Every Fifth Job Opening Is in Sales. How the Labor Market Turns a Person into Sisyphus

According to Headhunter for January 2026, the highest demand for employees remains in the “sales and customer service” sector—in St. Petersburg, where I live, this is 20% of all open vacancies. This includes: sales managers, sales consultants and cashier-salespeople, as well as call center operators. The most in-demand specialist in the labor market is the sales manager: 8,713 open vacancies as of February 21, 2026. Yes, some of the “service” specialists have nothing to do with trade—these are consultants, tech support, administrators, etc. But the HH sales statistics do not include: pharmaceutical reps, travel agents, real estate agents, “free trial lesson” teachers in online schools, and other tea promoters, so I'll allow myself the rudeness of leaving the percentage unchanged. If you ask me for more precise numbers, I'll say: unreasonably, monstrously many.

Every fifth open vacancy is related to artificially stimulating demand.

What does this mean? Reality has long been broken, the economy is face-down in the salad, and even marketing presentations can't make this dead horse move anymore.

Capital cannot exist without expanded reproduction; it must produce more, sell more, and force people to consume more, but demand is finite: people don't need a tenth subscription, a third insurance policy, a credit card with cashback on office supplies, or a vacuum cleaner with wifi control. To keep the whole pyramid from collapsing, the system has created an entire caste of people who must stand at its base and support a layer of what shouldn't exist—sales managers.

A sales manager is a person who is meant to compensate for the failures of the economy with their own humiliation. They're not a communication specialist, not an expert in human needs, and not a mediator between product and consumer, but a psychological saboteur. Their job is to hack the client's mind and implant a need that never existed. It's as if a fire department hired staff to start small fires so the department could justify its budget.

Humanity invented mathematics, the arts, penicillin, spaceships, memes, democracy, and also a functionary whose job duties include lying, hypocrisy, imposition, manipulation, pressure, and breaking other people's will.

A sales manager is a philosophical glitch, a civilizational bug, and personified proof that God does not exist.

To keep going, the system forces people to engage in anti-meaning: generate non-existent demand, invent motivations, “work with objections,” persuade doubters, and break down the resistant. It's institutionalized violence, which for some reason we call work: violence against the client, violence against the worker, violence against the economy, violence against morality, and against reality itself.

A factory worker sells their physical strength, a programmer—their skills, a doorman—their time. That's a fair deal. A sales manager sells their soul piece by piece. Every shift is an act of self-denial, every cold call—a small clinical death, every script—a loss of identity, every lie—an amputation of part of the conscience, every funnel—a funeral for self-respect. And so on until nothing is left of the person. The system doesn't need a person, it needs their ability not to cry in the bathroom for a long time. The one who manipulates best survives, the one who lies more wins, the one who perfectly fakes enthusiasm moves up. This isn't a job, it's a Sisyphus sequel written on methadone.

Sisyphus was sentenced to hard, agonizing, and meaningless labor: pushing a stone uphill; watching it roll down; going back to the base; pushing again. No goal, no rest, no hope. Day after day, forever. A sales manager pushes their KPI up the mountain of cold leads; repeats the same script phrases; listens to death wishes for the sixteenth time that morning; fills out a CRM report; comes to the office the next day and starts all over again, just to be able to pay for the kennel where they sleep between two shifts in hell. At least Sisyphus was immortal. The manager ages, burns out, loses mental health, loses physical health, and becomes a statistic in stroke data.

A sales manager is the ultimate Sisyphus. The stone remains, the person breaks.

According to Camus, the absurd arises from the clash between the human need for meaning and the silence of the Universe. For me, the absurd arises from the clash between the human need for meaning and the structure of the labor market in late capitalism. Camus's Sisyphus knows his work is meaningless, accepts it—and still continues, because he is free, it's his rebellion and his choice. The sales manager knows his work is not just meaningless, but harmful; his product is needed by no one; clients hate him; the plan is unattainable; the salary won't cover rent—and still continues, because otherwise he won't eat.

The gods punished Sisyphus for his audacity. The market punishes the manager for being born at the wrong time, without inheritance, without an apartment, without a survival guarantee. The sales manager is Sisyphus who not only pushes the stone but also takes out a mortgage on his own boulder.

Camus considered rebellion the only worthy human response to the absurd; he wrote: “I rebel, therefore I exist.” But the sales manager doesn't have the right to rebel, not even in his own head: you can't tell the client to get lost, you can't call the product garbage, you can't tell management their KPIs are hallucinations, you can't not smile into the phone. Every phrase is scripted, every step is monitored, every emotion is regulated. What for Camus was the highest manifestation of human dignity is here turned into a violation of corporate ethics and punishable by a fine.

If the European Court of Human Rights dealt with real problems, it would ban this profession as a form of torture.

You might say: well, you don't have to work in sales, everyone is the architect of their own happiness. I answer: try surviving on an ER doctor's salary. If you're not ready to embrace poverty as an ethical principle and can't code in Python, chances are life will force you to sign a deal with the devil disguised as an employment contract and upload your soul to a CRM (reminder: 20% of all open vacancies in St. Petersburg).

If a person is forced to become a sales manager not because they're a naturally cynical, unprincipled pig (no judgment, I envy them), but because they need to make mortgage payments, feed a child, and pay for their mother's treatment—they are a victim of systemic violence and the main avatar of late-capitalist absurdity.

Some people heal others, teach children, and save animals. If you get paid for that, not just given a twig—congratulations, you're a happy person. Some have to work as accountants or stand at an assembly line. That's very dramatic, but at least your work creates value, which can be a personal consolation and fits into the logic of the universe rather than breaking it.

The work of a sales manager is a crutch holding up the world's absurdity vertically at the cost of the mental health of millions who have to rape themselves professionally every day for a percentage of the profit.

I claim that the very existence of the “sales manager” profession is an anthropological scandal, evidence of a fundamental breakdown in the entire system of social relations, and yet another item in the multi-volume indictment against humanity.

Somewhere in a beautiful society of the future, which we will never see, the sales manager profession will be classified as:

- highly toxic,

- psychologically traumatic,

- requiring rehabilitation after dismissal.

Rehabs will open for former salespeople, and corporations will be required to pay them compensation for years spent in open-space panopticons where they were told: “If you didn't meet your KPI, you don't deserve love, lunch, health, or a roof over your head.”

What can we do about all this now?

First, call absurdity absurdity, violence violence, and catastrophe catastrophe. If possible, don't take part in it, but if you have to—at least try to preserve yourself, each other, and human dignity.

Next time you get a call at 9 a.m. from a sales manager gasping from a panic attack—don't tell him to fuck off, he's not a function, he's a person and a hero whose fate would make all of Greek tragedy weep. He fights alone on the front lines of the market economy for his right to sleep in a bed and eat food.