Comments on: The 10 Most Overpaid Jobs

By: Joseph Pearl

Joseph Pearl — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:45:48 +0000

Re Athletes: They think their professional contracts are everlasting. They get duped into investing in unsafe investments. They have a hard time comprehending investing. They need to use the same commitment and focus they used to make them professional athletes into their investing. Additionally, many need to modify their spending before they need to rely on bankruptcy. For instance many athletes can reduce the amount of autos they own in half i.e. 10 to 5.

By: Marek Zreda

Marek Zreda — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 04:50:19 +0000

I would add university administrators. With salaries many times that of university professors, they have the nerve to give themselves huge pay increases (at my university the highest was 62% over two years). They are usually useless. And they excel in one area: making money disappear.

By: Len Penzo

Len Penzo — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:51:02 +0000

Well, FS, I have practiced reading for some corporate videos and it’s not rocket science. Yes, it understandably takes most amateurs a bit of practice to properly modulate their tone to keep from sounding like a boring drone, and find the right cadence, but that stuff can be learned in a relatively short amount of time. I am certain some people can’t pull it off under any circumstances — but I think most can with practice. (By the way, I’ve paid voice actors too to do work for me and they do very well for the amount of work they deliver.)

By: foodslut

foodslut — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 15:10:28 +0000

Have you done voice acting? I never have, but having been in radio, I know “reading off the page” isn’t as easy as it seems (and in the private sector, I certainly wasn’t overpaid). Don’t know if they make a ton of money, but if it was so easy, lots more people would be doing it – and you’d be happy to listen to commercials, (or kids to video games) with boring, “Charlie Brown teacher” voices.

By: Paula Jones

Paula Jones — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:53:19 +0000

I suppose you can consider me a “public servant” since I work for a college that is state funded. Believe me when I tell you, I’m not overpaid; it’s the administration. I’ve worked here 23 years and I make $40,000 a year. Part of that income is because I worked hard, took classes, and received an increase because of it. Otherwise I wouldn’t even make that much. It’s the higher-ups who make $200,000, benefits paid for and golden parachute even if they don’t perform and are let go.

By: Len Penzo

Len Penzo — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 01:23:34 +0000

I just may have to do that one, Cemlyn. Thanks for the article idea. Can you tell me what type of contract work you did in Saudi Arabia?

By: Cemlyn Jones

Cemlyn Jones — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 03:16:21 +0000

Hi Len. A few years back I lived in Saudi Arabia as a contractor. Outside the city of Jeddah is this enormous crater, almost 1km diameter and around 150 meters deep. I developed a pet phrase (In the hole !!) I imagined putting all the people that I considered to be oxygen thieves and giving them a ‘bucket of sunshine’. First in there were bankers; hey, that it is our money !!, next came all lawyers; they create all the laws and then spend all of our money finding loop holes, soon after I added accountants; not for what they do but they are in a cartel with lawyers, they pass laws to say you have to have certified accounts and then charge ridiculous amounts for simply adding up some numbers. Soon after it became the norm to simply say “In the hole” when somebody pissed me off.

So, who would you put in the hole ?? How about Top 10 for the Hole ??

By: Len Penzo

Len Penzo — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:28:24 +0000

“Corporate bureaucrats?” Are you joking? The only place bureaucrats can be found is in the ivory towers of government. Private profitable corporations don’t have the time or money for such worthless paper-pushing nonsense.

As for your assertions about abusive executives,and talk of a so-called “predator class,” and “masters of the universe”? It’s as if you’ve been channeling Che Guevara.

I understand that to folks like you, government is viewed as a beneficial uncle and therefore that somehow justifies the insane pay and pensions those workers receive — off the taxes paid by those of us who work in the private sector, the only place where wealth is created.

That being said, your public infrastructure argument is nothing but a convenient straw man. Of course we need infrastructure, just as we need limited government. So what’s your point? That, therefore, government workers aren’t overpaid? You need to try harder than that, Mr. Wills.

Another point you seem to miss: Everybody who works for a private company, be it a large corporation or a small mom & pop shop, has the free will to leave whenever they want to and peddle their services to the highest bidder. Nobody need subject themselves to any “abuses” heaped upon them, be they real or imagined. If they hate their boss or can’t stand the job they can quit at any time and find employment somewhere else.

(By the way, speaking of “conglomerated monopolies,” the biggest one of all happens to be the federal government.)

By: r_wills

r_wills — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:21:57 +0000

You are assuming that a private company, run by corporate bureaucrats can be more efficient then public employees. That some how lower wages, lack of benefits and abuse by executives will wave a magic wand and make it all better.

So were is this paradise on earth you seem to believe is made so better by the innate wonderfulness of the conglomerated monopolies running everything?

What? This heaven on earth only exists in libertarian comic books? Who woulda thought!

Any country, you and I would actually want to live in relies on public funding of public employees creating, building and maintaining public works!

And golly, somehow even in those “despotic social democrat states” somehow people still own their own businesses, entrepreneurs create new businesses and the grandkid, descendants of the rapacious, still keep collecting enough from their inheritances to pay for their obsession for decadence.

Of course, I can see your viewpoint, that too many of us serf-employees may earn a decent living, keep our families housed and consumering. That we might have the gall to pretend that we are as important as your predator class, self-proclaimed masters of the universe.

By: Len Penzo

Len Penzo — Sun, 29 May 2011 16:02:42 +0000

I appreciate your point of view, but that doesn’t change the fact that government workers, who now make much more compared to their non-gov’t counterparts, are overpaid. You assume that all the jobs you listed could only be done by the government — which has no incentive whatsoever to hold down costs like a private company does because they have no competition. In fact, all of the jobs you listed could be done better, cheaper and much more efficiently if they were outsourced to private industry.