Preparing For The Future Of Work: Matthew Ramirez of Rephrase Media On The Top Five Trends To Watch In The Future Of Work

An Interview with Phil La Duke

Multiple Side-Gigs — Given that many workers want to be fully engaged while they are working and that they want variety in their days, we should expect to see many more people working as freelancers, independent contractors, and managers of multiple smaller operations. One benefit of such work is that you are largely your own boss, and there will be a greater evolutionary process, where workers are only recruited for specific things when they are needed, as opposed to the largely tenured system that retains many employees by virtue of their having been at the company a number of years.

There have been major disruptions in recent years that promise to change the very nature of work. From the ongoing shifts caused by the COVID19 pandemic, the impacts caused by automation, and other possible disruptions to the status quo, many wonder what the future holds in terms of employment. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute that estimated automation will eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030.

To address this open question, we reached out to successful leaders in business, government, and labor, as well as thought leaders about the future of work to glean their insights and predictions on the future of work and the workplace.

As a part of this interview series called “Preparing For The Future Of Work”, we had the pleasure to interview Matthew Ramirez.

Matthew Ramirez is a serial entrepreneur and investor, as well as Forbes 30 under 30 alumni. He grew and sold his first company, WriteLab, to Chegg (NYSE: CHGG) in 2018, where he worked for three years as Director of Product Management. His new company, Rephrase Media, develops cutting edge AI applications for creators, such as a paraphrasing tool that helps authors create compelling and varied content for their audiences.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers like to get an idea of who you are and where you came from. Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where do you come from? What are the life experiences that most shaped your current self?

I was born and raised in McAllen, Texas, a town with a hard-working, but largely poor population on the Mexican border. I studied at the University of Texas at Austin before going to Berkeley to pursue a PhD in Digital Humanities. Learning to program while teaching writing to college students was very impactful for me, as, on the one hand, I was grading largely repetitive patterns and on the other, I was learning to automate repetitive processes. It was in this confluence in 2013 that I started my first company, WriteLab, which developed AI based writing tools for students. Over the last eight years, I have managed teams in the development of ever more powerful AI based language products. I’m also an angel investor and sit on the board of Mathpix, the most widely used OCR system by STEM faculty and scientific researchers.

What do you expect to be the major disruptions for employers in the next 10–15 years? How should employers pivot to adapt to these disruptions?

As employees put more emphasis on the quality of their lives and time spent at work, employers will have to be very thoughtful about the incentives they create to retain top talent, because if the job just doesn’t feel right, employees are more and more likely to leave. One of the more obvious things employers can provide is the option to work remotely for everyone. This means that employers will have to design their company to thrive in a remote model, as opposed to one that merely survives as during the pandemic. Employees are thinking more broadly about their own work responsibilities, such that it’s no longer just about earning a living, but doing so meaningfully, ethically, and sustainably.

The choice as to whether or not a young person should pursue a college degree was once a “no-brainer”. But with the existence of many high profile millionaires (and billionaires) who did not earn degrees, as well as the fact that many graduates are saddled with crushing student loan debt and unable to find jobs it has become a much more complex question. What advice would you give to young adults considering whether or not to go to college?

The average young person is still better off with a college degree than without one. With that said, the return on investment from getting a college degree has clearly gone down as both a) tuition has skyrocketed and b) colleges have failed to keep up with the dynamic requirements of the job market. The best thing a young person can do is learn how to learn and become familiar with mental models inherent in various disciplines, so that when the landscape changes and more work is automated, they can more easily adapt. Some students have voracious appetites for learning, experimenting, and acquiring new skills; learning is their path of least resistance. Those students probably don’t need college. For others, the discipline that college requires will likely prove a great benefit as they seek to demonstrate their skills among their peers.

Despite the doom and gloom predictions, there are, and likely still will be, jobs available. How do you see job seekers having to change their approaches to finding not only employment, but employment that fits their talents and interests?

As more work becomes automated, large-scale and seemingly safe, salaried employment will be less common, since the gains from automating salaried jobs will surpass those gained from automating contracted or one-off kinds of work. Workers can expand their opportunities by being open to side gigs and remote work for distant clients. The typical employee has far more to offer than is required in an ordinary 9–5 job, and by exploring their own possibilities, they will be less fragile in the event they lose that ‘stable’ job.

The statistics of artificial intelligence and automation eliminating millions of jobs, appears frightening to some. For example, Walmart aims to eliminate cashiers altogether and Dominos is instituting pizza delivery via driverless vehicles. How should people plan their careers such that they can hedge their bets against being replaced by automation or robots?

The great irony is that the more we tout a particular industry as having lots of jobs, the more people crowd into it, and the more artifacts they produce, i.e., code, writing, designs, etc. Artificial intelligence, and neural networks in particular, have the interesting attribute of being able to automate best what we do most and that for which we produce the most artifacts. The more niche an area of human activity, the harder it is to automate with machine learning. Those areas are often less interesting to automate as well, since not as many dollars are spent on humans doing them. As a result, the future of work will likely be characterized by ever more rapidly automating the jobs that only a few years ago were most in demand, and workers may find themselves in a position similar to the Winfield family in Grapes of Wrath, who, having seen advertisements for the bountiful work in California, arrived only too late to earn a living.

So, the question may naturally emerge: “how can I avoid getting a job that will be automated?” This is the wrong question, since if an activity provides enough economic value, it will to some extent be automated eventually. Instead, it would be better to ask, “what are the things I know add value but which I never have time to do? How can I leverage automation to solve some of the more repetitive things I currently do, so I have time to do those other things?” By focusing on the new value you can add, the future of work can take on any form, but that future will be yours.

Technological advances and pandemic restrictions hastened the move to working from home. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?

Working from home reduces waste: wasted commute time, wasted gas, wasted energy, wasted office rent. It also makes in-person meetings more meaningful when they do happen. Waste reduction will be a major trend characterizing the future of work in all sectors, and those companies who will most succeed are those that can reduce waste at scale, and, in doing so, offer very compelling value for the price they charge. COVID-19 merely provided the activation energy we needed to address what we already knew, that people waste huge amounts of time commuting, time that affected not only employers but also the quality of life of employees, but that’s only the most obvious of wastes we can reduce.

What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support the fundamental changes to work?

We need to have enlightened beliefs about productivity, that it doesn’t need to fill up a 9–5 band and that employees needn’t be consistently producing at the same rate. We need to realize and live the realization that people are more than their jobs, and that each person contains a multitude of possibilities for creative and meaningful work. We need to unlock that value, and one concrete way to begin that process is by providing a universal basic income, so that people are not moored down to dead-end jobs to meet very basic needs. Doing so will be a great service to mental health and wellness, and people needn’t worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether it will come at all.

What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employers to accept? What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employees to accept?

I think employers will struggle most to accept this dynamic sense of time, letting go of the standard 9–5, five-day work week, and instead setting employees up for greater success, clarity, and accountability by being more explicit about what work they need to complete. This could have the negative side-effect of employers trying to compensate for a more liberal schedule by giving too much work to employees, but many of those employees that don’t perceive a balance will either burn out or quit before it gets that far.

Employees, on the other hand, may feel displaced and destabilized by rapid automation, especially as so many are used to the concept of ‘career’ entailing one line of work. Additionally, a new concept of work as a combination of activity for monetary gain and creative expression will take some getting used to.

The COVID-19 pandemic helped highlight the inadequate social safety net that many workers at all pay levels have. Is this something that you think should be addressed? In your opinion how should this be addressed?

Of course, we need a real-time safety net, one that a universal basic income will help provide, but we also need infrastructure to distribute food and meals in times of crisis, whether that crisis is a pandemic, a hurricane, or any kind of disaster.

Despite all that we have said earlier, what is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

People are becoming increasingly aware of and feeling increasingly responsible for the consequences of their choices, choices of where to work, what to buy, and how to live. This clearly puts demands on product creators to develop sustainably, responsibly, and with the user in mind. With advances in automation and more real-time feedback from consumers, developing and maintaining products will become simpler, supply chains will become more adaptive, and people will have more personalized experiences. This vision gives me great hope for the future of work and the outputs of work.

Historically, major disruptions to the status quo in employment, particularly disruptions that result in fewer jobs, are temporary with new jobs replacing the jobs lost. Unfortunately, there has often been a gap between the job losses and the growth of new jobs. What do you think we can do to reduce the length of this gap?

If there is a gap between job losses and job gains, there are many ways to stimulate job creation, including spending on infrastructure and public works, cutting payroll taxes for new hires, and offering incentives for entrepreneurs to start new companies. But more conceptually, if we run out of things that need to be done and can only be done by humans, there’s still much more we can do, creating greener spaces, caring for the elderly and for children, and spending more quality time with those we love. If we are so wealthy as a society that we don’t have enough work to create jobs, this can be a very good problem, if only we proceed with compassion and attention to the needs of others.

Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Watch In the Future of Work?” (Please share a story or example for each.)

1. Waste Reduction — The idea here is simple: we will waste less time doing things that don’t specifically bring us joy, satisfaction, rest, or monetary compensation. This includes commuting, long-distance business travel, and the like. We will also waste fewer natural resources, consume fewer animal products, and, as a result, take up less space.
2. White Collar Augmentation and Automation — White collar workers tend to produce more intellectual artifacts: designs, text, code, spreadsheets, research, all of which are machine readable. Blue collar jobs, which often still require an element of physical labor, don’t produce as many machine readable artifacts, making all but the most repetitive of physical labor (e.g., commercial bricklaying) harder to automate. Contributing to this is that software is far easier to build than robots are, as there’s much greater support for software development than there is available hardware to build robots. Another way to think of it is, there are many apps that you could replicate in a weekend with APIs, but how many robotics products could you say the same about?
3. Increased Access to Information Jobs — One side effect of white collar augmentation is that barriers to entry for entering the field will go down. For instance, OpenAI released its Codex model, which, trained on billions of lines of code, can produce working programs based on natural language inputs (e.g., “make a red ball bounce around the screen”). This will enable existing programmers to code faster, but also make it possible for those that don’t know how to code to develop applications.
4. Variable Length Work Weeks — People are losing patience with jobs or aspects of their jobs that are mindless, unfulfilling, and needlessly bureaucratic. One result of this is that depending on near and long term goals, there is no need to do exactly the same amount of work each week. Some weeks will be stretch weeks where you have more data to work with, more product to build, and more deadlines to hit; other weeks may be slower, outside the rush period for your business, etc. Enabling employees to work to meet the demands of the company’s objectives and not ask that they sit around, attentive yet doing little, will be a big step forward.
5. Multiple Side-Gigs — Given that many workers want to be fully engaged while they are working and that they want variety in their days, we should expect to see many more people working as freelancers, independent contractors, and managers of multiple smaller operations. One benefit of such work is that you are largely your own boss, and there will be a greater evolutionary process, where workers are only recruited for specific things when they are needed, as opposed to the largely tenured system that retains many employees by virtue of their having been at the company a number of years.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how this quote has shaped your perspective?

It’s a quote from Aristotle, “where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.” In Aristotle’s time the world moved more slowly, so you might have one vocation in your life; now it’s more important than ever to be attentive to all your talents, for your calling may change as the needs of the world change. Keeping this message in mind has helped me stay nimble and engaged.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Yes, I’d love to meet Orlando Bravo, the private equity magnate, who is very inspiring to many people, but certainly to Latinos working in software. I think he’s proven that you can take a very disciplined, value centered approach to high-growth businesses and come out very well.

Our readers often like to follow our interview subjects’ careers. How can they further follow your work online?

I’m currently working on a platform to help content creators save time and explore their own possibilities as writers. I’m also on Linkedin, and I’m always excited to hear about projects others are working on.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.