You know how it is. You get to a certain age, and suddenly, you start feeling like a low-budget Nostradamus. You look at the world, at the fast blur of technology, and you start piecing together the future. Not in a crystal-ball, horoscope-reading kind of way. More like, you’re at the bus stop and you see three different buses go by, and you think, “Ah, I see where this whole road is heading.”
And what I’m seeing is this: the days of the fixed monthly salary are on life support. They’re in the ICU, and the doctor is saying, “We’ve done all we can.”
Low-skill tasks? Already gone. Automated. If a software can do it, a software will. If a robot arm can do it, it will. That’s not a prediction, it’s just… Tuesday. The real shift is in the middle-skilled tasks. The stuff we get paid a steady salary for. That’s the next domino to fall.
Think about it. We’re already in a world where nobody asks “Do you have WhatsApp?” anymore. You just get a message. People assume two things: you have a phone and you have internet. Satellite-based internet is coming, and soon the only excuse you’ll have for being offline is a dead battery. So, what happens when every single person is accessible, at the click of a button, anywhere, anytime?
You become replaceable.
The biggest pain for any boss right now is when an employee quits. It’s a huge headache—the finding, the training, the sorting. But what if replacing a human for a medium-skilled task becomes as simple as changing a line of code? A quick search, a couple of clicks, and a new person is ready to go. The supply of talent will be endless.
This isn’t about being mean. It’s just economics. The starting salary for a role will stay the same, year after year, because the number of available people will keep rising, outpacing inflation.
So, what’s the new normal? The “job” itself will change. A job won’t be a month-long contract for a single company. It will be a series of small, task-based gigs. It will look less like a steady 9-to-5 job and more like a Swiggy or Ola driver’s life. One day, you’re driving for Ola. The next, you’re on a Zomato order. You pick and choose based on your convenience, your need for money that month.
Welcome to the future where you don’t get ₹30,000 from one boss. You get ₹6,000 from five different clients for five different tasks.
This changes everything. Everything we’ve been taught. We’re trained to specialize in one thing. The three-year degree course is the old model. The new model? A bunch of three-month crash courses. A handful of specializations. You have to be a jack-of-all-trades, a portfolio of skills. Because if your one big skill only pays you ₹6,000 a month, you’re not going to survive.
I’m putting this in a glass bottle and tossing it into the sea, like in those mystery movies. I’ll come back to this post in a few years and see how much of my prophecy came true. Let’s see if the middle-aged Nostradamus got it right. Or if I’m just an old man yelling at the clouds.
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