construction, textiles, carpentry, blacksmithing, at minimum there's a lot of other labor intensive jobs that are essential to civilized life.

then there's all the necessary jobs that exist because humans living in hives creates many challenges of its own. police, fire fighters, medical jobs, lawyers and judges, legislators, etc. are all necessary functions for city-dwelling.

you might be noticing that most of these jobs are not things that have a whole lot of venture funded software companies working on. no, most of our venture funded software is fairly trivial and unimportant stuff in the grand scheme of things.

for example, I just manage servers and shit for a company that, on a fundamental level, is a hunger merchant. our product is hunger. we make people want to consume more. it's certainly not a necessary thing. in fact, it is probably harmful at least a little bit. there are worse things but what we do isn't really a good thing, at least not in any obvious way.

so yeah, not all jobs are pointless. but a lot of software jobs are.

Protection from starvation is indeed our basic need, but according to Maslov's theory we have other needs as well. On the other hand, a field such as marketing exist only to extend your share of the market at the cost of others (and to defend against others who try to do the same to you). It's a zero sum game without any benefit to the society.