Adapt or die.

It’s a phrase I’ve been hearing for years, and usually in reference to someone’s career or trade. Typically, it’s spoken by a born-on-third-base type with a degree of arrogance while they talk about a “right-sizing” or “restructuring.”

As much as I hate to admit it, they’re usually right. You don’t, for example, see many telephone operators around anymore.

In the face of the seemingly unstoppable march of technology, many people have been faced with the “adapt or die” ultimatum. Many, many more are on the chopping block. First, we told everyone to go to college. Then, we instructed them all to get jobs in tech—two suggestions that are a little one-size-fits-all for my liking, but two suggestions that many people followed nonetheless.

Amidst all of these changes, plenty of people have gotten lost. I’ve never been well-suited for formal education, for example, and there are plenty more like me. Many others hate the degree programs they were steered toward. Plenty more dislike office work in general.

So why haven’t we asked a few of the most obvious questions? Questions like:

• Are all of these “adaptations” actually improving our society?
• Is the recommended path worth it?
• Will these advancements be a net positive or a net negative?

Looking at the state of the workforce and labor market, I’d say we’ve clearly gone wrong in at least a few areas. Almost every aspect of working society in the United States is flashing warning signs — workforce participation, wages versus costs, the hiring process, work/life balance, supply/demand balances in various industries, etc.

You name it — it’s broken.

Why? What do we do? How did it get to this point? Can it be changed?

The status quo

I want to be clear before I get started that I’m not in the camp that believes Western society needs to be completely destroyed and replaced with some sort of anarchy. Do we need a ton of work? Absolutely. Are things likely to get worse, maybe even much worse, if we don’t pay attention and make some changes? Yes.

Will the fabric of society collapse? No. There’s too much apathy and momentum being put into this machine to keep those gears turning.

That said, I define a “working” system as one that benefits—or at least provides a potential benefit—to most of its participants. In that sense, almost every major system in our nation is in a failure state.

Housing — the primary expense for most people — is all sorts of screwed up, though it is undoubtedly benefiting a good number of people right now. I’d argue that mass media (and, really, media in general) has completely failed its viewers but has succeeded with its customers, who are advertisers. Politics is also in a state of total failure. The dating scene and personal relationships are also not doing well.

That leaves, basically, work, and I think this area is the one that’s most destroyed. It’s hurting in enough areas that it’s almost impossible to tell which one is most urgent.

So we’ll try to tackle them all.

In no specific order, we should look at the demographics of the United States and its impact on the workforce, technological changes (both established and in the pipeline), increased efficiency alongside paltry wages, the culture surrounding work, and the process of looking for a job. Education will probably get sucked in as well.

If you look at each of those items honestly, it’s not a great picture. That much is for sure. We’ll call this the “data” section and lay down the foundation for what we’re talking about when we discuss the labor market and workforce.

Workforce participation has been on a slow but steady decline since about the year 2000, and now stands a little above 62%. Put 100 people in a room — they all need goods and services, but only 63 of them are still in the business of providing such things.

Still, the productivity a company can expect from the average employee has gone up significantly, and that might serve to offset that participation gap. Unfortunately, wages haven’t matched that growth. Boiled down? More work, less pay. Maybe coincidentally, maybe not, union membership has fallen dramatically during the same period.

Wages, at least nominally and among full-time workers, have increased by about 101% since the turn of the millennium. This sounds like a large number at first, until you consider that corporate profits are up about 550% during the same time period.

Inflation-adjusted wages have gone up 18% in that period, nearly all of it from 2012 to 2019. We’ve yet to reach real wages that match 2019’s figures in the five years since, despite all the boasts of a strong economy.

My more liberal (than me?) readers will suggest that all of that income has gone to the top 1%, but their share of our collective net worth hasn’t increased with the speed and consistency necessary to support that claim. Those profits must be going somewhere, though. Don’t they?

Amidst all of that, reporting indicates (unsurprisingly) that employees are more dissatisfied at work than ever before. That’s really like receiving an extended death sentence since many of them are in no position to ever retire. Those looking to escape that current situation enter a “hiring” process where hundreds of job applications yield few or no interviews and, in exchange for their trouble, receive zero feedback about why they weren’t advanced.

Probably because no one ever read their application, cover letter, or resume in the first place.

So, remind me again: why is everyone so unhappy?

Rot

To be clear, some people do well in our current system. I call them the plurality, as most of our institutions are designed to work for a plurality of people while simultaneously failing the majority of them. I suppose when you’re dealing with hundreds of millions of people, that’s the best you can hope for.

These folks, the content ones, are generally people who do well in structured, formal education. They like office work and specifically appreciate the finance or technology fields that they’ve been steered toward. They’re OK doing more or less the same thing (or at least working in the same field) until they retire. Or die. Whichever comes first.

Rarer (but still content) are the people who realized early enough that they were not that person and jumped off the merry-go-round. You might find a few of them in skilled trades or see the cop car flying past you on the highway.

Then there’s the rest of us: square, triangle, trapezoidal, and squiggly pegs being forced into round holes for most of our lives. This is the first area that the labor market is failing — we’re creating a lot of people who are qualified for jobs they hate, and we’re also steering people away from jobs we need, such as the trades or other non-collegiate roles.

But that’s just a supply-demand imbalance that will eventually cure itself as trade salaries go up and white-collar salaries remain stagnant — or disappear entirely as AI replaces many administrative roles in the coming years. A college degree nowadays guarantees nothing. So does a high school diploma. One is cheaper by $100,000 or more. No wonder the latest generation is enrolling less frequently.

But that’s just the mismatch between education, interest, and available careers. I’ve tackled that in-depth elsewhere and will do so again. The workforce has more problems brewing than just that. I just wanted to establish that the foundation itself is a shaky one.

As for other problems with the labor market, demographic trends tend to get top billing. The worker-to-retiree ratio falling as boomers finally retire has impacts everywhere, including on taxes and broader economic items, but naturally, it makes sense to start by evaluating the impact on the workforce.

The immediate concern is that there will be a talent and brain drain as those with forty years of experience (most of it while retaining a stubborn hold on top positions) depart their organizations. For anyone who is not a boomer and is currently working, this appears to be great news on the surface.

More demand for employees and more open positions would lift salaries, upper-level positions would become available for the first time in most of our lives, and the wide variety of organizations needing help would facilitate career changes or lateral moves that many of us have likely been pondering for some time.

The fundamental flaw in all of that is that it assumes a 1:1 labor market pre- and post-boomer retirements. That would require no advancements to automation, no further offshoring of jobs, and no AI replacements.

In other words, unlikely.

Nobody is foolish enough to suggest that AI isn’t going to replace any jobs. The debate, instead, is over whether it’ll create a net loss overall or just move demand elsewhere. Based on the 37% of companies that say AI has already eliminated jobs, I’m in the first camp. Elon Musk thinks that it’ll eventually eliminate all jobs — I’m not going that far, but I’m closer to his view than those who say it’ll be a net positive to the labor market.

Even if it ends up being a neutral figure in terms of total jobs, neutral is different from nothing. How many administrative assistants, loan processors, and payable clerks are qualified or interested in UX design? I think I’d rather just try to live out in the wilderness on my own devices than work in technology myself, but others hopefully hate it a little less.

Still, while our best-case scenario has a net-zero impact on total jobs, it would nonetheless wreak havoc on where those jobs were located and our current skill/demand dichotomy. To me, any job title ending in “assistant,” “clerk,” or even “processor” is one that I’d anticipate no longer existing in five or ten years. A lot of the “specialist” roles would probably go the way of the dodo as well.

Anything routine that involves making relatively standard decisions based on existing information or, worse yet, just sourcing and compiling that information is within the reach of AI. How many jobs require people to create truly unique, totally new, non-derivative ideas and concepts? The answer to that is very few.

That supply/demand mismatch, alongside the threat of job reductions overall, represents the shaky support columns we’ve built on top of a cracked foundation. Now, let’s flesh out the rest of the building.

Frustration

Then we get into the actual hiring process itself, which I would argue has become a totally demoralizing, dehumanizing, nightmarish hellscape the likes of which even a Bosch painting could not accurately portray.

At a few former colleagues’ urging, I decided to dive into this cesspool for this piece and examine the process in addition to using their anecdotes. It wasn’t great. The changes to the application and hiring process are some of the biggest in our lives in the last half-century or so, and this is another area in which the “adaptation” has not exactly been great.

The, we’ll call it “Indeed-ification” of the hiring process has benefited essentially no one except, of course, entities like Indeed and those that provide the software for companies to force on their applicants.

Say you’re a corporation looking for a unique, talented candidate. Almost universally, they all use either job boards, internal AI-supported software, or a combination of the two. A truly unique candidate who custom-tailors an edgy, modern resume and cover letter for this specific job is going to end up submitting a form that the AI/software cannot read or interpret and get screened out well before they reach the hiring manager.

So unique and talented? Dismissed prior to arrival.

Then 1,000 other people who use the generic, anemic-appearing Indeed resume use the “easy apply” process to inundate the recruiter or hiring manager with thousands of pages of indistinguishable junk that they just select from at random.

Assuming that even those candidates get through, though, because the way many employers set up these jobs ensures that won’t happen either. Take a position like this one:

So, you have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and experience as the listed requirements for the job. So, theoretically, a candidate holding an associate’s degree who has already done the job for four years would be more than qualified. But the headline on the posting reads:

Meaning that if you don’t have one, you’ll get screened out. In fact, Indeed will even forcibly step in and essentially warn you:

Required? But just above, it didn’t have the required box next to it. And the description was pretty clear that there were alternatives. And yet…we’re out.

All this just to have all the bachelor’s degree candidates waste their time interviewing so that they can subsequently be told the company is looking for someone with experience in the role. Ironic considering the company has already screened out most of the candidates with experience — most underwriters (the job which was posted here) I worked with in lending were 50 years of age or older and had associates or high school diplomas and 30 years of progressive work experience.

The best term to describe this process that I can think of is bullshit.

I haven’t even gotten started on all the personality assessments and “situational” testing that consultants use to justify their existence, either. And some of those are a real treat.

Listen, I believe personality tests like MBTI are useful in determining someone’s preferences in a very general sense, like whether someone tends to default to extroversion or introversion. What they cannot measure, with any real accuracy, is someone’s adaptability to a role and their performance in it based on a few generic “rate 1 to 5” questions. Not even close.

A good example? I have access to my own results. I’m rated in the “red” zone as a “do not proceed” for the job I currently have. Am I good at it? I think so. I originally left the role in 2020. I was called in 2021 and asked to return, then once more in 2022, at which point I accepted and came back.

In between, they went through three other people who all scored well on the personality assessment. They had to end up going back to me, Mr. “Do Not Proceed.”

My favorite of all of these, however, belongs to one specific international company worth $50 billion or more. I’m about to disclose proprietary information, so I won’t use the name, but I think the test is hilarious.

So, at a certain point in the personality assessment, it begins asking to choose which option you agree with more, with the five little circles beneath each set of options. Standard personality test nonsense. But the options presented to you are hilarious in that they’re both terrible. An actual selection is:

Which do you agree with more:

“I believe its morally acceptable to have an affair with a subordinate employee.”

or

“Stealing from the office is sometimes justified.”

You’re presented with about 25 of these in a row. There is no option to choose “none of the above.” If you select the middle circle for all of them, trying to indicate that you don’t like either option, you fail the assessment. Keep in mind that you’re only subjected to this after passing the first round, so this is meant to somehow be more serious than your resume review.

What value could that possibly have? I’m looking for employees who make bad decisions and are confident about them? It’s laughable. But it screens out candidates arbitrarily every day.

Should the roulette wheel land on your number three, four, or five times in a row (depending on the number of interviews and tests required,) you’ll get to enter a market where the expectation/workload/time commitment is completely out of whack with the salary or wage you’re provided.

Oh, an advanced degree earns me $25 an hour? Wonderful. People are wondering why graduate enrollment numbers are down? Look no further than that. While education should theoretically be a place for furthering learning, it’s really treated as a place for furthering income generation and career prospects. Financially, I’d be much better off banking that money and spending those six years working my way up from line cook to:

Some jobs — I’d argue very few on the current market — may actually need the knowledge acquired during the process of obtaining a master’s degree. Some employers might use it as a measure of dedication and commitment, though I’d argue that tolerating six years of minimum wage work shows much more of those traits. Still, if that’s the level of knowledge a position truly requires, it better be paying way more than $52,000 a year.

Just over a third of people have a bachelor’s degree. Master’s degree holders are closer to one in eight. A salary commensurate with their rarity would be expected in a system that made any sense. Ours doesn’t.

Restart

So, how do we fix all of this? Where do we even start?

Well, maybe that merger of education/career advancement needs to be looked at. I’ve hired or trained plenty of college grads, a few with advanced degrees. Do you know how long their training took for a typical corporate office, finance-adjacent role?

Exactly the same time that it took for the high school grad.

Right now, education is being used as a filtering system for jobs and careers that have little to no correlation with the education they’re requesting. The time commitment to obtain that minimum standard also leads to inflexibility in the workforce — those who sunk four or more years and $120,000 into a degree are not going to be keen to abruptly pivot to something else.

Given the amount of uncertainty and flux in the labor market right now, rigidity is the last thing we need.

Maybe higher education should be a place for learning, self-improvement, and expanding horizons.

Maybe it should be encouraged or even subsidized to allow more access to those in poorer communities. It’s a crazy thought, I know.

It might even be beneficial to allow people a choice to improve their knowledge of the world without the threat of bankruptcy or lifelong financial struggle.

Certificate courses, licensing courses, and on-the-job training programs can be career-specific vehicles for showing that type of practical knowledge and advancement. I could upskill somebody into an adequate entry-level risk analyst, underwriter, and processor in nine months. Call it three separate 90-day boot camp certificate courses if you’d prefer.

Whatever the name, it would be much faster, cheaper, and more specific to the career than the current “bachelor’s degree in business” requirement that two of those job titles carry around. Then we can save education requirements for jobs that…you know, need education requirements. And since that might actually mean something again, we can compensate them correctly while we’re at it.

Maybe we need a higher floor on wages.

If the only way to “win” financially is to gradually cross over from the “employee” side of the fence to the “investor” side of the fence, we might need to ensure that people have enough left to make that choice after purchasing their essential needs. Do we need unions to accomplish that? If that’s the case, I’m all for it.

Companies that actually want the best candidates and the most diverse field of them would do well to force their human resources, hiring managers, and recruitment teams to review all their applicants. Can that be tiresome, particularly as the economy tightens and hundreds of people apply for each job? Sure.

Even the worst, cursory skim-over by an apathetic department head is going to be better than arbitrarily throwing half the applicants in the garbage at random based on a piece of software, though. I put my money where my mouth is on this one, too.

Our application process: You get redirected off of Indeed. You click on the job you’re applying to. There are two boxes and one attestation. Box one—upload your resume. There is no autofill, nothing, just the document. Box two—upload a cover letter, which is optional. Attest that the information is true. At this point, you’re done. The screener, as it were, is us.

In our current workforce system, companies are missing out on intelligent candidates without degrees, creative and unique candidates with degrees that can’t get through screeners or personality tests, and experienced managers and senior technical staff who missed a checkbox somewhere during the five-step process.

Employees, on the other hand, are applying to hundreds of jobs in a scattershot format without a single callback or even auto-generated boilerplate email rejections. The loans on their backs are financially debilitating, and the reward is nothing. Qualified candidates are being told that they aren’t, while skilled interviewers and negotiators aren’t getting a chance to do either.

The only three groups benefiting from this process are overpriced degree mills, consultants, and job boards, none of which have any skin in the game.

I say we take them out of it entirely.