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.
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.
anything related to planning, creation and targeting of ads
Most CEOs.
How else are your kids friends going to fail upwards and support 4+ kids?
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.
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.
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.
I think of this in the context of healthcare constantly
A lot of expensive business consulting (think PwC or Deloitte) exists just to tell organizations things the orgs already know.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Now, that, is a postage tax.
Middle management
Landlords the worst
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.”
Life coach
GNOME Foundation names “professional shaman” as new executive director
That’s kind of a two-fer right there.
Advertising
Anyone who earns any portion of income by hanging shit on my doorknob.
