The String of Jobs

In the 1930s, a man could be a banker, then a farmer, then a farm-loan appraiser, then an insurance agent, then unemployed, then working for his brother's mortgage company—all within a few years.

Today, we change employers more often than our grandparents did, but we rarely change what we are. A software engineer hops from startup to startup, but remains a software engineer. An analyst becomes a senior analyst becomes a product manager, but stays inside the same domain.

The difference is specialization.

As professional and technical occupations grew from 4% of workers in 1910 to over 23% by 2000, work became something you needed credentials for, something that required years of formal training, something built around deep expertise in one narrow field.

The economy of the 1930s was more agrarian, more manual, with semi-skilled jobs you could learn by doing. The Depression forced people to cycle through whatever work they could get. Today, switching fields means retraining for years, taking a pay cut, starting over with a junior title—sacrifices that feel impossible with modern costs of housing, healthcare, and education.

We move more but reinvent less. We have more job titles but narrower identities. The string of mismatched jobs has been replaced by a ladder within one profession.