What are some modern bullshit jobs?

Cries in teacher

They really should be making like $50k/year max.

well they just got out of the rat race too well

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.

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".

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?

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.

The workers might know, but the executives would rather pay millions so a big name can tell them.

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.

I'm going to catch some flak but I found myself in a position where H&R Block came in handy. It wasn't for any services they rendered but because they have something akin to a protection plan where you pay a one time fee and they provide legal representation if any tax authority decides to come at you after filing.

The two times I used them were when I made an interstate move and the following year when I purchased a house. The place I moved to has a byzantine regional tax authority that collects local taxes on behalf of most - but not all - municipalities in the county (like I said - byzantine). This regional tax authority is notoriously disorganized and aggressive, opening investigations about years old tax debt that amounts to pennies only to discover that the debt was paid but their records were misplaced.

Both years I filed with H&R Block and signed up for their protection plan. Both years the regional tax authority opened investigations. Both years H&R Block paid for a lawyer to get on the phone and get the stick out of the tax authority's ass.

This is a super niche case but until I have a year where I basically don't do anything interesting (move, have a kid, change jobs, etc.) or the regional tax authority gets it's shit together and chills out H&R Block is actually providing value to me.

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.

health insurance provides a legitimate service to society. not a bullshit job. i get you have political motives to project but it's not a bullshit job.

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.

Not at all. They are the ones who make markets efficient. Although I would consider frontrunning retail using private order flow data is bullshit.

They provide liquidity and price stability.

Now, that, is a postage tax.

Anybody want to bet someone in the building administration is in bed with this company?

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 🙄

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.

Managers of people can be good.

Managers of managers are almost always useless.

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 ?

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.

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?

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.

Not a job

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.

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

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..

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

They provide plebs access to the complicated world of finance and pass on some of the yield. I think that's valuable.

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.”

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.

Very controversial statement but really couldn't be more true. Of course there might be exceptions but most of the time it's a cushy job where you are paid exorbitant amounts to do practically nothing of value.

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.

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.

Oh, yeah, they're bullshit right up until the moment you need them...

Professional athletes? Nah. Professional sports team owners on the other hand...

Ehh, watching sports is fun (for some people).

Not a bullshit job at all, unless you consider musicians to be a bullshit job too.

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.

not a bullshit job either. being a successful startup founder is one of the most stressful and hard working jobs out there.

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.

Yeah as is evident in Ukraine

Moron