"Today, it's hard to believe there was a need for elevator operators, but they weren't always automated. I remember growing up in the '50s, and when few buildings in our town had elevators, there was always an operator. A New York City operator strike in the '40s led manufacturers to create the elevators we have today."
"Secretary. In the '80s and even early '90s, every middle manager and up had a secretary to coordinate their schedule, type all sorts of things up, take their calls and messages, and often literally 'guard' their door as they were generally stationed right outside their office. There were tons of them, and they were always women. I had a shared one when I started my first corporate job as a junior individual contributor 'manager' in the '90s. Administrative assistants these days seem more reserved for executives and serve as general-purpose personal assistants doing what secretaries once did and more. There are far fewer of them."
"It's not dead yet, but COVID took out the dry cleaning business pretty hard. We used to have a van going door to door with people's dry cleaning, but remote work killed that job."
"Y2K programmer. There were people who would travel to different companies and rework all of their software so that they would still work after January 1, 2000. They did a great job and hopefully made a great deal of money, but after that, they had to go back to regular programming."
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