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posted by janrinok on Friday November 06 2015, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the keep-on-truckin' dept.

The animated graphic from NPR shows how the economy has changed over time. Interesting how jobs have shifted from production to services and distribution. "Peak Secretary" seems to have occurred in the mid 80's.


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 06 2015, @02:02PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 06 2015, @02:02PM (#259425) Homepage
    Was that simply the "holy shit, we need two incomes now" rush caused by people who couldn't really afford it being tempted into getting mortgages. The job market was probably flooded with many not-hugely-skilled housewives at that point. If there's no distinction between data entry clerks and secretaries in this data, then my money's on that little bit of social upheaval.

    Thanks, piddle-down economics!

    I notice that Nevada had "Recreation Attendant" as the top job for a while. Is that a euphemism for strippers and whores?
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Friday November 06 2015, @02:55PM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Friday November 06 2015, @02:55PM (#259463) Homepage

    You remember the primary tool of the secretary?

    The typewriter.

    Once upon a time, managers gave dictation to their secretaries -- secretaries who also spent a lot of time filing that correspondence and similar documents in physical manilla folders in metal filing cabinets.

    All those secretaries have been replaced by desktop computers.

    That "secretary" category likely included a lot of clerks who tallied physical paper ledger books with all the financial records. First spreadsheets and then financial databases replaced those clerks.

    So-called "Business Intelligence" has mostly automated the jobs of the managers who had secretaries, and the Cloud has mostly automated the jobs of the sysadmins who invented careers for themselves by maintaining all the robots (computers) who had automated all the other jobs.

    Next time you look at a datacenter...it is no small exaggeration to claim that each and every individual server in every rack represents a job that an human used to have but now doesn't. Where today we have datacenters filled with computers, we used to have floors of secretaries typing and clerks filing and what-not.

    So, that's where all the secretary jobs have gone. Into the Cloud....

    b&

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    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 06 2015, @04:48PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 06 2015, @04:48PM (#259529)

      The copier, then the printer, then e-mail, have cost millions of secretaries their jobs.