If your job main tool is PowerPoint then there's a high probability that your job is a bullshit job.
Cries in teacher
Teachers' jobs are anything but bullshit. However, the modern schooling system sucks, teachers shouldn't be doing/have to do what they currently do.
anything related to planning, creation and targeting of ads
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most CEOs.
If you can be the CEO of multiple companies at the same time, then you're probably not doing much in that position.
A lot of expensive business consulting (think PwC or Deloitte) exists just to tell organizations things the orgs already know.
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.
People I know who work in consulting have said they charge an outrageous amount of money to speak to factory line workers and say what they've said to the factory managers because the managers are too up themselves to do it
Tax prep software companies and tax prep services in general.
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.
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.
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.
Now, that, is a postage tax.
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.
Managers of people can be good.
Managers of managers are almost always useless.
Anyone who earns any portion of income by hanging shit on my doorknob.
Anything in the online sports betting space. Addicts, scumbags, degenerates, and the people who make money off them.
Anybody working in SEO / "search engine optimisation." Complete bottomfeeding scumfuck grift. The only reason it's not considered fraud is because the government hasn't caught up to it yet.
Landlords the worst
Influencers?
Health insurance agent, health insurance CEO, health insurance board member, etc
99% of middle management could have been automated away a decade ago
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.
Scrum master
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.
Any job can be a bullshit job actually. But for me:
"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.
Money managers, financial management. Yeah, they make sense in capitalism but they really don't produce anything tangible.
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.
Bankers. Specifically, the high up mega bankers.
Also politicians.
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.”
GNOME Foundation names "professional shaman" as new executive director
That's kind of a two-fer right there.
Middle management
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