I’m curious to know how common ‘bullshit jobs’ are among the Lemmygrad community.
Upvote the response that you feel more identified with. Feel free to add your own responses by putting [R] at the start of your comment (just so we all are sure which comments are responses and which are regular comments)
[R] Yes, I think it does.
[R] No, I do not think it does.
To add detail to my own response. I work in a service field that specifically caters to the stupidly rich. I like the actual work I do and the people I work with, but it’s not exactly a benefit to the majority of society.
I do not think it harms society persay, but without my job the rich would just have one less playground.
[R] I used to work “part time” (time doesn’t exist when you have a deadline) on Machine Learning research, and a lot of that area is just completely useless. A good portion of the articles pumped out are just “in this heavily synthetic framework, my model beats the state of the art by 0.1% accuracy”, and the only project I contributed to which was actually worthwhile never got any attention because it “was not novel” but most likely also because we didn’t have some big name researcher as a co-author. For a field about automating society I sure threw a lot of labour away there, and that’s the norm.
[R]: the profession I’m in can and occasionally does benefit society, but my particular job is making societally useless shit for booj pricks.
[R] No, and I think it’s actually harmful to society :(
[R] I make photos for passports, visa and ID cards. afaik the netherlands is one of the few places where they don’t take the photo at the city hall, instead I am employed by this person who rents this booth next to the city hall.
I guess I make better photos of customers than they would be able to take of themselves in a photo booth but that doesn’t justify the price I have to charge at all.
in a way it’s nice to not have to pretend your job is meaningful, the customers know it’s bullshit and I can focus more on putting the customer at ease and guiding them through the process of “oh fuck, I’m going to have to see a detailed photograph of myself now” by putting them at ease so perhaps there’s some value in that. in my experience women especially appreciate this attention and patience, they often walk in with “this is going be horrible, I look awful” and walk out with pictures they’re often quite satisfied with.
most folks don’t walk out of the photo store with a “rabbit in the headlights” photo you’d typically get in a photo booth, but most people don’t care as it’s just a photo for your passport you have to take once per decade, my boss knows this so he can charge obscene amounts.
perhaps I create some value specifically with being able to take good photos of children and babies. the requirements for the passport photos of kids under 11 are a lot less strict in the netherlands so you can get away with making photos with big smiles and that often makes the parents happy.
most customers are only inside the store for two minutes; I put them at ease, take a decent photo, walk them to the computer to pick the best photo, they say they look horrible, I say that’s nonsense, I stamp out the photos and charge the customer more than my hourly wage.
I spend the rest of the day listening to the radio, reading and fucking around on the internet.
[R] Only a little. Could be much better if it weren’t proprietary.
[R] I think it does but for the wrong reasons. I work in a cellphone renting service as a developer for the platform. The business model allows people with lower incomes to access good quality phones with a good customer service & insurance and it optimizes the life cycle of each phone which is great ecologically.
I’d prefer if phones were more accessible in terms of price, ownership etc, and I would love for that kind of electronic products to be long lasting, instead of rotting in drawers when manufacturers stop supporting their products, but until we live in that world, I think the compromise is pretty ok
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