The Computer Revolution and Unemployment

Yes, I think they are very much related. Computers are finally coming of age in offices all over the world, and the result is a shift in how companies staff.

When computers came on the scene in the early 80s in regular offices populated by people with no technical expertise, the buzz was that computers would help us do everything easier and quicker! Yeah, right! Not for at least for another 30 years.

Computers are finally living up to the hype. Or perhaps we low-tech humans with 30 years of dealing with them are finally more competent to use them. The truth is now we are getting a lot more done than we did 30 years ago. Personally, I think every day that I am doing the work that six of me could have done in 1981.

Remember what it used to be like? You would go to work in the morning and review the papers in your in-box. You would look for little pink slips of paper for phone messages to return. Then you would start to work. If you wanted to write a letter, you would take a yellow tablet and write it out in long-hand or if you were a big-shot you could have your secretary take dictation (I never experienced that). In any event, you didn’t type it yourself. Chances are that the letter would have to be retyped because of a typo. A letter I could zip off today in a few minutes via email would take two people several hours.

If you wanted to write a research report, you would gather all of the materials you needed around you. The magazine articles you might cite would come from your personal stash. You had a bookshelf in your office because you needed the books to do research. If you really wanted to get serious about research you would have to get in the car and go to an academic library. A thorough report might take days. And then somebody still had to type it.

If you wanted to do a slide presentation, you had to shoot the slides with a camera, get them developed; and spend several hours putting the slides in the right order in the Carousel tray and setting the timing. Obviously, PowerPoint is a great time-saver!

Our Boomer generation knows how to type and that has probably been our salvation. We didn’t learn to type in anticipation of computers, however. That was a fortuitous accident. My mother, like many others of her generation, made me take “personal typing” in high school so I could type term papers in college and letters when I was a functioning adult. I was in the college prep course, so there was no time in my academic day for regular typing. Besides, I was never going to be a secretary. In retrospect, typing was by far the most useful thing I learned in high school!

While doing anything before the office computer came along was harder than it is today, nobody talks about that decade from 1981 to about 1991 when computers seemed to make productivity go DOWN, not up. Nor do they consider the negative impact of SPAM and viruses on productivity that followed for another decade.

Why would all of these wonderful machines make things harder? The answer is that people had trouble using them. In the early 1980s, to type a letter you had to memorize a bunch of control codes. To add a column of numbers you had to create a spreadsheet and use formulas that reminded you of algebra class. I am not a fast typist (especially back then) and I could type faster than my computer display could show the letters. File names had to be short and have no spaces. In most offices there were a few computer-phobics and it was their secretaries who had to adapt. I was what some of my colleagues called a “computer person.” That meant I could turn it on and competently type and print a letter. I could even create a spreadsheet!

When the computer broke, I was still pretty helpless. There was no “tech support,” but I was lucky that my husband and son are both way more computer savvy than I am and could usually solve the problems. But all of that takes time.

For a whole decade we had offices with a handful of people who could deal with computers and a majority who could not. It wasn’t especially cost effective, but it was a way of life.

By the early 1990s many who simply could not handle computers at all had retired or moved to other careers where computers were not essential. The lingering computer phobic executives had competent administrative assistants who could do their computer work for them. At last we were beginning to realize some of the promise of what computers could do for us. They still broke, but they were easier to use. We still, however, had no access to information in real-time.
Enter the Internet and e-mail – BIG TIME! At first the Internet and its sister e-mail were novelties in the office. I remember having ten workstations in the mid-90s and only two of them had an Internet dial-up connection on shared line with fax machine.

Soon it became clear that everyone needed the Internet we got an Internet hub and DSL and thought we were hot-stuff. Now that everybody could get e-mail, we started using it to communicate. Everyone could get online, so we started using the Internet to research things and order stuff. It was pretty cool!

But everyone else also discovered e-mail and our e-mailboxes filled with SPAM. People started sending dumb jokes around via e-mail and employees, who lacked e-mail at home, started having personal e-mail come to the office and using the Internet to shop.

The bad guys also discovered that the Internet was a great way to wreak havoc, so we started getting debilitating computer viruses – not to mention big bad Trojan Horses and evil worms. Countless hours of productivity were lost in most offices.

But things are different now. We have SPAM filters so much of the distraction of SPAM is gone. Employees have computers and Internet access at home, so there is little temptation to waste company time on personal shopping or sharing jokes. The workflow is fast and furious!
We now have good virus protection software and a computer virus is a rarity. We don’t lose time to unraveling computers tied in knots by Trojan horses and the like. The computers mostly just work. And we have learned what to do when they don’t.

In order to work in an office today you have to be competent with basic office software. That means just about anyone can type a letter, create a spreadsheet, create a Powerpoint presentation, send and receive emails, and use the Internet. And, of course, everyone is self-sufficient. There is no longer much need for lower level employees to provide services for the higher ups. There is a culture of “do it yourself” – even if you are the boss!

I submit that there are thousands and thousands of jobs lost to increased computer productivity. In a tough economy, simply getting the work done is a top priority. Reducing payroll costs for a company may be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. It is unfortunate that many people are not able to find jobs – competent, skilled people who are very adept at using computers. That’s the point – just about everyone is able to use computers well these days.
So what will be the differentiator of the future? I submit that it might just be creativity and problem-solving and the ability to work with little or no supervision. Of course, that assumes there is money to hire anyone new, and that is, of course, the challenge of our times.