Your job is meaningless

You all understand that right?

I grew up on the stories on my grandfather talking about CCC Camps (Civilian Conservation Corps), the military predisposition of young men, and overall the state’s willingness to keep men employed through manual labor to ensure unemployment stayed manageable. I was in Ireland last year thinking of the similarities while I toured the country and view the spectacular endless stone walls that essentially lead nowhere nor seemed to draw any purpose. I later learned this was Britain’s way of distributing funds to the Irish during the “famine” instead of outright giving funds to those in need. The British used similar means during their occupation of India and it’s been deployed every since. The stark difference vs today where everyone on this forum (perhaps with the exception of the dancer who’s job actually does serve a purpose) is the historic jobs at least resembled some decency of use. The Irish walls, although often times were obsolete, did rid the rocky land of stones for further crop cultivation. My grandfather’s generation built most of the infrastructure used today and thus showed supreme importance, whereas all of us today simply are collecting a UBI pay-check spiced with the semblance of today’s service sector. I’m certain everyone has conference calls to join, meetings to attend, and presentations to prepare for so I appreciate your time in reading this. Serf’s gotta eat, right

So woke. Agreed, coming from an outside industry into finance, I don’t really get why people are getting paid what they do, to do what they do. I’ve met a ton of people in the industry, I’ve been unimpressed for the most part.

Seems the game is there are tons of arbitrary barriers to entry to keep it in as few hands as possible and to extract as much wealth as possible from the world. CFA was easy work, ran through that like it was nothing with zero prior finance knowledge whatsoever. MBAs I’ve heard are even easier. Not even close to as difficult as a stem semester. It’s easier to change yourself than to change the world… I’ll play.

thats a fascinating story about the irish people. we should do the same thing to homeless people. i’ve been thinking a lot. i think begging should be a crime. the government should beef up public stuff for these homeless people so that they congregate in those ghettos. but to have beggars soliciting for free shit is absolutely insane and to have them loitering in areas begging for stuff from low income people is just criminal. they should get it from the top and only beg in pv or something. anyways from what i see in rich neighborhoods their police typically pick up the homeless people and drop them off at more lower income urbanized areas.

Most jobs probably fall under this category. If you are the best engineer in Google, your job is to shove ads into peoples’ faces.

https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity

apparently for a typical day, most people are just productive for 3 hours. i raelly hate how the 40 hour work week is the standard. its absolutely medieval!

Throughout my career in finance I’ve always thought that very few people appreciate how lucky they are earning the salary that we do for the actual work that we do

I agree. I’m myself a very overpaid excel monkey.

In no other field do you get paid similar amounts for doing absolutely mundane stuff.

I think everyone takes for granted how jobs fit into a larger system which provides our current high quality of life.

I agree with this. I would add, the fact is, despite how meaningless or mundane these jobs can seem, the labor market mechanisms conspire to price these jobs as they are currently priced. If at some point society values these skills less, then they will be priced less — eventually.

Say you are an “overpaid” Excel monkey. Despite the sense this is meaningless, these skills are required to dynamically connect certain dots for your employer that allow them to take certain actions which add value to the firm. If that wasn’t true, your job wouldn’t exist for long. Not everyone is going to solve major world problems with their jobs. And these skills most of us have are not broadly commoditized, at least when bundled with the additional working knowledge that a CFA/MBA/Etc. background also brings to the table. Those skills are not free.

Well it depends…I think directing the capital where it is needed the most is pretty important task. Banks and financial institutions do that. It may seem meaningless for the simple minded but looking from a birds-eye-view, it quite vital for todays society.

Looks like there is a split of opinion between those who deem their job meaningless and those who adhere to the principal of efficient capital allocation and market dynamics.

I’d venture to say that most banks/financial institutions are poor capital allocators (history has shown this) and extract more value from society vs what they contribute. More so, the 10 largest banks in the US likely have more than a million collect employees - in all likelihood a fraction of a percent denote the employees actually making such calls.

i mean i think they are designed that way. i always thought it was weird that a bank is willing to lend money at shit fixed rates, but not willing to invest in real estate deals or the market where they could prolly make bank! (prolly due to regulations!)

anyways imo banks provide a service, they are essentially people who have a checklist to see if you are worthy to lend. like have you defaulted before, do you make a lot of money consistently, are you levered, are you white. all these things are important. they price that risk an compare to the current market rate they have to borrow.

from the consuemr end, they allow us to lever up to buy the things we want in life that are usually to expensive upfront. say a house that’ll be used for 50 years or a car that will be used for 12 years. (these are the average ages btw). if you are using it that entire time, then the payments should be spread out over that time period!

when market prices crash, they should push out the length of time that you can borrow further out. although as a bank, id be afraid to lend for that long of a time period. you never know when inflation might spike and bite your buttt!

I’m not saying the institution itself useless - more along the lines that automation has already rendered most of the jobs obsolete and yet people are still hired just to fill a quota to keep the masses without free time to think.

I agree that there are a lot of back office jobs that can probably disappear once banks aren’t running Fortan powered systems. But I think the evidence is quite good that capital allocation works well in America. If things didn’t work so well, then it would be easier to beat the indexes. Sure there is a cost associated with active management, but that cost has existed for decades and is fading fast. I think you need to zoom out a little in your perspective. We didn’t even have required financial reporting of companies 100 years ago.

Nerdy, banks provide a slightly different service. They do what you describe, but we can all do what they describe. The main thing they do is transform risky assets to risk free assets (deposits). Now of course,risk free assets don’t really exist - so different banking systems deal with this issue differently. In America, we have the FDIC which provides insurance on those deposits with the stipulation the banks are subject to oversight. This transformation of risk for savers is really the bank’s competitive advantage.

I’ve been surprised at what people are making these days. Wall St used to be highly paid, but other industries have caught up. I was renting out an apartment recently and two potential tenants submitted paperwork, one was a toy company sales person, and the other worked in pharma, both in their 30s, and their reported comp was not that different than mine.

was the pharma chick hot like jessica alba!

You’re making my point… The fact that indices, through passive measures, allocate capital in a more efficient manner than active management proves my point that automation has already rendered most jobs obsolete. Yet, despite this fact, people are employed in high numbers.

Put differently, since the advent of automation (say the 70s) we have seen wages essentially stagnate. If labor was indeed needed, all my free market libertarians would jizz out their beloved demand curve and translate that to wage growth. I understand the logical next thought, in this sequence of what’s been ingrained into our little heads, is real wage growth hasn​​​​​​’t increased due to a surplus of labor supply through globalization. This does hold some truth to it but I’d argue that most work wasn’t being done by h1b workers, but rather automation.

To neatly summarize it all, i’d venture to say the vast majority of folks on this forum are trivial, inconsequential. The likes of STL and myself, snake oil salesmen, may fall outside that category and simply be referred to as bullies selling stuff people dont need (which I deem worse).

With Thanksgiving approaching, what are you thoughtful for? A meaningless job? Yes perhaps - but I urge you to consider a different framework. My paisans in Italy and my Indian friends are already flirting with what I think is the solution.

It is true, back when I making my bones trading FLIRBs, it was had to determine what actual benefit my work produces. Now, I’ve found meaningful work with my charities. My main focus is on solar warming (often forgotten with all the talk of global warming).

Passive index are not responsible for the efficient allocation of capital. All it means is that the group of price setters (active management) as a whole are good at setting prices, even if it is very hard for any individual price setter to beat the group in a given year. This is the paradox of skill:

And while I certainly agree the political talking point is that wages have stagnated, the issue is more nuanced than that. Perhaps because you are a sales guy instead of an analyst (judging off your comment), you haven’t been exposed to the complexity. Even the metric you are citing gives very different results when the measure of inflation is changed. Not a very reliable statistic if the trend changes based on an inflation assumption IMO

Just this month, the CBO released data in stark contrast to your claim. i’m sure PA used it to update his America default model, but you could also use it in your “I’m bitter about the world” model

Do I think the above data is conclusive that you are wrong? No. But it is certainly the case things aren’t as simple as you’d lead the forum to believe.

Perhaps if you spent more time thinking critically about issues instead of growing more and more negative on this forum about everything related to finance, you would contribute to society. But it is understandable someone in a sales role would forget that some people actually have to make informed decisions that do impact the real economy. And this is true even if there are a few steps removed from the real world impact.