For example sorting, yarding if viable and common.

Stereotyped depictions

Accounting Is Dull

If you see an accountant in fiction, chances are they're dull, boring, and completely structured, being unable to relax or think outside the box. Many a story begins with an accountant discontent with their career and wanting to break out of the humdrum of cubicle life. If male, they're prime fodder for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It seems the only accounts who enjoy their jobs are the ones scheming with their employer to help circumvent income tax laws or cover up illegal financial activities. They may or may not also be predators looking for Nouveau Riche individuals who suddenly need to manage large amounts of money, or elderly estate-holders who might be less able to keep track of their assets, with the intent of funneling money from them. Closely related jobs are not exempt: Auditors and Tax Collectors are unnervingly strict, heartless and unforgiving. The reason this perception is so pervasive is because fiction writers are bound by their own biases; to someone who makes their living with their creativity, the idea of working in a cubicle crunching numbers all day would be a Fate Worse than Death.

Mr. Lau in The Dark Knight is the scheming sort of accountant, attempting to blackmail his employers. One compelling reason he was "hired" was because he relocated all of the various mafia's money. He took it from their banks without their knowledge in anticipation of a police raid. He is also banking on the fact that "Hong Kong would never extradite [a Chinese national]". Batman doesn't recognize national sovereignty and the hurdles of due process.
Leopold Bloom in The Producers musical and film is a textbook example of the dull, boring accountant as well as the scheming accountant (although for him it was more of a mathematical activity than anything else), but his time with Zero Mostel and/or Nathan Lane livens him up considerably.
Shallow Grave: "David may be an accountant, but at least he tries". David's boringness is continually Lampshaded until David gets a whole lot less boring later on. In the words of his boss:
Lumsden: Oh, it's unfashionable, I know, but yes, we're methodical, yes, we're diligent, yes, we're serious, and where's the crime in that? Why not shout it from the rooftops? Yes, maybe sometimes we're a wee bit boring, but by God we get the job done, and that's why I think you fit in here.
David Stephens: I'm boring?
Lumsden: You get the job done.
Louis in Ghostbusters (1984) is the "socially inept and unable to think outside the box" type of accountant. He even throws a party at his apartment and invited only business contacts because he could write the chips and dip off as a business expense and was loudly explaining this to his guests as a sound tactic.
The Parole Officer is built around the protagonist trying to clear his name after he sees "a man strangle a human being — well, an accountant, anyway."
Dave Barry's Claw Your Way to the Top has a chapter called "How Finance Works." It begins with this warning:
This stuff is deadly dull, as is illustrated by accountants. You never hear people say: "Let's have some fun tonight! Let's go find some accountants!" So unless you have no choice, you should skip this chapter. I myself am going to require powerful illegal stimulants to write it.
From Dave Barry: four portraits are shown with the caption "Which of these is the millionaire? Which is the accountant? Which is the jerk?" The answer is that Mr. B is all three: a millionaire accountant jerk. (It then goes on to state that the other three are slime, so perhaps accountants don't come off quite so bad here.)
One of the most despised and feared villains in the Discworld setting are the Auditors. They are essentially universal accountants tasked with keeping tabs on everything — and they would prefer to extinguish all life and random factors in the universe, because lifeless rocks tumbling around in predictable orbits are very tidy and manageable.
Monty Python has quite a few sketches including panicky, mousy chartered accountants. Perhaps best portrayed in the "Job Agency" sketch, where one initially wants to be a lion-tamer but, after finding out he was thinking of aardvarks, decides for something more tame... then decides "I'll think about it".
Counsellor: Yes, but you see, Mr. Anchovy, your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. Our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they're a positive boon.
Evan from Royal Pains is portrayed in lacking common sense, goofy, and annoying, and in fact loses all of HankMed's money at one point. But he's still a good accountant.
Ted from Queer as Folk (US). He is the most boring and uptight of the main characters, and also happens to be the oldest, if only by a few years. He is clearly unhappy, and tries out other jobs for a while (and also slipping into drug addiction, coming seriously close to destroying his whole life), before Brian asks him to come work for his new company, and after that he seems happy being Brian's accountant/personal advisor... thing.
In Parks and Recreation, Ben is an accountant, and is constantly made fun of for being nerdy and numbers-obsessed, though he's still generally personable and likeable. A running gag is that he repeatedly finds himself working at a local accounting firm and is, by far, the coolest guy there.
Cyril Figgis, the ISIS accountant and unlikely field agent in Archer. Awkward, rigid, and often Butt-Monkey for both enemies and colleagues. His smoothest infiltration was to introduce himself to a drug lord simply as The Accountant, suggest he was sent to audit the books, then imply that he could assist him in embezzling from his boss for a little bit of the action.
The Clock King from Batman: The Animated Series was a rigidly structured accountant. The one time he deviated from his set schedule, Disaster Dominoes ensued and he lost his business and gained a grudge.

Door-to-Door Salesmen

[Dead Horse Trope...] Before the world was full of Internet Ads, telemarketers, and TV commercials, the best way to sell your product was to get a group of individuals to go door to door. Common as cockroaches and was treated as such. They are annoying at best and stick their noses into others' lives to sell products. At worst, the door-to-door salesman is a sleazy Con Man who robs others of their hard-earned cash.

This kind of character was once very common in films and cartoons in the 20s to 60s but as more anti-soliciting laws were passed and with the growing abundance of better ways to sell products, these characters now rare but still pop up from time to time.

EC Comics' Haunt of Fear has the story "Death Of Some Salesmen" about a good natured salesman who ends up in the house of a backwater couple who has had enough of being sold bad products by other salesman.
Tales from the Crypt: The TV adaptation of the comic, "Death of Some Salesmen", makes the salesman a Con Man who sells fake cemetery plots to relatives of recently deceased people and doesn't care that he's taking what's left from old widows.
Betty Boop: "The Hot Air Salesman" (1937) is about a salesman who harasses Betty and the neighborhood into buying all kinds of crazy products. In the end not even Betty can take his behavior.

Advertising, marketing

Bill Hicks: "If you work in advertising or marketing... kill yourself.

No, seriously. This is not a joke. You're thinking, there's gonna be a joke coming — there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage. Kill yourself."

In the original 1967 version of Bedazzled (1967), The Devil himself admits he invented advertising.

Managers and their close cousins Consultants

The former are depicted as talentless meddlers that are to blame for everything that happens in any company. They may even be the Pointy-Haired Boss. The latter are usually scammers that get paid loads of money without doing any actual work.

Hou$e of Lie$ is about a group of consultants with only one goal in mind when they work with clients: convince the clients that they absolutely need them, no matter the cost.
A Series of Unfortunate Events has the villain, Count Olaf do "the odd bit of consultant work," as a means to get money. He uses his skills as a consultant to trick Mr. Poe into handing the Baudelaire children over to him. When informed of this, Gustav's response is
Gustav: A consultant? Why would anybody ever listen to a consultant?
Dilbert is probably a Trope Codifier, having named the Pointy-Haired Boss trope. Practically everyone at whatever company the cast works at who isn't a line engineer (sometimes even them) is incompetent, evil, or both.
Daria Morgendorffer's father Jake is a self-employed consultant who is always one agitation away from a nervous breakdown due to no self-respecting business needing his advice (plus some deep-seated childhood traumas). When he finds a new job working for an internet company, he reveals his complete ineptitude at performing a white-collar job that requires actual skill.

Scumbag Real Estate Agent

Their job is to sell property, no matter how run-down or decrepit that property is, so naturally, they'll be accused of being liars in the media. It doesn't help that, in the UK at least, they are almost completely unregulated, and any crook can become one. In the US, it's far more heavily regulated, but there are plenty who seriously test those rules. While there are lots of honest agents who obey both the letter and spirit of the law, there are plenty of sleazeballs who will do just about anything that they think they can get away with just to get some extra cash in their pocket.

In The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, the thought waves projected by the Alligatron, an avocado-based supercomputer, is all that prevents alien thought forms from taking over all licensed real-estate brokers in the United States. In the end, the Alligatron gets eaten by a gorilla, and when the protagonist points out what this means about every licensed realtor in America, the response is, "I suppose we'll just have to live with it."
On The Closer, when Brenda and Fritz want to sell Brenda's house and buy a new one together, they enlist the very sleazy and annoying estate agent Gary. While it's never specifically stated that he's crooked or dishonest, his Catchphrase is, after all, "Gary doesn't lie!"
The Simpsons had Marge become one in "Realty Bites", where she's mentored by Lionel Hutz, who utilizes Metaphorically True for any potential sale.
Hutz: There's "the truth" (shakes head) and "the truth." (smiles wide) Let me show you. (shows pictures of homes for sale)
Marge: It's awfully small.
Hutz: I'd call it "cozy".
Marge: That's dilapidated.
Hutz: Rustic.
Marge: That house is on fire!
Hutz: Motivated seller!
In an episode of South Park real estate is shown to be a job so easy to do that Cartman's mother was able to get one despite having no talent outside of hardcore pornography. The joke is taken even further when Cartman decides to set up his own real estate business, which manages to give his mother's firm some stiff competition. For an extra laugh, every real estate salesman assumes the same haughty pose in their professional photos, which leaves them with backward-curving spines.

Security guards

Usually portrayed as fat, bumbling, incredibly stupid losers who desperately want to be real cops but have absolutely no hope of ever getting into police academy, so they just act like power-tripping assholes instead. Their qualifications are little more than being tall, heavy-looking and occasionally belonging to an ethnic group that's reputed for being tough. Expect greatly overblown reactions to just about everything and completely uncalled-for rudeness. Particularly unpleasant examples frequently add in hefty doses of racism, as well as incredibly creepy behavior around women. Frequently given the Red Shirt treatment, which is rarely, if ever, considered a karmic strike against their killers (e.g. if the protagonists are sympathetic bank robbers, they can kill numerous bank guards in highly-dubious "self-defense" and somehow still be treated sympathetically by the plot).

One comic-book tie-in to The Matrix involved, uh, bumbling, incredibly stupid loser who desperately wants to be a real cop of a Bluepill security guard... except it was all Played for Drama: in his desire to be a real cop, he rushed to break up a fight between a Redpill and an Agent he was an accidental witness to, and the fight being way above his head, he got pointlessly killed for it.
Batman Returns has two Shreck Department Store security guards who show up very briefly for no other reason than to give Catwoman someone socially acceptable to humiliate. No Nolan-style Batman character nuances for even the minor players here, folks; the two guards are what anyone would expect: working-class, lecherous, and too easily distracted and incompetent to even attempt to do their jobs. Then there's the fact that they make demeaning comments about Catwoman even though they can see that she's holding a gigantic whip.
Catwoman: You poor guys - always confusing your pistols with your privates.
In Shazam Billy and Freddy slip by the school's security guard by having Billy turn into his superhero form and pose as Freddy's dad picking him up. Said security guard buys it hook line and sinker despite the suspicious circumstances.

Actors, showbiz celebrities

Portrayal depends on time period. Portrayal of acting as not-a-real-job that glamorizes dishonesty is a Forgotten Trope. Blah blah Starving Artist

In Stephen Sondheim's musicalization of The Frogs, the opening "Invocation" addresses the gods as "You who look down on actors (and who doesn't?)"
In Blackadder the Third, Blackadder himself was surprised that actors actually rehearse. He thought they "just got drunk, stuck on a silly hat and trusted to luck."

Writers

Bojack Horseman
- Diane is an aspiring writer whose only gig for the longest time was ghost-writing Bojack's memoirs. Once that's done she tries her hand at writing a political memoir, only to quickly realise she knows next to nothing about anything. She gets over this by writing a young adult series that actually does gain traction and gives her joy.
- Bojack's father Butterscotch was an aspiring novelist, but his inability to take criticism combined with his very vague description of what his novel was supposed to be about shot his dreams dead in the water. Given he once bragged about making one sentence go on for several pages, it's pretty clear his ambitions outstripped his talents.
- The scriptwriter for Bojack's new crime drama is shown to be a reality-deprived basket-case who objectifies women and can't tell a concise story without radically switching genres. His wishy-washy writing style partially contributes to Bojack's Sanity Slippage.

Ballet dancers

Male ballet dancers are almost always presented as Camp Gay or Camp Straight. Never mind that ballet is one of the most intense physical workouts the human body can experience, these guys are wusses. The trend toward Real Men Wear Pink portrayals acknowledges that the average male dancer is strong enough to lift adult women (his dance partners) over his head all day long and will crush your fingers in a firm handshake using his own, moisturized, silky-smooth hands if you decide to mock him or his profession. Ballerinas don't get off much better. Often the chain-smoking epitome of Beauty Is Bad, Lean and Mean, or the French Jerk (even though she's frequently Russian). The requisite dainty figure and young retirement age also seems to imply that even the most serious performer is just the plaything of fetishistic men (and only men; female creepy "admirers" get a pass no matter what).

In Black Swan, Nina, a ballet dancer, is obsessive and repressed and eats very little to keep a slim figure. The only other dancers focused on are Lily, who might be trying to steal Nina's role, Beth, whose early retirement left her bitter, and Veronica, who is only a minor character but is very bitchy. Lily smokes as well.
The Simpsons:
- In one episode, Lisa joins a ballet club, and discovers all the dancers smoke to keep slender and de-stress from the intensity of ballet.
- An even earlier episode was about Bart studying ballet because all of the other extracurricular activities were taken, and the bullying and abuse he took for taking such a "sissy" activity.

Network executives (in-universe uses of Executive Meddling?)

Scrooged: Frank's boss runs into him in the hallway and orders him to shoehorn some scenes with small animals into the production of A Christmas Carol to appeal to household pets, thinking that pet appeal would be The Next Big Thing.

Referees

The bane of many a sports fan. When they just do their job of enforcing the rules, no problem, specially when the contestants are making things difficult. But if they influence the game result by doing the job wrong - missing illegal moves, wrongfully fouling legal moves, failing to punish Unnecessary Roughness while heavily punishing minor felonies - soon the ref (and his mother) will be the target of chants across the stadium. If it's a decisive game, fans will remember the blunder even more.

Kill The Umpire, a 1950 comedy about a former baseball player turned umpire.
HBO did a show in Brazil starring soccer referees. Its name? FDP, Portuguese for SOB.
Chespirito often makes fun of football (soccer) referees in his many series. One notable instance in El Chapulín Colorado has the title character in a costume party, grabbing the sign from a guy dressed as a blind beggar and putting it on a guy dressed as a football referee.

Gynecologists like proctologists, professionally stick their fingers where other people don't, but with additional sex undertones. Male gynecologists are often presented as Covert Perverts who secretly enjoy getting their figurative noses into the lady parts of many a young woman, or awkwardly but otherwise harmlessly enthusiastic. By contrast, female gynecologists are rarely presented as any different to any other kind of doctor, apparently because it seems more "natural" for a woman to take an interest in women's problems.

In Kindergarten Cop, there's a child whose gimmick is to candidly recite a routine about basic sex education, who later turns out to be a gynaecologist's son. The implied joke is that the father is pretty open about the topic.
In one of Revenge of the Nerds sequels, one of the nerds of the first film is revealed to have become a gynecologist. He declares it in a wink-wink-nod-nod way that makes it pretty obvious as to what motivates him.
One of Dean Koontz's novels has a secondary gynecologist character. While he's lacking any major character flaws, he's not above cracking jokes about the patient's nethers to his anesthesiologist partner.

Etc.

Bones: Factory farming gets dragged over the coals in "The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken" for the awful way chickens are treated after the company abandoned free range farming and for the toxic and nauseating odors that come from the plant and ruin people’s health and enjoyment of the air. Even the employees, save for the Asshole Victim, hate the place, and one innocent employee half-seriously asks to be arrested as a suspect to get a few days away from her demeaning and disgusting job.

Evil/Incompetent X jokes

Incompetent/Evil Congressman Joke

Bones:
Brennan: If we're buried more than 4 feet deep, the concussion will turn our brains into jelly.
Hodgins: Well, then we can run for Congress.

Sandbox / Negative Depictions Sandbox

Accounting Is Dull

Door-to-Door Salesmen

Advertising, marketing

Managers and their close cousins Consultants

Scumbag Real Estate Agent

Security guards

Actors, showbiz celebrities

Writers

Ballet dancers

Network executives (in-universe uses of Executive Meddling?)

Referees

Etc.

Evil/Incompetent X jokes

Professions with trope pages already

Negative portrayals

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Index

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Sandbox / Negative Depictions Sandbox

Edit Locked

Accounting Is Dull

Door-to-Door Salesmen

Advertising, marketing

Managers and their close cousins Consultants

Scumbag Real Estate Agent

Security guards

Actors, showbiz celebrities

Writers

Ballet dancers

Network executives (in-universe uses of Executive Meddling?)

Referees

Etc.

Evil/Incompetent X jokes

Professions with trope pages already

Negative portrayals

Previous

Index

Next