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.
Money managers, financial management. Yeah, they make sense in capitalism but they really don’t produce anything tangible.
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.
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.
They provide plebs access to the complicated world of finance and pass on some of the yield. I think that’s valuable.
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”.
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…
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.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”
GNOME Foundation names “professional shaman” as new executive director
That’s kind of a two-fer right there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They provide liquidity and price stability.
deleted by creator
price stability.
No, the opposite of that.
Not at all. They are the ones who make markets efficient. Although I would consider frontrunning retail using private order flow data is bullshit.
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.
Scrum master
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.
It can definitely be/is a dedicated role. A useful one too, though not always…
This is the result of your company trying to save money by not hiring a dedicated 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’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.
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.
Middle management
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’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”.
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.
No. No you wouldn’t. We don’t need banks to implement the concept of currency in a society and you’re myopic for not understanding that but instead pretending to be some sort of authority on the matter.
🙄 uh huh. I prefer a currency backed by something with some longevity and not petted by grifters who keep getting arrested for fraud over and over again, or hacked and cleaned out with little to no recourse.
Regardless, banks aren’t “worthless” at all.
I think of this in the context of healthcare constantly
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.
I would distinguish between providing a service & creating value. the service that banks and insurance provide is useful, but only in the context of a money-centric society. they don’t create anything that has a purpose deprived of context, it’s only the moving around of numbers.
But we do live in a currency-based society. That’s like saying food only has value in the context of a chemical-energy based society. It’s a pointless semantic argument here.
perhaps it is, but I’m not convinced. if food, eating, whatever were an unnecessary and wasteful system then the growing of food and processing, production, etc would likewise be a waste of resources, human labour included. a lot of our work does go towards food production, supply, processing, etc - if you could switch to an alternate system that dispensed with food but didn’t otherwise alter our lives, that would surely be massively preferable. it’s hard to imagine because eating is such a fundamental need, but that’s just a limitation of this comparison.
if we could dispense with money but otherwise have society look much the same (or better, which I think it undoubtedly would be), that would be an improvement, to me, just by virtue of freeing up the labour of all the people who work solely in the overhead of the system. to imagine how else we might function as a society, I think it’s useful to identify ways in which the present system is inefficient.
if we could dispense with money
…but we can’t, so what’s the point
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.
Do you believe in unfettered free markets? Those jobs are very often to implement compliance to restrictions in the markets.
No, they are not.
They are often enough purely internal documents or remnants of old days, where certain documents were actually important, maybe.
The company I work for now has very much this attitude for the last 50 years.
As a result they have 3 locations, no sops, and no accountability.
Over the last 6 months is been my job to put us back in compliance with local and federal reporting requirements and develop SOPs. The feedback from the bottom up is that it’s wonderful to have consistency, different bosses giving the same answers to questions, auditors being able to complete audits in expected and appropriate times, and in compliance with reporting regulations.
Can companies go overboard and employ people like me who do busy unnecessary work? Absolutely. But it is definitely appropriate to have a couple of administrators.
Rules and procedures are always a trade-off. However, I would argue that the vast majority of organizations have way too many of them and produces way too much busy work.
Just look at your own example - I’m 90% sure, that the different locations did have procedures and did document stuff, just not in a consistent way. So their documentation was scattered and their reports practically useless.
Depends on the industry. If literally everyone just always documented everything, my job would be much easier.
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.
I’m in the digitalisation part of administration. And I’m certainly handling a ton of processes that are not redundant, but plain useless.
anything related to planning, creation and targeting of ads
Mod for any website
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!
Health insurance agent, health insurance CEO, health insurance board member, etc
Most CEOs.
How else are your kids friends going to fail upwards and support 4+ kids?
If you can be the CEO of multiple companies at the same time, then you’re probably not doing much in that position.
