SO EXECUTIVES RECOGNIZED the risk and vulnerabilities that come from relying on skill and decided to run the opposite direction, toward volume and growth. Rather than depend on a limited group of experienced people who are constrained by how much they can get done in a day, they replaced those workers with legions of folks who have no bargaining power and an almost paralyzing awareness of how replaceable they are.
This is a much more comfortable scenario for executives because it removes all distractions as they truffle-hog for margin and debate whether another round of layoffs would tweak the balance sheets enough to get private investors horny.
A good example of this dynamic can be seen with the food-and-beverage industry: It’s common knowledge, even among people who haven’t watched The Bear, that running a restaurant is incredibly difficult and many establishments struggle to remain open despite having an insanely talented kitchen staff.
By contrast, McDonald’s serves about seventy million people a day, every day, around the world. To achieve this, the company’s franchise model provides a rigid system in which the workforce is organized into discrete, easily replicable, low-skill tasks.
To get a sense of how low-skill, on its corporate website, the company boasts that one in eight Americans have worked for a McDonald’s restaurant. And while this stat seems more like the sign of a turnover problem than a flex, it offers a clear indicator of the level of skill needed to gain an entry-level job there.
Some might view this as snobbery, and I’ll take those notes, because I’m not trying to shame the employees. I’m trying to highlight how companies—specifically, a company with a profit margin of 57 percent—rarely value skill.
Regardless of how you feel about McDonald’s—or about how much of a jerk I can be—we can see the company has no interest in training its kitchen staff to develop the skills necessary to, say, become Michelin-star chefs. And there’s a good chance they wouldn’t even want an employee who harbored that kind of ambition, as that level of earnestness would only slow the process down.
Let’s run with that, actually. Let’s say someone has ambitions of becoming a Michelin-star chef. Let’s say she watched the episode of The Bear in which the pastry chef travels to Copenhagen to meticulously prepare dishes with tweezers and then decided, I want to train intensely to be truly, undeniably great at something.
The trouble is, our aspiring chef lacks the money not only to go to culinary school but also to pay rent—the most-significant hurdles for anyone who wants to achieve Mastery.
So she gets a job at McDonald’s, and in a few days learns the basic tasks to fulfill her role in the various stations. But she will never be taught to make things with tweezers. If she catches the eye of management, it’s only because they see the potential for her to become a manager or eventual franchise owner, at which point she will teach other people the basic tasks to fulfill their role in the various stations.
Here we see how there’s an inverse relationship between skill and scale, and how the more a business focuses on scale, the more it actively de-prioritizes and de-incentivizes the acquisition of skill so that a small group at the top make all the money while the laborers live paycheck to paycheck.
We can find parallels to this phenomenon in a variety of fields. And as tech continues to eat every industry, this dynamic only becomes more pervasive.
The rise of gig-economy platforms, in particular, exposes a widespread ambition to force more businesses into a scale-focused model that can eventually become automated for the sake of achieving passive income.
Automatically Unimportant
On a more personal note, I once worked for start-up that attempted to apply the Uber-style gig model to the moving industry. There’s a lot I will eventually say about this company, but for now I’ll sum it up as one of the dumbest things I’ve ever been a part of.
A particularly dumb thing was how leadership wanted to automate as much as possible but would soon lose track of—either because of turnover or failed systems—what those things were doing. On an almost daily basis, someone would discover something produced by some forsaken cloud service that was providing incorrect information or an otherwise bad experience to thousands of people.
“We need to fix that right now,” was a familiar phrase heard around the office.
In a similar vein, certain members of the staff would receive an email every morning around six-thirty or seven. It provided some kind of report. About what I forget. But after I’d been there a year, a few people were talking, and it came to light that the director of product had been waking up early, compiling those statistics, and emailing them on his own.
Eyes widened. “Shit, man. Why didn’t you say something sooner?” They all thought it had been automated. They completely took it for granted. And now the fact that part of this guy’s life revolved around sending an email they routinely just deleted was humiliating. It represented wasted time and months of resentment over a task that no one even thought about.
I mention this to bring attention to how quickly we lose appreciation for work once we think technology is taking care of it all. And how once the work is taken for granted, so are the people left doing it.