Some things are clearly valueless. For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless. There are a lot of jobs which have components like that in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due dilligence etc.
For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.
> For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless.
It seems plausible at least that you could evaluate a potential path forward, decide it is a dead end, let everyone know it is a dead end, have the report there just for backup in case anyone asks, and then not actually have anyone ask (maybe you have a really good reputation). I’d say the report there was still useful, even if only as an insurance policy.
> in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due diligence etc.
agree 100%. The commonality there is that these are things where the profit motive can't discipline wasteful management.
I'd also throw in the non-profit sector in general, in addition to what you listed. Without ongoing hard work by donors to prevent waste, non-profits become very good at incinerating all their money on excessive overhead.
For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.