18 ms·
Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless
- nine_zeros 3y agoI also feel that the 10 managers above me have a pointless job.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- Eric_WVGG 3y agoThe article mentions but doesn't link to Graeber's book on Bullshit Jobs. I've heard it referenced enough times now to put it on my to-read list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- rinze 3y agoIt's an amazingly fun book.
- umpalumpaaa 3y agoIts a very good book... Wikipedia says this – which should make some of the people here become either more self aware or critical of the book: "The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs: [...] *duct tapers*, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, *e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code*, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;"
- matwood 3y agoIt's hard to get rid of bullshit jobs without changing humanity. One of the biggest jobs of what's considered bullshit is dealing with the quirks of people.
- CSMastermind 3y agoI'll be the divergent voice here and say that I read it because I often heard it referenced here and it was one of the worst books I've ever read. Part of what makes it so terrible is that Bullshit Jobs is an interesting premise. The fact that some percentage of people think that their jobs don't need to exist is an interesting observation that merits deeper study. If anyone ever does that study and writes a book about it I would love to read it but Graeber's book is not that. Rather his book discusses the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs and then diverges into an incoherent political rant. I saw Sam Harris on the Lex Friedman podcast talking about debating 9/11 conspiracy theorists he said: > I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play Whac-A-Mole sufficiently well, so as to convince anyone of anything... > ...it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies that you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to because they don't connect in a coherent way... > ...I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that and the person will say, okay, well, but what do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise that hadn't even been scheduled for that day... > ...how long would it take to track that down, right? Did it happen, was it supposed to run that day, was there a completely mundane reason it would happen? And unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed ... He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird? That's what reading this book is like. There is no central thesis just a list of incoherent complaints. In his other works he proposes a Universal Basic Income, and some have read his book as an argument for that. But not only does he not directly argue for it in the book, even if he did his writings much like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are not set up in a way that could even lead to a logical point because they're just disjoint misrepresentations he deliberately misinterprets to make them seem like they don't make sense. It is a mentally exhausting read.
- hnbad 3y agoWell, most people outside those positions feel the same way about them.
- dylan604 3y agoLet's not forget social media influencers, ad tech, engagement tech/algo whatever, ad agencies, blah blah whatever else you don't like.
- systems_glitch 3y agoEvery time I read an article like this I think about Tavistock Prowse from Seven Eves.
- imiric 3y agoIf only people with jobs in industries that are not only useless, but harmful to society were this self-conscious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
- bpiche 3y agoSome may watch this clip for the first time and see an angry man, but he had a beautiful soul
- 1over137 3y agoFunny to post an anti-marketing rant with a link to youtube, a site full of marketing. Here's an invidious link instead: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
- sam0x17 3y agoThe mere existence of marketing and sales is a really good example of why unregulated capitalism (heck, even heavily regulated capitalism) doesn't perform well or do the things we would want an economic value system to do. Maximizing profits by selling useless products to people who don't need them isn't progress, but under capitalism it's oh so smart to do in the short term. I love that we worry about AI maximizing the wrong objective function and killing us all, when our own economic system is already doing that for us and has been for over a century.
- kikokikokiko 3y ago
- catboybotnet 3y agoWhen all you have done is make daily meetings to justify your job so that your boss doesn't up and fire you: yes, you have a very pointless job. I've also noticed sales are there to bullshit their way to getting somebody who isn't sure to buy something you're selling. Talk to an engineer, they'll tell you a paperclip holds paper. Talk to sales, you'll be on the line for an hour while he explains the majesty of the holy invention of paperclips, and why Paperclip Co.'s are the best. People who need paperclips will just buy them, bypassing the time sink.
- dougmwne 3y agoTell me you’ve never been part of an RFP process without telling me you’ve never been part of an RFP process. Sure, in some cases what you say is true, when you have an undifferentiated product in perfect competition with other products where potential customers have perfect information, a smoother spokesperson can make the difference. But in complex sales, the sales staff’s job is to understand the client’s needs and opportunities well enough, then coordinate experts on their team to present promising solutions. A sales person who is a value add is going out and finding people with problems that can be solved with the company’s product, thus pulling a customer into increased productivity. The role does not need to be a waste, even though many are wasteful.
- willcipriano 3y agoCompanies tend to really overestimate how differentiated their product is. Often these "value add" features are half baked or so situational that they can't be relied upon. I take them with a grain of salt and still frequently I'm disappointed.
- asynchronous 3y agoI refuse to believe sales reps have a job that is needed after talking to hundreds of them in my line of work trying to procure things. None of them have a brain. Not one.
- pixl97 3y ago
- klyrs 3y agoPeople in engineering and production have been saying this for years... the alarming thing is that marketing isn't on the list.
- classified 3y agoSome products are so useless they wouln't sell without marketing. So it's not pointless in those cases.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoBetter to be pointless than actively evil, like convincing people to buy things they don't need.
- atoav 3y agoHow can pointless things be needed?
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThis thread is about pointless jobs, which is what my comment references. Sorry for the confusion.
- atoav 3y agoAh I got confused, thanks for the clarification!
- jrgoff 3y agoThat sounds like it is pointless with extra steps
- Arkhaine_kupo 3y agoThe question is whether the garbage that gets visibility thanks to marketing is more or less vital and useful than the stuff we would lose if marketing was not a thing. I think it is fair to argue that word of mouth, good prices and quality rpoducts would thrive more often without marketing, compared to brightly coloured, cheaply made, nonsense that is easy to sell
- space_fountain 3y agoI wonder sometimes how many jobs period feel useful. I think feeling useful might be very different than being useful. We spent most of our evolutionary history in small tribes with personal relationships to the people our work helped. Capitalism has let that all become much more abstract so finding a connection between what we do and it’s impact on others is much more tenuous.
- horsawlarway 3y agoI think there's also been a distinct focus on specialization at a level never before seen. When the economic unit is the household, as it was in basically all pre-industrial periods, basic upkeep means that you have to complete a relatively wide variety of tasks. Farming, cooking, cleaning, home construction and repair, furniture production, clothing production, tool production, animal husbandry, tending/nursing, child care, etc... Even divided on traditional gender roles - there was a lot of diversity in available work. Tasks changed by season and need. Modern society rewards you for specializing - do one thing forever, better than others. But people are hardwired for exploring and learning. We can get bored, tired, apathetic and disillusioned if we follow a monotonous routine at work. Even if that routine is genuinely beneficial to society at large.
- classified 3y agoJust watch American Psycho.
- idbehold 3y agoThey aren't wrong.
- mahathu 3y agoAs someone not in those fields I largely agree
- ryandrake 3y agoThe "Bullshit Jobs" phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller: "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1/2 the population digging holes so the other 1/2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.
- silisili 3y agoIf such a scenario were recognized, and we end up with something like UBI, how does one 'get ahead?' It seems some people are always wanting and willing to get ahead, either through multiple jobs, long hours, or study. Is that dream now crushed into just do nothing and exist like everyone else? The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think. Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.
- eatsyourtacos 3y agoIt's absolutely true. I'm in the technological side of finance. I create a lot of cool systems. I absolutely hate what they are applied to, but it's satisfying to use technologies and design complex systems. But in the end it is utterly pointless. However so is so much other crap in the world.. and if I'm not doing this someone else will. Thus I try to take solace in just the work I do, not necessary what it's applied to. But yeah- finance is 98% bullshit in this world.
- euroderf 3y agoHFT, perhaps? That machine that skims a point or two off the entire damn economy.
- l33t233372 3y ago> finance is 98% bullshit in this world. I think this has been famously phrased as “money is the root of all evil”
- LatteLazy 3y agoUnpopular opinion time... Feelings are important for individuals and that can have an impact en mass. But they are not accurate or meaningful ways of measuring someones actual worth. For that we have money. This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers: everyone pays lip service to the urgent need to care for the sick, educate kids etc. But when it comes time to spend money or cast votes what they actually want are cheap credit and cheap goods and services. This is the problem with all sorts of commentary like this. It relies on people's own internalized hypocrisy. And that's both very strong and very misleading.
- louzell 3y ago> This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers I think it has more to do with the proximity to money. A banker is close to lots of money moving around, and in a position to craft some scheme to extract parts of it. This basically applies to all of finance. The closer you are, the more opportunities to extract large amounts. A nurse is far removed from the flow of money.
- matwood 3y agoNot just finance. If you want to be wealthy get as close to large sums of money as possible. That's why people move to big cities and go to top schools. They are proxies to being near large sums of money.
- polygamous_bat 3y agoIt's also much harder to make money by creating value (i.e. nursing a sick person back to health) vs stealing value at scale (i.e. charging $25 overdraft fees to poor people's bank accounts.)
- Ekaros 3y agoI think it is always about the efficiency. Both nursing and teaching is low efficiency jobs. With teaching the customers or users are poor be it students or pupils. Just take a number of students in class. And multiply that by amount of money you are ready to pay for teaching each month. Now add everything else, it just doesn't scale. Same goes for nursing, a single nurse can only nurse so many people in single month. And it only gets worse if you want 24/7 coverage. At least with teaching you could do 6 hours teaching + 2 hours other work during weekdays.
- karaterobot 3y ago> It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may also view their work as socially useless because unfavorable working conditions make it seem pointless. It's important to remember that asking people about stuff like this—the pointlessness of their job, their perception of safety, how happy they are—is problematic because in the end it just comes down to how they choose to define the meaning of a concept to themselves, how they are feeling on a particular day, how the question is asked, and so many other factors. Ask the same person again under different circumstances, or present the question differently, and you may very well get a different response. I don't take studies like this with a grain of salt, I assume they are packed in salt, like barrels of cod on a transatlantic sailing voyage in the 18th century.
- mike_hearn 3y agoIt's not just the methodology that's silly, this whole line of "research" is silly and the press release is misrepresenting the paper's results. It's perhaps a useful jumping off point for people to complain about their own jobs but as a work of scholarship it has negative value. The author claims he wasn't funded by anyone, and hopefully that's true but it sounds unlikely given that the university is apparently happy to advertise it for him. Although their announcement states that "employees in financial, sales and management occupations are more likely to conclude that their jobs are of little use to society" this is highly deceptive. If we look at Figure 1 on page 12 ("percentage of socially useless jobs by occupation") then we see that the winner is Transportation and Material Moving. Second top category: Production Occupations. Well it sure doesn't get more useless than those jobs! Who needs people who make things or move stuff around? Management actually does much better than Computer/Mathematical and Food Preparation/Service. Business and Financial apparently has the same number of socially useless jobs as Installation/Maintenance/Repair. That result directly contradicts his primary claim, so he just ignores it and announces what he wanted to be true instead. Right at the bottom with the second lowest percentage of useless jobs is, of course, social science. This sort of scientific fraud is unfortunately way too common in academic research. In some fields you can't assume the abstract or press release matches what the data says. This specific paper also reinforces the narrative that academia has a high tolerance for Marxists. It cites Marx and then discusses several other sociology papers that are built directly on Marxist theory (p7)! It's not often you see a citation from 1844 in something claiming to be modern science. The premise of the paper is also pure Marxism - words like price, wage, salary and market don't appear at all, and it takes as axiomatic that there's no objective way to judge how useful a job is.
- westurner 3y ago"‘[BS]’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless. Work, Employment and Society" (2023) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170231175771 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170231175771 : > Of course, this definition raises the question of how one is to decide whether a job makes a positive, a negative, or no contribution to society at all. To make such a decision, one clearly needs a theory of social value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics#Approaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics#Approaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency : > Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off. "Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 ; Impact_investing, Strategic_alignment, #GlobalGoals (UN SDG Sustainable Development Goals) ; > You can make an impact by solving important local and global problems by investing your time, career, and savings; by listing and comparing solutions. Impact investing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing Strategic alignment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment There are 17 Global Goals. GRI Sustainability Reports are aligned with the Global Goals. Helping keep the information for the [GRI] Sustainability Report ready all year may afford additional opportunities to find meaning and impact.
- highwayman47 3y agoI used to think sales was pointless and beneath me, I don’t anymore. I work in biotech and feel my job is pointless because we don’t make any sales. I’m trying to learn sales actually.
- matwood 3y ago> I’m trying to learn sales actually. Sexy indifference.
- highwayman47 3y agoExplain
- RGamma 3y agoIs your product useful?
- highwayman47 3y agoNo
- matrix_overload 3y agoWell, automation optimized away most need for physical work. Information technology and economies of scale optimized away a lot of thinking. So, the only driving factor behind many jobs is now the power dynamics. Power is when you can tell another person to change and they are forced to do as you tell them. So, the more power-driven your corporate ladder becomes, the more useless jobs it creates. The whole purpose of those jobs is to please the boss and contribute to their feeling of power. The actual economic output of the job can be zero, or negative, as long as is produces "power output" to the next level of management. Normally, when companies are forced to compete against each other, playing the power ladder too much makes you uncompetitive, so you are forced to bring merit back on the table. Except, the zero interest rates of the whole decade and the uncontrolled mergers have mostly destroyed this. So yeah, unemployment is low now, but every job sucks and people are miserable.
- skybrian 3y agoAutomation helps, but there are plenty of jobs requiring physical labor. They’re often low paid from a worker’s perspective and very pricey from a retail customer’s perspective. Consider child care. Often this isn’t about middlemen taking profits, but rather because the work doesn’t scale and people expect pay similar to industries that do scale. Office work often is in industries that scale very well and they can afford to be less efficient.
- euroderf 3y ago> automation optimized away most need for physical work. That and fossil fuels !
- yboris 3y agoBullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/150114331X https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp... Great read, right on topic :)
- FowlSoft2013 3y agoThere is an overwhelming level of nihilism in society. It's even more apparent since most have decided to use their occupation to define their purpose in life. I don't see how we can continue down this path and see positive results.
- UncleOxidant 3y agoIf you're a nihilist and you feel like your job is pointless then you wouldn't care, right? You'd just keep rolling that rock up the hill. People feeling like their job is pointless and being bothered by the pointlessness doesn't seem like nihilism.
- FowlSoft2013 3y agoMy view is that nihilistic tendencies create the feeling of pointlessness in occupation. A job is a means to an end. These discussions regarding which jobs are pointless vs meaningful don't do anything to address that people lacking purpose are more likely to call their job pointless.
- trealira 3y agoIs it only a means to an end? You're implying the only use of a job is to collect money in order to pay for food and housing and maybe use extra money to engage in hobbies. But, assuming you're not in an alienating job, working together on a problem connects you to other people, which gives you friends (or at least some mild human connection/interaction), and it might even leave you with a sense of fulfillment. The work itself can make you happy. > My view is that nihilistic tendencies create the feeling of pointlessness in occupation. I think it's the opposite: a pointless job creates a sense of nihilism. If the thing you're forced to do every day to survive seems pointless and meaningless, it drives you to think that life itself is just pointless and meaningless, and the job leaves you with nothing but a sense of emptiness. If you feel like you're helping people in your community and doing something meaningful and indispensable, it can easily become your identity.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoI think the problem is the social environment on the job and the general disillusionment of being an adult. Cheating on the math test while in high school was as pointless (sooner or later the chickens come home to roost) but it felt amazing in the moment because you were doing it with your buddies and against the “enemy” (teacher, school etc.) Adults all of a sudden feel the need to be important so they suffer in that same scenario
- fragmede 3y ago> the chickens come home to roost For whom? For those of us who became STEM majors, absolutely. Math and its tests only got more advanced after I got into college. But for humanities majors who's requirements only required a single math class, if that, to graduate never had "the chickens come home to roost". At most they bribed or cheated their way though that one college level math class.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoOk maybe but in this case the enjoyment was also short lived. One instance of cheating Also I was talking about high school where you have a set of mates to violate rules with as opposed to college where you kinda rotate people based on circumstance and location. Also you seem really triggered and stressed out, maybe the humanities people weren't wrong picking their path after all /s
- fragmede 3y agoHm. I'm not sure where you're picking up that I'm triggered and stressed out. Can you point out where you're getting that from?
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoYour bitter attack on the humanities majors for stuff that doesn't change your life one bit (it's irrelevant for you if they cheated/bribed or not)
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- spaceman_2020 3y agoYou’ll also find that the FIRE phenomenon is far more prevalent in these professions as well.
- nickpinkston 3y agoThis says more about working for a company with a pointless mission. It may be that engineering / production jobs are more likely at companies with clearly useful missions. Sales & marketing get a bad rap, but if we want to move into the future, someone has to convince people to do so. The problem is more that there are a lot of shitty/exploitative products that shouldn't exist and S&M folks are asked to sell shitty futures, and that feels bad unless you're a sociopath... which explains why Wall St / consulting are still so attractive to a certain set.
- breakingrules 3y ago[dead]
- boredumb 3y agoAmazing how many people who are smart enough to engineer software fail to comprehend that these things are necessary for success. If you are starting a company or currently running a company, the adage of "if they build it they will come" is not true, and your finances will not miraculously manage themselves and once you reach a headcount of anything outside founders and a few direct reporting employees you will have to find some one to spend at least a portion of their bandwidth preparing/planning work and focusing peoples time and energy. Obviously there are "bullshit" jobs, as people love to reference, in massive company's with thousands of employees and a billion dollars in assets - but... ok? Of course massive bureaucracies contain some level of redundancy and cruft but, even still a lot of that is actually by design from a planning perspective.
- alephnerd 3y agoThe best Engineers tend to be those who have humility to recognize that we are working as a team across all functions, but I've seen people with this lack of humility across all roles (Finance, Sales, Mgmt, etc) in my experience. HN just tends to attract a certain type of smooth brain.
- vsareto 3y agoI have maybe a hail-mary counterpoint: The day-to-day job on an individual scale can definitely be pointless. In aggregate though, the point of the job ends up being to keep people employed and pay taxes. That's it! No one will like that explanation without a perspective change, and for good reason. I'd wager most people do try to put some effort into having skills and holding down a job. It obviously sucks for that effort to go to waste. This study is, perhaps, a sign that we should view these jobs as a form of basic income in disguise. No one's going to like that ruse because it means your skills are being wasted, sure, but the alternative is ripping the band-aid off (and it's a big one) by eliminating those jobs and moving those people to socially useful ones. This action would cause chaos, which is likely why nothing has eliminated the bullshit jobs yet. The problem is, there likely isn't enough socially useful jobs as well paying as these pointless jobs. Even if there were, you'd need training infrastructure to transition people to new jobs. So why then should people change their perspectives? Well, the fault of having a pointless job is not really on the person, but the economy, which has grown very quickly and added jobs without regard to how socially useful they are on a long timeline. Nothing really keeps this job growth in check except market forces, which may not be rational. If you can mentally deal with the fact that your skills are going to waste and not being used for something socially important, and frankly stop caring as much at your job, you can use the time on the pointless job for more fulfilling things.
- sam0x17 3y agoI promise you I can name 100s of FANG upper managers whose day-to-day is pointless or a net negative. If not net negative to the company then certainly net negative to society. You aggregate those together, you just get a bigger net negative. That's how addition works. The collective net-negativity of hundreds of net negative upper managers doesn't magically trickle down into a net positive when viewed in aggregate. Also, if we're being fair, "pointless" is still net negative in the amount of the person's salary, at minimum, unless we're talking about unpaid volunteers.
- matrix_overload 3y agoThey are net positive by not starting a competing startup, and slowly rotting away into obsolescence in a snake pit. Have you noticed that an increasing share of innovation now comes from Asia, while U.S. startups are increasingly about grift or skirting regulation?
- JimtheCoder 3y agoI like how everyone here likes to sh*t on sales and marketing. Especially when so many people here have tried to create something tech based that solves a problem, but their endeavor fails because...they don't know how to sell it.
- jbverschoor 3y agoBecause they are lol
- coding123 3y agoI feel like the vast majority of people want to kill the idea of responsibility.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sam0x17 3y agoI love that we worry about AI maximizing the wrong objective function and killing us all as a result, when our own economic system has been doing that for centuries by maximizing profit over human life
- xyst 3y agoI am still waiting for the "AI revolution" to take over these "pointless" jobs and for Universal Basic Income (UBI) to become necessary. With the current state of AI, I feel accounting and most of the finance sector can be largely automated. 2-3 work days can become the norm where humans double check the work output from AI and sign off for correctness. The rest of the week can be used for personal time/investing in other areas/family time. Feels like we have never achieved that. Even some companies are reverting back to pre-pandemic and going back to 5 day work weeks and returning back to the office for no good reason other than "CuLtUrE"
- ne0flex 3y agoThis definitely hit home. I work for a bank and my position is helping connect the bank's clients to startups. If I was working for one of the corporate client's as part of their CVC or innovation investment scouting team, that would be different but just brokering the introduction kind of rings shallow. The only purpose I see to my position is when a startup is talking to a corporate but not necessarily to the key person to get the discussion moving. Corporates are generally capable of reaching out to startups on their own and the startups are usually eager to talk with them. Despite all that, I find it surprising that some of the corporates are unaware of some of the main players (at least from my perspective) in their target sectors.
- SpriglyElixir12 3y agoThis is going to be unpopular on HN but lots of software jobs are also pointless. So much effort gets put into automating things like finance or improving advertising. These things don't really add a lot of value to society but instead extract value from it. I know I'm hypocritical because I myself work in one of these areas but lately the lack of purpose has been hitting me hard.
- mrweasel 3y agoAbsolutely, while I'm sure there are people who find joy in solving hard problems related to fields like ad-tech, it's not a particularly useful job. Finance as well, there are tons of jobs that involve creating these huge convoluted systems which only exist because rules and regulation are pretty much incomprehensible. For my self, working on stuff like e-commerce sites or deployment automation can be a bit pointless. Many of those jobs only existed because a particular client felt special and wanted something that was a better "fit" for their particular situation... Most of it is non-sense. Fortunately I've also be lucky enough to work on products that truly makes society better, strangely enough those jobs pay way less.
- Borrible 3y agoI feel for them. The bittersweet decadence of a superfluous but well-rewarded, perhaps even parasitic existence. Life is hard, but fortunately everything is meaningless if you take the right perspective. Nobody is forcing them, right? "The game of life is hard to play, I'm gonna lose it anyway, The losing card I'll someday lay" - Johnny Mandel
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thisisit 3y agoI am unsure if the headline portrays the content correctly. The content is whether people "their work gave them “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society”. There might be people who feel their jobs do not have social impact but important nonetheless on a personal level. In that case, they don't exactly feel their jobs are pointless. And jobs like the ones in finance have been specifically targeted for adding nothing to society. Or sales being scummy. So, people might feel the overall impact of such labeling and feel that they have net zero impact on society.
- woodpanel 3y agoTo offer a counter narrative to the all-too-commonly offered BS-Jobs-theory which almost always is used in discussions that shall end with „see, thats why we need UBI, eh?“ (as is the old automation-will-take-our-jobs chestnut): Lots of the pointlessness stems from the many hours spent by white collar workers making up for other peoples laziness/uninformedness/stressedness, basically bridging the knowledge gap. So instead of feasting in the idea that whole segments of society should succumb to government allowances (effectively ending social mobility) we might show more virtousness toward human progress by focusing on not wasting other peoples time.
- raydiatian 3y agoGood. Fire them.
- pankbyton 3y agoI worked a year for a bank and will never do it again. It was very hard to get anything done as a tech person and outsider because every system required new permissions that were usually only granted after a long period of waiting and interference by management. Hardly anything was expected of me beyond showing up in the morning. I also realized that many of the old-timers did not do much at all. Banks are seen as the epitome of capitalism but they have just as much in common with Soviet organizations as with market institutions at this point. They are in effect junior partners of the government. The weight of the regulations keep outsiders out and shield them from competition. All they have to do is keep the politicians happy and rake in the dough.
- NetOpWibby 3y agoWhat a timely article. I see this just as I'm finishing listening to this interview with Codie Sanchez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkxZCJ2pYqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkxZCJ2pYqs She was previously a highly paid finance person who hated her job (60-hour weeks).
- Animats 3y agoThis chart is always useful.[1] It shows what people in the US are actually doing. Making stuff, total, is under 14% of the workforce. That's agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. 14%. The federal government is tiny, 1.4%. State and local governments are larger, and that's mostly teachers and cops. Many pointless jobs could be ended by taxing zero-sum activity. That includes most advertising and about half of finance. Finance in the US has doubled in size since the 1960s. Despite this, managed funds, as a class, under perform index funds. So, yes, there are a lot of pointless jobs. Where does that leave us? [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
- nprateem 3y agoLeaders largely fail to put work in perspective and lend meaning to it IMO.
- euroderf 3y agoRandom thoughts ahead. You have been warned. In 1987 I visited Soviet Estonia. Seeking gifts to take back to the USA, I bought a bunch of bottle openers. They were simple and robust. Stamped metal. And (get this) with the price stamped right in the metal. See the benefits ? No arbitrage/speculation: the price is fixed, and dirt cheap. No marketing costs: that right there is going to bring down the price. No R&D bureau to finance: it's a piece of cheap stamped metal. No pilferage: who in their right mind is going to risk their job stealing cheap stamped metal bottle openers ? Translate this kind of product idea to an OECD economy. The existence of a cheap stamped metal bottle opener does not preclude the existence of fancy bottle openers, just as the existence of cheap mass-produced coffee mugs does not preclude the existence of hand-thrown hand-painted cat-themed ceramic coffee mugs. But "universal goods" (let's call them that) are made & distributed basically at cost. Similarly, how about machines that dispense nutritious biscuits for free, if you insert your ID ? Nobody says they have to taste good, but they'd keep ya going. Maybe like in Repo Man: he opens the fridge and takes out a can labeled FOOD.
- Teever 3y agoPeople waste so much time the argument over which is better capitalism or communism when they fail to appreciate that both systems are technically failures because they both have not lead to a scenario where the cost of ensuring that the base physiological needs of every member of society has dropped to a point where it's just a given that every member of society will have access to three meals a day and a secure and warm shelter. We throw away double digit percentages of our food every year and there are laws that ban people from feeding the homeless. It's fucking sickening.
- edanm 3y ago> both systems [capitalism and communism] are technically failures because they both have not lead to a scenario where the cost of ensuring that the base physiological needs of every member of society has dropped to a point where it's just a given that every member of society will have access to three meals a day and a secure and warm shelter. What? That's a very weird take. Firstly, your goal might be way too high. Even in theory, a system can be optimal without being good enough. If there isn't a way to produce enough food (for example) no matter what, then a system that produces the maximum amount of food that is possible wouldn't be a failure in my eyes. Secondly, this makes an implicit comparison between the two systems and finds them both similarly wanting. But capitalism almost completely solves the problem of "three meals a day and warm shelter", whereas communism famously doesn't solve it at all. Under capitalism, a tiny minority of people starved. Under communism, millions starved. It's not even close. And while yes, the fact that we throw away so much food is terrible, but it's definitely better than not having enough, and that happens because of capitalism, for the most part.
- dh2022 3y agoEarth to University of Zurich - none of the managers I ever worked for felt their work is pointless. On the contrary - they felt their work is so necessary that they were working very hard to expand their charter / mission / statement of purpose / committee / whatever....
- baerrie 3y agoI have an answer: regulate those unchecked money machines they serve (aka skim some money off the top), and spread the excess wealth among the rest of the citizens. Then those workers will be fulfilled by ensuring the public’s wellbeing, not just feeding corporate behemoths.
- more_corn 3y agoI agree
- heattemp99 3y agoI've posted here before that I was top 0.3% nationwide in car sales, selling about 34 semi luxury cars a month average. I never felt my job was pointless. I felt the opposite. If I didn't answer my phone, a total idiot was going to answer it. If I didn't get to the customer, someone was going to lie to them or omit useful info and they'd get screwed a bit. Someone would frustrate them so much they'd buy something they don't even want just to avoid that dealership. So I felt a mission to get to as many people as I could. If you're good at your job, and have some integrity, it's easy to value your job even if it's sales.
- wesapien 3y agoI'm not having any of this. So what if other people think it's bullshit. As long as YOU don't think it's bullshit, that's all that matters and everyone can go...People will wish they have bullshit jobs when they are gone and can't provide for themselves/families.
- credit_guy 3y agoI'll go against 99% of the commenters here and say that the jobs are not pointless at all. It's just that people doing the job don't have the bird's eye view (or experience) to understand their usefulness. Here's a simple example: for the entire 19th century (the 1800's), the British empire was at least 20 years ahead of anyone else. Part of this was due to their formidable Royal Navy. But most of this was due to their financial system. All European governments, princes, aristocrats, people with money, kept their cash parked in British banks. Why? They trusted the British banks more than the banks in their own countries. As a consequence, British businessmen had better access to credit, scratch that, infinitely better access to credit, than their continental counterparts. Which meant that more enterprise was happening in Britain, and so, by some form of law of large numbers, more innovation, hence technological advantage, hence higher GDP, and more tax money to fund expensive cutting edge ships for the Navy, and round and round in virtuous cycles. Finance is fairly unintuitive, and it's easy to perceive it as a waste of people's time and talent. But it's finance and the rule of law (and the Royal Navy) that made a tiny island nation lend its name to the phrase "Pax Britannica", a period of stability and prosperity that humanity had not seen since the Pax Romana, almost two millennia prior. If you work in finance, don't sell yourself cheap. Your work is meaningful.
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoI work IT at a market maker/prop firm. 110% bullshit job but it’s low stress, pays well, great benefits, they feed me, pay for my gym, and give me plenty of vacation and unlimited sick time. On top of this I’m very good friends with my coworker so I’m basically getting paid to work with my bud. I don’t need my job to have meaning.