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is your entire career pointless? are you working in a bullshit job?

scureto1 said:
Financial services? Bain Capital - that's what that industry has to offer to society. People doing this kind of blood-sucking work are paid anywhere from 100k to the millions.
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I have yet to meet anyone who complains about the pay of hedge fund and private equity guys and be willing to put in the level of work they do.
 
scureto1 said:
the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.

With the exception of telemarketers (who are paid quite poorly and should probably be lumped in with the laborers, not the "admiinistrative" sector), all of these professions are paid far, far more than productive jobs but add very little or nothing to society. Yes, perhaps they do increase revenue and possibly even profit for the companies they work for, but only in a vampiric way. The revenue produced by this type of job is ALWAYS at the expense of either other (usually smaller) businesses or their middle or lower class employees/customers/clients.

Financial services? Bain Capital - that's what that industry has to offer to society. People doing this kind of blood-sucking work are paid anywhere from 100k to the millions.
Corporate law? This is an industry that exists solely to protect corporations from this industry.
Academic administration? I doubt I have to say much to convince you of the uselessness of this industry, from the anti-academia tone of your post.
Health administration? I seem to recall some discussion about the cost of healthcare skyrocketing. I wonder if this industry is a piece of that puzzle.

etc. etc.

All of those jobs, while offering nothing but zero-sum (probably negative-sum, in reality) growth, are paid vastly more than the jobs where people actually produce things or provide an end-user service of actual value. Those are the salaries you should be comparing to when you say that teachers and tradesmen are paid "quite well".
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this is nonsense. all of these "worthless industries" are the very necessary backbone of the industries that actually DO produce things. our economy operates on an absolutely massive scale, so we have incredibly elaborate support services. investment banks provide support for the creation and growth of companies, by managing the sale of their stock to stockholders. corporate law provides support for businesses by helping them negotiate their activities according to the very complicated rules we have to manage their very complicated operations. and our cutting edge medical facilities and academic institutions? pretty useless without their administrative staff. if they didn't need them, i'm sure the universities and hospitals would have figured it out and started saving millions decades ago. sure there's plenty of bloat and our healthcare system is stupid, but when you say that these industries are useless, you betray a woeful lack of knowledge about economies.
 
double ewe said:
this is nonsense. all of these "worthless industries" are the very necessary backbone of the industries that actually DO produce things. our economy operates on an absolutely massive scale, so we have incredibly elaborate support services. investment banks provide support for the creation and growth of companies, by managing the sale of their stock to stockholders. corporate law provides support for businesses by helping them negotiate their activities according to the very complicated rules we have to manage their very complicated operations. and our cutting edge medical facilities and academic institutions? pretty useless without their administrative staff. if they didn't need them, i'm sure the universities and hospitals would have figured it out and started saving millions decades ago. sure there's plenty of bloat and our healthcare system is stupid, but when you say that these industries are useless, you betray a woeful lack of knowledge about economies.
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You do have a lot of valid points and perhaps I was using an excess of hyperbole. I agree that, in principal, all of those jobs play a very important role. But as the original article mentioned, these industries have experienced unprecedented growth and in nearly every example, have grown vastly beyond the point where they are adding valuel and on into becoming like a vine that has wrapped around and is now choking the industry that it was supposed to help organize/coordinate. One would expect typical market forces to "trim the fat" and get rid of inefficient excesses, but every single one of these industries has a means by which it can either insulate itself and make itself appear necessary even while being an overall drain, or to provide the negative sum gains I mentioned before, which appear good to the business employing these people but are a net loss to society.

I was not referring to venture capital - venture capital is a great example of capitalism working the way it is supposed to. People who have money take on risk so that people with ideas and less money can execute them. The powerful take the risks because they are better equipped to handle sometimes losing and those with ideas get to execute things they would never be able to do without someone to finance them. I was referring to private equity firms and in particular, leveraged buyouts. An example from http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829?page=3 :

Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company's management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here's the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it's the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let's say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company's bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

"That interest," says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, "just sucks the profit out of the company."

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company's costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in "management fees." Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company's upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

This business model wasn't really "helping," of course – and it wasn't new. Fans of mob movies will recognize what's known as the "bust-out," in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company's credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. "It's the bust-out," one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. "That's all it is."
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A system that rewards parasitic behavior like this and CREATES inefficiency while funneling money from one set of owners to another is a system that needs re-evaluating. That isn't free-market capitalism, it is a disease.

Like I said, I recognize that in principal these fields play an important role, but they have all grown into a bloated, overgrown mess. I believe that the net loss from the inefficiency that the bloat creates is draining more money from the economy than it is saving. Not only that, but these no-net-gain jobs are very appealing to intelligent upper middle class people as a guaranteed solid paycheck and a position of prestige. They siphon talented people away from more creative paths that could be adding real, tangible value to society: like scientist, artist (of all variety), entrepreneur, etc.
 
no offense, but i know enough about finance to know that such a simplistic explanation is so full of holes as to be worthless. i certainly don't know enough to tell you that bain was a model of ethical business practices, but i don't think you've convincingly supported your claim that their entire industry is a worthless parasite dragging down the economy.

scureto1 said:
the net loss from the inefficiency that the bloat creates is draining more money from the economy than it is saving
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your entire argument rests on this assumption that these jobs serve no purpose to the economy, and you really just aren't making a convincing case that that is true.
 
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My job isn't bullshit at all! It's pretty important.
 
I'm an office administrator for our small office and it feels like I get stuck with all the menial work.
It's menial but it is important to our company so I guess it's not too bad!
 
I worked in a call center ordering taxis for 2 years. Very menial work. All the people I worked with thought they were the shit and even one little mistake they would start talking shit about you. I mean all I had to do was listen to some person and then type what they said in the computer. I could do this about 99.9% right but once and while you hit the wrong key or you miss hear someone and all hell broke loose in the office and the employees would start diagnosing you as dyslexic or schizoid. I left without even saying one word.
Hopefully I get this job walking dogs for this company. Im suppose to have a follow up interview this week!
 
I read an article a while back about the death of the "career". It was quite a while back though, I don't know where to begin looking for it. It basically outlined the notion that unless you're a successful entrepreneur, work in high finance or other certain fields like PhD level education, the aspects of career longevity are diminishing. Menial labor isn't as rewarding as it used to be with the introduction of outsourcing to cheaper labor sources and technological advancement. University students with grand dreams of long and fruitful careers may be looking at decades of going through several disappointing jobs instead before retiring if they do retire.

To a conflict theorist though, this might be interesting.
 
I'm in uni, I'm a premed (sort of - I'm in the UK, so I'm studying for a degree then doing graduate entry medicine hopefully, which is similar to your 'premeds')... A little nervous, I'm doing it a few years later than most people in that position, I'm pretty scared I'll just be too old and will have pissed my life away at uni by the time I'm a dr. If I'll ever be a dr. Not sure I'm good enough.
 
ahint said:
I'm in uni, I'm a premed (sort of - I'm in the UK, so I'm studying for a degree then doing graduate entry medicine hopefully, which is similar to your 'premeds')... A little nervous, I'm doing it a few years later than most people in that position, I'm pretty scared I'll just be too old and will have pissed my life away at uni by the time I'm a dr. If I'll ever be a dr. Not sure I'm good enough.
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Don't sweat it. When I started grad school I was the oldest student in the class. My life experiences were richer than my classmates not because I was any better than them, but because most of them were entering grad school right out of undergrad and just hadn't lived life yet. This very fact gave me a slightly different perspective on many of the issues we debated in seminars.

If anything, I would argue that being a little older will give you an advantage over the young people. Education is like many things in life. It's about the journey, not the destination.

Best of luck.
 
The ages in my grad cohort ranged from...er...22 to 50-something...life is less rushed than people think in this respect.

ebola
 
My job is bull shit and a joke. I work my ass off every day for nothing. Working on getting a phlebotomy job but is that gonna be any better.. guess atleast I'm helping some people kind of. Its more about the money from me.
 
career is a bullshit word in itself

career -

Something that society forces upon people, esp. nowadays. If you do not have a career, people automatically assume you are a lazy good-for-nothing bum. An unnecessary thing to have, and it's a shame that so many people spend all their lives aspiring to have a career. The concept is installed into most western children from birth, as their first twenty-odd years of their life is dedicated to "education", which generally teaches people to become "clever". Being "clever" means you will have a "good" career.

The majority of humans hate their careers, and up dying miserable. But hey, at least they paid off their mortgage.

Also, a pretentious way of saying "job".
"Careers are a twentieth century invention, and I don't want one" - Christopher McCandless
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Yes, I'm a damn bank teller, at BoA nonetheless. I started a couple weeks ago and it amazes me how complicated people make their finances out to be. Not only that, but I recently read about a bank in the US that is doing away with human tellers altogether and switching to automation, which is exactly what every bank should do. Child/Teenage/Young Adult/Drinking Adult would kick me in the fucking nuts if they found out what I was doing, I should be playing music all day everyday and now I stand at a desk and send checks through a scanner.
 
MonKeYDNA said:
Yes, I'm a damn bank teller, at BoA nonetheless. I started a couple weeks ago and it amazes me how complicated people make their finances out to be. Not only that, but I recently read about a bank in the US that is doing away with human tellers altogether and switching to automation, which is exactly what every bank should do. Child/Teenage/Young Adult/Drinking Adult would kick me in the fucking nuts if they found out what I was doing, I should be playing music all day everyday and now I stand at a desk and send checks through a scanner.
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Sorry you're working for The Man. Can't you play music nights and weekends?
 
I have an awful pretty bullshit job, the owner sucks and doesn't know how to run a business and I'm literally watching the place fall out of business. I do enjoy watching him suffer as no one comes in the doors because I'm on my way out very soon for another shit hole job but whatever, thats my life.
 
^I have an okay job but the owners just don't know how to run a business. They are expanding but not hiring people to obviously see how most of us can handle a lot of work. If only the operational side was good then it will be more organized and we will have more clients here in North America.
 
career just means the general field of the job market you want to get into, I had no idea people looked at a word so negatively. Nobody is saying you should strive to work for the same company for the majority of your life but if you gain experience in a field it is something you can never have taken away from you so why not search for another job that is similar if you want to live comfortably?

thats just how I look at it
 
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