I'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 (o

I'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.