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.

  • silencioso@lemmy.world
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    If your job main tool is PowerPoint then there’s a high probability that your job is a bullshit job.

      • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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        Teachers’ jobs are anything but bullshit. However, the modern schooling system sucks, teachers shouldn’t be doing/have to do what they currently do.

  • Narrrz@kbin.social
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    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.

    • blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Narrrz@kbin.social
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        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.

        • blackbirdbiryani@lemmy.world
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          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.

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            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.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      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.

      • spittingimage@lemmy.world
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        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.

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          I’m in the digitalisation part of administration. And I’m certainly handling a ton of processes that are not redundant, but plain useless.

      • Haywire@lemm.ee
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        Do you believe in unfettered free markets? Those jobs are very often to implement compliance to restrictions in the markets.

        • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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          No, they are not.

          They are often enough purely internal documents or remnants of old days, where certain documents were actually important, maybe.

          • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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            Depends on the industry. If literally everyone just always documented everything, my job would be much easier.

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            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.

            • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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              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.

    • phillaholic@lemm.ee
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      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.

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        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.

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          🙄 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.

    • airbussy@lemmy.one
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      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”.

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      If you can be the CEO of multiple companies at the same time, then you’re probably not doing much in that position.

  • ManosTheHandsOfFate@lemmy.world
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    A lot of expensive business consulting (think PwC or Deloitte) exists just to tell organizations things the orgs already know.

    • BeefPiano@lemmy.world
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      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

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      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.

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        This is because their execs are overpaid idiots who are on this list of people who should just stay home.

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

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        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.

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    Tax prep software companies and tax prep services in general.

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      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.

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        Pretty sure being able to figure it out on your own is the entrance to the legal loophole wealthy people use to squirm out of a huge bill.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          Saved me $3000ish last year

          There’s all kinds of esoteric rules the typical tax software doesn’t know how to handle

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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              No, that’s not how it works.

              On a certain level, if you can afford to pay lawyers to delay the process you can “get away” with anything, but there’s only so much creative accounting that can be done before it’s clearly a crime.

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                You can call them clear and obvious crimes or even chicken sandwiches if you want but it doesn’t actually matter what label we’d personally like to put on it if the government doesn’t prosecute it. Wealthy people and companies in our society have been successfully funneling money to sidestep tax law out in the open for as long as law and government itself existed and will continue to do so. It’s no secret that Apple pays no federal taxes. It’s acknowledged by both sides. Donald Trump publicly filed for bankruptcy several times despite making significant profits and walked away with huge write-offs and possibly even a huge refund. Hes openly bragged about it for decades now. He would love the opportunity to talk highly about himself by doing so again to a room full of IRS agents. Nothing will ever come of cases like these.

                It makes me sick also, because I feel like Bernie was our last chance to stop it. But at this point to even get angry about it anymore is a waste of energy and time. I was around in 2011 when the occupy protests did dick all to stop wall street from getting away with financial crimes. They all yelled and screamed that it was illegal, and it at least partially was. But who gives a shit if it doesn’t affect anything? Wall street hasn’t changed in almost a century aside from automated trading. Several movies were made named wall street, several decades apart, and it was almost literally the same movie. Our options are: just fucking cope already, or go mental. It’s likely not going to happen, at least not for a long time, and by that time most of the ones that already did or are happening now that we know about will already have too much time passed to be legally persuable. We have to just let it go and persue another battle. Cope.

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        Lol it’s so funny how many bad takes there are in this thread. But saying that the government knows everything g you owe is one of the worst one.

        No they fucking don’t. Sometimes they aren’t even sure that someone who got both his legs cut off needs disability, or that they can’t regrow their legs.

        Or that a dead person can’t have a job.

        Like, there are plenty of independent contractors and businesses that need to report their income, ecause how the fuck would they know that ?

        • dingus@lemmy.world
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          I get that there are a lot of people with special types of jobs where their specific financial circumstances or the way they earn money is unusual. In that regard, I get why those people need to file their taxes.

          But what about the remaining vast majority of people with standard jobs? The government absolutely does know how much I make and it makes zero sense for us to have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and not make a mistake on something that the government already knows the right answer to.

    • DancingIsForbidden@lemmy.world
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      All dicks and no holes. Just a big pile of fuckery and greed in a big circle. The fed fucks big pharma. So the pharma company fucks over the hospitals. The hospital turns around and fucks the insurance. And the insurance companies are legally justified to square the difference from out of your asshole. And since some of that comes from the fed via state run marketplaces, the cycle of fuckery is complete.

      If anyone’s offended by my language there, I apologize and assure you, it’s an entirely gender neutral and accurate metaphor.

    • dingus@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • cricket97@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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      Managers of people can be good.

      Managers of managers are almost always useless.

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      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 ?

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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      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.

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        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.

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      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 🙄

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        Years ago my dad was fed up with realtors and you couldn’t list a property for sale without a realtor license. So he figured it’s probably as easy as it seems, seeing how many airhead realtors he’d met. He was right. He read a book and then went and passed the exam to get licensed. Sold his own property himself and never used the license again.

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        Wow I didn’t know this. How fucking stupid. Why is there this for a house but I can sell anything else

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      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.

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        In property markets where prices are reasonable they can be alright, but up here in Toronto where detached houses go for 3 million plus, there’s just too much incentive for greedy parasites

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    Anything in the online sports betting space. Addicts, scumbags, degenerates, and the people who make money off them.

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        I don’t know why people are so insistent it’s not a job rather than arguing that it’s a bad job, etc. Small landlords almost certainly put a lot of time into maintaining the property, handling occupancy, reporting income, etc. How is it any less a job than renting out bouncy houses. Sure some landlords might outsource all this, in which case it’s more akin to holding interest bearing assets, but for a small landlord it almost certainly is a job under any definition of the word.

        • XIIIesq@lemmy.world
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          Small landlords put in a lot of time?

          How much would you say? My job takes 37 hours a week.

          • cricket97@lemmy.world
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            Is a job a job only if it takes a certain amount of hours a week? dumb comment tbh

            But to answer the question my friend who owns 2 properties spends probably anywhere from 10-30 hours a week. He mows the grass, takes trash to the dump, makes repairs himself, etc.

            • XIIIesq@lemmy.world
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              Pull the other one mate.

              If a landlord is providing services like mowing the lawn and taking rubbish out etc, you can damn well guarantee that they’re charging extra for those services.

              You honestly believe a landlord spends 15 hours per week maintaining a property? At that point, you’d be exceeding by far your tenants right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, so are you really that gullible or are you just on some really good shit? You’ve clearly never rented a property yourself.

              • cricket97@lemmy.world
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                He does not charge extra for those services. Idk what you are on about, I know for a fact maintaining his property takes a decent amount of work. I don’t respect some internet nobody telling me that isn’t true lol. 15 hours is not that much time.