Comment by jt-hill
1 day ago
This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11.
The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.
I always thought “soft skills” were a cope for those who didn’t learn an actual skill, until I entered the workforce. I was working mainly in customer service, construction, and facility maintenance roles, and in all three I found it was incredibly common for coworkers to have issues with anger management, emotional maturity, and basic courtesy. These jobs were all fairly terrible aside from customer service; perhaps not coincidentally, that is also where these issues were the least common.