Can you do the impossible?

I was talking to my wife a little tonight about general hiring practices, as she is in talent acquisition. The conversation was around the expectations of both potential employees and employers, with a pretty severe mismatch going on both sides. A lot of employees and especially the younger, have unrealistic expectation of salary, position and how fast they can move up in seniority. On the flipside, employers want "renaissance workers" (my term I think) who are able to do many things well, but they want to only pay them for one of those things.

Essentially, these conflicting conditions are untenable and even if a company is able to snag a renaissance worker, that person tends not to stay for very long, as they have options to go elsewhere and slowly, some companies are realizing how valuable generalist employees can be, as they are able to fill holes all over the place and happily shift too, as they can put to use and showcase their multiple skillsets.

I as thinking about this in regards to Hive also, where over the last five years there has been a relatively steady shift across the concept of "what is content" with there being far more blur interpretation now. However, one thing that is still pretty apparent here is, in order to consistently do well, it requires both building a unique niche based on topic and personality, as well as delivering content that people actually want to read or engage with.

Generally, the content has to also meet some standards of quality, with a little bit of formatting, and a grammar and spell check going a long way. But, this is definitely not a primary concern, as long as the readability is good enough and doesn't set up too many hurdles that break flow. All of these things are learnable and with practice, pretty much anyone could be (and my opinion should be) writing decent content that not only engages the audience, but engages themselves.

This seems like something that is forgotten by many people when they write, as they don't even seem interested in it. It is like they are going through the paces, copying formats of others like they are forms to fill and plugging in any old nonsense to fill just enough of the page to get voted and not attract criticism for low-effort.

But let's face it, most people are not writers by nature, nor do they care about what they write, they are here for the vote. If they did care, they would be writing about what they are interested in and have a little passion in their words, rather than it all sounding like a presenter on a 3 am news report that no one watches.

However, this is easier said than done, since a lot of people these days don't actually experience that much in their lives that is unique, since we are all largely consuming form the same narrow pool and because there is more consumption than creation these days, our imaginations aren't overly broad to take what we have and turn it into something that is ours. It is like we have lost our own voices and instead, just echo the sounds we hear around us.

But, I think this goes back to the changing in culture that has lead to the conflict between employer and employee. We no longer are able to evaluate the worth of skills well now and are largely blinded by our expectations of the future. We see people doing something well and relatively easily, and assume that they are born with it, so devalue its worth. The employer devalues the spectrum of skills of the renaissance workers that compounds to add additional value to what they do, and the employee devalues the time it takes to actually build skills and a proven track record to gain seniority through experience.

What I see in the future though, is that places like Hive will be a skill support, where for example a person is able to earn on their renaissance skills doing things that their employer is not going to pay them for. But, this is also going to set up an alternate employee pool, where employers are able to find skilled workers globally who already have a proven track-record that they are able to either hire or gap-fill skills that they need on a far more casual basis, leaving the employee free to pursue other avenues, whilst still bringing in some kind of steady income stream.

The push to work from home (WFH) through Covid social engineering is only going to speed up this process, as people will lose the connection to who they work for whilst simultaneously having increased options of how they use their skills to generate income. I suspect quite a few are going to be moving to 3 or 4 day work weeks in the office, but working 5 or six days for other companies. I also suspect that companies are going to be looking for more ways to evaluate the work getting done from home, and pushing to cut back on paid hours also.

But, whichever way you look at it, it is safe to assume that the way we work is changing in ways that are going to fundamentally shift what it means to be employed and, what it means to work for ourselves. What is going to be interesting is that while computers and then the internet empowered the employer to increase efficiency per capita, Web 3.0 is going to empower the employee to be less employee and more owner. It will unlikely be a full transition for most people, but even moving 20% into the ownership bucket, completely changes the makeup of the economy, and the distribution of the wealth.

There are going to be a lot of jobs generated through this economic shift, but there are also going to be many jobs lost in a whole range of areas, especially those that are narrow and programmable. That is a lot of things these days. What this means is that when we are unable to fill the jobs as employees because an AI can do it better, we have to find other ways to earn and while they keep pushing the idea of "reskilling" that is unlikely possible, because most can't travel far from what they know.

So, rather than reskilling, I predict there will instead be a shift in what we value and I think we already see this happening on blockchains, where digital assets of zeroes and ones, are worth more more than brick and mortar homes. It won't stop there though and what I hope is, what we will begin to value again, is each other and what we can provide person to person, to make our lives better in some way.

It sounds impossible.
But that doesn't mean it is.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]