Truth!
Airlines usually work on a schedule bidding system. The higher your seniority, the higher the bid. So new pilots get last pick an end up on “reserve”, sitting around an airport waiting to be called if a replacement is needed. And that airport is usually not desirable, say, Detroit.
I’ve always thought this system to be a bad idea. I don’t think seniority should count for nothing, but I don’t think it should count for EVERYTHING either, which is pretty much how it is at most airlines. And for cops, from previous comments. And teachers. And nurses, my friends tell me. Nurses even have a term for how badly new people are treated - they say nurses “eat their own young”. I think giving new people all the crap work is short sighted.
There’s a solution I’ve heard of, which is flipping the seniority list for assignments a couple of times a year. Normal bidding most of the time, but every so often the people lowest on the list get first bid. This gives the new people something to look forward to, and the senior people don’t forget what the struggle is like for new hires.
When I advocate for things like this people opposed often talk about “paying ones dues”. I retort that in many cases that’s just a euphemism for sticking it to the new guy. I have seniority now and a good bid, and I would gladly give it up a few times a year in the interest of improving new hire morale.
I work in commercial landscaping. Scut work for me is checking the landscape architect’s work since we’re usually obligated to install a project “as drawn” rather than “as labeled”.
“Ok, this bed’s label says that there’s 79 shrub roses. Count the circles and see if there’s 79 of them. Then do the same for every other circle on the drawing.”
Building trades seem to work like this in my experience. Apprentice electricians dig, carry heavy shit etcetera; plumbers apprentices wear out shovels for a few years and welders/fitters apprentices have a keen awarness of where the nearest forklift or grinder is.
At the same time your expected to show those kids just how that stuff is done. It’s nice to hear an 18yr complain that something is to hard then let them watch you do it twice over in half the time.
Academic library:
Shelving (important though it is). Shelf reading (that is, reading call numbers to make sure the books are in order. Incredibly tedious.)
Checking to see if we own the books that librarians want to purchase (or that faculty have requested we buy). You’d think the order system would be connected to the catalog and could do this automatically. It doesn’t (it sort of is connected, but not for this purpose. Don’t ask me why.)
Often there is a value in having the junior staff work long hours on the more tedious stuff so that they get a firm grounding in how things work. Cold calling, grinding through valuations or analysis, research, reports and whatnot. But frequently it can turn into a sort of “pledging”, allowing more senior employees to abuse the junior ones.
In management consulting, the “scut work” is usually any work you do while on “the bench” (consulting-speak for not assigned to a client). Typically it would be tasks like putting together responses to RFPs (which I guess would be called “proposals”), market analysis or Christmas card lists for clients. Maybe helping to build some internal office application that never gets built because no one works on them for more than a couple weeks.
Junior Lawyer. Research, writing memos, carrying heavy files (less so these days), research, drafting basic docs and pleadings, research, taking notes, telling clients where to sign.
My experience also as an electrician. I always took the time to instruct, and it paid off. Short story: After I retired from the military I went to work for a contractor. Another electrician and I were wiring up identical side-by-side panel boxes. As we were starting, he looked at how I was laying in my wiring and said “You do beautiful work, but that shit takes too long.” A half hour later I walked away finished and he was still trying to stuff a rat’s nest of wiring into the box. 
Medicine: re-writing expired standing orders, dressing changes, fetching supplies for the procedure that your senior is going to do, scribing notes
Around here, we call it “Monday”.
I’ve never heard the term scut work before. I guess we always called it grunt work. Hmmm.
In software testing, it’s grinding through manual test cases that someone else wrote. The product has changed since the cases were created, but of course haven’t been updated. It’s one thing to charge through a suite of cases that you created and have all the required assets for and can do in an efficient order. It’s another to run cases cold.
They’re interchangeable. Definition and definition.
My experience with architecture is that the interns get a lot of code work stuff: find out what codes are being used, what paperwork is needed, etc. They also get a ton of what we call redlines. These are corrections to drawings.
My friend worked in an Academic library where they had some casuals, married with small children, come in for 4 hour shifts shelving. They /loved/ it, got them out of the house.
Management decided to hire a full-time shelver, so that management didn’t have to deal with casuals…
Clinical genetics lab.
New people start off doing DNA extractions. Boring, and mostly done by robots, but it has to be done before anything useful can start.
Back when I was in sales it was cold calls. Weeds out people who can’t make a “genuine” smile after 50 rejections in a row.
University bookshop manager.
We don’t really have newbies, but students who help us out at the beginning of the year. They print and bind thousands of syllabus, unload book shipments as well as deliver orders (prepaid, so they don’ handle cash).
IT’s already been covered, so :
Mine Geologist: core logging and digitizing plans.
Yeah, I’d agree. I used to list SmallTalk on my resume; it generated so many headhunter calls I eventually took it off to keep them down. I learned COBOL years after it had stopped being commonly taught, and I’m smart enough not to put that on my resume at all.
I’d go with “tooling and database work.”