The different types of white collar jobs

I think I can break down most white collar jobs into the following categories:

  1. People who produce relationships (for example, sales or recruiting)
  2. People who produce things (usually products)
  3. People who produce infrastructure (usually involving technology)
  4. People who produce processes
  5. People who produce information
  6. People who produce decisions

These 6 categories are what I suspect “value” in business terms can be broken down into, and of course, we spend a lot of time trying to quantify that value using dollar amounts. How much you get paid is a function of how much value you’re perceived to produce. For example, it seems like society has decided that producing decisions is a high value activity.

There’s also a seventh category: People who support people who produce one of the above. They’re usually paid kinda poorly because they’re not directly producing value.