What is the most "Thankless" job?

Teacher.

As a teacher, I have to say I do get a lot of thank you’s. I get Christmas presents, gift cards, coffee, and hand written letters/cards. Sometimes my students reach out and/or visit me after they graduate. I feel quite valued and thanked. I live in Canada, if that makes a difference.

My wife who is a social worker spends her days slaving over people’s cases and is repeatedly harassed, and has been assaulted countless times. Now that is a thankless job.
- Yeah, I'd say living in Canada makes a huge difference. However, I think people answers "teacher" because, all things considered, it's a very hard and valuable job, frequently an underpaid one.
- This is highly dependent on what age of students you teach. Elementary teachers get thanked by parents. High school teachers get thanked by graduating students. Middle school teachers…well, not so much.
- Thank your wife for me. Social workers are the best people for so many reasons.
Thank you, teachers! o7
Youve never been thanked for being a teacher?
- Drive-through window clerk gets thanked a lot, too.
No, quite the opposite

Waste pickers in the clothing canyons of Ghana, or any other landfill/wasteland
Volunteer caregivers for people with disabilities, especially in places where there are limited or no social safety nets
Street vendors like the children hawking goods in Yemen or Samoa or Zimbabwe...
Cleaners, such as the Sewer divers in places like India where there is no protective equipment provided
Food services workers.
"Domestic" services workers like childcare, housekeeping, etc. I include victims of forced marriages here.
All other exploited, outsourced, trafficked, and/or forced labour, such as the cobalt miners in Congo, or the clothing sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, or the Phillipines call centre workers, or the hazelnut pickers in Turkey, or construction labourers in Qatar, or the chaingangs in the US.

Our supply chains for everything are filled with slavery. 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, of which 27.6 million were in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. That's an estimated increase of 10 million people from 2016 to 2021.

thanks for this very exhaustive list. this is the first time ive heard of sewer divers - with no PPE - sounds terrible.
- Sudharak Olwe has spent a lot of time documenting the lives of "conservancy workers" in Mumbai. His entire body of work is worth a look, Content warning: Image 12 is extremely NSFL with the body of a human child, but there are also dead and dying animals in images 4 and 11 but here is one collection. The photo I see most frequently is the one of a worker neck-deep in a drain
  
  Terrible is certainly a good word to describe it.
This is a great comment, and I believe the best addition to the thread.

I think you may really like this 4 part music/art video series.

Filastine - Abandon
From the description: Abandon bridges video art, documentary, and music to explore how we sell our time on earth, and how we could imagine to get free. Each of the four episodes profiles a unique personal revolt against low-valued work: an Indonesian miner, a Portuguese maid, American office workers, and Spain’s scrap metal salvagers.
- Thanks for sharing that! I confess dance is not really a medium I appreciate enough, but the music and filmography and overall sentiment were great. It reminds me of my favourite movie, Baraka.
  
  If you haven't seen it, it's a beautiful collection of global footage with music, and arguably more optimistic than I am. But it was from 1992 when things did seem a little more hopeful. It's in a similar vein to the Qatsi trilogy, which is more famous.
  
  This is just one "Chapter"/song from it, but it's something I think about often. It's probably the saddest part of an otherwise emotionally varied film: Baraka: Dead Can Dance - Host of Seraphim (7mins 14sec) Unfortunately none of the people here are actors or performers though, except the Japanese Butoh dancers at the end of it.
  
  I can't help but wonder how many of these people have survived the last 30 years since this movie.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/playlist?list=PLOgOGcIsnvZw7Fslm-afdYk-JHOsXclv4
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

Social media moderator

God I cant even imagine the shit they see. I saw a podcast episode of one and it just made me sad, think the podcast was other people's lives
- They don’t get thanked, they get PTSD.
- https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona
  
  It's a long read, but very much worth it. It goes into detail about the types of material these people have to spend all day watching and reviewing, and talks in length about some of the unhealthy coping mechanisms these teams develop for themselves. Lots of drug use, sex in the office, and suicidal ideation.
  
  While the article focuses mainly on Facebook moderators, I used to share an office with YouTube's content moderation team around the time this article came out, and a lot of the article rings true for YouTube, as well. I imagine it's similar across all the big platforms.
- There was that whole fiasco with the CSAM issue very recently on Lemmy. All of those poor moderators had to deal with all of that.
a significant portion of my job is to moderate and provide first line direction of all the social media pages for a huge company that commissions my company. We dont do any marketing or real engagement just moderation and essentially telling people to reach out to customer service per big company’s poorly provided directions. I don’t particularly care much for big company’s product but ive seen some really nasty people with attitudes towards my and my coworkers as if we physically made and handed them a defective product. We do sympathize and understand a certain level of anger but there are some people who are just outright cunts. It doesent help that big company does big company things and barely has customer support so more of the anger is directed towards us social media people
If you're a public moderator (eg. on reddit) you get thanked if you're doing a good job.

But not nearly as much as you get verbally abused or defamed.
- There are (or were) definitely some subs that were harder to moderate than others I'd imagine.
It's certainly thankless but is it a job if you don't get paid?
- Yes, definitely - being the caregiver for a child is often unpaid but still very much a job. Many volunteer positions are important jobs which are unpaid.

Cook.

Kitchen staff, for the most part, work long hours in chronically understaffed kitchens for very little pay. You get a break when things slow down and chances are you're going to be eating, hitting the bathroom, and trying to get a little sit time in a milk crate out back in that short little window (hint, pick two of those, the third might not happen).

You get burned, cut, over heated, covered in filth, and breathe in noxious crap all day from stoves, fryers, industrial cleaning chemicals, and other things.

You, probably, and a lot of your coworkers are short tempered, sore, tired, and possibly on drugs or alcohol. You are surrounded by ideal weapons for hurting others and you will be in or see a fight every so often.

Wait staff pretend to like you but really they work shorter shifts, go home relatively unscathed, and make a fortune in tips. So you also dislike and resent them. You don't want to but see above.

You work when everyone else is off so you end up hanging out with people in similar situations who aren't always the best people for things like networking into a better job. They really like partying though, and who needs a future.

Then you get a little older. Maybe you are running a kitchen and finally don't need to have roommates to afford the horrible apartment but you're only there about seven hours in a row at any given time. You met someone through friends but they don't see a future because you are always working.

Eventually, health issues force you to find other work and you claw your way to normalcy 15 years behind everyone else in retirement saving, salary growth, and so on.

Well fuck man I'm a senior in highschool and I was debating between culinary school and IT/engineering or something the like. Just made my choice a hell of a lot easier.
Oh shit. My daughter just started culinary school. Is there a fulfilling path forward for her?
- Food is art and just like art the people that produce them often run on razor thin margins. Aside from being a celebrity or an extremely niche job like being a private chef I am not sure if there is a lot of culinary work that pays very well.
  
  It's certainly an excellent hobby and life skill (you'll never be hungry again) but you can very easily learn that from home by watching other famous chefs.
- I haven't worked in the industry since the late 90s so maybe it's better now?
  
  There are positives. I learned that stress is transitory and I don't have to give in to it. Staying calm and working the system is how you survive getting slammed (overwhelmed by orders). I was in charge of a kitchen as sous chef in my early twenties, hiring people, ordering the supplies and ingredients, preparing for banquets and events. This was a massive confidence builder. I learned how to work with people I literally could not stand, and got to work with people I would back up in any situation.
  
  Plus your going to be a good cook for the rest of your life and that's a big plus. You might not want to cook when you are not at work but you can and that's great for family entertaining and your own personal enjoyment later in life.
  
  I also traveled to places I never would have been able to go to if I wasn't working there. I lucked out and worked in high end places, including one featured in the European Vogue Cooking magazine (meant something back then). I also worked in some dives.
  
  I learned so much about people and myself. But you can do that a lot of other ways that pay better!
  
  One last thing. With the exception of one or two really tough manual labor tasks I've done, no job has seemed hard after my time as a cook.
- Make her dethrone Rachel Ray and then do a show about cooking her remains.
- If she has good qualifications, she could cook in China in a city like Shanghai if she doesn't want to get burnt out. They would give good working terms and conditions, they just want a foreign cook on the team. Moreover foreign cooks are very common in big hotels and can usually run the kitchen as the Chinese staff can still be pretty mediocre at Western dishes.
- I'd say so. My wife has a degree in culinary. She's used it to work her way up the hospitality industry and is now a regional GM over a few hotels in our area.
I just left the restaurant industry after 10 years (mostly as a cook). This is too accurate, unfortunately 😐
Uhhhhh did you just read my autobiography? Graduated with a degree in culinary arts after high school whilst working in kitchens throughout the course of school. Worked my way up to district management in a metropolitan area. 15 years in I had zero life outside of work and nothing to show for my work other than crippling depression and addictions. Moved back home to start over. Got a 9-5 municipal job and I'm back in school working towards a doctorate in a completely different field. Never been happier in my adult life than the past 4 years that I've been out of the service industry. Fuck restaurants. It's even ruined my ability to enjoy eating out. Doesn't help that it costs a fortune now and 20% tips aren't enough anymore. Also fuck the restaurant owners that take advantage of their staff.
- I can enjoy a good restaurant but get really upset at crappy ones. I mean the kind of crappy you can detect with this kind of background. Like terrible menu choices that you know mean tons of frozen product or line cooks that have so many dishes to remember that they just wing it on half of them.
  
  And I'll never spend my own money to have someone else cook me a steak. :)

IT in so many ways in so many industries.

"Everything's working, so what are we paying you for?"

"Everything's broken, so what are we paying you for?"
At least it pays.. usually
- Honestly, not that well. I got out of IT because I could make double as a developer.

Speaking as a surgical tech: hospital janitorial staff, and sterile processing staff. They are INVISIBLE until something goes wrong, then everyone likes to bitch and point fingers, but they bust their asses constantly to keep us from becoming a giant pathogen cocktail. Hospitals would be fucking disgusting in the scope of like, idk, 2 hours, without those peeps.

Been a little bit since I put one of them in for an award. I think it's time to flex my keyboard again.

Street/Parking Lot Cleaners.

Every night, I clean up:

Styrofoam cups/cans/plastic cups & bottles
tossed out left over fast food
dirty diapers that someone couldn't walk 7 feet through the Walmart parking lot to throw in an actual trash can
empty boxes for: flat-screen TVs, Car seats, memory foam mattresses, or Amazon purchases
disposable vapes
trash bags that someone decided needed to be left in a parking lot instead of in a dumpster
So. Many. Plastic. Hangers.
receipts
grocery bags
candy wrappers
Edit shattered glass, but it makes that gravel in a vacuum sound when the truck sucks it up, so that's nice.

And the only time I get thanked is when my employer asks me to do extra work because there was a storm, another driver was out sick, another driver needed help on a site, or there was a big event that needed to be cleaned for/after.

Thank you for your work.
Thank you.
Thank you for doing this job !
I've learned shoppers in your country are messy pigs.

Being poor. You pay the bills of the rich.

Poor persons credit card interest pays for the points rich people can easily gain and spend.

I'd imagine the margins on many cheaper products are better than the luxury version. Disney+ comes to mind where they want people to take the cheaper ad version because it earns disney more money.

Hell, the whole point of a credit score is so that poor people pay higher interest rates, allowing for interest rates for the rich to become more competitive.
Thankyou for your service

Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs). These people do the grunt work at nursing homes. They change bed pans and wipe butts, they fetch things, help people stand and sit, and generally get talked down to by the lower level nurses. When I did ambulance transfer, they were the ones that actually knew the patient’s normal mental state, and how they’d been changing over time. All for minimum wage.

One of my old roommates did it. I work in patient transportation at the hospital, and two of my coworkers did it. All of them have talked about terrible the job was. And not even because of the things people think would be terrible. Like bed pans aren't fun. But its part of the job.

But they're understaffed, the managers suck because they're all only interested in money, so they get mentally abused by the higher ups, they have to work over time to get things done so people don't die but then get yelled at for working over time, etc. And all you said, it's for shit pay. I don't blame anyone for leaving those jobs. And it's sad, because ultimately it's the elderly who suffer from all of this.
My wife was a CNA until a few months ago. The pay rate has gone up to $12-15ish per hour at least but still terrible benefits on top of getting verbally beaten down by the nurses while getting physically beat up by the residents. Could make the same money with less risk of bodily harm working fast food

Tankless water heater installer.

It's thankless not tankless/s
- Its tankies not tankless/s
- You're throwing downvotes! 😱
Tank you!
No, that's a tankless job

He's talking about ultrasonic-cleaning those little gold things people hang around their collar

Garbage collector.

I only ever see mine from a distance and never get the chance to say thank you. My mum used to give them a tip at Xmas.
They should just swap the names for pickup artists and garbage men.
I thank mine all the time. You know how much job security I get from people constantly running into walls, or leaving the PTO on while driving?

Walmart greeters. They always say 'thank you' to you, but have you ever thought to thank them? I dont think so.

The ones in the town I live in check receipts of anyone who looks not like a white middle class family. It's such blatant discrimination it's not even funny
Thanks for... thanking me?
- Get a real job

Health care aide. They get paid a pittance to clean up people who have pooped themselves. They should get 300 dollars an hour and a bottle of tequila per shift.

Nurses, or hospital staff in general. Overworked, underpaid and generally unappreciated.

Step parent. While not entirely thankless (depending on the kids involved) it's tremendously underappreciated.

So much expectation that you do things for kids that aren't yours.

Don't get me wrong - it can still be rewarding in many ways, and my stepkids and I love each other like blood. We have a fantastic relationship.

But it gets under my skin every time I think about how little their own father has done for them, and I've had to pick up the (financial) burden, yet that prick will be the one who gets to walk my stepdaughter down the aisle.

That depends in her because it would be HER wedding.

If she is grateful enough, you'll get to walk her because you would have been her real dad all her life.

There is no written law that the bio that most be the only one who can walk her, its all just stupid wedding traditions.

If she grows to be a brat, and makes her bio dad walk her, then she doesn't see you as her real dad, and would be something for you to reflect on.
- I hear you, but it's not quite as straightforward as that. It's hard to explain (as family dynamics always are).

Social worker is pretty high on the list. Most are overworked, underpaid and treated poorly by their management, their clients, or both.

Jizz mopper

Detectives who work on CSAM cases. They have to watch, document, and describe the offending material in order to enter it as evidence. Then they get undeserved hatred for working with law enforcement.

My first thought was, what if a pedo became a csam detective.

And then, what if they had really strong moral convictions, so they’d never act on their desires, but they also enjoy their job.

my mind, after my adhd meds wear off
- Interesting moral thought experiment.
  
  If they never physically offend, and watching all of it, documenting it, and submitting it puts away those who do physically offend, and it saves someone else the trauma of having to watch it...

All customer and/or low level jobs

Nobody said cleaners? Cleaners, and rubbish/trash/garbage collectors

Morticians?

Don’t the bereaved thank them for making the deceased look good?
- Not sure how it is in the US, but I had to arrange a funeral in the UK this year and my only point of contact was the funeral director, I never even saw a mortician or anyone like that.
Came here to say deathcare. Especially those without a degree or license.

Meter maids are traditionally hated but if they didn't exist there is a good chance there would be no parking spots.

There are several jobs that are frequently mentioned in discussions like this that are actually thanked all of them time.

Nurses, teachers, fire, EMTs and police are always mentioned. They are hard jobs and mostly under paid. However they are constantly thanked, businesses give discounts and commercials and politicians thank them endlessly.

Grocery store workers, butchers, plumbers, electricians, custodians, truck drivers and most "menial jobs" are completely thankless. Think of the last time you saw a 10% off for nurses and if you've ever seen 10% off for overnight stockers.

Nurses, teachers, fire, EMTs

I,too, wanted to become fire when I grew up. Turns out it's not a real job. Instead I became disappointed.
Electricians get thanked in money. I’m a paramedic and an electrician. I volunteer as a paramedic because electrician pays double.

My wife is a school based therapist. The parents routinely cancel without notice. The kids have behavioral problems and trauma that makes interacting difficult and stressful. Not to mention that she has to read through the kid’s trauma history that requires them seeing her in the first place. Not a lot of thank yous for that kind of work.

Call center representative

Oh man, I worked at a call center for a little over four years doing internet technical support... Never again.

I am thankful for those that can push through it (especially on the more direct customer service side of things), as I certainly don't have the cognitive fortitude for it.

One of my roles at my current job still involves a lot of support, but at least its not over the phones thankfully.
I did that once. Now I try to get them to laugh on the phone, ya know? Make their day a little better without disrupting their average handle time stats.

Customer Service Agent.

I did that for years and had more wonderfully nice and thankful calls than I did bad ones, but man it sure feels like they evened out anyway.
- Felt this. Sucks that you remember more of the bad ones, but they can be SO bad.

I'll go with social activism. A lot of people wouldn't even recognize it as a job.

Nursing Assistant, though some of us nurses thank them. Man the pay sucks though.

Housewive/-husband.

Anything in retail.

IT

IT Support
- I'm a help desk tech and someone genuinely thanked me for showing them something today and I felt so good afterwards. People very rarely thank me in a genuine way. It's always polite, but you can tell nobody actually means it. They just want their shit fixed.
Yeah, the whole IT crowd.

Dishwasher

Tax Agent

Great answer.

Process servers?

A friend of mine would occasionally do this for a few bucks every so often and liked it. But, yeah, only the person paying him thanked him.
Maybe not by the defendant, but you don't thank your process server afterwards?

Most public service workers who take their job seriously. In my country, those include military personnel, teachers, actually competent politicians

Jobhunting

Being an undercover loss prevention officer.

I have never thanked one of those snitches.

Merchant Marine.

Bouncer

IRS auditor?

@AFKBRBChocolate

Harold Crick!

Tax man! BOO!

Any position in a corporation other than executive.

User experience designers. We are too often the lone voice for the user in teams of very smart people who think that being smart is the same as being right, working for business-minded people who are measured by production rather than quality.

We are the oracles for feature failure, and we are rarely listened to. We try to do the best we can, while refused opportunities to research, and are often brought in last minute to improve things that have already caused expensive usability and maintenance nightmares, and are blamed for being "expensive" and "out of scope" when we try to mitigate the damage.

And if an app sucks, we are the first to be blamed. But if you are a genius at your job, no one notices that you did it.

Politician

Barista working a Karen convention.

Software engineers/developers. They come up with software that everyone uses daily. But they work in shitty conditions, get kinda low pay, and because they're not as visible as writers and actors, are not able to hold a strike for kickbacks when their software is used or is still in use.

They basically built the modern world, but are exploited so that the ones who own the company get rich off their backs.

What? Developers are definitely not underpaid, I earn more than twice what a social worker gets after taxes.

Invisible is also very dubious, if I tell people I'm a developer, everyone assumes I'm a rich genius who's building cool stuff.

The true heroes of our industry are the admins. If they're doing everything right, nobody notices they exist, but if they do only a single thing wrong or some software has a bug they aren't even responsible for, they'll get the blame first.
- Where do you live? I live in Singapore and am definitely underpaid. Companies hire the cheaper workers from other Asian countries.

Landlord

So I guess I’m a landlord. We have a house that we rent. Bought it in 2007 using this cool thing called a sub prime mortgage. So we were sorta forced to hold on to the house and rent it.

Fast forward 15 years and I’m now renting the house I live in from a landlord. It’s made me realize that we’re good landlords. My dishwasher has been broken for two months collecting mold while its replacement has sat in my living room waiting to be installed.

Our own tenants have mostly been cool but I wish the guy we cut a break with (few months for free when he lost his job during covid) hadn’t grown weed in the garage and damaged some floors.

Other than that one guy, I don’t expect anybody to thank me.
- Thank you for your service. 🫡
- With house prices having almost doubled since 2007 and considering you (or someone else) has been paying your mortgage for 15 years, why don’t you sell it and buy a new house to live in?
Based on your upvote/downvote ratio, I think you win.
- Does it really count if the thanklessness is well deserved?
it's not a job
- Why isn't it?
I guess they didnt specify that they deserve any

Being the parent of someone who asks this kind of thing.