Goodbye Baby Boomers

The Globe and Mail predicts that the Canadian workplace will be totally different in 5-10 years because the baby boomer generation is retiring. Apparently something like 60% of most major companies is supposed to retire in that time. That could explain why Ontario recently repealed the mandatory retirement rule at age 65. Sadly, that probably won't help much, as the average retirement age in Canada has been falling fast.

Anyway, back to the Globe and Mail article. Their theory is that employers will have to get a lot more competitive, since there will be fewer people available and a lot of new job positions opening up. But that's only half the story. The other half is that product demand will also be changing dramatically because the same people won't be buying the usual stuff. And a handy rule of thumb for that "change" will be this: if you're the kind of company who's retiring a huge boatload of employees, you're probably also the kind of company whose market is about to decline.

So I'm not exactly sure there's going to be hiring desperation to match the retirement, at least not in every case. What there will be, with a reduced workforce size, is an inclination to do more work with less people like I wrote about before. This makes me feel like I have the right idea. Moreover, a company that can help other companies do more work with less people could have very good chances, because most companies won't have a clue where to start.

This is interesting to me because the current trend in business software is to solve problems with the brute force of huge development teams, so companies who try to do more with less are perhaps just throwing away the opportunity to become huge and mega-rich. But as time goes on, the brute force approach will be less and less viable.