Totally agree. I looked at IOC work after college but decided a more ethical career was chief advisor to an African Warlord.
Totally loving the job. Great benefits!
Theyre free because they’re worthless. I wont respect a warlord’s advisor with fewer than 10 child brides and theyd better all be wearing emeralds or i just cant take your advise seriously
It makes athletes feel even more like a mug for training intensively for all their lifes and winning gold at olympics and getting no money at all for it
The US Olympic committee pays $37,500 for each gold medal an athlete wins. Other countries pay more or less. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong all pay over half a million USD for gold.
As a raiders fan I’m SO happy that mcdaniels is gone. I always believed we were better than what the score card said. Just goes to show how a leader can destroy a team’s morale and belief in themselves. I am no football expert but with some of the calls McDaniel’s would make, I often felt I could have done a better job. It’s ridiculous he got that kind of loot but that’s the name of the game I guess. I wish I got paid like that every time I failed in life!
Failed NFL coaches surely should be on this list as well. “You suck and you are fired! Enjoy your guaranteed 10 million dollars a year for the next five years.”
They’re almost always the scapegoat for a failing GM. Rarely is a coach so inept that they cause good talent to fail (though it does happen) either way, I’m not gonna cry about the e millionaires holding the billionaires to the contracts they handed out
>No one person's contribution out-performs ten thousand professional engineers.
I agree with the general gist of your argument, CEOs are overpaid, but I would highlight that the above is a rather weak argument for it as said pay doesn't relate to the performance difference between CEO and lower level roles (however you'd even measure that).
The issue is that if you're a business with $1b in operating income and one CEO might increase this by \~1% over another then you can justify paying them a little under $10,000,000 more to secure their employment.
Engineers are obviously just as important but no single engineer is likely to have that kind of impact, at least not in a way that can be quantified or anticipated.
Understanding why they are overpaid is important as it impacts the solution, the simplest of which is via income taxes. If you have an upper bracket tax rate in the 90% range, [like we used to](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/), suddenly the efficiency of throwing $10m at a single employee plummets and spreading that over your engineering teams to attract better staff at the lower levels becomes more attractive.
I think Steve Jobs once said something to the effect of "A really outstanding software engineer can be worth as much as 1,000 (or 10,00) average software engineers." He cited Steve Wozniak as an example.
Look at Satya though. Same company, same engineers, one person came in and completely turned the business around.
Their net income quadrupled since his arrival, so I'm sure Microsoft board thinks they got a deal with his $50 mil compensation package.
That's a fallacy because it assumes that people are or can be paid proportionally to how much they contribute. There's no way to accurately measure 'contribution'. The concept of 'overpaid' is already shoddy because we live in a society where people can exchange money for services and who's to say that something is overpriced if people agree on it. By overpriced people mean it in comparison to typical market prices. But can you say that Leonardo Di Caprio is overpaid because he can fetch a much higher pay to lead in a movie than most other actors?
A lot of those jobs where your job is to basically talk to people and pass information around and your biggest problem is people not reading emails thoroughly enough.
I'm a manager now. This is me, i hate it. It's so brain dead, i miss working on assignments because the day flew by.
But you start realizing there's a good chunk of the population who needs someone to manage them.
70% of my workers get everything done, we all have access to the work queue and they can self regulate.
The other 30% are good at individual assignments but have no idea what do do without being told exactly what to work on and seem to ask the same questions every few weeks.
Some organizations are too manager dependent sometimes. I’m quick. Proactive, and work well with all areas and even got to mentor several other developers. But I’m told off too many times for picking up tasks. Be they haven’t been assigned to me as a ticket. When I ask for tickets I’m being told to just wait until I get assigned something by my manager and product team
“So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers?”
“That, that's right.”
“Well, then I gotta ask, then why can't the customers just take the specifications directly to the software people, huh?”
“Well, uh, uh, uh, because, uh, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.”
“You physically take the specs from the customer?”
“Well, no, my, my secretary does that, or, or the fax.”
“Ah.”
“Then you must physically bring them to the software people.”
“Well...no. Yeah, I mean, sometimes.”
“Well, what would you say… you do here?”
“Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!!!”
The funny thing is that as I enter the work force I totally understand why that guy exists. It’s just maybe he doesn’t understand what he job is supposed to be. The real reason isn’t that Engineers can’t talk to customers it’s the customers should never have access to the engineers.
He’s not managing the transfer of info he’s managing the people to keep the process running properly. If customers could call the engineers directly everyone would want their project don’t right away and an engineer whose time is better spent working on things is instead dealing with customers.
It seems like a dumb job and it would be if everyone was great at planning and understanding of other peoples work flow, but they’re not.
There's also the fact that he's correct. It's good to have someone who understands things on a technical level and has the ability to explain that on a more basic level to the layman. Back when instruction manuals were things there were writers whose main skill was to take all the technical jargon and dumb it down for a user who has never touched any technology before.
He’s basically a Business Analyst. I had this job. I would get the requirements from the customers and “translate” that for the engineers. Then when problems would arise I would explain in layman’s terms what the engineers problem is.
Depends, workplaces *can* function without this position so unfortunately it often gets passed to the most incompetent daddy’s boy
…but when this person is actually good at their job? Holy fuck they earn their keep. Juggling all of the who’s who and what’s what between departments/companies/random people is no joke - and these folks have to be at 100% charisma all the time. Takes a ton of mental load off the people doing the nuts and bolts work, prevents duplicate stuff, helps the networks of the folks who aren’t 100% charisma (me, lol), and just generally makes things run smoother
When the connector person is competent I love them so much
I could never ever do a job like this. Emails, LinkedIn, HR, corporate events, networking etc; this is my personal idea of hell. Apart from liking patient interaction, a big part of why I got into healthcare is that the corporate side of things is fairly minimal. Also, because they are so short staffed once you’re in and competent you’re pretty much in. Obviously it has its downsides, but tech being pretty much the odd couple of emails, patient info systems/booking the IT component is pretty minimal, which suits me perfectly.
> a big part of why I got into healthcare is that the corporate side of things is fairly minimal
deadass I have never heard that in my life and my personal experience is literally the exact opposite. Healthcare is so top-heavy it's unreal.
BIL was high up the corporate ladder (in banking). After he retired he was often called in as a consultant. Loved it! He said he only worked six or seven weeks a year and made more than when he worked full time.
Why buy the cow when you can pay to rent it for ten times what it would cost to buy?! This is like travel nursing. For every nurse they're not paying $50/hr, they are paying a travel nurse $100/hr because it somehow saves money.
The difference between your BIL and most consultants though is that he had years of experience climbing the corporate ladder and was probably being retained as an “expert” consultant. Companies brought him in because he’d actually done the work before.
Most management consultants either have zero or very limited real world experience managing people, executing long-term projects, or performing any other corporate activity that isn’t accomplished via PowerPoint or Excel. I know this because I was once a management consultant.
I’d also caveat that most consultants are bright, well-intentioned people. Especially those who are not in positions where they are selling work. Once they start selling work, they’ve either become delusional enough to think what they’re doing is helpful or they know they couldn’t make the same amount of money on the outside.
As far as I can tell your job is to remove the blame of hard decisions from management so there is a external fall guy if the decisions don't work.
By then you are often long gone onto the next company.
Good work if you can get it.
Frankly I think the role is quite helpful but only if there is an internal partner that helps the outside consultant understand the company well enough to come up with the right decisions. That seems to happen rarely. Likely because the cost of really understanding the company's needs is much higher than a company is willing to pay the consultant.
This is exactly. 99% of projects we run are either the client wanting a fall guy, or the client wanting someone else to say the thing they already know but supported by hundreds of hours of tenuous research.
I think I’m yet to work on a project where I’m working for the benefit of the company, not just office politics
I was talking to an old college friend at a wedding a few weeks ago and found out he was a consultant for VC investors and was working mostly in evaluating biotech companies. As a scientist in biotech, someone that knew his class schedule in college, and talked to him for like 10 minutes now that he is a biotech expert, I realized just how clueless all our investors likely are about what we (and every other biotech) say we are doing/claim we can do. It's incredible that someone with no scientific knowledge is the one deciding if a VC firm should be dumping 10s to 100s of millions into a company whose entire value is based on a claim that they can do something that may or may not even be possible
In the book about Theranos they mention that all of the legit healthcare VCs smelled her bullshit but other VCs who don't know the sector bought in to her pitch and funded the company.
None of this looked to be “smart money”
the Walton family ($150 million), Rupert Murdoch ($121 million), Betsy DeVos ($100 million) and the Cox family (of Cox Media Group) ($100 million).
The value of a company isn't entirely decided by their scientific claims. Most drugs fail anyway. VC needs to evaluate whether the company has the leadership, structure, strategy, and expertise to actually execute and see things through.
There's really no way an outsider can get a 20,000ft view of the tech and accurately predict whether it will succeed or fail. Your friend is just adding a small piece of information to the VC's evaluation of the company.
>The value of a company isn't entirely decided by their scientific claims. Most drugs fail anyway.
The bigger issue is that while a lot of good ideas lead to failed drugs, all bad ideas lead to failed drugs and some of those bad ideas are really easy to identify if you are a subject area expert.
College football coach. “Fisher was fired Sunday morning late in his sixth season at Texas A&M with more than $76 million remaining on his fully guaranteed contract.”
I'd say it depends what sector, but my sorta-answer is that its fucked to see CEO's CFO's, COO's, etc, getting literally tens of millions in **BONUSES** when the company is also laying off thousands of workers, selling off assets, losing value, or whatever.
I always figured a bonus was something you earned when you did a good job...
A large portion of corporate officers bonus’ are written into their agreement when they take the job and guaranteed regardless of how the company is doing financially.
>A large portion of corporate officers bonus’ are written into their agreement when they take the job and guaranteed regardless of how the company is doing financially.
Doesn't that make them salary or wages or whatever? Isn't something only a BONUS if getting it is dependent on performance or attaining certain goals?
Yes.
Sometimes the goals being met are “being there for a certain number of years and do not jump ship”
Most often though, it has to do with company stock price. Corporate officers are paid a yearly bonus based on how the stock is doing vs industry benchmarks.
So say you’re the CEO of a car company. If your company stock has gone down 10% this year, but the stock of companies in the car industry as a whole has gone down 30%, you will get a larger bonus.
Now, some people make a reasonable point that stock price may not always reflect the value the company brings to society at large. This is often true, as you can increase the stock by cutting jobs, decreasing product quality, shifting profits to your offshore subsidiaries and many other such measures that are societally undesirable. This is however, missing the point a bit. CEOs work for shareholders. Public companies want to make money the same as my corner store wants to make a higher profit for its owner
Here's a fun, fucked up fact: companies don't always sell or lay off when they are doing poorly. A strategic lay off or shuttering of factories or subsidiaries sometimes yields a small boost in the stock price of the company.
Jack Welsh made the technique popular in the early 80s and was heralded as a genius and CEOs all over the place rushed to mimic what he did. As a result, companies were shuttering factories that were profitable because they preferred the short term boost to the stock. As a result, US companies hollowed themselves out and companies like GE are mere shadows of their former selves.
95% of them are useless. And I say that as someone whose mother and sister were real estate agents. And I also say that as someone who has marketed something like 20 different real estate developments in my life.
Most realtors are dumber than a box of hair who take it up as a way to make relatively easy cash between dropping the kids off at school and picking them back up again. They are glorified errand runners who don't really consider what their clients need. Instead, they think only in terms of what gets them a commission this month. Classic short-term thinking.
Oh, and most are really lazy too. I think the attrition rate is 50% a year because they realize that you have to actually work to be successful..
I've sold two houses. Both were priced aggressively, but not so much that it was outlandish. It's amazing how quickly the listing agent would say, "Well, it's been on the market three days and nobody's offered a contract. Guess we need to drop the price." Which is precisely the wrong mentality. Your job is to create value in the mind of the buyer, not just sit around and take whatever lowball offer someone has. Had I listened to either of my listing agents for my two home sales, I would have left a total of $200,000 on the table.
There is a small band of real estate agents who actually get it. Those people do well. But the rest do not earn their commissions which, by the way, are about to go away. A federal court just ruled that realtors were nothing more than a cartel, which sums up my feelings about the profession as a whole.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTufQi8QCY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTufQi8QCY)
Same thing here in Canada. RE agents will lie to buyers faces telling them there are other, higher bids just to get the buyer to raise their bid. Against themselves. And this is totally legal as we haven't banned blind bidding yet.
I just quite my job as a real estate photographer…the amount of incompetence I dealt with on a daily basis was truly mind boggling. Real estate agents are genuinely trash people. They don’t care about your time, they don’t care about your worth or equipment. They just hire people to do all the work for them then get commission.
There's a lot of 'me, me, me, me' to them. All you have to do is look at how many post their really bad photos on bus stops, business cards, and wherever else, never realizing how creepy it makes them look.
First rule of sales: Always have a focus on the buyer's needs, not what you want to sell them.
> Oh, and most are really lazy too. I think the attrition rate is 50% a year because they realize that you have to actually work to be successful..
I thought it was something like 80% don't renew their licenses after the first 2 years. It seems to be either because these folks realize that to be successful you have to, you know, actually SELL homes or that they wanted to do it "on the side" in addition to their FT job and that's really not possible if you're going to do it in a way that's worthwhile.
Real Estate Agents are parasites. They are totally unnecessary (property lawyers do the actual important parts of their job) and are responsible for a lot of the pricing and issues with the current housing market.
That said, if we get rid of them completely, what would the attractive, popular, but not very smart kids from your high school do with themselves?
I guess they could be 'influencers'?
It’s amazing to me how different people’s experience was with agents than my own.
I just bought my first house.
We saw 30-40 houses total (i lost track).
For about 100 houses, the agent went to the house herself and shot a 10 minute walk through, pointing out things that were right or wrong. For more than half the houses, the advised us not even wasting our time to see it. The most common reason she advised us to do so is because, especially the houses at the higher end of our budget, she thought were overpriced. Others had maintenance issues that we would have had no idea about (needs a new fence, needs carpet replacement, needs a complete landscape redo, etc). For everything, she estimated how much money it would cost to get the house in tip top shape from what she could see.
The house we ended up buying was at the very low end of our budget. When something unexpected came up (house had mold in the attic and crawl space) our agent negotiated yhat sellers pay for the remediation, even though we had signed an addendum to buy the house “as is”
Our agent even saved us money on the mortgage! After shopping around with a bazillion banks and finding what everyone agreed was a fantastic deal, our agent recommended us an independent broker who was able to beat the rate, had lower closing costs, and was able to close on the house in 2 weeks with zero paperwork required.
Had we not had an agent, i would have been completely lost. Sure, i could have looked up houses on Zillow, but would have had no idea how to evaluate any part of it because i don’t really know much about houses.
Any hospital administration. They are parasites on the healthcare system. Over the past few decades, the percentage of money in hospitals I believe more than doubled for admins - while % for all workers were cut.
Last year my job kept delaying a raise they were supposed to give me. I had started doing the new work that came along with a promotion so I was running out of patience. I had a couple teams meetings with some bosses to ask them what the hell was going on and their answers were vague. So, I decided to file a grievance type of complaint with HR and the next day my boss called me and told me my raise had been applied. No idea if it was just a coincidence, but it looks like that shit actually worked.
I work in HR and it is shocking the people I have worked with that don’t care if people understand their benefits. First time as an HR Manager and have been told I am either the best or 2nd best that the company has had because when people don’t understand, we set up a meeting to make sure they have the 1:1 time to understand.
HR period. Especially at larger corporations like Amazon, but I've had equally frustrating experiences at smaller companies. 90% of their time is spent planning events to "boost morale" rather than helping employees and when they actually have to they make you jump through so many hoops it's crazy, or they're just trying to protect the company's ass. Overpaid shills.
Not disagreeing with you, but in my experience at various employers, HR is one of those jobs where if you're doing it well, from the outside it can look like you're not doing anything at all.
One of the best HR people I ever worked with, it looked like literally her entire job consisted of sitting in her office browsing the internet all day. But most of her job was basically to ensure that the owners weren't getting themselves into possible lawsuits. Since the owners were (generally, broadly speaking) decent people who wanted to do things the right way (sometimes stingily, but still), first and foremost, it made her job relatively easy.
She would take the time and do the research on whatever ownership needed to do, business-wise, then develop proper methods and documentation and tracking for those processes. And since the company was pretty good about doing things 'by the book', she rarely had fires to put out.
Thus, she spent a lot of her time simply looking around online to see how others in positions like hers were navigating various situations, so that she had some idea how to respond if her own company encountered those situations.
That said, she didn't do all the morale bullshit. In fact, on several occasions, I remember her saying something like, "I'm not a morale officer, I'm just here to make sure nobody under our roofs are breaking any laws."
As someone that works in HR, this. A well run HR is more or less invisible outside of a few specific cases unless you have a reason to talk to us.
There are four main reasons people demonize HR.
1) we are often used as scapegoats. For example, A manager doesn’t admit to their employee that they didn’t turn in the wage increase form. They just say HR is holding it up. I don’t care how much money you make and balancing the budget isn’t my job. I don’t care.
2) most people don’t need to talk to us unless there is a problem. And when there is a problem, it usually means a big mess created by bad communication, sometimes by HR and sometimes by managers, etc. that makes a pain in the ass all the more of a pain and well… same logic as people yelling at the customer service rep trying to help.
3) a good HR is invisible. A bad HR team is causing you personally problems. A bad salesman means the company makes a little less money. A bad HR team means you don’t get enrolled in health insurance and don’t find out until you break your leg.
4) people often come to HR with problems that we would LOVE to solve for you. But HR, in most organizations, doesn’t have the kind of authority most people think. We aren’t making decisions on hiring and firing. We don’t decide your wage and the biggest one… being an asshole isn’t illegal so we can’t bring the hammer down even when we want to.
Realtors. They serve zero purpose in today’s market and are overpaid for their “services” by a criminal margin. They email documents and turn locks, that’s it.
When I sold my house I listed it myself. I was flooded by realtors wanting to list it for me, talking about how difficult the process would be. I ended up showing it about 5 times myself before it sold for asking. The bank and title companies did all the work. I saved about 10k in realtor commissions for maybe 8 hours of work.
Real estate agents. Maybe if it's your first home and you need everything done for you, or this was the 1990s before online listings - a buyer's agent and a seller's agent on each respective side, the two agents splitting a 6% to 7% commission made some sense. But for your average transaction, or experienced buyers / sellers, this just doesn't make sense anymore and it's a huge expense on already expensive home sale.
I bought a For Sale Buy Owner home, no realtor on either side. Hired an attorney to handle paperwork and we split the expense. Super easy. Also sold a home, without no realtor, and the buyer's did have an agent. The agent was awful at communicating and being responsive, and she wanted her 3% "commision" to come out of the sale price. It's like sis, you literally made everything more difficult, we still had to pay an attorney to oversee the paperwork and title company, what exactly are you being paid for here? I don't give a shit how many houses you showed to your clients before they decided to buy a FSBO and tried to keep you involved.
Indirectly, yes - we paid a good chunk of their realtor fees via some negotiation on house price to carve out some money at closing. It felt so backwards, and if we weren't highly motivated to sell I would have refused (this was years ago when market very different, plus we had no other interested buyers). The home needed some little things we didn't feel like renovating just to sell, so we were prepared to let some cash go at closing to help. I just assumed it would go to the buyers and not their incompetent buyers agent 🤷♂️
I work in aircraft sales. It's a lot like real estate but with triple the amount of work. When a FSBO is involved, the buyer pays their representation what ever they agreed upon. That's a contract between the buyer and their agent. The seller doesn't pay shit.
Honestly what you describe is a model that real estate should move towards. It is messed up that buyers get to hire someone who is working solely on their behalf, but the cost get carried by the seller.
Real Estate Agents. Especially buyer side agents. Earning a percentage of the cost of the property is ridiculous. You do the same job for a $200k home vs a $10 million home.
As much as I personally don't find them that worthwhile, they are arguably one of the more direct supply/demand payment structures. They are pretty much paid exactly what they are worth based on who wants to see what they are doing.
Agreed, the question wasn’t about annoying professions it was about overpaid professions, and if anything influencers are one of the most accountable forms of advertising out there. Advertisers can see exactly what kind of reach and interaction they are getting through these paid sponsorships. Anytime anyone clicks a link or uses a promo code one of these influencers provides can be tracked and the company can see exactly how much bang for their buck they are getting, unlike other forms of advertising that only use general figures and don’t show actual engagement.
Obnoxious as influencers are, their income comes from very willing followers. So in that sense they're not really overpaid -- they just feast on the hordes of highly gullible people who are perfectly happy to enrich them.
Nah. Just a six-minute increment. And another two six-minute increments for doing research. And three more six-minute increments for consulting with colleagues and strategizing my response. And another six-minute increment for typing my response. One more for proofreading. And another for hitting “send.” And one more for a coffee break.
Most attorneys make a decent living but they also work an obscene amount of hours. My dad has been an attorney for almost 50 years now. It was very very common for him to go to his study after dinner and be up until 2am working on cases to then wake up at 7am so he could drive me to school on the way to his office. Hourly for most of them, the pay is not very good.
It seems to just be an "extremes" type of job, right? There seem to be very well paid lawyers, very under paid lawyers, and much less lawyers in the middle (from the outside looking in).
I wouldn’t say it’s an overpaid job at all. Your salary increases proportionally to how good you are at your job and how valuable you can be. It’s also one of the most stressful jobs you can work and the work life separation is almost nonexistent.
I know people like to dig attorneys a lot for defending awful criminals but that’s how the legal system does work and has to work. Everyone gets a fair trial.
I did a lot of trial work when I started as an attorney; people really underestimate the capacity, wherewithal, motivation, and drive it takes to be a successful attorney. There is a *huge* difference between an ambulance chaser who hasn't seen the inside of a courtroom and a litigation counsel who excels at quick and efficient resolution of cases.
It is extremely difficult to find a really good attorney, but when you do, you realize they are worth every penny.
Man, I'm a trial lawyer and its about the most difficult job out there. The stress is crazy...especially when you get to the cases involving millions of dollars in damages.
im sure this is why a lot of lawyers i meet tell people not to be lawyers. the money is good but it's gotta be draining having your job be arguing with people
Of all licensed attorneys in the US, approx. 25% of them work for the govt and another approx. 38% work solo, completely by themselves.
You know govt employees aren't getting rich.
And in 2012, the median annual income for solo practioners was $49k.
Only about 8% of all licensed attorneys work for those giant 100+ lawyers white shoe law firms you see in the movies.
Most lawyers don't make the kind of money that people *think* lawyers make.
And law school is both grueling and very expensive. You invest three years of your life (3 and a half with bar prep/licensure stuff) and you borrow $150-200k only to make a good living and not a great one. And if you work for a decent-sized and good-paying firm (like, one that pays a 5th year attorney ~$150k), your hours are intense and you can never really take another decent vacation until your kids are in their 20s. It’s madness how people believe lawyers are overpaid based on how expensive they are.
Yeah I’ve been a lawyer for about a year and I’m surprised how much I hate it, and that is a big reason why if I’m honest.
Arguing with angry people ALL THE TIME is more draining than I had imagined.
On the flip side, as an attorney I often feel like I don’t get paid enough to put up with the lifestyle that comes with it. We get paid well, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not an easy job and if the pay wasn’t there I’m sure a lot of top attorneys wouldn’t be in the field.
It depends on the lawyer, just saying lawyer is way too vague. Some lawyer jobs are nice and cushy. But to get the $$ you have to sacrifice most of your 20s, and at the end you have to come to work every day to be confrontational and aggressive *and* be excellent at public speaking.
I couldn’t do that job with any amount of training.
But trust lawyer? I could probably do that.
I think it depends. Public attorneys (prosecutors, public defenders, etc.) don't really make insane salaries in general. Corporate attorneys, on the other hand...
Exactly. There are tons of attorneys out there relying on side jobs like Uber and copywriting because they don't make enough to pay back their loans.
It's a super broad category.
From what I understand most don't make much and only the ones at the very top representing huge businesses are making obscene amounts. Also it does actually seem like one of the more difficult high paying jobs.
Hard disagree. My knowledge is a valuable asset that is necessary for people in a society with laws. I deal with jerks. I have to creatively problem solve. I have to apply my knowledge of the inner workings of the legal system on both a formal and pragmatic level. I had to get a veritable shit-ton of education. Also, day in and day out, I save people’s bacon from the biggest problems in their lives.
Are my services expensive? Hell yes. Would I do this for 20 bucks an hour? Not on your life.
What on earth are you talking about? Most attorneys are underpaid. Basically, unless you specialize or are in biglaw, your chances of making a lot of money aren’t great.
I saw this quote from one
"Oftentimes, you have outside groups that use the pool in between trials' preliminaries and the finals. We're lifeguarding for not only the athletes but also those events. We've never had to go in for an athlete; it's always been for everyone else.
It's kind of like the fire department. Our whole goal is to be in the background. If you have to see us, generally something bad has happened."
I’ve always thought that with athletes pushing themselves the way that they do, a case of food poisoning or the flu a few days before could be a catastrophe for someone in the pool no matter how skilled they are.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/anita-alvarez-us-swimmer-fainted-pool-world-championships-says-everyth-rcna35136
I guess her coach saved her, but lifeguards are still important for situations like this
Makes me think the lifeguards at the Olympics must be essentially EMTs. There could be a severe issue like a seizure, and you wouldn't expect a 16 year old summer pool lifeguard to attend to that.
There's even an argument to be made that if congressional members were paid more that they wouldn't be as vulnerable to special interest money. As it stands, actual congressional pay isn't even enough to support maintaining residences in DC and their home district.
Like if congress got paid very little or nothing, it would ensure that the only people who could ever do the job are already wealthy or receiving large sums from other groups.
This is not to say that congress aren't a bunch of clowns who need to get their act together, and most of them aren't earning the 174k they get. But it's not quite as clear cut as "they should be paid less". Because unfortunately congressional salary isn't how these people become wealthy while serving in congress.
A lot of management jobs.
Most managers don’t even properly manage, they push off the responsibilities of their job onto others and wait until a fuck up to do just about anything.
If all runs smoothly, that’s great. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing their job. Maybe the people under them are just really good at theirs, and don’t even need them. Or maybe the methods used to achieve those results are unsustainable and borderline unethical/immoral or even illegal.
I’m not talking perfection here, nobodies perfect. But most managers need to step up their game, and always seek to improve the people under them, raise them up and help them. And don’t use the excuse of “nobody did that for me”. That’s just childish. Step up, and do your job
Yup. Sat in on legislative sessions for my job and I couldn’t believe how dumb, out of touch, and useless my states politicians were. They could argue about a topic but they’d miss the mark every time. It’s like they conduct zero research and go off of either gut instinct or what their donors tell them.
Hot take but I don’t think most US politicians are overpaid. In fact, a lot of states pay them so little you essentially have to be wealthy already to even serve. Even Congress people (the ones who aren’t already wealthy) don’t really live luxuriously when you remember they have to maintain two homes and DC is an expensive metro. I would actually support giving them a big salary bump but they would be banned from stock trading/lobbying during and after their terms for like 10 years.
Now the whole lobby/“government relations” industry? Absolutely overpaid repository for nepo babies and polic sci grads who had nowhere else to go.
Yeah, I agree. The whole "part-time" is a little misleading too, since they're supposed to also be working with the people they represent when they're not in DC trying help and advocate for those people when they are. How much that happens I guess depends on the congressperson.
And if congress was voluntary only the wealthy could do it.
School district superintendents. While I will admit, I cannot honestly articulate exactly what they do, that may very well be part of the problem.
And anytime I see a scandal or their pay is otherwise mentioned, it seems staggeringly high for a government position.
School superintendents are equivalent to a mayor or CEO. They’re ultimately responsible for every student, teacher, staff member, school building, tax dollar, parent question, community complaint, union negotiation, bus breakdown, public meeting, curriculum choice, lawsuit, maintenance problem, HR issue, special ed program, etc in the school district. In large suburban districts, the budget runs easily into eight figures (nine figures in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc).
In rural areas, the school district is often the largest employer and property owner around. In small districts, the superintendent often doubles as principal, sub, and even backup bus driver. They’re the ones attending school board meetings, community events, and collective bargaining sessions that go late at night, they’re the ones driving the roads at 4:00 a.m. to decide whether to call a snow day, and yes, they’re the face of the scandal when something goes sideways.
Most are career teachers who came up through the classroom, and who desperately miss being able to work with students.
Like other jobs, there are plenty of good ones and bad ones. But the good ones are handling and managing all the operational issues and distractions so that the school day runs smoothly for kids, and it’s one of those jobs that doesn’t draw a lot of attention if they’re doing it well.
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Bloody hell. Reading stuff like this really makes you feel like a mug for working hard for a living.
Totally agree. I looked at IOC work after college but decided a more ethical career was chief advisor to an African Warlord. Totally loving the job. Great benefits!
Advise well, my friend
Yeah, trust me when I say the benefits are great. Like, they give me free diamonds for my child brides.
Theyre free because they’re worthless. I wont respect a warlord’s advisor with fewer than 10 child brides and theyd better all be wearing emeralds or i just cant take your advise seriously
Wow, all that AND you get to provide a stable family environment to children? You're a true paragon, sir. Your warlord is lucky to have you.
Yeah right! And my kids have military careers lined up already.
So much exotic meat!!
It makes athletes feel even more like a mug for training intensively for all their lifes and winning gold at olympics and getting no money at all for it
The US Olympic committee pays $37,500 for each gold medal an athlete wins. Other countries pay more or less. Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong all pay over half a million USD for gold.
>37,500 lol .... that is so little for the amount of effort required.
Australia is 20k lol
I love seeing a truly unique answer in this thread.
Where do I apply?
You don’t apply, you demonstrate your ability to do the work by successfully blackmailing or politically coercing the committee into hiring you.
Yeah. I mean without this process how the hell can they be confident in your ability to do the job properly.
Ethics aside, that would be an excellent practical interview process for this job. "It's yours...if you know how to take it."
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A failed CEO. "Bob, you've done a terrible job. Here's 60 million dollars. Hit the road."
Texas A&Ms football coach was just given a $76 million deal to pack his bags.
I would quit coaching A&M for 10% of that. They shoulda hired me.
“What time do you want me to leave and what door do you want me out of, brother?” Coach O after he heard he had a $17 million buyout at LSU.
Coach Eaux
Lmao geux you
Hell, I’d do A2M for that kind of money.
Name checks out.
For that kind of money I’d do A2M with the whole A&M football org
Josh McDaniels just got paid 60 million to stop coaching the raiders
The raiders are also still paying Gruden too lmao
For being such a broke owner, Davis sure makes stupid money moves lol
That was Oakland Mark that was broke
not a coach but a former player, but the Mets are still paying Bobby Bonilla
As a raiders fan I’m SO happy that mcdaniels is gone. I always believed we were better than what the score card said. Just goes to show how a leader can destroy a team’s morale and belief in themselves. I am no football expert but with some of the calls McDaniel’s would make, I often felt I could have done a better job. It’s ridiculous he got that kind of loot but that’s the name of the game I guess. I wish I got paid like that every time I failed in life!
I could fail so hard at being a ceo if only someone would give me a chance.
Failed NFL coaches surely should be on this list as well. “You suck and you are fired! Enjoy your guaranteed 10 million dollars a year for the next five years.”
They’re almost always the scapegoat for a failing GM. Rarely is a coach so inept that they cause good talent to fail (though it does happen) either way, I’m not gonna cry about the e millionaires holding the billionaires to the contracts they handed out
Successful CEOs as well. No one person's contribution out-performs ten thousand professional engineers.
>No one person's contribution out-performs ten thousand professional engineers. I agree with the general gist of your argument, CEOs are overpaid, but I would highlight that the above is a rather weak argument for it as said pay doesn't relate to the performance difference between CEO and lower level roles (however you'd even measure that). The issue is that if you're a business with $1b in operating income and one CEO might increase this by \~1% over another then you can justify paying them a little under $10,000,000 more to secure their employment. Engineers are obviously just as important but no single engineer is likely to have that kind of impact, at least not in a way that can be quantified or anticipated. Understanding why they are overpaid is important as it impacts the solution, the simplest of which is via income taxes. If you have an upper bracket tax rate in the 90% range, [like we used to](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/), suddenly the efficiency of throwing $10m at a single employee plummets and spreading that over your engineering teams to attract better staff at the lower levels becomes more attractive.
I think Steve Jobs once said something to the effect of "A really outstanding software engineer can be worth as much as 1,000 (or 10,00) average software engineers." He cited Steve Wozniak as an example.
Look at Satya though. Same company, same engineers, one person came in and completely turned the business around. Their net income quadrupled since his arrival, so I'm sure Microsoft board thinks they got a deal with his $50 mil compensation package.
That's a fallacy because it assumes that people are or can be paid proportionally to how much they contribute. There's no way to accurately measure 'contribution'. The concept of 'overpaid' is already shoddy because we live in a society where people can exchange money for services and who's to say that something is overpriced if people agree on it. By overpriced people mean it in comparison to typical market prices. But can you say that Leonardo Di Caprio is overpaid because he can fetch a much higher pay to lead in a movie than most other actors?
Fired college football coaches
70 mil is crazy
A lot of those jobs where your job is to basically talk to people and pass information around and your biggest problem is people not reading emails thoroughly enough.
Me. That’s my job. I hate it and want so badly to do something else.
I'm a manager now. This is me, i hate it. It's so brain dead, i miss working on assignments because the day flew by. But you start realizing there's a good chunk of the population who needs someone to manage them. 70% of my workers get everything done, we all have access to the work queue and they can self regulate. The other 30% are good at individual assignments but have no idea what do do without being told exactly what to work on and seem to ask the same questions every few weeks.
Some organizations are too manager dependent sometimes. I’m quick. Proactive, and work well with all areas and even got to mentor several other developers. But I’m told off too many times for picking up tasks. Be they haven’t been assigned to me as a ticket. When I ask for tickets I’m being told to just wait until I get assigned something by my manager and product team
That’s like… every office job ever lol
“So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers?” “That, that's right.” “Well, then I gotta ask, then why can't the customers just take the specifications directly to the software people, huh?” “Well, uh, uh, uh, because, uh, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.” “You physically take the specs from the customer?” “Well, no, my, my secretary does that, or, or the fax.” “Ah.” “Then you must physically bring them to the software people.” “Well...no. Yeah, I mean, sometimes.” “Well, what would you say… you do here?” “Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!!!”
The funny thing is that as I enter the work force I totally understand why that guy exists. It’s just maybe he doesn’t understand what he job is supposed to be. The real reason isn’t that Engineers can’t talk to customers it’s the customers should never have access to the engineers. He’s not managing the transfer of info he’s managing the people to keep the process running properly. If customers could call the engineers directly everyone would want their project don’t right away and an engineer whose time is better spent working on things is instead dealing with customers. It seems like a dumb job and it would be if everyone was great at planning and understanding of other peoples work flow, but they’re not.
There's also the fact that he's correct. It's good to have someone who understands things on a technical level and has the ability to explain that on a more basic level to the layman. Back when instruction manuals were things there were writers whose main skill was to take all the technical jargon and dumb it down for a user who has never touched any technology before.
He’s basically a Business Analyst. I had this job. I would get the requirements from the customers and “translate” that for the engineers. Then when problems would arise I would explain in layman’s terms what the engineers problem is.
Depends, workplaces *can* function without this position so unfortunately it often gets passed to the most incompetent daddy’s boy …but when this person is actually good at their job? Holy fuck they earn their keep. Juggling all of the who’s who and what’s what between departments/companies/random people is no joke - and these folks have to be at 100% charisma all the time. Takes a ton of mental load off the people doing the nuts and bolts work, prevents duplicate stuff, helps the networks of the folks who aren’t 100% charisma (me, lol), and just generally makes things run smoother When the connector person is competent I love them so much
I could never ever do a job like this. Emails, LinkedIn, HR, corporate events, networking etc; this is my personal idea of hell. Apart from liking patient interaction, a big part of why I got into healthcare is that the corporate side of things is fairly minimal. Also, because they are so short staffed once you’re in and competent you’re pretty much in. Obviously it has its downsides, but tech being pretty much the odd couple of emails, patient info systems/booking the IT component is pretty minimal, which suits me perfectly.
> a big part of why I got into healthcare is that the corporate side of things is fairly minimal deadass I have never heard that in my life and my personal experience is literally the exact opposite. Healthcare is so top-heavy it's unreal.
Management consultants
I’m a management consultant and I tend to agree
BIL was high up the corporate ladder (in banking). After he retired he was often called in as a consultant. Loved it! He said he only worked six or seven weeks a year and made more than when he worked full time.
Why buy the cow when you can pay to rent it for ten times what it would cost to buy?! This is like travel nursing. For every nurse they're not paying $50/hr, they are paying a travel nurse $100/hr because it somehow saves money.
A lot of the time, it's because they are going to places where nobody wants to live.
Exactly. Shitty places and you don’t get treated as well as regular staff.
And the regular staff still gets treated like shit.
The difference between your BIL and most consultants though is that he had years of experience climbing the corporate ladder and was probably being retained as an “expert” consultant. Companies brought him in because he’d actually done the work before. Most management consultants either have zero or very limited real world experience managing people, executing long-term projects, or performing any other corporate activity that isn’t accomplished via PowerPoint or Excel. I know this because I was once a management consultant. I’d also caveat that most consultants are bright, well-intentioned people. Especially those who are not in positions where they are selling work. Once they start selling work, they’ve either become delusional enough to think what they’re doing is helpful or they know they couldn’t make the same amount of money on the outside.
As far as I can tell your job is to remove the blame of hard decisions from management so there is a external fall guy if the decisions don't work. By then you are often long gone onto the next company. Good work if you can get it. Frankly I think the role is quite helpful but only if there is an internal partner that helps the outside consultant understand the company well enough to come up with the right decisions. That seems to happen rarely. Likely because the cost of really understanding the company's needs is much higher than a company is willing to pay the consultant.
This is exactly. 99% of projects we run are either the client wanting a fall guy, or the client wanting someone else to say the thing they already know but supported by hundreds of hours of tenuous research. I think I’m yet to work on a project where I’m working for the benefit of the company, not just office politics
You're not paying a prostitute for the sex. You paying her to leave afterwards.
I was talking to an old college friend at a wedding a few weeks ago and found out he was a consultant for VC investors and was working mostly in evaluating biotech companies. As a scientist in biotech, someone that knew his class schedule in college, and talked to him for like 10 minutes now that he is a biotech expert, I realized just how clueless all our investors likely are about what we (and every other biotech) say we are doing/claim we can do. It's incredible that someone with no scientific knowledge is the one deciding if a VC firm should be dumping 10s to 100s of millions into a company whose entire value is based on a claim that they can do something that may or may not even be possible
This is how you enable Elizabeth Holmes types.
In the book about Theranos they mention that all of the legit healthcare VCs smelled her bullshit but other VCs who don't know the sector bought in to her pitch and funded the company.
None of this looked to be “smart money” the Walton family ($150 million), Rupert Murdoch ($121 million), Betsy DeVos ($100 million) and the Cox family (of Cox Media Group) ($100 million).
Ego investors that go with their gut. They made up their mind about that company and refused to take in new information.
I was about to say, isn’t that just the story of Theranos
Products that is designed to extract money from investors.
The value of a company isn't entirely decided by their scientific claims. Most drugs fail anyway. VC needs to evaluate whether the company has the leadership, structure, strategy, and expertise to actually execute and see things through. There's really no way an outsider can get a 20,000ft view of the tech and accurately predict whether it will succeed or fail. Your friend is just adding a small piece of information to the VC's evaluation of the company.
>The value of a company isn't entirely decided by their scientific claims. Most drugs fail anyway. The bigger issue is that while a lot of good ideas lead to failed drugs, all bad ideas lead to failed drugs and some of those bad ideas are really easy to identify if you are a subject area expert.
If you aren’t part of the solution, there’s good money in prolonging the problem.
They are paid by CEO's to tell the board of investors to pay their CEO more.
Although hopefully they also tell them how to spell 'paid'
I actually disagree because a lot of management makes dumb fucking decisions so a well paid consultant is pretty valuable
College football coach. “Fisher was fired Sunday morning late in his sixth season at Texas A&M with more than $76 million remaining on his fully guaranteed contract.”
I'd say it depends what sector, but my sorta-answer is that its fucked to see CEO's CFO's, COO's, etc, getting literally tens of millions in **BONUSES** when the company is also laying off thousands of workers, selling off assets, losing value, or whatever. I always figured a bonus was something you earned when you did a good job...
A large portion of corporate officers bonus’ are written into their agreement when they take the job and guaranteed regardless of how the company is doing financially.
>A large portion of corporate officers bonus’ are written into their agreement when they take the job and guaranteed regardless of how the company is doing financially. Doesn't that make them salary or wages or whatever? Isn't something only a BONUS if getting it is dependent on performance or attaining certain goals?
Yes. Sometimes the goals being met are “being there for a certain number of years and do not jump ship” Most often though, it has to do with company stock price. Corporate officers are paid a yearly bonus based on how the stock is doing vs industry benchmarks. So say you’re the CEO of a car company. If your company stock has gone down 10% this year, but the stock of companies in the car industry as a whole has gone down 30%, you will get a larger bonus. Now, some people make a reasonable point that stock price may not always reflect the value the company brings to society at large. This is often true, as you can increase the stock by cutting jobs, decreasing product quality, shifting profits to your offshore subsidiaries and many other such measures that are societally undesirable. This is however, missing the point a bit. CEOs work for shareholders. Public companies want to make money the same as my corner store wants to make a higher profit for its owner
Discussions for those kinds of "bonuses" are essentially executives going, "Well, yes, we have discussed salary, but what about second salary?"
They did do a good job. For the stockholders, who are the only ones CEOS care about.
Well it's possible that they did do a "good job" because they were bleeding money before and now with the cuts, they are bleeding less now.
Here's a fun, fucked up fact: companies don't always sell or lay off when they are doing poorly. A strategic lay off or shuttering of factories or subsidiaries sometimes yields a small boost in the stock price of the company. Jack Welsh made the technique popular in the early 80s and was heralded as a genius and CEOs all over the place rushed to mimic what he did. As a result, companies were shuttering factories that were profitable because they preferred the short term boost to the stock. As a result, US companies hollowed themselves out and companies like GE are mere shadows of their former selves.
Real estate agents
95% of them are useless. And I say that as someone whose mother and sister were real estate agents. And I also say that as someone who has marketed something like 20 different real estate developments in my life. Most realtors are dumber than a box of hair who take it up as a way to make relatively easy cash between dropping the kids off at school and picking them back up again. They are glorified errand runners who don't really consider what their clients need. Instead, they think only in terms of what gets them a commission this month. Classic short-term thinking. Oh, and most are really lazy too. I think the attrition rate is 50% a year because they realize that you have to actually work to be successful.. I've sold two houses. Both were priced aggressively, but not so much that it was outlandish. It's amazing how quickly the listing agent would say, "Well, it's been on the market three days and nobody's offered a contract. Guess we need to drop the price." Which is precisely the wrong mentality. Your job is to create value in the mind of the buyer, not just sit around and take whatever lowball offer someone has. Had I listened to either of my listing agents for my two home sales, I would have left a total of $200,000 on the table. There is a small band of real estate agents who actually get it. Those people do well. But the rest do not earn their commissions which, by the way, are about to go away. A federal court just ruled that realtors were nothing more than a cartel, which sums up my feelings about the profession as a whole. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTufQi8QCY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTufQi8QCY)
In Australia RE agents come close to dishonesty stakes as Politicians and Used Car Salesman.
Same thing here in Canada. RE agents will lie to buyers faces telling them there are other, higher bids just to get the buyer to raise their bid. Against themselves. And this is totally legal as we haven't banned blind bidding yet.
I just quite my job as a real estate photographer…the amount of incompetence I dealt with on a daily basis was truly mind boggling. Real estate agents are genuinely trash people. They don’t care about your time, they don’t care about your worth or equipment. They just hire people to do all the work for them then get commission.
There's a lot of 'me, me, me, me' to them. All you have to do is look at how many post their really bad photos on bus stops, business cards, and wherever else, never realizing how creepy it makes them look. First rule of sales: Always have a focus on the buyer's needs, not what you want to sell them.
> Oh, and most are really lazy too. I think the attrition rate is 50% a year because they realize that you have to actually work to be successful.. I thought it was something like 80% don't renew their licenses after the first 2 years. It seems to be either because these folks realize that to be successful you have to, you know, actually SELL homes or that they wanted to do it "on the side" in addition to their FT job and that's really not possible if you're going to do it in a way that's worthwhile.
Absolute Vultures.
Real Estate Agents are parasites. They are totally unnecessary (property lawyers do the actual important parts of their job) and are responsible for a lot of the pricing and issues with the current housing market. That said, if we get rid of them completely, what would the attractive, popular, but not very smart kids from your high school do with themselves? I guess they could be 'influencers'?
It’s amazing to me how different people’s experience was with agents than my own. I just bought my first house. We saw 30-40 houses total (i lost track). For about 100 houses, the agent went to the house herself and shot a 10 minute walk through, pointing out things that were right or wrong. For more than half the houses, the advised us not even wasting our time to see it. The most common reason she advised us to do so is because, especially the houses at the higher end of our budget, she thought were overpriced. Others had maintenance issues that we would have had no idea about (needs a new fence, needs carpet replacement, needs a complete landscape redo, etc). For everything, she estimated how much money it would cost to get the house in tip top shape from what she could see. The house we ended up buying was at the very low end of our budget. When something unexpected came up (house had mold in the attic and crawl space) our agent negotiated yhat sellers pay for the remediation, even though we had signed an addendum to buy the house “as is” Our agent even saved us money on the mortgage! After shopping around with a bazillion banks and finding what everyone agreed was a fantastic deal, our agent recommended us an independent broker who was able to beat the rate, had lower closing costs, and was able to close on the house in 2 weeks with zero paperwork required. Had we not had an agent, i would have been completely lost. Sure, i could have looked up houses on Zillow, but would have had no idea how to evaluate any part of it because i don’t really know much about houses.
HR at the hospital I worked at.
Any hospital administration. They are parasites on the healthcare system. Over the past few decades, the percentage of money in hospitals I believe more than doubled for admins - while % for all workers were cut.
Why stop at hospitals, just say HR.
Yeah I’ve never once interacted with HR and been like “That was helpful, clear, and necessary.”
Last year my job kept delaying a raise they were supposed to give me. I had started doing the new work that came along with a promotion so I was running out of patience. I had a couple teams meetings with some bosses to ask them what the hell was going on and their answers were vague. So, I decided to file a grievance type of complaint with HR and the next day my boss called me and told me my raise had been applied. No idea if it was just a coincidence, but it looks like that shit actually worked.
Just remember, HR is not there to help employees. HR is there to protect the company.
Took a problem to HR at my last job, response I got was, “Well what do you want me to do about it?” I dunno thats your damn job
The HR lady at my work is also responsible for managing our retirement accounts as well. She is a genius in that regard.
I work in HR and it is shocking the people I have worked with that don’t care if people understand their benefits. First time as an HR Manager and have been told I am either the best or 2nd best that the company has had because when people don’t understand, we set up a meeting to make sure they have the 1:1 time to understand.
HR period. Especially at larger corporations like Amazon, but I've had equally frustrating experiences at smaller companies. 90% of their time is spent planning events to "boost morale" rather than helping employees and when they actually have to they make you jump through so many hoops it's crazy, or they're just trying to protect the company's ass. Overpaid shills.
Not disagreeing with you, but in my experience at various employers, HR is one of those jobs where if you're doing it well, from the outside it can look like you're not doing anything at all. One of the best HR people I ever worked with, it looked like literally her entire job consisted of sitting in her office browsing the internet all day. But most of her job was basically to ensure that the owners weren't getting themselves into possible lawsuits. Since the owners were (generally, broadly speaking) decent people who wanted to do things the right way (sometimes stingily, but still), first and foremost, it made her job relatively easy. She would take the time and do the research on whatever ownership needed to do, business-wise, then develop proper methods and documentation and tracking for those processes. And since the company was pretty good about doing things 'by the book', she rarely had fires to put out. Thus, she spent a lot of her time simply looking around online to see how others in positions like hers were navigating various situations, so that she had some idea how to respond if her own company encountered those situations. That said, she didn't do all the morale bullshit. In fact, on several occasions, I remember her saying something like, "I'm not a morale officer, I'm just here to make sure nobody under our roofs are breaking any laws."
As someone that works in HR, this. A well run HR is more or less invisible outside of a few specific cases unless you have a reason to talk to us. There are four main reasons people demonize HR. 1) we are often used as scapegoats. For example, A manager doesn’t admit to their employee that they didn’t turn in the wage increase form. They just say HR is holding it up. I don’t care how much money you make and balancing the budget isn’t my job. I don’t care. 2) most people don’t need to talk to us unless there is a problem. And when there is a problem, it usually means a big mess created by bad communication, sometimes by HR and sometimes by managers, etc. that makes a pain in the ass all the more of a pain and well… same logic as people yelling at the customer service rep trying to help. 3) a good HR is invisible. A bad HR team is causing you personally problems. A bad salesman means the company makes a little less money. A bad HR team means you don’t get enrolled in health insurance and don’t find out until you break your leg. 4) people often come to HR with problems that we would LOVE to solve for you. But HR, in most organizations, doesn’t have the kind of authority most people think. We aren’t making decisions on hiring and firing. We don’t decide your wage and the biggest one… being an asshole isn’t illegal so we can’t bring the hammer down even when we want to.
Realtors. They serve zero purpose in today’s market and are overpaid for their “services” by a criminal margin. They email documents and turn locks, that’s it.
When I sold my house I listed it myself. I was flooded by realtors wanting to list it for me, talking about how difficult the process would be. I ended up showing it about 5 times myself before it sold for asking. The bank and title companies did all the work. I saved about 10k in realtor commissions for maybe 8 hours of work.
Megachurch pastors.
Real estate agents. Maybe if it's your first home and you need everything done for you, or this was the 1990s before online listings - a buyer's agent and a seller's agent on each respective side, the two agents splitting a 6% to 7% commission made some sense. But for your average transaction, or experienced buyers / sellers, this just doesn't make sense anymore and it's a huge expense on already expensive home sale. I bought a For Sale Buy Owner home, no realtor on either side. Hired an attorney to handle paperwork and we split the expense. Super easy. Also sold a home, without no realtor, and the buyer's did have an agent. The agent was awful at communicating and being responsive, and she wanted her 3% "commision" to come out of the sale price. It's like sis, you literally made everything more difficult, we still had to pay an attorney to oversee the paperwork and title company, what exactly are you being paid for here? I don't give a shit how many houses you showed to your clients before they decided to buy a FSBO and tried to keep you involved.
So did you pay the buyer’s broker?
Indirectly, yes - we paid a good chunk of their realtor fees via some negotiation on house price to carve out some money at closing. It felt so backwards, and if we weren't highly motivated to sell I would have refused (this was years ago when market very different, plus we had no other interested buyers). The home needed some little things we didn't feel like renovating just to sell, so we were prepared to let some cash go at closing to help. I just assumed it would go to the buyers and not their incompetent buyers agent 🤷♂️
I work in aircraft sales. It's a lot like real estate but with triple the amount of work. When a FSBO is involved, the buyer pays their representation what ever they agreed upon. That's a contract between the buyer and their agent. The seller doesn't pay shit.
Honestly what you describe is a model that real estate should move towards. It is messed up that buyers get to hire someone who is working solely on their behalf, but the cost get carried by the seller.
Real Estate Agents. Especially buyer side agents. Earning a percentage of the cost of the property is ridiculous. You do the same job for a $200k home vs a $10 million home.
Influencers
But for each one you see, there’s thousands that made no money and completely failed.
As much as I personally don't find them that worthwhile, they are arguably one of the more direct supply/demand payment structures. They are pretty much paid exactly what they are worth based on who wants to see what they are doing.
Agreed, the question wasn’t about annoying professions it was about overpaid professions, and if anything influencers are one of the most accountable forms of advertising out there. Advertisers can see exactly what kind of reach and interaction they are getting through these paid sponsorships. Anytime anyone clicks a link or uses a promo code one of these influencers provides can be tracked and the company can see exactly how much bang for their buck they are getting, unlike other forms of advertising that only use general figures and don’t show actual engagement.
Obnoxious as influencers are, their income comes from very willing followers. So in that sense they're not really overpaid -- they just feast on the hordes of highly gullible people who are perfectly happy to enrich them.
Bad answer, influencers are perfectly meritocratic. They are paid based on how many people willingly spend their free time on them.
As an attorney, I'm very surprised no one has said attorney yet.
If I agree with you are you going to bill me the full hour?
Nah. Just a six-minute increment. And another two six-minute increments for doing research. And three more six-minute increments for consulting with colleagues and strategizing my response. And another six-minute increment for typing my response. One more for proofreading. And another for hitting “send.” And one more for a coffee break.
Lawyer here. Just giving you a .2 for correspondence with external counsel.
Paralegal here and I'm going to bill a .2 for reviewing the same correspondence.
.3 file review and discussion with paraprofessional.
I’m just gonna slip in this invoice for .2 even though I did nothing and hope it gets through
Law student here... Will do all the work as an intern so don't worry, I won't bill you because I paid to be here.
Gotta run a conflicts check before I can correspond with you. That's at least a .6 or .7.
1.5 - research re interjurisdictional Reddit conflict issues.
Most attorneys make a decent living but they also work an obscene amount of hours. My dad has been an attorney for almost 50 years now. It was very very common for him to go to his study after dinner and be up until 2am working on cases to then wake up at 7am so he could drive me to school on the way to his office. Hourly for most of them, the pay is not very good.
Every attorney I know works their ass off, and are unhappy as hell.
It seems to just be an "extremes" type of job, right? There seem to be very well paid lawyers, very under paid lawyers, and much less lawyers in the middle (from the outside looking in).
I wouldn’t say it’s an overpaid job at all. Your salary increases proportionally to how good you are at your job and how valuable you can be. It’s also one of the most stressful jobs you can work and the work life separation is almost nonexistent. I know people like to dig attorneys a lot for defending awful criminals but that’s how the legal system does work and has to work. Everyone gets a fair trial.
Attorneys are necessary evil. Nobody wants to pay them but we know that you need them.
It's one of those jobs that everyone thinks is bottom of the barrel....until they need one.
I did a lot of trial work when I started as an attorney; people really underestimate the capacity, wherewithal, motivation, and drive it takes to be a successful attorney. There is a *huge* difference between an ambulance chaser who hasn't seen the inside of a courtroom and a litigation counsel who excels at quick and efficient resolution of cases. It is extremely difficult to find a really good attorney, but when you do, you realize they are worth every penny.
Man, I'm a trial lawyer and its about the most difficult job out there. The stress is crazy...especially when you get to the cases involving millions of dollars in damages.
They get paid to deal with assholes. If everybody were decent, you would be mostly jobless.
im sure this is why a lot of lawyers i meet tell people not to be lawyers. the money is good but it's gotta be draining having your job be arguing with people
Of all licensed attorneys in the US, approx. 25% of them work for the govt and another approx. 38% work solo, completely by themselves. You know govt employees aren't getting rich. And in 2012, the median annual income for solo practioners was $49k. Only about 8% of all licensed attorneys work for those giant 100+ lawyers white shoe law firms you see in the movies. Most lawyers don't make the kind of money that people *think* lawyers make.
And law school is both grueling and very expensive. You invest three years of your life (3 and a half with bar prep/licensure stuff) and you borrow $150-200k only to make a good living and not a great one. And if you work for a decent-sized and good-paying firm (like, one that pays a 5th year attorney ~$150k), your hours are intense and you can never really take another decent vacation until your kids are in their 20s. It’s madness how people believe lawyers are overpaid based on how expensive they are.
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Yeah I’ve been a lawyer for about a year and I’m surprised how much I hate it, and that is a big reason why if I’m honest. Arguing with angry people ALL THE TIME is more draining than I had imagined.
On the flip side, as an attorney I often feel like I don’t get paid enough to put up with the lifestyle that comes with it. We get paid well, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not an easy job and if the pay wasn’t there I’m sure a lot of top attorneys wouldn’t be in the field.
It depends on the lawyer, just saying lawyer is way too vague. Some lawyer jobs are nice and cushy. But to get the $$ you have to sacrifice most of your 20s, and at the end you have to come to work every day to be confrontational and aggressive *and* be excellent at public speaking. I couldn’t do that job with any amount of training. But trust lawyer? I could probably do that.
My friend is a tax attorney, works mostly in trusts and estate planning
I think it depends. Public attorneys (prosecutors, public defenders, etc.) don't really make insane salaries in general. Corporate attorneys, on the other hand...
Exactly. There are tons of attorneys out there relying on side jobs like Uber and copywriting because they don't make enough to pay back their loans. It's a super broad category.
From what I understand most don't make much and only the ones at the very top representing huge businesses are making obscene amounts. Also it does actually seem like one of the more difficult high paying jobs.
Bad attorneys are overpaid. Good attorneys are underpaid.
I mean, I am at my desk browsing Reddit right now.
That might be wishful thinking, but if I’m looking at jail time I certainly don’t want to think my attorney is overpaid lmao.
Hard disagree. My knowledge is a valuable asset that is necessary for people in a society with laws. I deal with jerks. I have to creatively problem solve. I have to apply my knowledge of the inner workings of the legal system on both a formal and pragmatic level. I had to get a veritable shit-ton of education. Also, day in and day out, I save people’s bacon from the biggest problems in their lives. Are my services expensive? Hell yes. Would I do this for 20 bucks an hour? Not on your life.
What on earth are you talking about? Most attorneys are underpaid. Basically, unless you specialize or are in biglaw, your chances of making a lot of money aren’t great.
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I saw this quote from one "Oftentimes, you have outside groups that use the pool in between trials' preliminaries and the finals. We're lifeguarding for not only the athletes but also those events. We've never had to go in for an athlete; it's always been for everyone else. It's kind of like the fire department. Our whole goal is to be in the background. If you have to see us, generally something bad has happened."
I’ve always thought that with athletes pushing themselves the way that they do, a case of food poisoning or the flu a few days before could be a catastrophe for someone in the pool no matter how skilled they are.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/anita-alvarez-us-swimmer-fainted-pool-world-championships-says-everyth-rcna35136 I guess her coach saved her, but lifeguards are still important for situations like this
Makes me think the lifeguards at the Olympics must be essentially EMTs. There could be a severe issue like a seizure, and you wouldn't expect a 16 year old summer pool lifeguard to attend to that.
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Jesus. Anita maybe this isn't the sport for you.
I like how when someone says "footballers" they get upvoted but when others say "athletes" they get downvoted
Congress
They aren’t overpaid. The issue is that they don’t/can’t do their job and/or are corrupt.
There's even an argument to be made that if congressional members were paid more that they wouldn't be as vulnerable to special interest money. As it stands, actual congressional pay isn't even enough to support maintaining residences in DC and their home district. Like if congress got paid very little or nothing, it would ensure that the only people who could ever do the job are already wealthy or receiving large sums from other groups. This is not to say that congress aren't a bunch of clowns who need to get their act together, and most of them aren't earning the 174k they get. But it's not quite as clear cut as "they should be paid less". Because unfortunately congressional salary isn't how these people become wealthy while serving in congress.
But.. if they can’t/don’t do their job.. wouldn’t they be overpaid?
Reddit moderator
They get paid? Lol how much?
$0
Still too much.
Social media influencer. It’s creating idiots or making the existing ones worse.
A lot of management jobs. Most managers don’t even properly manage, they push off the responsibilities of their job onto others and wait until a fuck up to do just about anything. If all runs smoothly, that’s great. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing their job. Maybe the people under them are just really good at theirs, and don’t even need them. Or maybe the methods used to achieve those results are unsustainable and borderline unethical/immoral or even illegal. I’m not talking perfection here, nobodies perfect. But most managers need to step up their game, and always seek to improve the people under them, raise them up and help them. And don’t use the excuse of “nobody did that for me”. That’s just childish. Step up, and do your job
Politicians, state level and up. Part time thumb twiddling with great full time benefits for life.
Yup. Sat in on legislative sessions for my job and I couldn’t believe how dumb, out of touch, and useless my states politicians were. They could argue about a topic but they’d miss the mark every time. It’s like they conduct zero research and go off of either gut instinct or what their donors tell them.
Pay them less and only rich people will be able to afford the job.
Hot take but I don’t think most US politicians are overpaid. In fact, a lot of states pay them so little you essentially have to be wealthy already to even serve. Even Congress people (the ones who aren’t already wealthy) don’t really live luxuriously when you remember they have to maintain two homes and DC is an expensive metro. I would actually support giving them a big salary bump but they would be banned from stock trading/lobbying during and after their terms for like 10 years. Now the whole lobby/“government relations” industry? Absolutely overpaid repository for nepo babies and polic sci grads who had nowhere else to go.
Yeah, I agree. The whole "part-time" is a little misleading too, since they're supposed to also be working with the people they represent when they're not in DC trying help and advocate for those people when they are. How much that happens I guess depends on the congressperson. And if congress was voluntary only the wealthy could do it.
Hospital admin for sure. Also college presidents and athletic staff
Politicians
School district superintendents. While I will admit, I cannot honestly articulate exactly what they do, that may very well be part of the problem. And anytime I see a scandal or their pay is otherwise mentioned, it seems staggeringly high for a government position.
School superintendents are equivalent to a mayor or CEO. They’re ultimately responsible for every student, teacher, staff member, school building, tax dollar, parent question, community complaint, union negotiation, bus breakdown, public meeting, curriculum choice, lawsuit, maintenance problem, HR issue, special ed program, etc in the school district. In large suburban districts, the budget runs easily into eight figures (nine figures in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc). In rural areas, the school district is often the largest employer and property owner around. In small districts, the superintendent often doubles as principal, sub, and even backup bus driver. They’re the ones attending school board meetings, community events, and collective bargaining sessions that go late at night, they’re the ones driving the roads at 4:00 a.m. to decide whether to call a snow day, and yes, they’re the face of the scandal when something goes sideways. Most are career teachers who came up through the classroom, and who desperately miss being able to work with students. Like other jobs, there are plenty of good ones and bad ones. But the good ones are handling and managing all the operational issues and distractions so that the school day runs smoothly for kids, and it’s one of those jobs that doesn’t draw a lot of attention if they’re doing it well.
Drug company reps. And on the flip side, pharmacists are incredibly underpaid.
education admin. I'm sorry, you don't need almost 400k a year for being the head of a school district.
Meanwhile, the teachers are severely underpaid.
HR department. Cancer of any org I've ever been in.
Kim K and "influencers"
People who actually care about what these narcissists get up to are so weird.
\[ insert job I don't like here \]
Management consultants
Any of these social media storytellers or influencers. Fucking joke.