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.
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 ?
Worker owned cooperatives, worker managed teams, company decisions made democratically.
All other kinds of companies are dictatorships.
and why should that be any better? just because it appears democratic does not mean it makes it automatically “better” <- name 1 cooperation which has shown success for every 1000 “dictatorships”
democracies are plagued with slow reaction time which would take away your entire market edge. Also democries require transparency. If everyone knows the costing structure/ suppliers… you are done.
“Why would having a say in making decisions about your employment be any better than just doing whatever the richest idiot says?”
Do you even hear yourself? They’ve got you loving the taste of boot polish.
go freelance. you don’t have to. since your consider yourself smarter than your boss try starting a business.
it’s a trade off between income fluctuation and stability.
since you didn’t address any of my points but chose to just respond with random statements, I take it you were convinced but too ingrained with your original statement to admit. It’s fine happens to many of us.
glad to have helped you thinking critically.
Why would we be done? Most of this stuff is public record or easy to determine if you have a head for business finance.
not really… even for publically traded companies the you cannot tell much about their suppliers and customers. Most of the customers of the Firm I work for have NDAs stating we cannot openly advertise.
Only in services/tech sector where product differentiation is large you are a bit isolated form these concerns.
Oh please my competitors are often using the same suppliers and they have the same type of beancounters we have. Especially in my industry where we have a bunch of overlap. Just recently I had a corporate partner put together a quote for something we normally buy but wanted them to buy it. They came back with a price within a few percent of what we normally pay.
There is a reason why the three letter agencies are so good at catching money laundering. They have data on what X type of business should be buying and selling at what markup.
I bet you can do it. Just start looking at your numbers.
so you agree that numbers aren’t currently in the public domain. You just think they can be and it wouldn’t hurt.
Also this isn’t the only problem I outlined. it’s one of them.
also people are often disinterested and unqualified to even understand a balance sheet. let alone deciding on company direction.
I just find it fascinating that many people are convinced that they can run a company while they aren’t even able to manage their own finances
Found the middle manager
haha no right now I am peasant class.
They’re only there to act as a buffer between the C-suite and the peasants.
This is a very important role in some companies, otherwise the C suite meddling would stop any work from getting done.
I’ve had two excellent managers and both of them saw their primary purpose as being a bullshit filter to free up the rest of us to do actual work.
That is a good point actually.
I am just thinking of my job. The client wants something stupid, I have to pick and choose my battles. When it comes time for me to hand over to fabrication I get yelled at. Never mind the fact that what the fabrication manager sees is the aftermath of my work. They had say 13 bad ideas and I got it reduced to say 6.
Managers of people can be good.
Managers of managers are almost always useless.
Influencers… Do I really need to say anything else?
well they just got out of the rat race too well
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.
Health insurance agent, health insurance CEO, health insurance board member, etc
“Startup founder”
not a bullshit job either. being a successful startup founder is one of the most stressful and hard working jobs out there.
Stressful, expensive, hard working and statistically unproductive.
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.
If big VC firms were losing money in terms of net total they wouldn’t exist. Albeit most of them define success as being acquired by a big company like Google. As for independent VCs most of them are probably wasting heaps of money and just following the hype.
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.
Not a bullshit job at all, unless you consider musicians to be a bullshit job too.
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’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.
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.
anything related to planning, creation and targeting of ads
Bankers. Specifically, the high up mega bankers.
Also politicians.
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!
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.
Most CEOs.
If you can be the CEO of multiple companies at the same time, then you’re probably not doing much in that position.
How else are your kids friends going to fail upwards and support 4+ kids?
Middle management
Scrum master
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 had a good SM who really helped keep the team organized and reduced the amount of BS we had to deal with so we could focus on the work, and helped us surface issues so we could address them and find better ways of working.
My current SM is completely useless and exactly what you’re saying. Good SMs exist, but they are few and far between.
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.
Mine rocks out with his cock out. I get a little annoyed with him constantly pressing us to find better ways of working, when we’re already the #1 team.
But still, the man really knows his shit and has turned a lot of things around for the company. He’s a good person to approach when you’re having a problem, of just about any sort.
OTOH, before we had him, we were floundering around trying to play agile and not actually accomplishing anything.
The way I learned agile scrum master was a role that everyone on the team rotated through, not a specific person.
This is the result of your company trying to save money by not hiring a dedicated scrum master.
It can definitely be/is a dedicated role. A useful one too, though not always…
Reddit mod.
But on the other hand the employment criteria is just to be mentally challenged.
People get paid for that?
Yes, actually despite claiming to be volunteers, mods of large communities on reddit are frequently offered decent sums of money for going along with shilling/advertising. That’s why many tried to become mods of hundreds of major subs, not for “power”.
I mean the default subs that have millions of subscribers. Your subs look great topic-wise, but they have like 50 people so I don’t think you’re going to get ad offers yet.
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.
Nah reddit mods are actually awful. I would tend to agree with you if it were a bunch of random mod teams but reddit is almost entirely controlled by a small group of powermods who get off on flexing their minute amount of power on an internet discussion forum. Truly awful people who contribute nothing to society by taking over small communities so they can use their power to indiscriminately ban people they disagree with.
The only incentive to become a reddit powermod is power.
My apartment complex uses a package delivery service that basically acts as a middle man to receive your packages and deliver it to you. They use contractors who pick up packages from their warehouse and deliver them door-to-door. As expected, it’s common for packages to get lost/stolen. Instead of getting your package on the date/time promised, you have to wait several more hours for it to actually arrive. If it gets to the warehouse late in the afternoon, you’ll get it the next day. If you have Amazon next-day delivery, you essentially negate it with this service. If you’re expecting perishable items, good luck getting it fresh. If your package is large or heavy, you’ll have to wait several days as they only deliver oversized packages on specific days. All these are mandatory with a fee ranging from $10 to $30 on top of rent.
Anybody want to bet someone in the building administration is in bed with this company?
So the rumor is the owner is related to one of the big apartment companies, that’s why the service is being pushed hard to a lot of apartment complexes in my city.
Now, that, is a postage tax.
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.
This is because their execs are overpaid idiots who are on this list of people who should just stay home.
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
That’s basically all Gordon Ramsay did on Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell. The only time I can remember that it wasn’t because the owners or management weren’t listening to their workers, the problem was a 21 year old kid that BS’ed his way into a head chef position, who had no business being a head chef. The episode ended with the kid being fired, cause he couldn’t manage to maintain a clean kitchen.
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.
