To believe most jobs are pointless?

This is also true for many university administration roles. Not enough to do but still back fill the roles when people move on.

Not true.

Many universities have made huge numbers of professional services staff redundant and trying to back fill holes when people leave is becoming increasingly challenging.

And ironically, often the more people you have, it just makes the inefficiency even worse. It's often counter productive when you bring in more people, as that's more people needing admin support, more meetings, more training, slower response times when a specific task is now broken down and done by 2 or 3 people instead of 1 who did it all themselves, etc.

A classic case is my OH's chemotherapy which is a fiasco every single month due to the NHS apparently "needing" several people to organise the steps, i.e. blood test taken, blood test review, prescription raised, prescription assembled, consultant appointment and finally handover of the drugs. Different people for each stage. So the appointments are never done in the right order - i.e. just this week, they pinged an appointment for drugs collection (a week too early!!), which is stupid because he hasn't even had the blood test done yet. Apparently "communication error" between appointment clerks. Bearing in mind this is all in the same oncology dept, so they can't even blame different depts (yes, the appointment clerks work in the same office, they're not using centralised appointment depts for oncology appointments done on the ward!). That just causes wasted appointments, and lots of wasted time as my OH usually has to make at least 2 or 3 phone calls every month to tell them what they've cocked up this time, all requiring them to spend time and communicate with eachother to rectify. Something that could so easily be standardised and streamlined, because it follows the exact same pattern every 4 weeks, yet "too many people" screw it up.

This is also true for many university administration roles. Not enough to do but still back fill the roles when people move on.

I used to work in an office. The task of pushing paper around was removed, then replaced with valuable work like generating money to pay wages. Wages that then get taxed to pay for vital service. Wages that are spent in shops keeping the economy going....

I think perhaps they might be referring to the "middle management" in public sector jobs that are well paid but perhaps a mis-use of the public's money?

e.g. a friend of mine works for our local council. He is well paid (earns more than me as a teacher), and really doesn't have to do a lot, nor is it particularly stressful. He finds it quite amusing how little he has to do, and the same for his co-workers. In short, the job 10 of them do could easily be done by 5, and if it were a private company, there would absolutely only be 5 of them doing it.

I think another example that makes me FURIOUS is academy schools. In multi-academy trusts (where many schools are run by one "trust" or company), such a HUGE amount of money is siphoned off to pay for the layers and layers of additional people to manage "academy" stuff. I work in one of these as a teacher, and we have a "super head" that overseas the 4 secondary schools and 20+ primary schools. He is paid a large 6 figure salary. Then they advertise trust admin roles paying more than teacher salaries!! And yet, the EDUCATION, which is what should be paid for by the money coming in from the number of pupils we have, is getting more and more scaled back due to money going into the Academy Company. A Level classes of 25 for practical subjects and insufficient equipment with no funds to buy more. Classes of 34 at KS3. School trips being stopped this year due to insufficient funding (even though pupils pay a contribution, the school still has to pay for pupil premium children and subsidise the cost for educational purposes). Way to many pointless jobs that have been created due to a school becoming a business.

My school has 9 members of the senior leadership team who do no teaching at all. It’s extremely inefficient. There is no clarity on who you escalate what to. They also repeat each other’s work. It’s an utter shambles. Yet they get paid considerably more than the teachers doing the actual teaching.

Not in the public sector.

There is no advantage to a manager in not filling a vacant post, and every status advantage to filling it.

Time after time a post-holder leaves as their job is pointless and they have nothing to do, and the manager will recruit to the post. It happens over and over.

Yeah it's very unfair how the physical/caring work is underpaid, yet does the most positive things for society.

Which tabloid are you penning for?

Well, according to a lot of my students, my job is pointless because 'we speak English already and when am I ever going to study a poem when I'm older?', so you can add English teachers to the list.

And Welsh teachers, because 'I'm never going to use it in a job, so what's the point?'

Yes but that was a task within the job not the actual purpose of the job.

I know someone who works in an office in long meetings that don't go anywhere and lots of time spent on the phone on tasks that fail more than they succeed, and endless paperwork that takes months to get approved or fails in its purpose. His job is trying to get aid into Gaza and life saving medications into Ukraine.

Surely a lot of jobs are there to make money for the employer? So would society collapse? No! Is someone somewhere prepared to pay this person because it makes the business profit overall - yes!

I do agree about some of the red tape. I see this in my job a lot and it drives me mad. But (most) of that red tape is there for an actual reason and I’m not sure we’d be better off as a society without it

There isn't a "glut" of delivery drivers. Demand is high and supply is low. It's hard for firms to find delivery drivers, especially for any vans bigger/heavier than a normal car licence, and especially for anti-social hours driving, such as overnight.

Hand car washes, nail bars, Turkish barbers, ethnic convenience stores are often more about money laundering, illegal working, modern slavery, etc., and aren't really anything to do with what they're actually doing/selling as they're just "fronts", so irrelevant when talking about the job market.

Healthcare and social care IS a massive problem, mostly caused by low pay and low respect, plus poor working conditions.

But, yes, we do need a "job audit" to actually look long term at where the shortages are going to be, what jobs will be created and what will be lost, over the next 10/20/30/40 years, and work backwards right back to the schools, to change the way we educate our future workforce whilst they're children, to provide relevant and required training for 16-21 year olds which must include far better provision of trade/manual/vocational skills and probably reduced academic/university choices, a return to our once World leading adult education sector so that people have more options to retrain once they've left formal education, at whatever age they are. The whole system from age 4 to 21 is a mess and still based on what we needed several decades ago, not what we're going to need in 10/20 years' time. And a new initiative for adult education, retraining, re-skilling, etc is an absolute essential and we literally can't start that soon enough - far too many people in their 20s, 30s and 40s are pigeon-holed because of their school qualifications and prior employment and are just "fodder" for the lowest paid and lowest respect jobs.

I would say many businesses, and definitely the public sector, are not nearly as efficient as they could be, which creates extra work and therefore needs people to do it.

Some jobs also only really exist during the good times, when people have more disposable income, or businesses have more to spend.

OP was a bit vague about which jobs she values. I wonder if she thinks running MN is a valuable job? Do all these threads 'contribute' to society?

Of course society wouldn't collapse, but would the company function you perform collapse? is that function not occurring detrimental to the companies service?

That's the question.

Companies performance isn't based on societal collapse, its based on making profit ergo enabling people to be paid... which would actually result in societal collapse - if 95% of people all of a sudden stopped getting paid...

If you speak to any business owner, they will tell you that nobody hires someone for the sake of it leading to extra costs for the company.
If they are there working, it is because they are needed.

But even those aren't "pointless" to the point you could just scrap all of them overnight, that's ridiculous.

My previous job was finance admin for a company that supplied pallet wrapping. So yeah, definitely not "key worker" material but without the financial and logistical ends being thoroughly covered, stock wasn't purchased, deliveries were not sent out, our customers who were mostly factories, warehouses and waste sites would have to stop operating in some cases. Which would then knock onto their customers/schedules. If we didn't do reports and checks for the profits etc, we'd likely go bust after a while.

I kind of get what you're saying but I think it's massively over simplified to say any job that isn't teaching or a Dr or nurse is "pointless" and I'm sure you'd agree once you had no deliveries or none of the shops were stocked etc.

I know people are theorising about AI taking over but I still think that's a way off and can also see there being a huge backlash against it for all the potential issues it would cause.

From what basis do you make this massive generalisation?

Are you a CEO of a major company employing 1000s of staff?

Or are you just an observer with a wild opinion?

I believe many, many jobs are pointless.

Over the last 25 years I have repeatedly asked myself 'would society collapse if I stopped doing my job?'

The answer has always been a resounding 'no'.

I work in pharma in an “office job” and no there’s not one person here that has a pointless job. We manufacture and provide biologic medicines that are for people with cancer and rare diseases, every single thing we do needs to be documented and regulated. Do you want your meds to be safe, of good quality and effective? I think you do…

How sad that you're so dismissive about your dd's chosen career.

My adult DD has a high powered job in an international company - she tells me what she does, but it means nothing at all - it is all flim-flam. Meetings, unnecessary international flights, company away days ....... sometimes I feel really sad that this creative person is wasting their life on it all - but not my decision!

So, because you don't understand your daughter's job you've decided it's 'film-flam' and a waste of her life??

What an awful thing to say. Who's to say she's not using her creativity in her role? Or that she enjoys her job and is creative in other ways?

I've worked in a lot of places where people have complained about red tape and unnecessary bureaucracy around health and safety etc.

But I have also worked in countries where compliance activities are not prioritised, and I have seen the impact of that.

I know which model I prefer.

Ever worked somewhere where paperwork and red tape slow everything down without making anything safer or more efficient?

Ever worked somewhere when these jobs are removed or scaled down?
I work at a university where we've just removed a number of jobs you would consider pointless.
It's an absolute disaster.