Last week Grainne Seoige got a new job. She managed to pull off an achievement perfected by senior managers in large corporations — successfully disassociating herself from the failure of her employer — in this case Sky News’s Irish bulletin.Instead, she will be picking up a nice cheque in RTE for an HN (a shorthand for “handy number” here in the midlands). Seoige will be presenting a one-hour magazine programme in the afternoon for more money than she earned at Sky, where she anchored two hard news programmes a day.

What is the true HN though? If one were to design the perfect job, what would it look like? A few core characteristics should feature. The best jobs place the greatest physical distance between yourself and your boss. My job, for instance, is great. I sit at home with my unbrushed hair and cup of tea 25 miles from my boss, and I am protected from the mood swings and annoying personal habits of co-workers.

Teleworking is undoubtedly a boon to the employee who doesn’t care for management, and employers are quite justified in suspecting that this way of working is an excuse for sloth.

Fortunately, appalling commuting times and modern management fads require that at least some workers get to loll around at home while others toil in the cubicle hell of today’s office environment.

If  “working” at home is at the top of the scale, the bottom end is surely occupied by the call centre — the sweatshop of the 21st century.

The call centre means no escape. You have to be at your desk reading from a script, while the computer system dials the next customer to get their insurance renewed or their mobile phone upgraded. If you want to go to the lavatory you raise your hand so that a floating telephonist can take your place while you relieve yourself.

Between the call centre and teleworking, there are other options. Sales, repairs, inspecting things, research — any of these allow you to claim that you are somewhere else instead of the office. One sales executive I know couldn’t face her boss one morning. She went out to her car, started the engine and rolled the windows down. Then she phoned in pretending to be on her way to Cork. Job done, she went back inside and got into bed for another snooze.

Still, she was in sales. The tricky aspect of that discipline is the transparency of performance. Good jobs avoid any semblance of accountability. This is best achieved if there is no tangible way of measuring success. Those audience figures were a bit of a nuisance for Grainne, and I’m sure Pat Kenny’s nights are filled with anxiety dreams about his Late Late Show numbers. Sales jobs have those awkward quotas that have to be filled, so a faltering performance is easily identifiable. It’s much better to do a job with no objective method of measuring success or, more importantly, failure.

Marketing is pretty good for that. I used to work in marketing and was always fascinated by how little time it took new directors to suggest changing the logo. Changing a logo uses up loads of time and it’s difficult to criticise. It looks like such a positive thing to do. A new colour, a dynamic swoosh. It worked for Nike, it just might save your company.

Still, for true lack of accountability you have to plump for management jobs. The whole point of managing is that you are not actually creating or producing anything yourself. You are simply supervising the production of others. If you are managing a department that fails to meet its targets, it’s easy to shift the blame onto poor-performing underlings. You can get at least six months out of getting rid of an employee, hiring another and rabbiting on about learning curves. Blaming lack of resources or lamenting the strategic direction of the company will also work for a while.

And the funny thing about management is that everyone thinks it’s important to manage down. Actually it’s about managing up. The people who report to you most likely believe that you are completely incompetent. That’s probably true, but, fortunately, it’s irrelevant to your success. Once you can convince the other managers that you’re great, you’ll be fine.

It’s shockingly easy to convince other people of your brilliance. If you’re a guy you just assume a confident air, stick your chest out, and push your chair back a couple of feet when sitting around the boardroom table. Spread your knees, look casual while speaking in a deep voice, and get everyone unconsciously worrying that you have the biggest penis in the room. Then those grotesque MBA-manufactured phrases such as BPE (business process engineering) and “out-of-the-box thinking” and, God protect us, “going forward” just trip off the tongue.

If you’re a woman this won’t work. You’ll actually have to deliver results. Sorry about that.

Then there’s the management consultant, the holy grail of employment. Matthew Stewart writes a revealing piece in June’s The Atlantic magazine about his experiences in this role. He pointed out the consistent lack of empirical data to back up anything the management consultant advises. One time he got involved in winding up the failed subsidiary of a large European bank and noticed on the expense ledger that a rival consulting firm had racked up $5m in fees from the same subsidiary. “They were supposed to save the business,” said one client manager, rolling his eyes. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “they were supposed to keep the illusion going long enough for the boss to find a new job.”

There was no question of the management consultant being held to account for advising a company that failed spectacularly under his strategy.

You could paraphrase that old line “those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. Nowadays, those who can, do. Those who can’t, consult. I must try it sometime if this column writing lark ever dries up.