I'm so fucking lucky That being said, and being thankful for, having been lucky up til now doesn't mean I'm going to stay that way for any guaranteed amount of future time. Although I don't necessarily follow the same chain expressed here elsewhere, I do think a lot about automation and worry what it will do to the job landscape. Especially my job landscape. I need to start getting some IT/CS certifications. Also I'm staying living right where I am here, a magical place where you can catch a movie in a theater with reserved recliner seats and a bar for $6 if it's a matinee. My friend from DC was mindblown by the lower COL here when she visited. I'll take it.
My wife got her first degree in math. She graduated into a recession and didn't get hired into any accounting firm so she took a 3-hour class at Egghead Software (before it became Newegg) in MS Access... which of course she put on her resume. Then she interviewed for entry-level at a multinational insurance firm. As she was finishing up the interview, another manager stopped her and asked her about her "database experience" (the other manager had been scouring resumes). So my wife wasn't hired as an entry-level accounting trainee, she was hired as a database administrator and software architect. One afternoon's worth of MS Access. Still friends with that boss, by the way. We actually ended up moving to LA within six months of each other, and moving back within three for completely unrelated reasons. My wife officiated her wedding and they had a lot of our stuff in their storage unit for a year. We have brunch or barbecue like once every six weeks.
So I had that automation project for a while, while I was real hype about but don’t expect anyone to remember. That got handed off to a senior manager because over six months it became rapidly apparent the level of automation that senior-senior management wanted us to effect was way beyond my level of influence, aka: I can’t make managers invest time they don’t have and I can’t order around my peers and next-level-up associates on how to do their work. That snr manager and I had a relatively-okay-as-far-as-it-goes-considering-it-was-a three hour long meeting to hand off the automation project. He used to work in IT. I’m confident he can handle this better than I can. I’m happy to hand it off. One thing he said to me, which was confidential but also imho as a ‘millennial’ completely on point, was “I think our department will have to shift from being transactional auditors, to basically technical managers who oversee scripting and backend automation testing. And I don’t frankly know who’s ready for that.” I’m good at my job. I’m pretty fucking good for 28, at least. But I know most of what I’m good at I’m also smart enough to really efficently and accurately automate. I’m talking gap reports and targeting high risk populations to pinpoint errors, stuff you could never do with a random and manually reviewed population. But like there’s only so many reports I can ever make before I cover most of everything, I gotta learn how to write reporting and read scripting, man, I just don’t see any other option.
Page 10, Exhibit E5. McKinsey is not optimistic about the future of financial services.