a mobile app - the common things we get paid to do.
And because of SaaS proliferation, there need not be as much custom internal software. This used to be a huge chuck of the work for devs.
Devops, too, removes need for as many 'it guys'.
The need for more software continues to outpace the trend of needing less developers to create it. For how long will that be the case?
When game machines solved the problem of moving lots of 2d sprites around we wanted to make 3D games.
When flat shaded 3D moved to hardware we wanted texture mapping.
Now even a mobile phone game will have people writing pixel and vertex shaders.
Then there's mmo technology where we have to build and run servers for millions of players with no downtime.
In my industry at least team sizes have only ever gone up as has complexity.
So our needs change over time towards better and better software but there might be a ceiling to software needs for the majority of applications.
If? Make that when.
So, the next question, considering all the companies entering in this landscape: How do we change our country to handle a mass forced exodus into unemployment? What do we do with 5 million unemployed?
Worse yet, what do we do when we are looking at 50% unemployable? (Not unemployed, unemployable. As in work done at free != absolute lowest cost of food/shelter) And when that number climbs, where do we go? What do we do?
Software development is taught in elementary school now. So I suspect a lot of the next generation will pursue that.
The underlying issue is machine learning is making more and more jobs unemployable. Those jobs would not be economical for humans to do at any price (ie: $0).
And saying that software development is going to be it is simply fallacious. It's obvious to me that most software development is also going to be eaten up by lower levels of machine learning. And also, software dev is very easy to export and 'grow' in the lowest wage countries you can find. And import is easy, unlike any physical good.
And it still leaves the big question: What are we going to do with massive unemployment?
I'd be interested in figuring out ways to cross check that set. On the surface it looks like self driving trucks would throw most of the country out of work.
I don't think some jobs are inherently more groupable, I think the choice of grouping is purely arbitrary. We could just as easily have separated long-haul truckers from local delivery people and these charts would completely change.
If there are 100 people and 2 are truck drivers, but the other 98 all have different jobs, then truck driver is most common, but there's still not a lot of truck drivers.
An important note: they are using Census Bureau data and categories. The CB has two broad categories, "managers not elsewhere classified" and "salespersons not elsewhere classified". They map makers left those out because they consider them broad and vague to the point of meaninglessness.
• There are so many truck drivers for a few reasons. One is that it is much less affected by globalization and automation (so far) than most other jobs, and another is that the "Truck Driver" is a very broad category in the CB data. It includes delivery drivers, for instance. Some other large jobs are split across more than one category. Teacher, for example, has separate CB categories for primary school teacher and secondary school teacher.
• Secretary rose in the '80s as the economy shifted away from factory work and toward office work. Then the personal computer took away more and more of the work that secretaries did, so Secretary fell.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8172461
If we believe Marx and that jobs are going to disappear, that requires either rich people not using money or money disappearing from the system. Currently inflation encourages rich people to use money in some way or another. And we have no reason to expect deflation.
Where is money going to disappear?
In an earlier look at this story, I went through a set of occupational categorisation and census data dating back to the 19th century. As might be expected, there's been a tendency for the total number of occupational classifications to increase over time.
As might not be expected, the high-water mark of classifications isn't the present, but the classification scheme used for 1910 - 1920 census data.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...
My favourite of all the occupations comes from the 1880 classification: #309, "Gentleman".
I wonder if people know that Google, Amazon, Tesla and even Apple are hard at work at killing their jobs!
Don't get me wrong, driver-less future is a nice future! But a lot of people may get caught off guard.
It's strange that data this useless is published/publicized, it's almost a honey pot for idle, unscientific speculation.
It may still be meaningful for a few industries, but not in general.