DAMunzy,

Money managers, financial management. Yeah, they make sense in capitalism but they really don’t produce anything tangible.

lorty,
@lorty@lemmy.ml avatar

The financial industry is, ostensibly, about connecting people that need money to people that have more than they need. In practice it’s about skimming from the top of EVERYTHING in society.

Takumidesh,

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.

xenoclast,

If the business is to produce educated people. Teachers provide the core benefit… and pretty measurable.

It’s when there’s a teacher with 7 line managers that are just have meetings to talk about the teachers “output” that causes the problem.

DAMunzy,

I’ll agree to that but still wish we didn’t have a “need” for finance people.

afraid_of_zombies,

Yeah but those aren’t groups I have to deal with unless I choose to. You really can’t get around the financial system. It’s not like I can take a 100 bucks and walk up to say a gas station and say “1 share please”. And before you say Robinhood keep in mind that you don’t actually own those stocks, they own them and you are just “managing it”.

AdolfSchmitler,

I mean most are just greedy cuz the field attracts those kind of people. You’d be surprised how many people have next to no financial literacy and a GOOD financial expert can do legitimate good for these people.

DAMunzy,

I did say it makes sense in capitalism. I too pay to use one. I’d like a world without them.

cricket97,

They provide plebs access to the complicated world of finance and pass on some of the yield. I think that’s valuable.

resin85,

What does Atwater make?

What do you mean, like, how much money does the company make?

Oh, no, I mean what do we make?

I don’t follow. We make money.

No, I know we make money. I mean, what do we create?

We create wealth.

No, no, I mean, what do we build, what do we design, you know? Because I have some ideas that could really help the company.

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, we don’t build anything.

Presi300,
@Presi300@lemmy.world avatar

Influencers… Do I really need to say anything else?

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

well they just got out of the rat race too well

mojo,

They really should be making like $50k/year max.

xenoclast,

It’s basically modelling. With the same spread of poorly paid to insanely paid for no good reason.

Influencers in the modern age are competing for advertiser attention.

z00s,

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.

Meltrax,

Managers of people can be good.

Managers of managers are almost always useless.

Cryophilia,

They’re only there to act as a buffer between the C-suite and the peasants.

This is a very important role in some companies, otherwise the C suite meddling would stop any work from getting done.

I’ve had two excellent managers and both of them saw their primary purpose as being a bullshit filter to free up the rest of us to do actual work.

z00s,

That is a good point actually.

afraid_of_zombies,

I am just thinking of my job. The client wants something stupid, I have to pick and choose my battles. When it comes time for me to hand over to fabrication I get yelled at. Never mind the fact that what the fabrication manager sees is the aftermath of my work. They had say 13 bad ideas and I got it reduced to say 6.

Lancoian,

how are you connecting cancelling of WFH to middle managers ?

Also in your ideal company you don’t have team leads department heads but peasants talk to CEOs directly ?

Semi-Hemi-Demigod,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

Worker owned cooperatives, worker managed teams, company decisions made democratically.

All other kinds of companies are dictatorships.

Lancoian,

and why should that be any better? just because it appears democratic does not mean it makes it automatically “better” <- name 1 cooperation which has shown success for every 1000 “dictatorships”

democracies are plagued with slow reaction time which would take away your entire market edge. Also democries require transparency. If everyone knows the costing structure/ suppliers… you are done.

afraid_of_zombies,

Why would we be done? Most of this stuff is public record or easy to determine if you have a head for business finance.

Lancoian,

not really… even for publically traded companies the you cannot tell much about their suppliers and customers. Most of the customers of the Firm I work for have NDAs stating we cannot openly advertise.

Only in services/tech sector where product differentiation is large you are a bit isolated form these concerns.

afraid_of_zombies,

Oh please my competitors are often using the same suppliers and they have the same type of beancounters we have. Especially in my industry where we have a bunch of overlap. Just recently I had a corporate partner put together a quote for something we normally buy but wanted them to buy it. They came back with a price within a few percent of what we normally pay.

There is a reason why the three letter agencies are so good at catching money laundering. They have data on what X type of business should be buying and selling at what markup.

I bet you can do it. Just start looking at your numbers.

Lancoian,

so you agree that numbers aren’t currently in the public domain. You just think they can be and it wouldn’t hurt.

Also this isn’t the only problem I outlined. it’s one of them.

also people are often disinterested and unqualified to even understand a balance sheet. let alone deciding on company direction.

I just find it fascinating that many people are convinced that they can run a company while they aren’t even able to manage their own finances

Semi-Hemi-Demigod,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

"Why would having a say in making decisions about your employment be any better than just doing whatever the richest idiot says?"

Do you even hear yourself? They've got you loving the taste of boot polish.

Lancoian,

go freelance. you don’t have to. since your consider yourself smarter than your boss try starting a business.

it’s a trade off between income fluctuation and stability.

since you didn’t address any of my points but chose to just respond with random statements, I take it you were convinced but too ingrained with your original statement to admit. It’s fine happens to many of us.

glad to have helped you thinking critically.

z00s,

Found the middle manager

Lancoian,

haha no right now I am peasant class.

Rednax,

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.

bradorsomething,

They provide liquidity and price stability.

kent_eh,

price stability.

No, the opposite of that.

cricket97,

Not at all. They are the ones who make markets efficient. Although I would consider frontrunning retail using private order flow data is bullshit.

sin_free_for_00_days,

God I wish they would tax trades. Not even much. Like 1,000 trades for a dollar or something. Just to stop that type of fuckery.

Joker,

Anything in the online sports betting space. Addicts, scumbags, degenerates, and the people who make money off them.

ettyblatant,
@ettyblatant@lemmy.world avatar

Anyone who earns any portion of income by hanging shit on my doorknob.

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S,
@PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

The entire defense industry.

HerrLewakaas,

Yeah as is evident in Ukraine

Moron

PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S,
@PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Yeah because we would definitely be motivated to manufacture fucking Hellfire missiles and landmines without the pressures of global capitalism… /s

Like I get it, getting rid of the defense industry ≠ getting rid of war, but it would be a much more daunting task to wage war if we didn’t have fucking weapons factories.

son_named_bort,

Life coach

Marcbmann,

Honestly, can just be a different form of therapy. Worked with one in conjunction with a therapist through a service provided by my medical insurance.

The therapist was completely useless. The life coach had me questioning the way I thought about things, and got me to seriously reevaluate the ways I caused myself stress. All she did was ask questions, but they got me to see things differently. Helped a lot.

danileonis,
@danileonis@lemmy.ml avatar

It depends on what you mean by “contribute”. Most of the jobs right now don’t contribute to nothing if not maintain the (zombie) capitalism system.

Narrrz,

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.

NOT_RICK,
@NOT_RICK@lemmy.world avatar

I think of this in the context of healthcare constantly

agressivelyPassive,

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.

spittingimage,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

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.

agressivelyPassive,

I’m in the digitalisation part of administration. And I’m certainly handling a ton of processes that are not redundant, but plain useless.

Haywire,

Do you believe in unfettered free markets? Those jobs are very often to implement compliance to restrictions in the markets.

agressivelyPassive,

No, they are not.

They are often enough purely internal documents or remnants of old days, where certain documents were actually important, maybe.

Cryophilia,

Depends on the industry. If literally everyone just always documented everything, my job would be much easier.

thereisalamp,

The company I work for now has very much this attitude for the last 50 years.

As a result they have 3 locations, no sops, and no accountability.

Over the last 6 months is been my job to put us back in compliance with local and federal reporting requirements and develop SOPs. The feedback from the bottom up is that it’s wonderful to have consistency, different bosses giving the same answers to questions, auditors being able to complete audits in expected and appropriate times, and in compliance with reporting regulations.

Can companies go overboard and employ people like me who do busy unnecessary work? Absolutely. But it is definitely appropriate to have a couple of administrators.

agressivelyPassive,

Rules and procedures are always a trade-off. However, I would argue that the vast majority of organizations have way too many of them and produces way too much busy work.

Just look at your own example - I’m 90% sure, that the different locations did have procedures and did document stuff, just not in a consistent way. So their documentation was scattered and their reports practically useless.

phillaholic,

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.

brutallyhonestcritic,

No. No you wouldn’t. We don’t need banks to implement the concept of currency in a society and you’re myopic for not understanding that but instead pretending to be some sort of authority on the matter.

phillaholic,

🙄 uh huh. I prefer a currency backed by something with some longevity and not petted by grifters who keep getting arrested for fraud over and over again, or hacked and cleaned out with little to no recourse.

Regardless, banks aren’t “worthless” at all.

airbussy,

I’m no economist, but banks are pretty useful from how I understand it. Lending out money people don’t use is like creating money out of thin air. Helps people buy houses and everything. I tried looking for the video I saw on this topic, it’s something like “how banks create money out of thin air”.

blackbirdbiryani,

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.

Narrrz,

I would distinguish between providing a service & creating value. the service that banks and insurance provide is useful, but only in the context of a money-centric society. they don't create anything that has a purpose deprived of context, it's only the moving around of numbers.

blackbirdbiryani,

But we do live in a currency-based society. That’s like saying food only has value in the context of a chemical-energy based society. It’s a pointless semantic argument here.

Narrrz,

perhaps it is, but I'm not convinced. if food, eating, whatever were an unnecessary and wasteful system then the growing of food and processing, production, etc would likewise be a waste of resources, human labour included. a lot of our work does go towards food production, supply, processing, etc - if you could switch to an alternate system that dispensed with food but didn't otherwise alter our lives, that would surely be massively preferable. it's hard to imagine because eating is such a fundamental need, but that's just a limitation of this comparison.

if we could dispense with money but otherwise have society look much the same (or better, which I think it undoubtedly would be), that would be an improvement, to me, just by virtue of freeing up the labour of all the people who work solely in the overhead of the system. to imagine how else we might function as a society, I think it's useful to identify ways in which the present system is inefficient.

Cryophilia,

if we could dispense with money

…but we can’t, so what’s the point

WhoresonWells,

Corporate communications / public relations

They’ve largely subverted the occasionally useful profession of journalism. There’s a big difference between researching things your audience wants to know, and asking someone with a commercial agenda what they’d like to tell your audience.

zout,

Any job can be a bullshit job actually. But for me:

  • People who seem to be on Linkedin most of the day, looking for leads "lets get a cup of coffee together".
  • Corporate communications.
  • People who's job consists mostly of copying data from one excel sheet to the next.
  • Government consultants, especially in IT (but not limited to IT only)
agressivelyPassive,

“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.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

Therapists used to be the most helpful thing in the world (or so I’ve heard), now they’re so unhelpful they have to rely on the state to get us to use them and have so many different indie-based projects and programs competing with them, like BetterTherapy (which isn’t bad tbh). The old joke is they’re paid friends but now I see they’re just paid, you could be in a genuine situation where something obliterates the quality of your life (e.g. custody battles) and they’ll be like “does lithium sound good” (which by the way, lithium is outdated by two thousand years, so if it’s recommended right away to you, run). The reason they’re not set up like lawyers where you only pay them “if you win” is because they know this would destroy them.

bob_wiley,
@bob_wiley@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

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  • Haywire,

    Psychiatrist prescribe drugs not psychologists.

    shinigamiookamiryuu,

    Tell that to the therapist. I know they’re not supposed to prescribe drugs, but they definitely have the power to arrange that.

    alvvayson,

    I fear the medical profession is also going down this path.

    Government and lawsuits are totally regulating everyone to death. Doctors used to be knowledgeable and creative (and they still are) and had the freedom to prescribe whatever they thought would be the best.

    Now, they can only follow conventional wisdom and the exact recommendations of the regulators. If they deviate just a little to find the perfect fit for your case, they risk themselves and their livelihoods.

    TheOneCurly,
    @TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page avatar

    It’s primarily private insurance (at least in the US) that drives that. The doctor can prescribe something and then a “doctor” who works for the insurance company can take a 10 second look at it and deny it outright in favor of a more profitable treatment.

    alvvayson,

    When it comes to costs, yes, but there is also another angle.

    Sometimes doctors will prescribe expensive, patented drugs when cheaper, better, out-of-patent alternatives exist.

    This is not to the benefit of the insurance companies.

    Rather the pharma industry and regulators act in a concentrated rap battle: the regulator covers their ass by only approving in accordance with the latest, most comprehensive studies (“evidence based practice”) and the pharma industry only bankrolls new studies on their most profitable medications.

    spittingimage,
    @spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

    Nine out of ten doctors are great.

    The regulations exist because of the tenth doctor.

    alvvayson,

    The problem with that thinking is that it also applies to patients in a different way:

    9 out of 10 patients fit the 90% confidence interval.

    And the tenth patient gets told to F off, because the scientific consensus does not cover their situation.

    CarlsIII,

    Exorcist

    ivanafterall,
    @ivanafterall@kbin.social avatar

    Oh, yeah, they're bullshit right up until the moment you need them...

    CarlsIII,

    Legion told me you’d say that. I mean, nuh-uh.

    blazera,
    @blazera@kbin.social avatar

    Landlords the worst

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