How Your Job's Changed

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Have a great retirement ElizabethofYork. I look forward to reading how it's going and what you are getting up to.
When I started sheltered housing about 20 years ago, I was a temp and got paid weekly.
My " office" was a converted broom cupboard and all records were kept on paper. I was trusted to do weekly fire checks and watch out for health and safety issues.

Fast forward to today, everything is computerised and if I scratch my arse it has to be recorded online in several different places. It takes me much muck longer to do a needs and risk assesment.

Health and safety is off the scale. It's not just a quick pat test of electrics and flame retardant materials anymore. Everything has to have a risk assesment. Someone came out to to a fire inspection recently. Amongst other things they measured the gaps around intake cupboard doors.

Someone came out to do a quote for some work recently. That's just a quick job on a ladder I said. Oh no, they said, no one is allowed to spend more than 20 minutes up a ladder.

To quote a previous Client, the worlds gone barmy.

 

[kropotkin]

I still dictate letters to a typist.

Me too

 

[Winot]

Can you think much faster than you can type, though? If I was dictating a letter at normal speaking speed, I would not always know the end of a sentence while I was articulating the middle.

Ah, well this is the thing you see. When people type letters themselves they tend to start typing before they have arranged their thoughts, and edit as they are going along. It's much more efficient to work out what you're going to say first, and then commit it to paper/the screen. Dictation forces you to do that.

 

[kropotkin]

I hate dictating letters. When I get back the stream of consciousness toss I dictated it is embarrassing. Takes ages to edit it. Probably faster to type it out in the first place. But then the secretaries might get sacked

 

[Uncle Fester]

Work as a programmer and things have totally changed.
Used to be a buzzing office with people chatting, joking, bouncing ideas off each other and regular hours.

Then Covid struck.
After lockdown most only came in once a week and now everyone works from home.

Get a phone call every 2 or 3 days from the boss and havent seen anyone apart from him and the secretary in well over a year.
No meetings and no contact from anyone unless i call them.
Used to be a regular 10 to 7. Now working 11+ hours most days and some weekends - never seem to switch off.

Still go into the office once or twice a week to keep things running, but its finally being sold off next month.

Still got a job - so quite lucky really..

 

[shakespearegirl]

TV has totally changed since I first started in the industry 30+ years ago.

Technology has definitely been at the forefront of these changes. Film - digital = much smaller shooting crews and less assistants, meaning less of a career progression path particularly in the camera department. Same in post production, editors used to have assistants, it’s very rare now.

In production a lot of the support roles have been phased out. Even 10 years ago on a big project I’d have at least one production manager and a couple of PAs. I’ve left the industry now but my friends tell me they are fighting to get even one PA.

These changes mean that senior people are being paid to do the work of a PÁ, or not actually being paid, just expected to work longer hours.

Clients are much much more demanding and budgets are being slashed. And asking for huge amounts of versions/deliverables to run across social. I did an audit for a client a couple of years and tracked asset usage, so much of what they were asking for was never used..