Jobs You Held That Are Now Obsolete

[stmartinfan]

The post about telephone operators reminded me about jobs I used to do that have disappeared. My list includes:

Key punch operator…creating the paper cards used in early computers to program or enter data. Of course they were fed into an IBM computer that was huge but had less brainpower than my cellphone.

Typist…working on a manual computer to create personnel paperwork that documented government employees positions and got them in the payroll. One copy of the multi page form went into their personnel folder that followed them from job to job throughout their career. I also worked on a project to start computerizing all those paper records by reviewing and coding them all.

Sugar beet hoer…worked as a teenager to hand hoe and thin the long rows of sugar beets on farms in the Red River valley of MN. Some farmers brought migrant workers north to do the job, but some smaller ones hired us kids in the 60s. We got paid by the row—50 cents or so if I remember right.

Many of my other jobs still exist but the work looks very different, such as public relations that relied on paper press releases and telephone calls to reach primarily newspaper, radio or TV, compared to the social media focus of today.

Do you have obsolete jobs in your resume too?

 

[jp10558]

Do you have obsolete jobs in your resume too?

Book rebinder maybe. I had a summer job working rebinding books. We did all sorts but I think a major part for the permanent workers was making huge library consolidated versions of the local colleges masters and PHD Thesis prints by year. I'm pretty sure they don't print those physically anymore, or at least don't need to spend the money to store library copies like that.

And I was surprised back then, but would be absolutely shocked if there was much call to rebind paper books at all in 2025 for like consumer / fiction / whatever. There can't be that many people sentimental about a specific physical copy of a book.

 

[emeryjre]

Installing dial up modems in a rip roaring 286 computer
Not a lot of demand for this service at this point in time

 

[dlpearson]

Paper route when I was a teenager. I'd load up my Schwinn 10-speed bike (had two metal storage bins to hold the newpapers on each side of my rear tire) with the stack of papers delivered to my house, and then ride through the neighborhood dropping off a paper to each neighbor that was a subscriber. Then once a month I had to go "collecting" door to door to get payment (and then pay my supervisor for what I "owed" for the papers, and then kept the leftover amount as my pay). This was the mid-to-late '70s.

 

[wackymother]

Paste-ups for magazines and newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s. Text came on long strips of heavy paper called repro; you would run it through a waxer to put warm sticky wax on the back, then use a metal ruler and Xacto knife to trim it. Then you would paste the strips on a template made up to the dimensions of the periodical, printed in light blue called non-repro blue. I am still pretty good with an Xacto knife, not that I have much call for it these days.

 

[SmithOp]

One summer I bailed hay on a farm. Riding on a hay wagon behind the baler we stacked up the bales, then up to the barn and stacked them in the loft. It was a dairy farm.

Nowadays I see the hay is rolled by the combine into huge rolls then wrapped in plastic by another machine.

Anybody else enjoy Rufus the Bull videos? . He likes to tear up the hay rolls.

 

[sponger76]

HTML coder for a small business to build/run their website back when it was just starting to be the thing to do to have a website. The site was mostly just informative requiring simple HTML. It didn't require database stuff to track inventory and orders for online sales. That is pretty much obsolete since it's easy to find GUI interfaces to build sites with zero coding knowledge while getting much more complex code in the background. I don't remember any of that stuff anymore anyway.

Worked a a store that sold music CDs and VHS/DVD movies. Due to everyone mostly streaming music and video, standalone music/video stores are way less prevalent and geared mostly to a niche audience rather than being mainstream like they used to be.

 

[buzglyd]

I worked for a very short period of time in a factory that made printing plates for newspapers. The plates had a photo-sensitive resin on them and when an image was projected on them, they would use a solution on the plates and the resin would wash away except for the words in the story. It was a huge worldwide company and doesn’t exist anymore, at least in the San Marcos location where I worked.

I also worked in radio and we cut tape when making commercials. Literally, with a razor blade.

 

[moonstone]

In addition to being a Bell Canada repair clerk working the old cord boards I was a telex/teletype operator for a large tour company in the Toronto suburbs before getting a job with Bell.

~Diane

 

[dioxide45]

Installing dial up modems in a rip roaring 286 computer
Not a lot of demand for this service at this point in time

Was that the entire job though or just a task you did as part of a job as something like a computer hardware technician? Which is a job that is still around.

 

[kanerf]

Well I am an IT guy, so a lot of equipment that I have worked with and programming languages I have use have gone away, but not my core job skillset. Have to keep up-to-date of course, but there is plenty of training out there to do so.

 

[Passepartout]

The long-haul driving portion of my job is being overtaken, but not the customer service side of exhibit work. Early on I stuffed ads, comics and circulars into newspapers before delivering them. Machines do ALL of that now- well, uh, what newspapers?

 

[Carolinian]

My first job was as a paperboy, a function that is now obsolete in many places. In high school, I was a bag boy in a supermarket, which now seems to be obsolete most places. In college, I worked one summer pumping gas at a convenience store, but it has been years since I have seen a manned gas pump. It is now all self serve, it seems.

 

[jeffox]

After the wife was a 411 operator, she moved up to doing data entry for the phone book. Next she went into the newspaper business and was managing a distribution warehouse when she was laid off.

 

[vacationtime1]

Paper route when I was a teenager. I'd load up my Schwinn 10-speed bike (had two metal storage bins to hold the newpapers on each side of my rear tire) with the stack of papers delivered to my house, and then ride through the neighborhood dropping off a paper to each neighbor that was a subscriber. Then once a month I had to go "collecting" door to door to get payment (and then pay my supervisor for what I "owed" for the papers, and then kept the leftover amount as my pay). This was the mid-to-late '70s.

+1

I had exactly the same deal delivering the Santa Barbara News-Press around 1966-68. The paper cost $2.25/month and I had to collect that amount from each of my 93 customers every month. My net take was about $30-$32/month, which was BIG MONEY for a kid back then.

 

[claraj]

Data entry… no one is doing that anymore right?

 

[buzglyd]

Data entry… no one is doing that anymore right?

Oh yes they are shockingly.

 

[dioxide45]

Data entry… no one is doing that anymore right?

Very much so, 10-key is still a good skill to have.

 

[TolmiePeak]

Taxi driver is soon to be extinct.

 

[ScoopKona]

Photo lab tech. Put myself through university developing film and printing pictures. It was much better pay (and any hours I wanted) compared to most on/near-campus jobs. I'd wake up at 4am, work for a few hours, go to class. Do my class work. Work a couple more hours and go to bed.

I seriously thought it was a skill I could use in a pinch for my entire life. "People are always going to want their film developed."

Nope. Not so much. It's still a niche skill for serious photographers. But the days of a photo lab in every other strip mall in North America are long gone.

 

[PigsDad]

Sugar beet hoer…worked as a teenager to hand hoe and thin the long rows of sugar beets on farms in the Red River valley of MN. Some farmers brought migrant workers north to do the job, but some smaller ones hired us kids in the 60s. We got paid by the row—50 cents or so if I remember right.

Ok, have to ask -- where did you do this? I grew up in that area. Although we never grew sugar beets, my grandfather and uncles did near Hillsboro, ND and I would stay with my cousins for a week every summer and often I earned a little money hoeing beets. I also had relatives that brought in migrant workers -- had an extra house on the farmstead where the family lived each summer.

Kurt

 

[1Kflyerguy]

My first real job was working for working for a computer software game company. I copied 5.25 inch floppy disks, and occasionally cassette tapes. We usually used an outside service for the tapes. After a bit my manager started one of first contract manufacturers focused on the software industry and I followed him. He was a terrible business manager, but I spent 18 years in the industry before moving to another industry. Obviously contract manufacturing is still arround but nobody copies floppy disks anymore.

 

[CalGalTraveler]

Cobol, Basic, Pascal programmer.

 

[DeniseM]

When I was in college, I was a teletype operator for a local stock brokerage firm. It had a keyboard, but no screen, and the order you were entering was displayed on a paper strip that printed out, so it was difficult to proofread your work, until after the mistake was already entered in the system. It was nerve wracking.

 

[dioxide45]

My wife used to be a photographer for several local Yellow Pages publications. She is still a photographer, but the printed Yellow Pages are now gone.