this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Well documented that there's a ton of make-work and very little value add to quite a bit business bureaucracy.
The most successful businesses are often those that operate as make-work mills and gatekeepers, rather than material value-adding firms.
Whether that means we have a ceiling on meaningful work, or we simply don't have anyone doing critical tasks, is an open question. But given our volume of waste and our profound lack of public services, I'm willing to bet a lot of high value labor is neglected in the race to fabricate opportunities for rent seeking.
I can at least speak to one type of value-add, which is wastewater. I worked in a wastewater plant for a year as a lab tech. I even planned to get my operator license so I could stay on as an operator.
While it isn't "neglected", I would have quite literally been making $15/hr as an operator, at a time where I could have gone literally to any minimum wage job and made about that much in my area. That's not taking into account the 84-hr week you're pulling every week - 12 hrs on, 12 hrs off, 7 days (but you're on-call when you're not there). Benefits? Haha. And this was at a major metropolitan plant. I talked to a few smaller plants in the more rural exurbs and they literally were wanting to pay me $8/hr or less, with no benefits either, and they insisted that this was enough to "buy a house in the area".