Had a friend who worked as a prosecutor in Austin, TX for a few years. She was Harvard trained and thought she’d come home to do some real good. A lot of what she ended up doing was arguing with her bosses about how the homeless people who kept getting swept up by the cops weren’t best served by getting repeatedly fined when they obviously had no ability to pay. She ended up becoming an extension of the city’s (already meager and poorly funded) social services, effectively operating hand-in-glove with a public defender who was too overwhelmed and disinterested to handle the absurd caseload shoveled both of their ways.

Eventually, the workload and contrary instructions and the horrible psychic damage she had to suffer dealing with bullshit got the better of her and she quit. I wouldn’t say she was a ghoul for doing the job, but it does seem like the job rewarded ghouls and punished everyone else. The overwhelming majority of folks who land on your desk are going to be burnouts of one sort or another. Some of them are going to invoke pity. Others disgust. Others confusion. You don’t really get points for doing the right thing or the wrong thing. You get points for clearing the backlog as quickly and efficiently as possible, so your boss/coworkers don’t feel as overwhelmed as you’re going to feel at the end of the day.