Really solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry.

WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as more efficient workflows evolve from the old "filing cabinets and typewriters" methods that some companies are still using to this day.

Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.

The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require labor power, it does not anymore.

I watch my partner's experience in accounting and the difference are stark.

There are many many bs steps in accounting with paper that disappear when digital tools are used.

Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required.

"We've always done it this way" is an excuse for firms that will fall behind other digitally empowered firms.

What does this mean for investors? Don't invest in companies that insist on using filing cabinets.

Burry is a hedge fund manager. The most important part of his job is to scare people away from the S&P and entice them to put money into his fund.

It's generally a mistake to trust the financial advice of any hedge fund manager, and they usually provide advice that makes the S&P seem like a bad bet.

Michael Burry has been claiming the sky is falling for more than a year now. In my eyes he is no longer credible. Broken clock and all that.

At this point, the entire globe has fallen in uncharted economic territory. Anyone projecting certainty about what the future holds is a fool, liar, or both.

There is a strange cast of right-once hangers-on from a decade ago like burry that people love to quote in headlines. Nate silver is another example.

Why are these people so interesting to bloggers/journalists?

I've been reading headlines like this for over a decade now. I wonder when it will finally happen.

Also interesting use of the word bubble considering it involves an unprecedented change in how our economy has functioned for the past 3/4 of a century.

"The car dependent American suburb bubble is bursting"

I dunno, didn't he also say there was an imminent water crisis and that index funds were a bubble? Who knows, dude very well may be right in the long term but I don't think they panned out as investments.

Ultimately, he may very well be right but I don't put much more weight into his opinion than any other prognosticator. I feel like the subprime bubble was uniquely suited to his expertise, but stuff like this requires both a deeper understanding of jobs and technology than he has, and is less of an inevitability.

That reads like "We wish to start paying our devs like our cleaning staff to get more profits"

I'm not afraid to say Burry is wrong.

White-collar jobs will boom, but they'll be outsourced. Work from home changes nothing about labor needs only labor location. If anything, work-from-home is a net productivity negative for large, bureaucratic organizations because slacking becomes even easier.

Burry has a history of incorrectly predicting crashes [0]. You predict one crash correctly, and all you see are crashes. Then again… maybe we're in a very slow moving "crash" right now, and he predicted it 4 years ago?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/oawsxf/i_an...

Riiiiight..... just let me know when I can easily find good devs.

Doubt it.

This recession is more about everyone else down to line cooks in restaurants being able to negotiate for higher salaries.

I wouldn't really call it a "bubble" though more sort of "overdue wage adjustment" but the Fed is moving to crush it.

Love the lack of science with regard to the throwaway line about WFH causing lower productivity.

Buisness people can write as many opinion pieces as they want about it.

I am never again giving up WFH.

The Bullshit Jobs bubble is bursting.

https://archive.ph/eqRpg

They took one tweet from Burry and expanded it into an article on their own, adding almost nothing that isn't filler.

What he means exactly is still not known.

Managers will always find a reason to add headcount to their departments and orgs. Yeah we will probably see sone layoffs and modesty in things but eventually it gets sorted out and a new bull market takes hold and we are off to the races again. Impossible to see right now and it could be months or years. But it will all come back and we’ll make similar mistakes again.

If anyone has read "Bullshit Jobs", will know those jobs were created and why they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Not correct. Boomers are retiring and with them their experience.

Gen Z are much smaller than Boomers. This is a structural issue that can be fixed only via immigration.

What could have been automated probably was automated.

Also, due to china failures, there is going to be boom of insourcing not outsourcing.

Maybe we should start referring to WFH jobs as virtual collar jobs or something.

Isn't his job white-collar? It would be prudent for him to buy some cattle. Did he actually buy any?

“Everyone else is overpaid but me”

What is a white-collar job?

This dude and this article are really not making a great case here.

The last sentence of the tweet is a dead giveaway of the archaic thinking. Why is WFH going to be blamed again? It feels like it's yet another manager's plea for employees to come back to the office and get micromanaged.

The article tries to answer my question:

> Work from home. The work from home trend is threatening office jobs because it reduces the need for many traditional office roles like secretaries and receptionists.

In what world are secretaries and receptionists a prevalent job title in the first place? Is the author of this article retired or something? The first wave of computing already shifted those roles. Executive assistants to the SLT are not just answering phones and twiddling thumbs. On top of that, in the modern world receptionists are one of the most minimally staffed parts of a company already. My last 1,000 employee in-person company had no more than two or three receptionists and they were contracted out to a vendor.

You know what is expanding post-pandemic? Co-working spaces. [1] Technology and the pandemic aren't eliminating offices, they're changing them. Many employees want a separate space to work, or a place to collaborate in person, but they don't want to be forced to go in daily. Companies don't want to have to make long-term lease commitments and dedicate one seat per employee.

Guess who has receptionists? Coworking spaces. But again they aren't sitting there twiddling their thumbs. WeWork and the rest of the modern coworking spaces are highly automated. You can't just ask the reception desk to fix something or make a change to your office, you have to put in a ticket. These receptionists wear many hats: they're salespeople, they set up events, they communicate with tenants, they do light cleaning. Their tasks are too varied to be replaced by an automation, and their salaries aren't that expensive.

> In contrast, the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed by office professionals is now being performed by software.

Automation is driving new business ventures for precisely the reasons the article brings up. Thousands of businesses exist today that couldn't possibly exist because computing wasn't powerful enough. As soon as you automate an enterprise task it opens up more opportunity to provide more complex business products and invite new ventures into the mix making products that didn't exist in the past.

Being able to do more things with less money is basically always a net positive.

> Furthermore, while restaurant, retail, and even factory workers are all expected to be ultimately replaced by robots that tech companies like Tesla (TSLA) are producing, this technology is even further away from being widely deployed, with some predicting these machines to not be meaningfully impactful until the end of this decade.

Not 100% related to my argument, but this quote above is one of the dumbest things this article claims. Anyone who thinks that retail and hospitality workers are going to straight up be replaced by robots is delusional, especially with the timeframe of "the end of this decade."

It costs something like $20/hour to hire a line cook, less in low cost of living areas. Certainly, the future of hospitality has fewer workers per customer, but that's just normal labor optimization. There won't be a fully automated McDonald's, but McDonald's employees work with a lot of automated devices. The dexterity and intelligence of a human is very difficult to replace entirely. Robots aren't going to be talking to customers at the Apple Store, the whole reason people are there is to talk to a person, and retail salaries are already quite low.

And why is Tesla in this discussion? Tesla doesn't produce factory automation robots. They purchase plain jane factory robotics that have been part of the auto industry for decades. It's like the article just wanted to bring up Tesla for no reason.

> As a third strike against the safety of white collar jobs at the moment, most companies have already more than fully recovered their number of white collar jobs from before the COVID-19 outbreak.

The article from this point on is basically talking about the normal boom/bust cycle of business, even though the beginning of the article and Burry's tweet are talking about permanent decline.

I'd say that this part of the article unintentionally makes the opposite argument it's trying to make. It is directly stating that blue collar job demand is worse, and white collar jobs recovered almost immediately.

What is the actual structural reason why companies won't hire more white collar workers? You can't just spew out "automation" because the past 20 years or so has shown us the opposite trend in relation to automation. White collar workers are the foundation of automation companies.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/technology/coworking-spac...

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