I'd been expecting "peak office". "Peak factory worker" was in the 1970s in the US. I'd expected that, with everything being computerized, total office employment would decline as well. Didn't happen.
Why is an interesting question.
Why is an interesting question.
The fastest growing list on the other hand, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm , has some office jobs, but it's dominated by healthcare jobs that some of which are kind of office-like.
There's also some weirdness, with Computer Programmer listed on the decline list, while Software developers, applications is on the fastest growing list.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
I’ve heard this distinction arose partly because most/many early programmers were women, a relic from the days of the human computer
I'd speculate that office workers are often interacting with things that can't easily be outsourced or don't make sense to outsource fully. Billing, HR, support, legal, accounting, marketing, advertising, PR, and dozens of other things.
The wealthiest (and many of the largest by employee count as well) US corporations today are largely software companies. Facebook is software, its ad network is software. Google's search engine is software, its ad network is software. Most of the value in AWS is in the software services. Software has comically fat margins typically. It affords staff bloat that most any other type of business does not. It's also incredibly hard to undercut via simple industrial methods like dumping (as in the steel or aluminum industries).
If you look at the ways you can beat a US manufacturer on making a pair of shoes for Nike or steel or an electric fan or office chair or toaster, those methods will not work well against Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Oracle, AWS, Adobe, Workday, Intuit, ServiceNow, et al. I'm not putting my data in China's cloud with their version of AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean or Linode even if it costs 1/4 as much. I'm not using their Cloudflare. I'm not running my CRM software in their cloud. And so on.
Wealthy, yes; high employee count, no. Facebook has about 35,000 employees. Alphabet/Google, 103,549. Amazon is huge, at 650,000, but they have a warehouse and trucking operation. That's not software.
WalMart has about 2.2 million employees. Ford, about 200,000. Boeing, 153,000. The biggest "tech" company is IBM, with 366,000 employees.
(What does Alphabet/Google need 103,000 people for? They don't build much hardware themselves. They don't do customer support. They backed off on doing network outside plant, as Google Fiber. What part of the operation is labor-intensive? Ad sales?)