Robots Wanted

Lately I've been seeing job descriptions that are so insanely comprehensive and so demanding, that no human could possibly fill them. Of course the thing ends with some goofy language about the person being a self-starter and a high-energy team player.

High energy?! Try just plain high -- a person would have to be so pumped up on cocaine, going full-tilt 24x7 to accomplish half the crazy tasks listed in some of these job descriptions, I can't help thinking managers have flipped their lids.

The skills required for some of these wonderful jobs cut across skill sets that are so antithetical, they require someone nearly schitzophrenic in their ability to focus on tiny details and, of course, simultaneously be a visionary big picture person, oh, and yeah, btw, I forgot, you have to be a sales closer and also an engineer and do your own typing and have had 10 years of profit-and-loss responsibility and have managed a team of 25 people. [It's a given you know how to fix the copier and you don't require any benefits or health insurance.]

After a while, you begin to understand what managers are really looking to hire -- they don't want to hire humans, they want robots.

They've grown used to hiring 5 people, slowly or quickly laying off 4, forcing some poor idiot to do the work of 5 for a year or two, and now, it is revealed more and more, this idiot then trains his counterpart in India or China and he's cannon fodder as well.

So there is going to be a very interesting labor market in the next few years. Managers are actually going to need to hire some American human beings one of these days. Those managers are still going to think they can hire one person to do a five-person job. People will have lost so much trust in such companies, or already gone bankrupt a few times, that they would rather flip burgers in their own neighborhood than fly on the 15-hub never-direct flight to East Jesus, arrive in the middle of the night, spend what's left of the night sweating out perfect transitions for their Powerpoint slides in some crappy hotel room far away from home, working for one of these slave owners.

Of course the smart guys will build their OWN robots to take their place at work. They'll have better things to do than actually keep a job.