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I hear this complaint a lot but I work in a microcosm of a corporate environment with around 200 employees that directs billions of dollars in spending that is almost entirely composed of "laptop class" people and while I understand the incredulousness of onlookers it's very hard to tell which of the email senders and data enterers could in actuality be replaced without catastrophic consequences. If this wasn't the case then some group or another would have already raided the department and gotten rid of all of them so that they could show 10% reduced costs on some corporate slide deck and ascend the payscale. These things are much more darwinian than outsiders believe.
This is very obvious with AI entering the picture and the various departments looking around at eachother with hunger in their eyes. Do we really need this many pricing analysts? Can our underwriting be done more efficiently? Surely we can get a closing document for a $150 million deal done in under a week of labor. I promise you that you are not the first person to wonder if some job really needs to exist. Someone with skin in the game is fighting ever budget season for that job to exist and there are real stakes.
The starbucks email job sounds so frivilous until a whole region of shops doesn't get their bean delivery and can't sell their most profitable drink for a week costing the company millions because some process wasn't followed properly.
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