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Bullcrap Jobs (1 Viewer)

Do you have a bullcrap job?

  • Yes

    Votes: 11 13.9%
  • At least 50% bullcrap

    Votes: 15 19.0%
  • No

    Votes: 53 67.1%

  • Total voters
    79
I definitely think that people confuse "wants" and "needs" and thus vastly overestimate how much money it takes to live a meaningful life, but I still go back to the expectation of a certain amount of time spent working.  I've been salary for 20 years, and my take-home pay has definitely gone up over that time.  But for the most part the only changes I can push for is in compensation, not time spent working.  If my manager offered me a 5% raise and I countered by saying "since you think I'm earning 105% of my salary, how about I just work 5% less and keep my salary constant", he'd look at me like I was from Jupiter.  It's not something that most people are even conditioned to entertain as an option.
We are conditioned to live above our means and go into tremendous debt.......my wife and I made a choice years ago to live simply, and stay out of debt...our kids harass us for more, cuz their friends have bigger homes and more comforts......we are not keeping up with the Jones'!  .I took a big pay cut and gained quality of life.....I also paid my way thru college by taking out loans that I paid back.

My only point is I agree......wants vs needs.......it's easy to see what the Jones' have and think they are living on easy street, but in reality, they prolly work their asses off and are up their ears in debt!  That's no way to live!

 
I'm not speaking to low wage...I'm a professional engineer with a PhD and an MBA.  I started my career at 33,000 per year and worked often 60 hours per week because that's what engineering is.
I'm lost as to how a PhD engineer only commands 33k.  

 
I'm lost as to how a PhD engineer only commands 33k.  
That's starting wage for a consulting engineer is quite low (I'm a civil not a computer which is much higher).  

And as I mentioned they have since farmed a lot of that work out to the third world.  

 
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I'm lost as to how a PhD engineer only commands 33k.  
That also struck me as on the low end, but depending on location, year, and industry it's not insane.  I shared an office in grad school in '99 with a guy who took a lowball ~43K offer to go back home with his Master's, and I know that some industries put very little stock in a PhD.

 
That also struck me as on the low end, but depending on location, year, and industry it's not insane.  I shared an office in grad school in '99 with a guy who took a lowball ~43K offer to go back home with his Master's, and I know that some industries put very little stock in a PhD.
In general a PhD is overkill for engineering, but that salary is pretty low even for a new bachelor's.

I had no idea civil engineers were so poorly paid.

 
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In general a PhD is overkill for engineering, but that salary is pretty low even for a new bachelor's.

I had no idea civil engineers were so poorly paid.
I don't remember the numbers, but I remember in high school looking at average salaries of civil versus mechanical and it pushed me to choose mechanical.

Killface's talk about offshoring was more surprising to me.  Offshoring is a way of life in the electronics industry, but I would have thought one of the advantages of civil engineering as a career would be less offshoring pressure.

 
I don't remember the numbers, but I remember in high school looking at average salaries of civil versus mechanical and it pushed me to choose mechanical.

Killface's talk about offshoring was more surprising to me.  Offshoring is a way of life in the electronics industry, but I would have thought one of the advantages of civil engineering as a career would be less offshoring pressure.
To be fair I wanted to be a professor but at the time and it continues to this day it's very hard to find a fulltime job in a university.  They keep you on post-grad work for years and never give tenure anymore so you make peanuts for decades

If i knew i was going to consulting i wouldn't have done it.

This was the mid 90s for me

Offshoring is huge in civil nowadays.  All the big firms put a couple of shiny faces in the cities and then send all the work to pakistan

 
Yes, I understand.  But the opposite could be true too.  I work for a smaller financial institution.  My company could be merged with a larger one and my job and others eliminated without much impact on society.  The point I'm trying to make though is banking is critical for a modern society to function and people have to be doing these jobs.  In that way, they aren't bullcrap.
The book itself claims that upwards of 90% of jobs in real estate, finance, and insurance are in the category of the title. I think that is partly because the author clearly has leftist leanings and thus views rent seeking activity as neccesarily creating useless jobs.

One of the more powerful tools he uses is to define the different categories these jobs can be grouped into, which helped frame my own mental experiences. Box-checkers, task-masters, and etc.

 
The book discusses all this stuff in much greater depth, from what bull#### jobs are, why they're bad, why they've proliferated, etc.  At the end he suggests that a Universal Basic Income could help fix the problem but makes clear that the book is about identifying the problem and generating discussion rather than proposing a specific solution.  I'm interested to hear from anyone with thoughts about this.  From a public policy perspective the book changes everything.  Politicians are always talking about creating jobs and the dignity of work, when the real crisis isn't that too many people are jobless, it's that too many people are doing jobs for no good reason while they could be enjoying their lives doing other things.  
It really grates on the brain to hear politicians talk about creating or destroying jobs now.

 
I usually have a modest backlog of audiobooks that I save for car trips and then finish up over the course of a couple of long runs or something, so I finally got around to starting this one yesterday when I was on the road.  I'm only about halfway through but it's been a thought-provoking listen so far.  

I like the fact that the author draws quite a few examples of BS jobs from academia -- he's definitely on to something there.  Most people who work at my university actually have real jobs that just happen to be mostly invisible to students, faculty, and the public.  But some of the author's anecdotes correspond exactly to things that I have first-hand experience with.  For example, the office secretary who basically does her boss' job for him or her.  Or, even better, the office secretary whose job exists entirely because it makes her boss feel like a big shot to have two secretaries instead of just one.  I was listening to some of this and was like "Hey how does this guy know so much about our History department?"  (I'm making up the part about the History department because I don't actually want to name real names on a message board, but I could cite multiple real-life examples of this stuff at my institution).  

My current job is probably 80% BS and 20% real work.  It doesn't have to be that way -- I had way more stuff to do when I was originally hired into this position, but that was with a boss who liked to delegate and didn't really care how I solved problems as long as they got solved in a way that was broadly acceptable.  My current boss doesn't like to delegate and wants things done a very specific way, which means I don't have much latitude for decision-making.  Also, my current boss does quite a bit of the job that I was originally hired to do, and those duties have been replaced by stuff that's almost entirely BS.  I don't want to go into too much detail, but the gist of it is that a large chunk of my official duties now involve supervising people who absolutely positively do not need my supervision, which is a phenomenon the author discusses.

Where I differ with the author is that I think this is kind of awesome.  The author would say that I'm an outlier in that regard, and I'm open to the argument that he's right.  I'm highly introverted, highly self-motivated, and spend large amounts of time on meta-cognition relative to normal people.  I have no problem finding intellectually engaging ways to spend my workdays, arguing with strangers on the internet for example.  Retirement is a ways off yet, but I'm a lot closer to retirement than my colleagues think.  Not close enough yet that I can truly just coast, but close enough that I can see the crest of the hill from here.  Being paid to do like two hours of real work in a typical day suits me just fine.  And besides, I like working in higher education, I like my colleagues, I like my boss despite the delegation issues (different people have different leadership styles), and I like most of the people I come into contact with.  If I ever really get bored, there's a tenured faculty job waiting for me any time I want to go back, so there's also that.

Like I said, I'm not finished with the book yet, and I don't sign on to all the author's arguments.  He devotes a chapter to how ancient civilizations wouldn't have understood the concept the people selling their labor by the hour or by the day, but that seems kind of pointless -- the development of modern labor markets is a good example of clear-cut moral progress compared to what it replaced (e.g. slavery).  But overall I think the author makes some really astute observations about how bureaucracies are shaped by factors that are more sociology and less economics.     

 

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