How Much Value Does Your Job Generate?

It was arguably the invention of the printing press that - in the Early Modern period -doomed countless powerful and wealthy monasteries whose primary economic function had been the manual transcription of books. As a recent article by John Carter would have it, the one-two punch of the internet and artificial intelligence is in the process of unleashing a similar torrent of hellfire on universities.

That’s happening because the primary economic function of modern universities is providing their students with credentials. Those credentials are what employers assess to decide whether graduates have the baseline skills and discipline to perform entry level work.

The internet made it trivial (and cheap) for anyone to teach themselves most professional skills in the comfort of their own homes. And AI has now made it possible to check all the curriculum boxes without requiring even a modicum of discipline. That’s because there’s no practical way for professors to accurately assess whether submitted assignments were of human rather than machine origin. And, apparently, there’s also no practical and politically-acceptable way to force thousands of students to sit for handwritten exams in wireless internet-blocked rooms.

I’ve read that these days you have to search hard to find a university student who has never used AI to generate coursework. And that poor, lonely student now has to compete with peers whose work looks perfect (except for the occasional “As an AI, I’m not able to…” that they forgot to remove).

Once the first AI-powered university cohort graduates in 2026, will any employer be interested in hiring people who have never reliably demonstrated self discipline, have no skills that couldn’t be picked up from YouTube videos, and aren’t nearly as fast, cheap, and pleasant as AI?

That alone was interesting enough. But Carter also makes the claim that, for many decades, typical employers have agreed to hire far more managers and analysts than they really need.¹ Layoffs, when they happen, usually hit the blue collar workers who actually do stuff. But the teeming masses of keyboard jockeys just keep growing like grass (to phrase it politely).

Let’s focus on that “far more managers and analysts than they really need” bit. Canada’s federal civil service has famously grown by more than 40 percent since 2015. But there’s no indication of any improvement to - or even increase of - the services they deliver. So what have those extra 110,000 workers been doing with themselves?

The unions invariably blame service delivery failures on layoffs and understaffed departments. Right. So then how did you get the job done better 15 or 20 years ago with less than half the office chairs? Or 40 years ago without the internet? Funny how many workers CRA has added since online tax filing allowed them to stop manually opening, reading, and processing tens of millions of paper tax returns each year.

I’m certainly not suggesting that Canadian civil servants are, as a group, lazy or indifferent to their responsibilities. I know that’s not true. But I suspect that many of them are frustrated and even demoralized by the gaping distance between the work that fills their days and the real world problems they’re supposed to solve.

Here’s an provincial example from Ontario. Not for the first time, I dipped into the the Government of Ontario’s 2024 sunshine list, of public employees earning more than $100,000 annually. Using the Ministry of Education as an example, I see that the list contains 61 people with the job title Education Officer, 47 Senior Policy Advisors, 24 Senior Programmer Analysts, and 18 Senior Policy Analysts. I wonder what each one does.

I’m sure that new educational policies are regularly researched and published and new curriculum guideline documents are conceived and distributed among provincial high schools. All that certainly takes time. But how much time? And if there are 18 senior policy analysts, how many junior analysts are they supervising? And what about the 1,062 Assistant Curriculum Leaders employed by just the Toronto District School Board?

Could much of what all those folks do be largely replicated by a single human supervisor, a half dozen interns, and a SuperGrok Heavy AI subscription (worth $345 CDN a month)?

Even if SuperGrok Heavy failed miserably, would anyone notice?

---

Update: this comment from Kevan definitely deserves more attention:

The inflation of the generally unproductive, unable to make decisions, middle management level policy analysts extends to all levels of government. At the same time you would be hard pressed to find any significant increase in frontline/blue collar staff who actually deal with people and problems.

Most of these people have been sucked into a system where executive status (ED/DG) positions are rewarded by the number of other directors and managers who report to them. And they, as Poly Sci, Soc et al grads, likely now with MPAs or MBAs paid for by government, look to hire people who reflect their own educational paths.

The frontline, blue collar, technical staff are rarely consulted or promoted to management and the analyst class is unwilling to work with the technical folks for fear of not knowing what most employees think their managers and their advisors should know.

As such the goal for the managers isn't the best program or best public service but rather what is the best policy decision that will support the careers and political aspirations of their senior appointed staff and their Minister.

As such more and more people are employed, fewer and fewer of which deliver services; therefore, less and less gets done.

I would suggest that no one outside the government organization would notice the elimination of 50% of the policy analysts and their managers?

1. This point is fleshed out by the anthropologist David Graeber.