I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.
The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.
What about the guy that sits at a computer and works through an issue queue changing the color of buttons or adding an extra 2px of padding to a class or writing glue code so one API can talk to another API?
Oh no, those are highly skilled professionals as API Integration Architects and Gartner tells me we currently have shortage of 230,000 of those. Hence we need import these best and brightest from outside.
It depends on the job. T-shirts yes. I enjoy building microgrids. There are many unsolved challenges. When the robots start doing it maybe it’ll be boring. That’s a long way off.
I can't help but feel you are romanticizing manufacturing jobs. The vast number of manufacturing jobs that "give people purpose" are still here - those people just travel to china once a quarter.
The guy that stands at a station for 8 hours a day, stamping the same 4 bolts into a car frame does not have anymore "purpose" than a guy running around in an Amazon warehouse.