Personal experience in the cross collaborative nature of purchasing job functions
Christopher Clayton
04/07/2024
I was lucky enough coming into the job market at the tail end of the effects of the Great Recession with a liberal arts degree to eventually find my first stable entry-level work at a company involved with many different global suppliers and teams. This at least related to my degree to some extent (Asian Studies).
In an initial entry-level purchasing/supply analyst support role for the purchasing planners and managers, it did entail a lot of admin work and coordination with many different departments, much more than I would have expected, which only continued to expand. It didn’t help that I was still experiencing the effects of an emotional injury from a situation that had strongly activated my attachment anxiety patterns, and then a sense of disenfranchised grief. I was looking forward to utilizing research and business skills from my degree and professional certificate program after going through all of that, but they rarely came into professional use.
Even so, the amount of cross-collaboration with suppliers, Sales, Development, Finance, the warehouse and the sourcing department I served allowed insight into many different corporate functions, despite my personal feelings that low-level admin tasks were distributed in an imbalanced fashion to the sourcing/planning department versus the admin load in other departments.
I’ve never thought about seriously writing down these general experiences before because of the amorphous soft skills involved, but the sheer volume and importance of my cross-functional work means that I at least want to summarize it. Ultimately, I strongly believe that admin tasks must be shared within an organization at all hierarchical levels and that core skills-based business analysis and negotiation tasks should be co-owned for input by various departments.
However, the situations I found myself in, namely trudging through hundreds of emails per day on basic coordination and admin tasks, allowed for overcoming some people-pleasing tendencies. That is, apologizing too much for business outcomes that I couldn’t directly control, such as unexpected manufacturing delays, and finally letting some managers know exactly what concerns I was having. Especially given the number of directors and managers wanting a say or some level of control in the admin work I was doing, despite being in other departments.
For a while, I still overly corrected for what I saw as my aggressive responses from when I made video game modifications on a volunteer basis. In some instances, I called forum users out for advertising their modifications in my forum threads without crediting me in their threads, in one instance to a prolonged degree, and cross-criticized users for criticizing my work which I felt was unfair due to the no-cost and experimental nature of it. In wage and salaried work, eventually when I felt confident in the work I was doing, I found a balance in learning as much as I could despite personal frustrations. Then brought forth particularly stubborn issues in a point-by-point fashion (within one email or in-person communication only), in as respectful of a manner as I could, when it did reach a point where it was not worth being silent anymore.
It was absolutely critical to find my own tolerance limits and eventually bring up issues to those I felt impacted by. The sheer number of directors and managers from other departments all wanting to shift various admin tasks over to the lower levels of the sourcing department, besides the department already having regular purchase order cutting, factory communication and planning work, necessitated establishing boundaries at times.
Coordination between sales teams and suppliers - the raw basics
The first big workflow change I experienced working in a purchasing support role, after learning the Enterprise Resource Planning system (not well-known software until shifting to SAP later) and getting into the pattern of keeping purchase orders up to date, was coordinating emails with the Sales teams. This started out as pushing shipment instructions (ocean containers versus international air freight) between Sales managers and analysts, and the first and third-party suppliers for the finished consumer goods.
I would eventually come to see this as "playing telephone" due to all of one miscommunication I had made on one set of shipping instructions, as well as one incident of accidentally letting some units go by air freight instead of by container, alongside the general frustration of processing so many emails as a pure middle-man.
The cross-communication risk could have been neutralized had the Sales teams and other non-US supply chain teams communicated directly with suppliers. Eventually they would take on more of that role, but to start with, I struggled to figure out how to add value in that set of tasks. Because I was not in a purchasing planning role yet (not a lot of direct insight into how factory manufacturing plans were done), I started attempting to add value to this coordination process by including how much product was left to ship in the weekly instruction coordination emails.
This would be a precursor to eventually collecting a standard template outlining item codes, purchase orders, ex-factory dates and container statuses from suppliers, and running a Visual Basic macro that the IT department wrote with purchasing support’s input, that I consolidated into one report weekly from supplier submissions. Then I would distribute it to Sales teams, and did that task for the duration of that support role before passing it on to someone else. This had the effect of finally cutting down on hundreds of emails per week about where product was and when it was coming out during a difficult market demand situation for that category of consumer/discretionary good. However, it did help that the market demand and first party factory production times eventually smoothed out.
Coordinating international air freight with sales analysts at the time boiled down to their coming up with the list of sales orders at risk of not being fulfilled in the next six or so weeks (not possible to fill on time by ocean container), and matching them with the week’s batch of supplier shipment instruction files (what was ready to ship, gross weight and dimensions with columns to split ocean vs. air requests, a template which my sourcing department standardized). Then I would pass the total air requests to Trade Compliance for their coordination with the forwarder to estimate the costs, and would then pass down the final file for authorization with my department’s vice president. For all approved air freight, I logged it in an Excel file and wrote a Visual Basic macro to summarize all of it. Eventually I would run sales order reports myself, consolidate the results for item code, total quantity at risk and need-by date, and let Finance refine my own suggestions.
Early on with so many shipment requirement emails at peak season (autumn and winter for this type of product), and the fact that I was constantly wondering what sort of value I was truly adding and why so much low-level admin work was packed into the sourcing department by other departments and non-US Sales teams without any seeming assistance, I was discouraged. This was occurring at the same time as many other cross-functional admin tasks outlined below were part of the support job, but coordinating with Sales definitely left me the most drained. However, it gave me familiarity with the entire corporate logistics process, how it related to sales orders and how factories prepared goods for shipment in their warehouses, even though this familiarity occurred by brute force via the large amount of pure coordination work to do.
Supplier invoice proofreading for Accounts Payable and Trade Compliance
The other task taking up much of the early efforts in my initial purchasing support and analysis role was proofreading factory invoices, often with the support of only one other person in the same role. This also involved hundreds of emails per week in peak season (autumn, winter) for the type of consumer goods I was supporting, checking all of the supplier invoice documents for item quantity and price matches in the invoices. All of this overlapped to an extent with previous work I had done to proofread public domain books and article uploads for a non-profit Internet archive.
The logic behind this entire set of tasks was to lessen the load on Accounts Payable staff finding discrepancies themselves, which they would then need to report to purchasing planners in the sourcing department for review anyway beyond a certain threshold of apparent overcharges, and for Trade Compliance. Trade Compliance primarily wanted documents checked in this way so they would not have to do it, and ultimately the freight forwarders asked for this of Trade Compliance so they were assured of clearing goods at the intended valuations. International Customer Service also wanted it done so they would be assured of generating commercial invoices for the non-US Sales locations in their own currency at the intended item quantities (markup passed on for US development and marketing fees, and then currency converted for customs clearance in those jurisdictions).
If there was a discrepancy with pricing in particular, we would need to check the Financial Cost of Goods Sold (FINCOG) file for that product group, maintained by category managers in collaboration with development directors. Then it required checking with the supplier if information still didn’t match. A quantity mismatch that couldn’t be explained as a typo in the purchase order compared to the Excel planning workbook for that category required checking with the supplier. The volume of tens and tens of invoices per week alongside many departments wanting final documents meant any issues that came up had to be resolved quickly, although we typically had time before the waybills (final proof of shipment) were available anyway. Processes such as putting the invoices up for payment schedule and passing it to the customs brokers (A/P and Trade Compliance, respectively) couldn’t happen without final proof of shipment.
Early on, I ended up writing a multi-sheet Visual Basic script, at least for the first party supplier because of the volume of invoices generated from that location and all in the same format, to consolidate all of the invoice quantities and compare them to a current version of the consolidated purchase order report. That meant the workbook had to be based on a purchase order report in sheet 1 that the IT department built because they had the passwords and other ERP system access points to allow an Excel to SQL query for that information. Then my additional scripts required entering an invoice file and path to pull in invoice data for the comparison.
When we switched to SAP, we as the few purchasing support personnel (again, myself and one other person, besides contractors at times) also became responsible for uploading Advance Shipment Notifications into the system (virtual receipts for non-US locations, and the virtual receipts for the US locations ahead of physical inventory receipts). For non-US shipment data, this was a task International Customer Service had been doing by hand or in a semi-automated way to generate virtual receipts against their sales orders in the previous US system (typically one-to-one with factory purchase orders for that international location, and then that location maintained their own retail customer sales orders that drew supply). Because many purchase orders came out in pieces due to final factory scheduling and the way purchasing planners were creating initial plans in their templating for purchase order allocations, I understand how that receipt process must have been tedious. The US warehouse also had been entering physical receipts largely by hand.
The challenge of adding the ASN process onto the purchasing support team was that it added yet another Excel template to educate tens and tens of international suppliers about. Then proofreading them for quantity in the same way as checking quantity and price on the invoices. The intent from our shared IT service provider (sibling company) at the time was to have the suppliers fix discrepancies on their own so they would learn, but the number of item codes of the consumer products involved and host of data issues that could occur (e.g. suppliers adding dimensional qualifiers to Excel cells that should have been numerical data points alone) meant that we corrected errors by ourselves frequently. It involved too many invoices to proofread and ASN files to upload to cross-educate the suppliers on every single point.
Another challenge was the flow of uploading ASN data, and making error corrections after upload. Because the shared IT services were concerned about creating a control structure for these low-level purchasing and receipt documents to supposedly meet Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 (at least in a way that they thought was an effective internal control system), the uploads and receipt generation themselves went through an automated bot account in SAP after passing through an Excel upload website that the sibling company had set up on their server. The only person with the ability to then edit these virtual receipts, which we as purchasing support staff were generating, was the inventory manager in the US warehouse.
That was one of the most needlessly arduous data policies I had ever seen because it was easy to miss a data discrepancy caused by a supplier. Then an already-overworked inventory manager dealing with physical receipts had to be the one to undo it so a re-upload could be accomplished. It made no sense not to simply to give the purchasing support staff SAP accounts the direct ability to upload the ASN files, and to edit them.
I still don’t see how splitting up this task alone somehow meant fulfilling Sarbanes-Oxley control stipulations; it was a low-level data organization task. Even if it can be argued that such a task needed some sort of auditing or oversight component, my manager or someone else could have been designated as proofreader of all these virtual receipts to meet having an internal control structure.
I brought these types of issues up lightly and only once in a while, but I had to say something originally because I was the only one even with permissions to upload virtual receipts at all. I was designated as the only one who "should" have the ability to even get into the Excel upload template system on the server to keep task distribution tight.
Again, it seems this was done as some conception of keeping tasks in certain silos to try meeting Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, just in case such tasks might fall under needing an internal control system and to make sure it could be explained simply. However, it was way too much work to do for one person given the amount of errors that could occur with the number of suppliers and Excel data sheets involved. Also, there’s nothing in SOX that I can see that describes exactly how control structures need to be run. The way this document flow control structure was implemented put all of the burden on the low-level staffers. I handled it for about a week before telling the shared IT service personnel that I couldn’t do all of that alone. Then the second support staffer along with contract help we had at the time were given IT permissions to use the upload system as well. This still didn’t result in gaining broad permissions to edit virtual receipts directly in SAP.
Eventually, transitioning back to our original ERP system solution and then to NetSuite as part of a change in ownership, none of these control system concerns ever came up again. I also wasn’t as involved in these documents anymore as a purchasing planner.
Physical item data collection from suppliers
After working in a purchasing support role for a year or so, it came up that the warehouse managers wanted to move item weight and dimension collection responsibility over to the sourcing department. Naturally this fell on the low-level support roles to handle, again myself and one other person. We didn’t use contractors to help in this particular situation. Warehouse staff had been making measurements of cartons and individual items for system item master purposes, and the managers apparently did not want to use a portion of their temporary or permanent labor to make these measurements anymore.
This then involved needing to survey the international suppliers for item weight and dimension data, as well as carton weight and dimension data (thousands of items initially, and then limited to new constructions later). Data reporting issues would frequently occur, same as what we eventually saw with Advance Shipment Notifications when we used that process, e.g. suppliers putting dimension qualifier data such as "kg" right in the data-only cells. Data also sometimes looked too large or small for the product involved.
The company still owned a particular sportswear brand which meant a large number of the suppliers to review fell under outerwear and garments. That involved a lot of self-similar carton and item dimensions, e.g. T-shirts. Because not all of those suppliers in particular were responsive or filled in every data point, and given the nature of these soft good products, I’d take data samples from packing lists and use that for large swathes of similar entries.
Of course, because of the sheer volume of data, I wrote a Visual Basic script to put all of the information together from the supplier templates into one master template. The other person covering his share of suppliers submitted the data back to me first for one more audit, and then it was also consolidated into the master template. At that time, Finance was uploading the data into the system before the company created a Material Master role.
Smoother and targeted collaboration - manufacturing plan communication with Sales, Finance, executives and suppliers
Finally moving into a purchasing planner role, which was still consolidated with much of my previous support role tasks, I at least felt like I was adding more direct value to the company and the cross-collaborative communication work was more targeted.
At first, I focused on looking at previous purchasing planners’ Excel workbooks for their strategies to divide demand forecasts into multiple months. The challenge in this product space was generally long lead times at manufacturers due to the margin requirements of the company, and technical materials and processes involved. I especially checked with my contacts at the first party supplier for more insight into their processes, because ultimately these plans were then modified based on conditions at the factory for efficiency or other matters. We still needed to keep reviewing the actual production plans and changing demand forecasts, however, to make sure demand priorities came out first where possible and to anticipate international air freight needs when it was not possible for goods to finish on time.
Eventually with an understanding of patterns of total capacity availability per month at twelve suppliers that I was eventually making initial plans for, and then cutting market order allocations by international Sales region when demand forecasts stopped fluctuating so much (start of pre-season sales orders flowing from retail customers), I had an efficient workbook process. That is, the process started with a bulk order planning tab in Excel for each product type, which I then distributed into capacity months once a factory indicated roughly how much capacity per month they could offer (or simply what they had in the case of the first-party supplier from labor availability, and various policies influenced by US Accounting). Then I had a tab with a distribution formula to assign each international Sales forecast a proportional share of product once we went ahead and committed to an allocation assignment for a particular capacity bucket. We didn’t typically confirm allocating every bulk capacity bucket at once in case demand forecasts continued to fluctuate, which allowed more easily redistributing items (e.g., if one region lost demand in a certain model but another gained demand in that model).
This entire process meant collecting a demand forecast update on set intervals, e.g. once every month, from Finance who worked in collaboration with Sales on the US side and from the non-US Sales managers for their regions. As part of these requests, I would generally communicate how much product we had committed to already, at least in terms of bulk purchases even if they weren’t distributed by market share yet, and the anticipated ordering plans for remaining product.
The process of getting an order bucket approved also took place in key ordering months, which corresponded to our receipt of a demand forecast update to be able to check previous approved buckets for any changes we could make at the factory. Then the next bucket was put up for approval, with each purchasing planner filling out their share of proposals (by product and supplier responsibility) in a consolidated executive summary sheet on a shared server drive. This generally consolidated the by-item-code workbooks into a summary by model of total purchases committed (goods in some stage of material acquisition and/or assembly) relative to current demand forecasts, the next proposed assembly order and how much would be left over to purchase after that. I was not always in the executive approval meetings to share my strategies directly, but my manager in the least would present them.
In this product space which often featured wildly fluctuating demand projections which we had to use at first for manufacturing planning due to the long lead nature of the products, especially during the pandemic with incredible demand increases for some product after an initial downfall, this entailed both delivery risk as well as excess inventory risk depending on how actual confirmed pre-season sales order flows from retailers ended (late product relative to final demand forecasts, as well as too much product relative to final demand forecasts).
In low-capacity situations due to substantial demand increases, we as purchasing planners worked with suppliers to increase capacity share where possible and to otherwise make sure specific models at highest sales dollar risk were prioritized. There were limitations based on tool change-out capability. In particular I met with the primary third-party aluminum finished goods supplier, closely monitoring each stage of their own first and third-party material acquisition, assembly, heat-treatment, etc. processes to get urgent product out as quickly as possible amid many labor and material challenges in the pandemic in the aluminum and carbon fiber space.
In excess projected inventory cases, we worked with suppliers to find out the state of different materials and assemblies, and if caught at the material stage, to pause the unwanted assemblies. At the tail end of my purchasing planner role in this context, I had started to create excess material reports and dollars involved for all raw materials and assemblies we were not able to outright cancel without scrap costs, what the costs would be to scrap the material and existing sub-assemblies versus building them out, and any options available for storage at the suppliers.
This also required communication with the Sales teams regarding their actual committed allocations by purchase order and when they would come out according to the final manufacturing plans, after working to optimize them as much as possible. In cases involving excess product, of course no Sales team wanted to take excess. However, if US Finance made a determination not to scrap due to the cost involved, and if the US had no inventory room in particular, all locations would need to help take the burden according to their previous demand forecasts. Brand executives generally helped to cross-communicate this message as well.
Even though I was involved with generally understanding final factory prices as confirmed between the factories and development directors, especially for cost outlines as described and for product demand falling below factory minimum order quantity for executive review, and coordinating production and shipping agreements between Legal, Trade Compliance and my share of suppliers, I was not involved directly in price negotiation. I remembered purchasing planners and managers I served being more involved in co-owning such tasks with development and line management, but I never did when I became a purchasing planner. It ended up being a quirk of how margin strategies from Sales in collaboration with retail customers, revenue goals from executives, Finance and the changed ownership group; and Development’s influence over different aspects of supplier relations came together in the specific company organizational structure that settled in.
Thoughts on buying as an admin function - 6/21/2024
Looking into sourcing and procurement further as an academic discipline, perhaps what describes the pattern I’ve experienced is ‘maverick buying’. That is, other departments assumed control over supplier decisions in a tactical and strategic sense, leaving the sourcing/supply chain department’s middle employees with execution of purchase orders and supply planning at a high level, leaving only a lot of admin functions left. This creates a real challenge to find tactical value out of creating supply plans given that under this organizational model, the choice of which suppliers to use or continue using, final factory prices from negotiation and raw material choices have already been wholly decided, which impacts overall factory capacity and lead times at the supply planning stage. That leaves supply plan creation squeezed between all of these pre-planned variables, and yet a sourcing department can be held entirely responsible for how much is spent on international air freight and other on-time delivery metrics despite this overall lack of control.
This is in contrast to Sales, Development, Sourcing and Legal sharing in creating a price strategy based on delivery goals (wholesale margin goals and resulting factory price strategies, with mutual understanding of what different price points will mean for potential delivery), and what sort of delivery and liability terms make sense to present to a supplier when reworking a production and delivery contract or presenting an initial one to a new supplier. Instead, many points in my experience have been dictated to the sourcing department or expected to be merely coordinated by the sourcing department with the suppliers, which keeps Sourcing stuck primarily with considering how to get through admin tasks efficiently rather than co-owning substantive decisions.
This comes down to an organizational choice, one which wouldn’t be as impactful to employee well-being if all comparative advantages in a company were paid base equally. However, it is the case that mostly dealing with admin tasks will generally result in a lower-paying job versus tactics or strategy-heavy jobs. Doing admin work has never been beneath me in my estimation, but it definitely has stagnated my compensation potential, and will continue to be that way if I work a similar admin-heavy job for a company that treats different comparative advantages as having directly different market values, with base compensation further impacted by interview and salary/wage negotiation performance (how most companies still treat base compensation).
Special circumstances regarding consumer warranty parts purchasing - 5/2/2025
For the types of products I dealt with, annually all of the sales management teams and warehouse teams wanted warranty parts for retailers to use and for any warehouse repair programs they had. The US had outsourced all of the warehouse repairs to third-party shops acting as ‘authorized dealers’ even though they had not signed any authorized dealer agreements. Item codes were rarely made for them as well, making processing them more difficult as they had to go on a ‘text PO’ via a budget number. Which no department wanted to deal with as an expense and planners were never afforded their own budgets. It had been decided while I was still an assistant in the sourcing department that planners would transfer the item code generation process to engineering and with line management helping as needed which added to all of this. The planner dealing with those products before me while I was an assistant to planners and managers ended up making his own decisions on air freighting them directly after a while. I ended up following his lead.
All of this perhaps combined to make warranty parts some of the most politically-charged issues given the competing needs versus what various departments were willing to do. Much like the planner I had formerly assisted before taking over those categories directly, I planned direct shipments from the factory regarding US parts because the lack of item codes meant that any shipments going to the warehouse first would not be brought in and scanned as inventory. They would sit on the floor and cause a delay in someone having to manually get the warehouse to push them out the door, and then explaining how some prior agreement with salespeople no longer in the company meant that the shipments were supposed to be free in return for those shops being authorized repair centers to relieve the warehouse. However, doing direct shipments under a regime of a US trade and compliance department not wanting to manage direct shipments due to their requiring special instructions sometimes caused friction. The fact is though that the parts typically came out after mass production, which again was staggered and often delayed due to factors discussed above, with the shops asking over and over to get them quicker before it got too deep into the autumn sales season but where obvious motivation existed for the company to prioritize mass production.
In this backdrop, right before we finally had more of a system imposed to get item codes created for the parts to get them properly on sales orders, one season we had a much larger demand than usual as part of the COVID uptick in demand for these consumer goods. Engineering still created the order form and I distributed it all out to the sales teams and warehouse teams as needed. The form still had a built-in calculator with global-level recommendations for number of parts to buy based on current sales forecasts that I had collected before, and a section for aggregating all orders by region which I didn’t use because I was utilizing my own form for consolidating it all.
However, the current US person who had not done this before put all of his reported US data in that second column and I missed it. I ended up taking all the global-level data still in the pre-calculated area out of habit and from not thinking the quantity that unusual because of yet another standing issue; that the standard parts were in kits of multiple parts but the US repair centers regularly wanted some parts without any item codes as singletons that weren’t normally on offer which they could have gotten at hardware stores, but wanted to save money off factory purchases. So the large quantity didn’t clue me in to a big problem, and I wasn’t working with parts often enough to remember that some parts were rather expensive because they were more like entire sub-system replacements. The part orders had already sent when the US person started questioning my order form so once the parts came in, I went to the warehouse and sorted out what was actually needed by hand. Then the rest were ultimately decided to be air freighted back to China by my department leader.
That was probably the largest error in terms of visceral financial impact I made besides air freighting a decent number of skis that were only supposed to be ocean-freighted due to being a number of quality rejects that the US agreed to take to support that particular factory. I had completely misread an email during my period as a planning assistant working with Sales to decide air vs. ocean freight decisions as part of the hundreds of emails per day that I was processing. That latter situation that occurred early on in my work was in the context of massive amounts of finished goods air freight being largely auto-approved by the trade and compliance department due to stressors in the industry and the company. I completely owned both mistakes but there were clear and obvious structural issues with message telephoning and lack of layers of data verification that went into all of it.
I would have liked to support warranty parts more but that in particular had so many structural and political conflicts that I almost couldn’t believe it. Eventually near the cessation of my planning job activities, the company simply declared at a high level that it wouldn’t consider warranty parts purchases at all without high-level approval so the fact that parts were already pushed to the back of production only became became even less of an executive concern, in contradiction to other departments constantly declaring a need. Followed by attempting to make these warranty part dealers aware, where by that time one of them had actually signed up to be an authorized dealer and to purchase the parts because it was finally agreed as a company that the ‘free parts’ regime finally didn’t make sense; a contract that I had never seen before anyway and again one tendered by salespeople who no longer even worked there anymore. Exceptions were made to supply parts for those circumstances given that it constituted ‘revenue’ or break-even, but it at least allowed me to have basis to finally limit their requests, such as all the off-menu demands. For the few agreed to be kept it was also leverage to finally get item codes created for them.
Now I see consumer goods recycling/refurbishment as a potential form of manufacturing growth in the US, but I can’t see it catching on with established companies that outsource most or all of their production to other countries for reasons similar to the ones I encountered in this example.
Thoughts on continuing job market declines relative to personal job search and current corporate employment strategies - 11/13/2025
When I first started looking for another equivalent buying or supply chain-oriented job after finishing the roles that I described in the previous section, I was able to attain multiple interviews and some were very intensive culminations into multi-person, multi-hour affairs. This is how hiring and interviewing has been trending according to pop culture articles for all sorts of office roles.
However, in line with other office job losses across the board, the number of supply sourcing and buying-adjacent roles I can find on job boards of all sorts has been halved or even become scarcer than that. The emphasis is also on ‘media buying’ such as coordinating the purchase of ad campaigns on various platforms with marketing rather than hard goods-related positions. This has to do within roles local to me or which are US-remote. I also went back to looking for legal assistant and paralegal jobs (other jobs related to my skills even though I don’t have professional experience in them) and the field is also very much gutted.
Finally, programming and engineering have also been impacted by an increasing rate of job losses as was predictable because of increasing ways in which the jobs could be automated via large language models. This still merely involves an amalgamation of previous programming work, where it’s coming to light how much of it has origin in data scraping (data taken and exploited on a commercial scale without compensation or credit for use in such models); including from the New York Times, Reddit and Wikipedia. Individually-free information doesn’t necessarily confer a right for commercial use in this manner. A major private dispute included exploitation of works available on LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror which has finally resulted in a recent legal settlement [The Authors Guild].
I have seen it argued that such lawsuits should be dropped in favor of companies or individuals finding different ways of making money via products (at least regarding the ones that sell access to written works such as the NYT), but this would be a capitulation to mass commercial exploitation which would remove a reason to create ANY such works. Corporations already assume a right to intellectual property produced by workers as part of company work as it is; this would only hand more power to AI-related companies. The logic is also circular in that because large language model AI only amalgamates existing data, there wouldn’t be a source of creative data anymore if taken to the logical conclusion (no more creative works being produced at all).
I never worked formally in dedicated software companies in particular and never wanted to because I was already sick of that kind of work because of my volunteer background in creating video game modifications, particularly some of the repetitive programming aspects which AI can now be a partner in. However, as described here, I worked within my supply-related roles to complete adjacent programming tasks that didn’t explicitly need to get done but helped automate various tasks. Yet that never entailed getting paid anywhere close to the market rate for a programmer or software engineer in my area. Now, even programmers in particular are facing a call to ‘upskill’ just to be able to attain entry level jobs, and to be able to fill multiple comparative advantages at once. E.g., [Business Insider].
Amidst all of this is why I started converting my investments into a more highly-active strategy. I.e., more individual stock investments and a medium-term intent to turn over assets experiencing price appreciation as I outlined in my article on medium-term investment strategies. There’s no choice in a difficult job market except to make money through one’s own existing accumulated money. However, rightfully so is the question of how people can even break into an entry-level role at all to start making money [Intelligencer]. The current attitude toward attempting to use large language model AI as a mass job replacer without any other types of roles being made available only adds to the trend from the Recession. At least entry level roles had a shot at being attained even if it took doing an internship or two to get them.
The consistent pain point is that entry level roles in traditional hierarchy-focused corporations that treat labor as a commodity have always represented a lack of opportunity to use one’s full skills because of the attitude that it is a ‘proving ground’ with limited compensation on top of that due to how such a comparative advantage is valued. Entry-level engineers, particularly in software, represented a higher-than-average entry-level compensation, at least until recently, but that also resulted in average rents in software-intensive cities increasing just as highly. Now on top of that, we’re back to tight hiring conditions in which higher swathes of experienced people could end up in such roles and not be paid much for them in spite of the ‘free market’ logic of paying people more depending on experience and skills (again, part of the logical conclusion of how labor is treated in such a system in spite of calls to ‘upskill.’). Besides the risk of even higher permanent unemployment due to more entry level roles being entirely eliminated for now.
I’m not focusing on possible structural solutions as part of this article (I already started exploring this in the worker co-op-focused article); but on an individual scale, becoming more completely self-sufficient using one’s existing money to invest is the alternative that I’ve been able to utilize. I do that while continuing with a much less enthusiastic and scaled-down job search because I have the money to do so. I’d rather use the money in that way than to ‘up-skill’ via a certificate program or other educational program which may not pay for itself whatsoever with the pace of excuses being made by corporations to uncreatively shed jobs without the same pace of replacements amidst record profits at the largest such corporations.
It has been argued that men in particular should move on to traditionally women-dominated jobs such as healthcare and teaching because of losses in programming and finance in particular [The Hill]. Aside from this article making claims about gender-based ‘instincts’ at a vague surface level, the other problem with this analysis is that it’s been the entry-level grunt-work end of the latter industries that has been growing the most and they have been disproportionately paid the lowest compared to the actual performance of such companies. For related jobs in the public sector, pay may be slightly higher baseline but then funding crises can occur. Otherwise, I’d agree that everyone should keep options open given the continuing reality of how most companies operate. In any event, every worker gets paid so disproportionately low compared to executive labor and relative to the profit performance of companies (regarding private sector jobs) in such currently-dominant governance structures that there has to be understanding for every person’s employment situation; including social issues related to gender/sex driving even further excuses to give certain persons even lower pay. Biological concerns by sex also should be taken into account in the balance of interests in an uplifting way, but instead they are used as an excuse to pay even less; such as when someone takes maternal leave and thus has a ‘participation gap’ to exploit.
I myself have not been in any particularly glamorous or particularly male-centered types of jobs; it was primarily admin work. However, at some point what it comes down to for me is doing some level of interesting work that makes use of my experience to make me want to work for an organization again (fill a comparative advantage that uses my core competencies). Especially so when traditional authoritarian corporate structures still find every excuse to keep labor-as-an-expense as low as possible, with more opportunities to do so than ever. I happen to be able afford to hold out and to contemplate creating businesses instead. However, to me this is what everyone should be able to do by some point; at least after grinding through uninteresting and laborious jobs which the majority of people have to put up with. Yet the majority of jobs are paid unusually low compared to company performance on the excuse of the ‘commonality’ of the capabilities in spite of their presumably filling a needed comparative advantage. This is why I chose to save as much money as possible, but not everyone can do so relative to the cost of necessities and of rent; especially now that corporations have found ways to wholesale eliminate entry-level jobs.
Citations
1. New York Intelligencer, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-replacing-entry-level-jobs-gen-z-careers.html, accessed 13 November 2025.
2. The Authors Guild, https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/, accessed 13 November 2025.
3. The Hill, https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5528062-gender-flip-job-crisis/, accessed 13 November 2025.
4. Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-vp-shares-how-entry-level-engineers-can-stand-out-2025-10, accessed 13 November 2025.