How do you currently explain your job to your coworkers? Do you say the things in your first paragraph?

@dwizum I try to, but I've found people seem to not care, I feel like they think I'm either lying or they've already written me off by the time I elaborate

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's actually not a workplace issue, but a personal relationship issue.

Is the company overall growing, shrinking, or stable?

Move to Europe. We are used to increase productivitiy constantly. It is (maybe with France as an exception but France is pretty backwards in many respects, including this) unheard of that the type of work you do should be bad here. Instead it leads to higher salaries when the employees become more productive/prevents that jobs are outsourced.

I knew it was a mistake to come down out of the trees!

Yes, the logical thing to do is to increase sales, more marketing, more sales people, etc. But it is so much easier to decrease costs than increase sales, so sometimes (bad) managers resort to cutting employees first rather than last. That is a legitimate concern for the line workers.

@DJClayworth: Yes, it is a relationship issue, but it's about a workplace relationship - why on earth is that not on-topic? Most questions here are about issues with other people in the workplace - colleagues, the boss, customers.

To explain why your job is socially needed is not easy, so it's best to give an analogy. Next time they say that, tell them: "So, whenever I want to cook a meal, you're saying I should pay someone to cut wood, instead of using gas..., or pay someone to carry water, instead of using tap water" . I think you get the point.

If people didn't advance technology like you are, we'd still be steam powered ...

Make this t-shirt your new work uniform.

Read "try to put people out of work" as "try to get ME fired!"

Increasing sales of one company will to a certain amount decrease the sales of another company of that sector. Surely technological innovation is needed but that does not cover the fact that a lot of (older) people will be put out of work or at least earn much less with your "help".

@Issel You assume that increasing productivity while doing X will increase the market for X, which is not true in general. In fact the market often shrinks as a result if the demand is rigid enough.

i.stack.imgur.com/Wvvlt.png

Have people really lost their jobs due to automation? Is management planning to cut on labor force?

@Mawg Even the trees were a bad idea and we should never have left the oceans.

For this kind of argument, I always put into perspective this with farm tractors : they put probably 95% of the workforce out of work. Tractors makers should be the main to blame. Ow, and tool makers as well.

Just pointing out that people have been complaining about jobs being automated since the invention of the threshing machine - but it and all the related inventions since have just resulted in people being able to afford more bread. (Though this probably won't console your colleagues)

You already have a perfect one liner response to your question from your second paragraph: "no job could be entirely automatic; my intention is to enhance, not replace"

I have done the same job on and off for a decade, and to be honest i have never been faced with workers that respond like this. Although to be honest i have noticed that american companies are somewhat unique around here as they retain a tier of workers that most local engineering companies already phased out years ago. So all designers already work on automating design, taking a bigger step does not seem unreasonable to them.

“If it weren’t for that blasted backhoe, a hundred of us would have jobs with shovels.” “Yeah, and if it weren’t for those stupid shovels, a thousand of us would have jobs with spoons.”

Lets say they're right and you're putting people out of jobs. What's bad about that? It's just how the market works. Certain works needs to be done, and you can get it done with automation in a cheaper way than they can working. So that sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

"It's just how the market works" does not take into account the immense amount of people that will be put on the streets in the next years if automation is indeed forced as much as it could be. There will be not enough time to adjust for most of those people. If you want to put them out this fast you need to make sure otherwise that they will have enough liquidity in this money-based economy. If millions of people will lose their well paid jobs and have to cope with minimum wage afterwards (if at all) this will crush the whole economy, and so also your "high" level (for now) job.

@Mołot has a very important point here. Have any of your efforts led to workforce cuts or eliminated positions? The way that you need to approach the issue is different based on this clarification.

@d-b How is "move to Europe" a relevant comment in any way? Why are mods not deleting this crap?

@Mołot To address the question of "Have people really lost their jobs due to automation?" The answer thus far is No, and it's my genuine belief that none of the positions are intended to be replaced, ideally just freed up to handle other/more workload.