One time, a highly-respected creative team from overseas spent two weeks working only on one project. they didn't come up with anything decent, and the client was not happy.

So my partner and I were pulled in at the last minute, and had the project put on our plates along with about a million other things we had to do. In five hours, we came up with several solutions that were better than anything the other team came up with. Our boss was happy, and the client says "this improves how we do business."

I say this not to knock on overseas, lower-cost creatives. There are stunningly talented people everywhere. I'm just saying that a certain amount of job security comes from being good, and pushing yourself to always get better.

Asari

Gann

GregorMendel

oldandintheway

c0dek

monkity

Years ago, you could have substituted "Enterprise software" in your post for "non-litigation lawyering" and had a reasonable point. But open source proved that you could create a complex system as long as you separated the stuff that was vital for your business , business rules and data, from the stuff you don't care about, object relational mapping/caching/cpu management/etc.

Perhaps non-litigation lawyering software will emerge that will allow you to plug in the stuff relative to your business. Think Quicken for the Mergers and Acquisitions dept.

arod

You could offshore it, or do it more efficiently with better software, probably replacing a lot of humans. But it seems to me that boring detail work is not something you can get others to do for free. (Open-source software design notwithstanding.)

FrisbeeDragon

Final

Siegeman

jharbert

I think there's a big (not realized) market for people to manually tag images on Flickr until such a time when automatic image recognition has evolved greatly; in the meantime, we can create MTurk.com hits for help with that.

Torley

jesustonight

Joseph

In terms of research jobs (where I would get worried) I don't think there's been too huge of a shift with the existence of things like arXiv. Assuming that designers and creative folks are like researchers- that is, any one of them may be good enough at a basic level to do the work of many others, but has specialized in a different area- this might raise the bar slightly to stand out but it is likely that big names will stay big names.

icelight

Annalee Newitz

And bloggers! The web will always need bloggers.

...right? XD

phoenix

-Kle.

Klebert L. Hall

nicepants

Gin doesn't go for more than fifty cents an ounce.

braak