Reports of the death of the 9-to-5 job may be greatly exaggerated

A few months ago, a bold prediction rocketed around the internet. “Your 9-to-5 job is dying,” it said. “By 2034, it’ll be extinct.” Eighteen million people saw this lofty statement posted by an investor on the social platform X, which says it came directly from the mouth of the co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman.

Hoffman, to his credit, is a smart man who has correctly predicted several large megatrends over the past few decades. In 2002, while visiting Australia on holiday, he vocalised his belief to a friend that the world needed a social network to help people transform their economic lives, which led to him starting LinkedIn the following year.

Our workplaces are changing rapidly around us. The way we are working now is very different to that of our parents.Credit: iStock

In 2010, he saw the future of the sharing economy long before any of us realised we’d one day be sharing our spare rooms and cars with total strangers, and became one of the early investors in Airbnb.

So when it’s reported that Hoffman predicts the traditional 9-to-5 jobs that most of us work have an expiry date within the next decade, people are naturally going to take notice. This single tweet spawned hundreds of breathless media stories around the world that all repeated the same prophecy.

But once you take a closer look at the claim, all is not what it seems. Hoffman’s “latest prediction” is actually from a video that was filmed in 2017, and in the full interview he doesn’t once mention 9-to-5 jobs or give them an end date.

What he actually says, however, is far more interesting – especially given it was originally recorded in the pre-COVID years, before accelerant was poured on many slow-burning trends.

The way we are working is shifting, and it’s going to affect us all. Some of these changes are positive, and others present fresh challenges.

Hoffman’s take on the future of work is that we’re moving towards a more flexible and fluid world: “You may not only work in multiple companies in your career, you may work in multiple industries,” he said. “You may not actually do a lot of your work fully as an employee, you may actually be working in the gig economy, or you may have two or three gigs. All of these things are the directional changes for what we’ve seen in the workforce for the last few decades.”

Hoffman is right, too. Our workplaces are changing rapidly around us. The way we are working now is very different to that of our parents, and it will be very different again for the next generation.

There is opportunity within this change, but there’s also a truckload of flashing warning signs we need to be aware of. The shift from permanent employment to a looser, gig-style economy might bring flexibility and autonomy to some, and uncertainty and exploitation to others.

Recent figures from the Bureau of Statistics showed that almost 1 million people had more than one job in March this year, representing 6.7 per cent of total employment, a rise of 1 per cent of workers since the pandemic. Like many countries, we are also currently grappling with how to give more protections to gig workers as more people turn to it.

As well as a growing gig economy, it is Hoffman’s other prediction that will arguably have a bigger impact: the effect of AI on the workforce. Artificial intelligence and automation are slowly working their way through workplaces around the country, bringing opportunities, productivity and apprehension.

So yes, the way we are working is shifting, and it’s going to affect us all. Some of these changes are positive, and others present fresh challenges, but will your 9-to-5 job be extinct just after Brisbane hosts the Olympics games? I doubt it.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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