Dying Careers You Should Avoid

Yahoo ^ | Terence Loose

[Lazamataz]

COBOL programmer.

A surprising amount of business is still conducted using COBOL and RPG-2 and -3.

[Vinnie]

Health insurance salesman .
Unless obamacare is repealed, and the chances of that are remote, this will be a dead profession.

[muir_redwoods]

I used a more primitive device also made by IBM. I would type a line blind and when I had entered a set number of characters, the device would print out a line right and left justified. These would be pasted up on a copy board and then photographed. The resulting negative would be mounted on a flat specific to the press that was going to print the work, touched up for any imperfections and then used to burn a plate. It seems impossibly primitive now.

[Tijeras_Slim]

I would also recommend taking the Myers-Briggs personality test to find out what careers you would like and be good at.

"Let me tell you about my mother."

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

There goes my buggy whip and gas lamp business.

Move to Lancaster County PA. You'll do well!

Regards,
GtG

PS Location, location, location!

[Maceman]

Yikes!! That sounds a lot less efficient than linotype, even.

[JoeProBono]

Bird catchers can always find work somewhere especially in China

[Billthedrill]

Hmm, well...33 years in the IT biz and I’m ready for another gig. My sister suggested “organ donor.” But I don’t know how to play the organ...

[redhead]

"I remember tons of ads in the paper for ‘Key Punch Operators’ back in the early 70’s"

Did that, too. Somewhat similar, but TTY predated keypunch by decades. I was also the only operator in the District who could operate the IBM MagCard Selectric typewriter. (Noisy!)

[Opinionated Blowhard]

Any career in the private sector where you have to work hard and make a lot of money doing so because Uncle Sam will tax the s__t out of you and confiscate your wealth and you’ll end up with the same income and assets as some lazy bum who spent his whole life on public assistance and certainly less than the Lords and Ladies who work for the government and get benefits and a retirement package estimated to be worth several million dollars on average.

[Tijeras_Slim]

It doesn't pay to over specialeyes.

[muir_redwoods]

Well, it was all done on paper and the paste up adhesive (wax really) allowed for updating for prices (remember the inflation of the ‘70’s?) and dates for the next printing.

[JoeProBono]

Wage scale can be an issue

[Maceman]

Well, I do remember using wax adhesive for paste-up. But typing in characters for each line, printing out line by line and then photographing it, (which is how I understand the process you described) sounds incredibly time-consuming.

[Daffynition]

[muir_redwoods]

You describe the process accurately. At $2.50/ hr I didn’t mind spending the time.

[Tupelo]

Cameraman, Stripper, Platemaker, Pressman. All good paying high skilled trade jobs that are damn near obsolete.
I was a heatset offset web pressman back in 60s & 70s when that that trade was expanding daily. Damn, but it was fun to be in demand and compensated accordingly. By the mid 90s, all were starting to die out or worse downgraded to semiskilled labor.

[righttackle44]

Humans don't do such a good job, either. This past weekend, I watching Lethal Weapon 2. Because I'm older now, I have background hearing problems, so I often turn on the closed caption program just so I don't miss the movie dialog.

In that scene where Murtaugh is trapped on the toilet bowl because of the bomb planted behind it. The bomb squad has done it's job, and now Murtaugh and Riggs are deciding when Riggs is going to pull Murtaugh into the bathtub and pull the blast blanket over them. So it's the usual, "Do we go on three, or is it one, two, three, then go?"

Rigg's line is, "Well, I don't know, Cochise, it's your [bottom].

The closed caption transcritionist came up with, "Well, I dunno, goat cheese . . ."

[Aria]

Very very true. I’m a corporate drone but the people and place where I am are great so it’s a trade-off.

My husband is a consultant - in less than 2 months he makes what it takes me a year to make.

[flaglady47]

“Didn’t another recent article list Underwriter as one of the best careers?”

I would think Undertaker would be a great career. An endless supply of customers.