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Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by nojster on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @01:35AM (#39913945)
With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.

Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by gruez on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @01:42AM (#39913991)
> With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.

Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by nojster on Thursday April 04, 2024 @01:04AM (#39926731)
On a relative scale, I agree with you that the amount of training involved differs for accountants and burger flippers, thus this is a good example.

On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.

I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.