America.

Reminds me of something. Driving thorugh Jacksonville, Florida, in 1998 or so with my then-girlfriend.

She says after hearing some loud pops, “Oh, cool, someone is lighting off fireworks!”

Me: “Those weren’t fireworks. Not fireworks at all.”

To become a high earner, hone skills that will protect you from automated competition.

If only it were that easy. Not everyone has that luxury.

However, I do so that’s what I’ve been working on the past seven or eight years.

My current job is number 10 on the list: Solutions Architect.

I’ve been an IT Manager before, too.

Solutions architecture isn’t really automatable because is requires pretty deep comprehension across a very wide array of knowledge domains, involves quite a lot of customer contact and understanding what the customer actually needs (versus what they say they want), and often involves on the technical side understanding the difference between what the manufacturer claims some product can do versus what it actually behaves like in the real world including in various non-standard environments. And lots of other soft skills, too: high writing ability, negotiating between different technical teams, assigning research and doing direct research and…well, more than I want to list here.

So, if my sub-field is ever automated, I’ll be long-retired by then because it’ll be one of the last to go that way.