What are some modern bullshit jobs?
What are some modern bullshit jobs?
Jobs that either don't contribute in any meaningful way or jobs where one would be better off if they were paid to be on call.
What are some modern bullshit jobs?
Jobs that either don't contribute in any meaningful way or jobs where one would be better off if they were paid to be on call.
anything related to planning, creation and targeting of ads
They really should be making like $50k/year max.
It's basically modelling. With the same spread of poorly paid to insanely paid for no good reason.
Influencers in the modern age are competing for advertiser attention.
well they just got out of the rat race too well
not exactly what you're asking, but banks and insurance companies are the majority of what I call "the beaurocracy of money". they don't produce anything of value, and are basically just a sinkhole for labour.
I hate capitalism as much as the next lemming but banks and insurance companies, at their base level, definitely provides a service. Banks help you spread the cost of things over time at the expense of interest, and insurance companies do something similar with risk.
Its only when they do warped shit like lend money at zero interest or force consumers to pay for insurance (thereby negating the need to be competitive) that they start to leech off the system.
Administration in general. There are so many jobs in (public and private) administration whose entire job is, to fill out forms or write reports, that nobody will ever read.
The same is true for countless middlemanager positions. It's not a full-time job to manage 10 employees who are not directly working with you. No idea how this is called in other countries, but in Germany we call it Matrixorganisation, and it's often as absurd as it sounds.
I'm in administration and part of my job is filling out forms and reports that no-one will ever need unless there's a problem in which case they become very important indeed.
In today's business environment we tend to forget that redundancy = resilience.
Do you believe in unfettered free markets? Those jobs are very often to implement compliance to restrictions in the markets.
Huh? I can go almost anywhere in the world and wave my phone at a register and take whatever I want home. Without a bank Id have to carry a lot of everywhere.
I think of this in the context of healthcare constantly
I'm no economist, but banks are pretty useful from how I understand it. Lending out money people don't use is like creating money out of thin air. Helps people buy houses and everything. I tried looking for the video I saw on this topic, it's something like "how banks create money out of thin air".
Most CEOs.
How else are your kids friends going to fail upwards and support 4+ kids?
A lot of expensive business consulting (think PwC or Deloitte) exists just to tell organizations things the orgs already know.
They exist to take the blame. “PwC says we have to close down the plant, those damn bean counters!” - CEO who told PwC she wants to close down the plant
In fairness, some companies, especially the big ones, won't accept a hard truth until a third party agency tells them directly. This is primarily because the grunts of the workforce often have the most knowledge of the systems but whose opinions are easy to dismiss.
People I know who work in consulting have said they charge an outrageous amount of money to speak to factory line workers and say what they've said to the factory managers because the managers are too up themselves to do it
This is because their execs are overpaid idiots who are on this list of people who should just stay home.
The workers might know, but the executives would rather pay millions so a big name can tell them.
Because they are connected to them. This is what happened with Toys R US. Bain Capital bought control and made the company hire consultants from Bain Capital.
M I D D L E
M A N A G E R S
This is the real reason why companies are trying so desperately to camcel WFH. Covid revealed the truth (that we knew all along) that these people add no actual value to a company. They're only there to act as a buffer between the C-suite and the peasants.
how are you connecting cancelling of WFH to middle managers ?
Also in your ideal company you don't have team leads department heads but peasants talk to CEOs directly ?
Managers of people can be good.
Managers of managers are almost always useless.
Tax prep software companies and tax prep services in general.
Yep.
Government already knows everything you owe.
They just cant tell you
Cause Tax prep lobbying said it would be unfair to their business.
So you gotta play the whole complicated game of figuring out your taxes, because H&R Cock wants your refund.
Lol it's so funny how many bad takes there are in this thread. But saying that the government knows everything g you owe is one of the worst one.
No they fucking don't. Sometimes they aren't even sure that someone who got both his legs cut off needs disability, or that they can't regrow their legs.
Or that a dead person can't have a job.
Like, there are plenty of independent contractors and businesses that need to report their income, ecause how the fuck would they know that ?
Pretty sure being able to figure it out on your own is the entrance to the legal loophole wealthy people use to squirm out of a huge bill.
The entirety of the health insurance industry
All dicks and no holes. Just a big pile of fuckery and greed in a big circle. The fed fucks big pharma. So the pharma company fucks over the hospitals. The hospital turns around and fucks the insurance. And the insurance companies are legally justified to square the difference from out of your asshole. And since some of that comes from the fed via state run marketplaces, the cycle of fuckery is complete.
If anyone’s offended by my language there, I apologize and assure you, it’s an entirely gender neutral and accurate metaphor.
I like how an annual doctor's visit and a biannual dental cleaning are supposed to be 100% covered by insurance.
But every time I go, I get a bill later on with the explanation that "the provider is asking for too much money for the services so we are refusing to pay the full amount". Fuck off. That's not how that's supposed to work.
Now, that, is a postage tax.
Anybody want to bet someone in the building administration is in bed with this company?
Flash traders.
They abuse the technologies used by the stockmarket to buy and sell within milliseconds, so they can make a profit. They add absolutely nothing of value to the system, yet leech both money and talented employees from the market.
They provide liquidity and price stability.
price stability.
No, the opposite of that.
God I wish they would tax trades. Not even much. Like 1,000 trades for a dollar or something. Just to stop that type of fuckery.
Real estate agents
Yes! It shouldn't be difficult to purchase a house, but when we were looking, none of the seller agents would even talk to us until we had a buyers agent 🙄
Years ago my dad was fed up with realtors and you couldn't list a property for sale without a realtor license. So he figured it's probably as easy as it seems, seeing how many airhead realtors he'd met. He was right. He read a book and then went and passed the exam to get licensed. Sold his own property himself and never used the license again.
Wow I didn't know this. How fucking stupid. Why is there this for a house but I can sell anything else
The agent we have used for several houses has been indispensable. He got us into our current house before it was listed, and before that he knew all the issues with every house we looked at because he's been in the area for so long. You may have had bad agents, but some of them are really good at their jobs and add quite a bit of value.
In property markets where prices are reasonable they can be alright, but up here in Toronto where detached houses go for 3 million plus, there's just too much incentive for greedy parasites
Landlord
Anyone who earns any portion of income by hanging shit on my doorknob.
Anybody working in SEO / "search engine optimisation." Complete bottomfeeding scumfuck grift. The only reason it's not considered fraud is because the government hasn't caught up to it yet.
I'm learning web design, and one of those topics I need to learn is SEO so the websites I make rank higher. While I don't like the idea of "gaming the system" to rank higher, it kind of becomes a necessity when everyone does it. What for you makes it such a scummy business?
Because of AI, SEO it's likely to disappear along with search engines. People will just ask AI instead of using Google or Bing.
I'll take the bait a little. I will help small businesses out of SEO holes from time to time. My friends' business was really stuck, and often you just need an outside eye to point out some obvious things: their home page was a splash screen with no text, they didn't use the most-searched terms in their headings, they were using text-on-imagd with no alt text.
As, generally, it's agreed we need businesses to have a society (somewhat unfortunately), and businesses need the internet to function nowadays (mixed blessing), I don't think it's necessarily bad to help the smaller guys succeed.
Anything in the online sports betting space. Addicts, scumbags, degenerates, and the people who make money off them.
Landlords the worst
Influencers?
Scrum master
The way I learned agile scrum master was a role that everyone on the team rotated through, not a specific person.
It can definitely be/is a dedicated role. A useful one too, though not always...
Never met a scrum master yet who was actually a driven motivated individual. Its almost like it's a default job you just fall into if there's nothing else for you
I've seen at least two SMs who were really motivated and they can actually be a tremendous help.
My last project was complete chaos, and that one lone SM managed to get it all streamlined and efficient. Then he was pulled from the project and everything collapsed again.
Health insurance agent, health insurance CEO, health insurance board member, etc
99% of middle management could have been automated away a decade ago
lazy trope.
who hires middle managers ? Execs. Why do they hire them ? to keep a layer between themselves and the workers.
so whenever you think your manager is useless, remember he's not there for you.
This is the first correct answer that I came across in this entire thread.... Ugh..
Money managers, financial management. Yeah, they make sense in capitalism but they really don't produce anything tangible.
I think 'producing something tangible' is hardly a fair metric.
A therapist doesn't produce something tangible, but many of them provide value to their clients.
A guitar teacher (or any teacher for that matter) doesn't produce something tangible either, but they again provide value.
If the business is to produce educated people. Teachers provide the core benefit.. and pretty measurable.
It's when there's a teacher with 7 line managers that are just have meetings to talk about the teachers "output" that causes the problem.
I'll agree to that but still wish we didn't have a "need" for finance people.
Yeah but those aren't groups I have to deal with unless I choose to. You really can't get around the financial system. It's not like I can take a 100 bucks and walk up to say a gas station and say "1 share please". And before you say Robinhood keep in mind that you don't actually own those stocks, they own them and you are just "managing it".
What does Atwater make?
What do you mean, like, how much money does the company make?
Oh, no, I mean what do we make?
I don't follow. We make money.
No, I know we make money. I mean, what do we create?
We create wealth.
No, no, I mean, what do we build, what do we design, you know? Because I have some ideas that could really help the company.
Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, we don't build anything.
I mean most are just greedy cuz the field attracts those kind of people. You'd be surprised how many people have next to no financial literacy and a GOOD financial expert can do legitimate good for these people.
I did say it makes sense in capitalism. I too pay to use one. I'd like a world without them.
The financial industry is, ostensibly, about connecting people that need money to people that have more than they need. In practice it's about skimming from the top of EVERYTHING in society.
Diversity and Inclusion Officer
I dunno. There's an inclusion officer at my kids school who's sole role is to make sure kids get the help that they need to not get left behind academically. They don't have "Diversity" in their title, so it may not be demographic driven which I'm guessing is the distinction.
They mean the C-Suite "position" that changes absolutely nothing about inclusion or diversity in the company.
This is an interesting one that I hadn't thought of before. I think the same could probably be said for any sort of corporate job where you're coming up with stupid corporate nonsense speak. Like whoever's job it is that's seems to come.up with a million pointless acronyms for a company that they share with new employees at orientation for some reason.
Diversity and etc. is no doubt important, but should be strived for as a group.
Life coach
Honestly, can just be a different form of therapy. Worked with one in conjunction with a therapist through a service provided by my medical insurance.
The therapist was completely useless. The life coach had me questioning the way I thought about things, and got me to seriously reevaluate the ways I caused myself stress. All she did was ask questions, but they got me to see things differently. Helped a lot.
Any job can be a bullshit job actually. But for me:
"Consultant" in IT is often enough a fancier sounding title for "rentable body". You're basically working as a contractor of some sort, but officially you're a consultant.
As evidence I present the Irish Bank Strike:
[A]lmost the entire banking system of Ireland went on strike after an industrial dispute in 1970. The strike lasted nearly six months, yet the economy escaped unscathed.
People used cheques to manage large payments and, while the banks were closed, risk of default on the cheques was shouldered by neighbourhood pubs.
Here's the Bank of England's Ben Norman and Peter Zimmerman:
How did payees manage this risk for such a prolonged period? Notoriously, local publicans were well-placed to judge the creditworthiness of payers. (They had an informed view of whether the liquid resources of would-be payers were stout or ailing!)
For example, John Dempsey, a publican in Balbriggan, near Dublin, was “…holding cheques for thousands of pounds, but I’m not worried. The last bank strike went on for 12 weeks and I didn’t have a single ‘bouncer’. … I deal only with my regulars … I refuse strangers. I suppose I’ve been able to keep a few local factories going.”
That is so cool. Thank you for sharing it.
It reminds me of what makes me continue to be bearish on BitCoin.
I worked at a pretty advanced technical place, with a woman, let's call her Janet.
If the system misplaced 2 cents, Janet would hunt you down and make you find it.
All that tech could melt down tomorrow, and I would still do business there, as long as Janet was there.
If the entire world economy collapses, I will still bank with Janet.
If Janet is using pen and paper, I trust that's good enough for me. If Janet is using one massive Excel file, fine by me. If Janet starts accepting payment in weirdly shaped rocks, I will accept weirdly shaped rocks as payment, too.
And when Janet adopts BitCoin, then I'll be all-in on BitCoin.
This is the sauce- 12 weeks without banks in a high trust community, what happened? Thanks!
GNOME Foundation names "professional shaman" as new executive director
That's kind of a two-fer right there.
Middle management
Politicians
We could very easily vote on most issues ourselves using the wide array of technology at our fingertips, with a similar or possible better sense of security than what politicians currently provide.
But the only way for that to happen is for politicians to make it happen, and who would vote to eliminate their own job? No one.
Well, the second problem would be figuring out who curates the system. If you've ever voted on a referendum you'll probably know what I'm talking about. You can make any proposal sound awesome/horrible if you leave out the right details.
If you've ever organized to resist a referendum you've probably also experienced the "we'll just rephrase this and try again later" effect, wherein special interests just need to stubbornly keep pushing until the opposition voters get sick of participating in the polls.
I don't think these are unsolvable problems, but they do inherently require setting up a representative beaurocracy of unelected technocrats -- an apparent oxymoron. It's gotta be someone's job to run the machine and ideally you want them to be looking out for the people above all else.
So, how to play kingmaker? Well, if we take literal kings & elected representatives off the table, what remains is a model akin to academia, wherein credentials & seniority are prioritized above most else. It's not a bulletproof system (none are), but if you squint hard enough the EU sort of exemplifies what this model could look like -- just replace the delegates with smartphones, essentially.
Who would draft new legislation? I know it's not just politicians that do this but their staff helps a ton. I just don't see a good system of John Everyman drafting a bill that makes sense. That said I would like to see politicians get fixed cause the system is clearly broken.
Hmm... I'm not sure I agree with this completely despite politicians obviously being problematic. At least at its core, the rationale is that the significant majority of people aren't aware enough of all the contentious (or even mundane) issues in society, so we elect people we trust to make our decisions for us. I just checked Canada's recent bills in Parliament, and the voter turnout for something like this would be almost nothing:
Bill C-16 - An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023
Obviously our current system is very easily corruptible and that needs to be addressed, but getting rid of politicians altogether wouldn't necessarily fix our society, despite how terrible they're making it right now.
Professional athletes.
Professional athletes? Nah. Professional sports team owners on the other hand...
Por qué no los dos?
Ehh, watching sports is fun (for some people).
watching sport is free.
Reddit mod.
But on the other hand the employment criteria is just to be mentally challenged.
Most people don't run into any issues with mods online. If you're constantly running into "asshole" authority figures in online communities it might be you...
Try to open a controversial topic, let's say CCP or other heated sub reddit, Even when non political, mods straight power tripping when you ask serious questions.
But I think this is a reference for an old thread of "my wife think being a mod is not a real job"
Sometimes, sure. But with 15 years on reddit I have run into some power-tripping mods before... /r/portland, for example - I mainly agree with their politics but when I didn't they'd delete all of my posts and then shadowban me. Not allowed to disagree.
Politicians
"Startup founder"
That depends most startups are shit and fail but they still are useful. But the idea is VCs will just fund thousands of startups in hopes one is a unicorn and actually has a product worth selling.
But the founder is expected to use capital they don't have to fund the business until it is attractive to people with capital. They are expected to market the product without marketing experience. They are expected to negotiate with people who are negotiating from a position of strength and who has much more experience. They are expected to be personally attractive to get interest from VCs. After they have gotten traction they are expected to be "coachable" and follow the advice of advisors that up until now have not been involved in the growth of the company.
The ecosystem is broken. Founders rarely get funding and when they do they end up losing most of the business they built. VCs are getting very few positive results.
Stressful, expensive, hard working and statistically unproductive.
The entire defense industry.
Yeah as is evident in Ukraine
Moron
Yeah because we would definitely be motivated to manufacture fucking Hellfire missiles and landmines without the pressures of global capitalism... /s
Like I get it, getting rid of the defense industry ≠ getting rid of war, but it would be a much more daunting task to wage war if we didn't have fucking weapons factories.
Corporate communications / public relations
They've largely subverted the occasionally useful profession of journalism. There's a big difference between researching things your audience wants to know, and asking someone with a commercial agenda what they'd like to tell your audience.
Therapists used to be the most helpful thing in the world (or so I've heard), now they're so unhelpful they have to rely on the state to get us to use them and have so many different indie-based projects and programs competing with them, like BetterTherapy (which isn't bad tbh). The old joke is they're paid friends but now I see they're just paid, you could be in a genuine situation where something obliterates the quality of your life (e.g. custody battles) and they'll be like "does lithium sound good" (which by the way, lithium is outdated by two thousand years, so if it's recommended right away to you, run). The reason they're not set up like lawyers where you only pay them "if you win" is because they know this would destroy them.
I fear the medical profession is also going down this path.
Government and lawsuits are totally regulating everyone to death. Doctors used to be knowledgeable and creative (and they still are) and had the freedom to prescribe whatever they thought would be the best.
Now, they can only follow conventional wisdom and the exact recommendations of the regulators. If they deviate just a little to find the perfect fit for your case, they risk themselves and their livelihoods.
It's primarily private insurance (at least in the US) that drives that. The doctor can prescribe something and then a "doctor" who works for the insurance company can take a 10 second look at it and deny it outright in favor of a more profitable treatment.
Nine out of ten doctors are great.
The regulations exist because of the tenth doctor.
Advertising
Exorcist
Oh, yeah, they're bullshit right up until the moment you need them...
Legion told me you’d say that. I mean, nuh-uh.
Department of social services workers.. Their job really doesn't help anybody, and it would be a better usage of tax payer dollars to have a UBI.
It depends on what you mean by "contribute". Most of the jobs right now don't contribute to nothing if not maintain the (zombie) capitalism system.
Some local governments have rules that X must be done by someone in that area. Usually the mayor's nephew. To get around it they are made into a rep for the company that does the actual work. No value whatsoever to the project, the users, or the taxpayer.
If your job main tool is PowerPoint then there's a high probability that your job is a bullshit job.
Cries in teacher
Teachers' jobs are anything but bullshit. However, the modern schooling system sucks, teachers shouldn't be doing/have to do what they currently do.