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The rise of the pointless job

• gadders 9y ago
  We need a B Ark: http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Sh...
• fullshark 9y ago
  Yet another guardian piece that seems like it was written by an edgy teenager.
  • kristianc 9y ago
    In this case the edgy teenager in question wrote the generally well-received 'Debt: The First 5000 Years.'
    • tome 9y ago
      There were certainly plenty of hits of edgy-teenageriness in that book.
      • microtherion 9y ago
        Not to forget this quote for the ages: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republi­can) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
        • walshemj 9y ago
          Laptops in the 70's do tell
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • optimusmaximus 9y ago
      >generally well-received >muh popular opinion The fact that the writer happened to write something that lots of people enjoyed neither contributes to nor detracts from the fact that this article is full of willfully contrarian edge, befitting a teenager.
• yosito 9y ago
  Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs? Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?
    • sbinthree 9y ago
      That they are educated has nothing to do with whether they are right or their points are useful broadly. It's a dramatic story from someone who themselves thinks they are more useful than they are.
    • drb91 9y ago
      You’ve employed some sort of inverse ad hominem here. Credentials don’t mean we should take someone seriously. Their words should stand for themselves.
      • toomuchtodo 9y ago
        > Credentials don’t mean we should take someone seriously. This is a level of cognitive dissonance I’m not prepared to commit to arguing against. I’m not capable of issuing the bar to every lawyer I require the services of, nor the board to every presumed doctor, nor a thesis defense to every academic. Credentials aren’t perfect, but they are superior to the time required for everyone to judge everything on their own. For example, almost all scientists agree that climate change is human caused. Do I spend my time digging through climate data, verifying this? No. I rely on the expertise of experts.
        • drb91 9y ago
          This makes sense for hiring a human. It doesn’t make sense for evaluating what they say in a general context. Credentials are fairly useless next to consensus for evaluating a given statement. Credenials have use; just not in conversation.
• Proven 9y ago
  The socialists at Guardian complain when people get fired, but they also complain when they don’t. And I haven’t noticed they’ve ever wondered if government jobs might be economically pointless (ie damaging). Usually it’s the opposite - they tend to recommend and call for more damage.
• hammock 9y ago
  A rewrite of this classic essay which has been discussed on HN many times: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
  • _rpd 9y ago
    This rewrite seems to be advertising his new book on the topic. Good summer reading.
  • scroot 9y ago
    Yes, and he has expanded it into a full book. It comes out later this month.
• vinceguidry 9y ago
  Edwardian-era mansions employed whole teams of butlers whose sole job was replacing candles. Not everyone is in a position to make a discernible impact on society. 20% of society will always drive 80% of progress. Think hard how you want the remaining 80% to support their families.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    Probably more like Victorian era.
  • tlb 9y ago
    The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro has a vivid portrayal of this. The people doing it took it very seriously indeed.
  • logfromblammo 9y ago
    Replacing candles was not a pointless job until electrification and incandescent bulbs achieved widespread adoption. The Edwardian reign was just at the tail end of candle-based lighting. By 1914, most of the households that could afford it would have already installed at least one electric light. The Great War would have devastated the available supply of footmen, and made those still around prohibitively expensive, so I'd expect that any servant-employing house would have given up their candle-men entirely by 1918. They would be electrified afterward, with the hand-carried lighting moving to oil lamps, and any lamp-refill duties moved to less expensive female servants. After that, those teams of footmen could be replaced by just one footman, or part-time handyman, to replace burnt-out bulbs. We still have people whose job includes responsibility for replacing malfunctioning lighting, including fluorescent tubes and ballasts. But we no longer have people whose sole responsibility is lighting, except perhaps in the very largest buildings, or those with special lighting needs, such as museums. It wasn't busy work, but the majority of those jobs definitely don't exist any more.
  • nunya213 9y ago
    Pretty simple, return to a 90% top tax rate and give the proceeds out as Basic Income. This shit situation we are in is not sustainable, we have levels of inequality in the US not seen since the roaring 20s and we all know how that ended.
• lainga 9y ago
  I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest. As a result, the samurai class, especially Tokugawa's bannermen and "inner" families, sort of lost their purpose. There were no more wars to fight - not when peace lasted "as long as the waves roll" - and the strongest rebels they could expect were peasants who could not own swords. Because they couldn't just revoke the lands Iyeyasu had distributed (without very good reason), and to give the samurai something to do, the Edo government expanded constantly, creating dozens of superfluous or sinecure bureaucratic roles, so that the second and third sons of samurai families wouldn't just sit around at home. I believe this pattern was repeated across the various daimyo han at each castle town. Further, the samurai household themselves created redundant job openings just to get more peasants out of unemployment. This was how every samurai ended up with six porters. Even as certain samurai families sunk into abject poverty in the 1800s, as the shogunate neared its end, this policy continued: your grandfather had increased the number of household retainers from five to six, to give someone's fourth son a job; and it had become hereditary, and now that fourth son's grandson was your sixth retainer, and you couldn't destroy the position even if you could barely afford to pay him. When I hear politicians talking about "creating jobs", I think of the shogunate.
  • burn_cycle 9y ago
    This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?
    • lainga 9y ago
      My major source for all this was Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan. It's a sweeping book - 600 pages, I think, and covers everything from 1300 to 2000 - but one of its main focuses is the end of the Sengoku period and the rise of the Tokugawa.
• Dirlewanger 9y ago
  In the US, I think it largely stems from our individualistic natures. Our fierce independence comes at a cost to the greater community; we often don't interact, and in the worst case outright loathe, our neighbors. People would rather bitch on NextDoor about a loud party down the block instead of confronting them directly about it. We solve disputes not by working it out with the other party, but with subpoenas. Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum. Many well-meaning government initiatives aimed to benefit the greater good are met with intense suspicion (your NIMBYs). Companies don't see offering jobs as enriching communities, but rather bestowing saintly privileges that those plebians better be thankful for. They're decked with such ridiculous liability clauses that the case of the carpenter in the story is not an exception, but the norm. That was somewhat of a rant, and I don't really have any kind of solution to all of it. America is several thousand tragedies of the commons, from a neighbor-to-neighbor level all the way up to the federal government.
  • tiberius1900 9y ago
    I have to say I don't understand many things about your comment, so I'd be glad if you were to clear them for me. 1) You blame your "individualistic natures" for the appearance of pointless jobs. Now, I haven't lived in the US, but that seems odd to me. I live in Romania, a society that is profoundly focused on the community, and the abundance of pointless jobs, particularly in the communistic years (communism being a profoundly anti-individualistic ideology) was absolutely staggering. It just seems to me pretty self-evident that, as you move the focus from the individual, and his own happiness, he will find less motivation to do a meaningful job, and be contempt with a pointless, but simpler job. I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me. 2) "Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum." I'm afraid I just don't follow here. Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector? 3) You claim, quite rightly, that companies are not concerned with the public good, just with their survival and/or success, and consider jobs given out as "saintly privileges". Firstly, all of the modern advances of mankind, from the industrial revolution, to the ridiculously cheap products provided by Rockefeller, Edison, and the like, to the supercomputers almost every human in the civilized world carries with him in his pocket, were made, not in the interest of "the greater community", but in those people/companies' self-interest. Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive? The one that says "I am owed this job by my company"? Or the one that says, "My job is nothing but a privilege given onto me by the company, and I must prove every day that I deserve it?" In any case, I'd be really grateful if you could explain these points to me. Thanks in advance!!
• tlb 9y ago
  The goon category is interesting in a future world where AI has replaced most jobs, because it can employ an unlimited number of people. (Goon jobs exist to counterbalance other goon jobs. Militaries are the canonical example.) Most jobs -- teachers, auto workers, plumbers, farmers -- have a natural ceiling on employment related to demand, but goon jobs don't because when one side hires more goons, the other side has to also. Militaries have created millions of jobs this way. Goon jobs are not just blue-collar. A growing category of goon that allows unlimited highly paid professional job creation is inter-governmental lawyers. For example, the CA government is suing the EPA about vehicle emissions limits. Both sides can justify a big budget for hiring lawyers. Metropolitan areas like the Bay Area provide lots of opportunities for cities to sue each other, transit authorities, and the state. I don't see any upper limit to the number of jobs this can create. All this is only a bad thing if you care about efficiency. If you let go of that axiom, there are unlimited jobs to be created.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • mfoy_ 9y ago
    I die inside. But any suggestion of "mincome" or the like is met with such a harsh reaction... What, effectively, is the difference between goon-bloom and mincome? Is it just that one is too obviously a subsidy?
    • lmm 9y ago
      The protestant work ethic is still there - the notion that a difficult job is better for the person doing it than an easier job with the same pay.
      • Filligree 9y ago
        Depending on the definition of "difficulty", and the type of person, I'm not sure they're wrong. We're all engineers here. Can you honestly say you'd prefer a job that paid the same, but where you wouldn't have to use your mind? Of course, it's been used to justify some serious horrors.
• Odenwaelder 9y ago
  A job for one week was to move plastic roof boards from an automated saw on a pallet. They would save lots of money if they‘d place a robot there. In fact, the hole factory could have been automated.
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I would think carefully about this. Elon Musk thought the same thing with Model 3 production, and then said “humans are underrated” and that they bought into automation too much, leading to production delays. https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-1825264384 https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-ar...
  • richev 9y ago
    I saw a similar thing at a Mars chocolate factory in the 1990s: a lone worker with a conveyor belt of chocolate bars to one side, and a robot opening up boxes to the other. The worker was grabbing handfuls of chocolate bars and filling up the box that had been presented to him. When full, the box would head of down another conveyor belt and be automatically stacked on a palette ready for shipping. Long-since automated I suspect, but at that point in time I presume that the human was cheaper and more reliable than the equivalent robot. Aside: the equivalent job on the M&Ms production line _was_ being done by a robot, and required the packets of M&Ms to be neatly lined up in their boxes.
• mfoy_ 9y ago
  Keynes was a little more direct: "The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up."
  • crdoconnor 9y ago
    Keynes said that the government paying people to dig holes and fill them up was sufficient to escape a liquidity trap. He didn't actually advocate nonproductive work.
    • ams6110 9y ago
      There's tons of actual productive work that could be done though. Cleaning trash from streets and parks, filling potholes, fixing sidewalks, pulling weeds, painting over graffiti. These things would would make everyone's days a little nicer.
      • monocasa 9y ago
        Or even stuff that has real meaning. Rebuilding our crumbling highway system, laying fiber to the home for a next gen telecoms infrastructure. Just going back to school and getting information job skills. Child care. The list goes on and on without resorting to telephone handset cleaners.
        • vkou 9y ago
          For some reason, even when people acknowledge that there is an endless amount of busywork work that could be done, the suggestions are always meaningless fluff. Cleaning up the parks? Yeah, that's better then sitting around on your ass, watching Netflix for 8 hours, but there's so much more that people could do... Which would, of course, compete with private industry.
        • CountSessine 9y ago
          Cleaning trash from streets and parks, filling potholes, fixing sidewalks, pulling weeds, painting over graffiti. These things would would make everyone's days a little nicer. Or even stuff that has real meaning Why do you think that maintaining safe and beautiful cities has no real meaning? Someone needs to do it. Is this just elitism?
• romanr 9y ago
  This is another argument in favor of universal income. Bullshit jobs is one of consequences of progress, low cost goods, food and comfort. With increasing automation it’s going to be get incrementally harder to find bullshit jobs for people. until society understands that not everyone can and have to be employed.
  • foamflower 9y ago
    The opposite is true. At some point in the past, elevator operators served a useful function, since elevators were hard to operate. Today, even the existence of automation (i.e. accessible elevator UI) has not completely driven the elevator operator extinct, but has transmuted his job into bullshit. Same goes for gas pump improvements (I suppose we can thank New Jersey and until recently Oregon). The entire "Flunkies" category seems to exist only because of the existence of automation.
    • zanny 9y ago
      Whats the opposite? He said progress beget bullshit jobs, you just stated the same thing.
    • mrfusion 9y ago
      Why until recently for Oregon?
      • lkbm 8y ago
        Until a few months ago, it was illegal to pump your own gas in Oregon--they had to have an attendant at every station to do it for you. They recently made it optional, at least for rural stations.
  • lucas_membrane 9y ago
    Do-nothing jobs may be a problem, but do they outnumber jobs that exist to support, sustain and inflict a system that is not user-friendly? For example: How big is the 'security' industry (include 'national security')? What percent of the workers at the health clinic you visit are there to control, limit, and ration the access to medical care? Isn't the entire legal system there to sustain the power of the powerful? Isn't the educational establishment designed to support a hierarchical society in which the highly-educated are few, highly-paid and comfortable, and the rest are not?
• rhacker 9y ago
  When I look at a downtown with tall buildings I always think about what the fuck people are doing in those buildings. I get the sense that more and more people are hired to simply report on a team. That report goes up one level and its part of another team report (just representing more people). Then that report goes up... and it continues for as many levels of bureaucracy that the company decided was necessary. Most of this falls directly in the category of "not my problem" that is eating everyone's soul. Because more and more people subscribing to "not my problem" we are creating perfect systems that need bureaucracy. The opposite structure is more people doing the hands-on-work (that is reported on) and more of those people being involved directly in decisions and are stakeholders on firing. Everyone has a sense of how much work is being done and who the slackers are so there is no more a need for upward reporting and downward decisions. Now the argument being made is that AI is replacing jobs so you could say - well this upward reporting job is all that we have left! So I say boo-fuck to that. We don't have spaceships going into space on a daily basis, we don't recycle 100% of what can be recycled, we don't have clean freeways, we don't have technology that perfects our pollution, we don't have AI.... so there are A FUCK TON amount of work to be done, but no one wants to do it because of our "not my problem" attitude. Heck if what we're facing is a training problem, then heck, I see a hell of a lot of jobs right there!
• Aunche 9y ago
  In some developing countries, there's an unofficial social contract that the wealthy should employ as many people as possible, even if they need to make pointless jobs. A company I worked for had a remote office in India that employed people to hand out paper towels in the bathrooms.
  • Aloha 9y ago
    noblesse oblige - which can mean many things - but it often includes this.
  • NPMaxwell 9y ago
    Creativity helps a lot here
  • blackbagboys 9y ago
    This is also common in higher-end nightclubs and bars in the U.S., although these aren't full-time jobs and the attendants work mostly for tips.
    • monocasa 9y ago
      Or just strip clubs in general. I was in the most ghetto strip club I've ever heard about (unpainted cinder block walls), but they had an attendant.
      • pbrb 9y ago
        That's to keep ppl from rubbing one out my man.
        • monocasa 9y ago
          Haha, that makes sense.
      • fencepost 8y ago
        Things even (especially?) the skeeviest strip club owner doesn't want happening on the premises: drug use,drug trade, prostitution. And the skeevier the club the more likely that some of the clientele would be involved in one or more of the above.
• anm89 9y ago
  Staggeringly ignorant. It's a mostly free system. Why is someone paying someone to do these "pointless" jobs". Hint: the answer is this that is bullshit. Surprisingly, companies like nothing more than accumulating money. Paying people to do nothing gets in the way of this goal and so generally it doesn't happen. This doesn't mean everyone personally feels their job has value and it doesn't mean there aren't pointless jobs in a large corporate environment but as a systemic thing, valueless jobs aren't exactly our most pressing concern. Not every value providing task in the world induces the person doing it to instantaneosly reach nirvana because it is so wonderfully fulfilling. Many jobs are mundane. It doesn't mean they are valueless. Why would someone be paying them to do it otherwise?
• transfire 9y ago
  There are a whole lot of pointless jobs in government -- they only exist because of excessive authoritarian regulations.
  • Xuper 9y ago
    Also most of charities. They sell feel good and employ bachelors of arts.
• eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  Honest question: how much of our work is not absolutely necessary? It's easy to write a piece of software once and share it with everybody. The product you are working on - what unique value is giving to humanity? (I mean beyond "it pays the bills" and "it uses $popular_thing_of_the_year") I believe we reached a level of productivity where - in rich countries - we are all keeping each other busy with loads of unnecessary work.
  • tlb 9y ago
    Only farming is absolutely necessary. Farming is down to about 2% in the US. You could cut that in half if people stopped ordering avocado toast and just ate oats. So, probably 99%.
    • rabidrat 9y ago
      What about plumbing or sanitation? Construction of shelter? Medical care? Firefighting? If those things aren't "necessary", it seems difficult to argue that farming itself even is necessary.
    • gajjanag 9y ago
      You might want to adjust the figure to account for clothing/minimal construction work for shelter - both are definitely fundamental in most parts of the US. One might also wish to add in a minimally functional healthcare system to ensure a reasonably high average life expectancy. Nevertheless, the point is still extremely valid; I would estimate around 95%. Update: As in general it is easy to draw overly pessimistic conclusions from this (I have been affected by this myself), it may be of use to point out that positive answers do exist for this issue. One of my personal favorites is the powerful, short book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
• PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
  I work a very productive job with direct outputs. But my job still doesn't advance humanity forward. My company provides a solution for problems caused by other entities, but it isn't a solution to some fundamental problem. Some days I feel as if the job is pointless because, in the end, I'm just a duct taper, even if I'm duct taping for an entity that is outside of my organization. If you take the concepts in this argument and expand it beyond just companies (which the author started to do when mentioning armed forces counted as goons), I think we would see a society that is already filled with useless jobs.
• leroy_masochist 9y ago
  TLDR: serving in the military is a bullshit job for "goons". The Guardian really is a parody of itself sometimes.
  • TulliusCicero 9y ago
    Incorrect. They're saying that the military is a "goon" type of job, in that it involves aggression, and you have to do it because others will plow over you otherwise. It has nothing to do with the character of soldiers. This same underlying logic also applies to corporate lawyers and advertisers.
    • leroy_masochist 9y ago
      Right, and therein lies the Guardian's stereotypical grad student reasoning: militaries only exist because of humanity's lack of enlightenment, and military service is therefore a job that "lacks positive value" and is "essentially manipulative and aggressive". Even if you subscribe to the standard litany of lefty anti-person-in-uniform grudges, the notion that militaries around the world exist primarily to guard against other militaries is misguided. A much bigger motivating factor for the existence of large standing armies is the general desire of illiberal regimes, be they on the right or on the left, to keep the young male population (ie the backbone of a potential revolution) occupied on a daily basis.
      • pnathan 9y ago
        > A much bigger motivating factor for the existence of large standing armies is the general desire of illiberal regimes, be they on the right or on the left, to keep the young male population (ie the backbone of a potential revolution) occupied on a daily basis. Would you mind citing that or expanding on more depth? I'm curious as to your reasoning chain there and think it is an interesting critique of the article's classification.
        • leroy_masochist 9y ago
          It's a common practice throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world (and Russia until recently). Compulsory military service for males at 18, for a varying amount of time but enough to a) make a tangible difference in the number of young guys loitering about because they have nothing to do in the bad economy; b) have a large internally deployable force to quell any unrest at a moment's notice; c) indoctrinate young men with the idea that being a man / being a patriot / being of good character means supporting the regime and its ideology (while also giving young men a group identity as a veteran of the armed forces loyal to the government). Fighting a war with another country is not the reason most countries spend money on their armies that could be spent elsewhere.
• c22 9y ago
  A lot of people have pointless jobs, but it seems even more people have jobs that are actively contributing to the wanton destruction of our entire world. I suspect these are both symptoms of our elevation of capital to the status of universal good. This will only get worse as long as we continue to espouse the default view that people who "don't have a job" are useless moochers and people who have high paying jobs are valuable contributors to society.
  • amelius 9y ago
    "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." --Jeff Hammerbacher
    • geodel 9y ago
      The best minds of previous generations were fighting wars or leading battles. I personally do not think either of those activities is specifically better or worse.
      • Filligree 9y ago
        I do. Wars. Wars are worse.
        • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
          They do help reduce economic inequality, nothing like a good war to flatten wealth.
          • gonzo41 8y ago
            Yeah look at Alepo. But the average Syrian didn't really have all that much anyway. The west will never fight a war like WW2 ever again.
        • optimusmaximus 9y ago
          >muh war is bad, you guys. amirite? >muh humanity Judaeo-Christian bullshit. Words can't describe how hard I'm rolling my eyes right now.
• mbid 9y ago
  There are plenty of bullshit jobs in the software industry. Many things designers and graphics developers do is goon-ish. Design is mostly an arms race. Employees of big companies create new design languages and at some point the rest has to adapt or be left behind. Of course, marketing is 99% bullshit anyway, and that's where a good deal of the design goes. I doubt games are more fun now than 10 years ago because graphics has gotten better. If anything, games from 10 years ago have gotten worse because we're used to more complex graphics. Almost everybody here is a duct-taper. 95% of our time is spent dealing with technical debt. We're using decades old technology that was never designed to solve the problems we face now. Take the twitter password problem on the front page: This would've never happened had we just adopted a more sane approach to authentication. When you wait for hours on your windows updates, think of the poor souls who know that none of this is necessary but can't entangle the mess that makes this necessary (apparently). And think of the poor souls in testing who can't report the real bug that is a broken code architecture which makes automated or more fine-grained tests impossible.
  • ASpring 9y ago
    It's a bit much to say design is goonish and an arms race. I'd argue the reason that Apple is the most valuable company in the world is mostly due to their design expertise. You can make the same argument about software between companies being an arms race that competitors adapt to to or get left behind (see cloud, mobile, voice, etc.).
  • staplers 9y ago
    Design can create efficiency. There is far more nuance about 'design' than your clear bias towards it states.
• habeebtc 9y ago
  Well, from an evolutionary perspective there are successful fish who evolved suction cups on the top of their heads so they could both save their energy swimming and also eat the food scraps of the shark they are attached to. Some would argue that this metaphor better describes finance industry professionals though.
• crazygringo 9y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is completely ridiculous and flies in the face of economics and capitalism, and deserves to be called out. Remember that David Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist. Pointless jobs exist because of inefficiences. Someone higher up couldn't be bothered to automate it, and there isn't enough oversight of the budget. An entrenched interest (like a no-longer-needed union regulation) is too hard to fight. Etc. But capitalism is the most marvelous machine for removing inefficiencies, and therefore removing pointless jobs. Why? Because the owner/capitalist will make more money when they're removed/automated. It's easy to say McDonald's cashiers have pointless jobs, and they're being replaced with kiosks. Or taxi drivers with driverless cars. The same way the original human "computers" were replaced by calculating machines. The process isn't perfect and certainly isn't instant, but it happens and is relentless. Pointless jobs decrease over time. And trying to claim that they're rising, as Graeber does, is simply disingenuous and dishonest.
  • jnordwick 9y ago
    You are not allowed to speak positively of capitalism here. It is a messy system, far inferior to the more modern technocratic ways we should be following.
    • optimusmaximus 9y ago
      Yes, and the fact that capitalism created the conditions that allow people like the ones who pontificate on HN about the messiness of capitalism to exist at all should go completely unmentioned.
• smm2000 9y ago
  Author lost me on doorman. Doormen absolutely bring value and saying that doormen is bullshit job is the same as saying that waitress is a bullshit job - in the end customer is fully capable of bringing the food from the counter to his table on his own. Doormen Can accept packages when you are not in your apt (leaving outside is not an option in NY) Can accept laundry delivery Provide security by screening people out at the entrance Virtually eliminate burglaries/theft Can provide key to housecleaner/installer/plumber/etc Keep parking spot in front of building available for short time use by residents (often semi-illegally) Can help brining up heavy suitcases/bags to the apartment Doormen absolutely provide value and apts in buildings with doormen sells for more than equivalent apartments with only intercall.
  • trophycase 9y ago
    Right. The real useless jobs are the 10 people working on animating hair for the next Assassin's Creed game or the CGI for the next Marvel film
    • peterwwillis 9y ago
      Those aren't bullshit either... Who else is going to animate the hair? If there's a robot that can do the job, great, but it has to get done somehow.
      • chongli 9y ago
        No it doesn't. Marvel movies could stop existing tomorrow and it wouldn't matter at all. Life goes on.
        • nwatson 9y ago
          Getting paid to satisfy others' frivolous pursuits is the future of work. With more real-world work being automated away, we'd better hope there are jobs like "World of Warcraft Concierge" and "Sim City Colorist." All the "honest day's labor" jobs are evaporating.
        • 8y ago
• expensivedrone 9y ago
  I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package. However, the team that I go put into, is one of the slowest moving and least useful I've ever seen. I spent my first couple months trying to make things better, and be more productive - only to have my team-lead actively micromanage and stonewall me in order to bring my productivity down to a crawl. I tried talking to my manager about it, but they started blaming me personally every time I pointed out any ways of improving the way we do things. Eventually, I stopped trying at all, did the best I could (~2 hours/day of productivity), and just zoned out the rest of the time. Apparently this has pleased my manager/team-lead, and everything has been smooth (boring) sailing ever since. It still boggles my mind that I'm getting paid $350k/year to essentially browse HN and post stuff like this all day.
  • billysielu 9y ago
    Nice username :)
  • modbait 9y ago
    Through my long career, I've notice virtually no correlation between my pay and the utility of my position. And indeed, I've had one or two jobs like yours. Sadly for my bank book, I can only stand being useless for relatively short stretches. I still reminisce about my lowest paying job, my first. It was probably the most enjoyable and satisfying. It was also useful, though perhaps not at the top of that list. It's annoying that so many useless jobs pay so much. But even worse that it's so hard to find a position where being useful is even a possibility.
    • not_real_acct 9y ago
      My experience is similar. I look at it a lot like insurance policies. For instance, my company once had a service contract with a software company that cost about a million a year. One time I audited that service contract, and found that they'd used it exactly ONCE the entire. A million dollar phone call. But they're not going to cancel the contract, because they want the support in case they need it.
• bluetomcat 9y ago
  Bullshit jobs is what the antiquated capitalist system gives us in return for the increased efficiency in other human activities. You automate the production of essential goods and services with increasingly less people needed to support it, but you still need to employ everyone, so you invent jobs just for the sake of them. The system should be designed to reward us with more spare time, not to make us busier with ever more mundane tasks.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• billysielu 9y ago
  That reminds me of the forgotten employee, which is very awesome, and slightly relevant. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
  • Aloha 8y ago
    I remember reading that years ago. One day, I'd like that to be me.
• EGreg 9y ago
  This is why we proposed this at our company: https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributions/ https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...
• peterwwillis 9y ago
  > tasks that could easily be automated If I had a nickel for every time someone told me automation was easy I would be richer than Jeff Bezos.
• _bxg1 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woK2FcqJVuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woK2FcqJVuE
• helpme420 9y ago
  These types of jobs are extremely common in Luxembourg (a small country in EU). The workers stay because they are highly paid.
• zby 9y ago
  Graeber has been pushing this for some time now - it is an interesting observation. In this particular article he does not even try to explain why this happens - but in other places he made silly theories about capitalist employers doing that on purpose to keep people from revolting - while omitting the simplest explanation - that it is the result of complexity of our organizations. People don't understand their jobs. Sometimes it means they do something useful but they don't understand why it is needed, other times they really do something useless - but nobody really knows which is which or what part of a job is useful. Then there are company power plays which are counterproductive to the whole - but they are meaningful for the people who commandeer them. And the biggest problem is that there is a positive feedback in that - after a few failures to rationalize the organizations people give up. The harder the organizations are to be understood the less people work on making them more rational.
• unit91 9y ago
  I had a very similar experience once when I worked for the government. I wanted my small desk pointed a different direction, so I rotated it. A few hours later my supervisor and a union rep showed up fuming. They have people for moving things, why was I trying to take their jobs?!
  • fencepost 8y ago
    Not sure if true or false to demonize unions, but I've heard stories about the horror of trade shows at union facilities where booth staff were literally not allowed to plug items into power strips within their booths - it required a service request and probably a charge.
    • unit91 8y ago
      I've experienced that at a trade show too. That convention center did it as a means of charging crazy money for electricity. Internet was very expensive too. Trade shows are a racket facilities-wise but worth it as publicity/B2B opportunities.
  • slyall 8y ago
    On the other hand a company that I worked for some years back had published a summary of recent accidents in the monthly newsletter[1] A significant number were for office workers who had tried to change light bulbs or similar by standing on desks or office-chairs and then fallen off. [1] - Yes, company newsletter could be seen as a bullshit job
• rossdavidh 9y ago
  Kind of lost me when they gave military jobs as an example. By this logic, it is "pointless" for organisms to have immune systems, since if other organisms didn't cause infection it wouldn't be necessary. Maybe, but that's not the way the world is (or was, or likely will be anytime soon). It's a definition of "pointless" so remote from the real world as to seem...pointless.
  • 21 9y ago
    Here is an article which argues that we should stop using militaristic terms for the immune system, that the immune system is not an army of killers, and that it's job is not to kill enemies, because talking like this brings harm in the world, by legitimizing violence. I'm scratching my head at this. https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-guard-against-military-notions-of-immunity https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-guard-against-military-...
    • jeffreyrogers 9y ago
      I don't know. Most developed countries militaries exist more to respond to aggravations from other countries than to actively stir up conflict. If a country decides not to have a military than it's at the mercy of a country that does to play nice. I'm sure it's true though that once you have a military you're more inclined to use it, but militaries do serve a useful purpose.
  • solidsnack9000 8y ago
    I wonder if the author would also consider police pointless. Crime and warfare are both in a very real sense "outside the law" and in consequence outside the markets governed by it.
• _bxg1 9y ago
  The Lynx one is brilliant.
  • dave7 9y ago
    Yes, I laughed and expected it to be mentioned here more than just the one comment. Reminds me of codereddit: http://codereddit.com/?sub=todayilearned http://codereddit.com/?sub=todayilearned
• newnewpdro 9y ago
  It's called an "occupation" for a reason. There's no requirement of merit or value to qualify as one, just occupy the people.
• haywirez 9y ago
  This is by David Graeber of "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" fame: https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080
• jacob019 9y ago
  entertaining read, not sure I understand the bit about business owners.
• SantaBarbarian 9y ago
  Want to see pointless job? go into a nice department store in Tokyo to buy a shirt (if, say, United Airlines lost all your good clothes on the way over-- just as a hypothetical). the sheer number of people involved in greeting, seating and feting you is stunning. then there's the five levels of distribution to get any kind of product to market...
• fenwick67 9y ago
  I worked with a guy whose job was about 50% copying and pasting data from source A to B or going through an Excel sheet and doing the same thing for each entry. Eventually he automated it in a hacky way with VBA that worked most of the time. He spent a lot of time watching YouTube paylists while the VBA scripts ran submitting web forms etc. It seemed like a pretty sweet gig.
• jwilliams 9y ago
  Perhaps I'm reading to much into the title - but seems like pointless jobs have been around a very long time. What is the "rise" really referring to here?
• SpaceEncroacher 9y ago
  When you stop solving interesting problems crusty old man reality sets in. If you agree to stagnate in a pointless job you a part of the problem until you change your perspective. Are you waiting for Linda Carter to save you?!
  • downrightmike 9y ago
    If there's a chance of that, I'm good.
• chaostheory 9y ago
  These are the types of jobs that are useful for anyone just starting to build something. You may not need a seed investor if you have the right pointless job
• chaostheory 9y ago
  > “I work in a college dormitory during the summer. I have worked at this job for three years, and at this point it is still unclear to me what my actual duties are. Primarily, it seems that my job consists of physically occupying space at the front desk. While engaged in this, I am free to ‘pursue my own projects’, which I take to mean mainly creating rubber band balls out of rubber bands I find in the cabinets. A doorman's job is not bullshit. The job acts as a deterrent for people who shouldn't be inside that dorm. There have been cases where students get raped by a stranger inside their own dorm room.
• andrewfromx 9y ago
  This is universal income disguised as a real job?
• slx26 9y ago
  The problem is clearly not just about completely pointless jobs. Among jobs that actually have a purpose, we find many that are: required to deal with the problems generated by bad practices/inefficiency (the article mentions duct-tapers. Commenters here also mention how in computer science we deal with a lot of technical debt, even when many times we know there's no way out unless we rewrite from scratch), or even worse, generated by the own inefficiencies and 'stupidity loops' in a system (see a good deal of bureaucracy, supervision and reporting taks, goons, etc.) Of course we can't remove inefficiency completely, but these are big problems with big consequences. I'm really saddened by it: I regularly see a lot of comments from people that seem to be very capable but end up doing dull jobs, for dumb bosses, wasting their potential when they could be adding so much more value to our societies (and also be happier with it). And I don't intend to blame anyone here, it's not like we have much better choices in many cases. Sometimes you even think we would be able to achieve more with less man-hours if we didn't spend so many of them on nonsense. The need for jobs for everyone has also been discussed. UBI as an alternative, etc. To me it's clear the number of jobs we need/will need in the future will fall. And that's a good thing (we can produce more with less resources), but it also has very negative consequences, due to the way our economic system works and our need for money. But there's also a social problem. The concept of work is so valued that society rarely stops to reflect about the positive consequences of needing less work. And without this, it's really hard to build towards that society with less jobs or less work hours sanely. The difference between "work" and "paid work" is very important, and I feel we don't talk enough about it either. Work is important for humans, even necessary. But we can't keep repeating nice quotes that are actually referring to "work" and applying them to "paid work" to evangelize the concept. The whole situation is very frustrating. I'm quite young, and I think about it pretty often. I don't really like the perspective for most jobs I could do. What can I do? What can we do? Ignore the rest of the world and just try to find the best place for yourself? Try to live with less? Get in politics, start a business? I find it really hard to ignore so much waste of potential and useless pain.
• ryanmarsh 9y ago
  For an amusing take on this please read "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" by David Graeber https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs It was good enough to warrant a response from the Economist https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0 https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-...
• tripletao 8y ago
  > I should add that there is really only one class of people who not only deny their jobs are pointless, but also express outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. These are – predictably enough – business owners and others in charge of hiring and firing. A manager's job can certainly be pointless, and often is; but how could the owner's possibly be? An owner who has hired managers who operate a profitable business with minimal supervision is just a success. The managers can be perfectly happy with this situation, if they prefer a stable salary to the risky residual claim. I'm not sure the author quite believes in capitalism here.
• HillaryBriss 8y ago
  my favorite flunky job is the one where an executive tells the flunky to print emails out on paper and put them into a big stack so the executive can ignore them later
• maggotbrain 8y ago
  A great example would be the author of this article.
• pjscott 8y ago
  Once upon a time there was a thing to be done. Huge meetings were held, and goals were set for how much of the thing should be done per month. Metrics were set up to track how much of the thing had happened. Over a hundred people were invited to these meetings, and countless man-hours were spent on defining goals. Many more hours were spent on measuring progress toward those goals. Group emails were sent, vaguely confused words were spoken, and spreadsheets sprang forth from the void. None of this affected the people whose job was to actually do the thing. They did as much of the thing as could be done in the time they had. The goals came from the void and the metrics went into the void, and no echo was heard. ... And "once upon a time" means, in this case, "a few months ago at a big company where I work." The really funny thing, though, is that most of these jobs make local sense. The managers who went to the meetings and so on? They were sheltering their people from all this so that things could get done. Even the people who set all this in motion were probably well-meaning, since they wanted the thing to be done and took actions that they perhaps thought might plausibly lead toward this. I can't hate any of the people involved -- and yet the end result of it all is complete waste; utter horrifying destruction of irreplaceable time and energy. It would be better to light large piles of cash on fire, because it would be much cheaper and at least then we'd be able to stare at the flames. How do you prevent this sort of situation?
  • nefitty 8y ago
    Is this an argument against the need for managers? Google tried that, and it failed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/07/17/google-management-is-evil-harvard-study-startups/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/07/17/googl...
    • pjscott 8y ago
      Yes? No? Abort, retry, fail? I mentioned jobs making local sense. And it's true! If any single one of these jobs were to go away, things would get worse. The system would leave its local optimum, and many problems would ensue. And I want to get out of that Nash equilibrium -- but how?
• TheMagicHorsey 8y ago
  People in this thread that are praising job-creation as a social good miss the point. Jobs are not good on their own if they produce nothing. If you are unable to distribute wealth through other means and a job is absolutely necessary, then find some useful work for the person to do. There is ALWAYS more work to do There are never enough bridges, roads, doctors, books, movies, research, etc. etc. If your society cannot find useful things for people to do, that is a failing of your method of societal organization.
  • Bakary 8y ago
    The bottleneck is not the amount of work that ought to be done but the difficulty of training people to be able to do it.
• osteele 8y ago
  Some (not all) of these jobs provide slack to an organization. A human is effectively paid a retainer, or given an excuse to on premise and engaged, so that they have the knowledge, context, and social capital to deal with unusual or unforeseeable situations when they arise. Giving someone a job that causes them to feel useless or disengaged, in order to maintain their readiness, is bad management. The existence of a job whose value can't be summarized on a process chart is not. The article was entertaining enough satire, but in the end had me wishing for an alternate version that categorized the forces that create and sustain jobs. It pretended to this, but by starting from the assumption that corporations and managers are idiots or ill-intentioned, it sacrificed insight for populism. I recommend _Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency_, Tom DeMarco, 2002.
• Avshalom 8y ago
  As a aread this with that: https://longreads.com/2018/04/26/is-your-job-lynchian-or-is-it-more-kafkaesque/ https://longreads.com/2018/04/26/is-your-job-lynchian-or-is-... discusses it with in context of Ask A Manager and What Color is Your Parachute
• megamindbrian2 8y ago
  How about building and app that is never used, never sees the light of day, and it's construction never serves as an example of what to do or not to do to anyone?
• megamindbrian2 8y ago
  Cold callers are the same as recruiters.
• ImaCake 8y ago
  Universities are filled with this kind of pointlessness. The result is a massive amount of friction between those on the "edge" of the university doing useful work in research, teaching, building things, and the people in the "core" who routinely fire and re-hire whole departments and replace perfectly functional buildings in order to justify their paycheck. It's not that the beaucracy running a University isn't needed (it definitely is), but it has got out of control and is consuming valuable resources better used elsewhere.
  • xbgood 8y ago
    This is the same in industry: At a company that was supposed to be financially struggling, the CEO did: 1) Lay off software engineers are (the best ones, he had no clue). 2) Increase the head count in the HR department. 3) The increased head count in the HR department proceeded to move from one billing or HR platform to the next because they needed activity. 4) Hire "diverse" new (cheap) software engineers with no clue. I think professional unions with all their flaws are needed not primarily to bargain for higher incomes, but to stop this social welfare program for the bureaucracy.
• hutzlibu 8y ago
  Goons are only pointless, if you look at them from a idealistic all-humanity-together approach. And even though they tell us often they are there because of the other goons... they are usually there to dominate(or exploite) the others. Which gives the own side a massive advantage. Even though it mostly happens today in a much more subtle way than the open conquering, stealing and blundering, of the past, it is mostly the same principle. There are nice exceptions, though, like the swiss etc. but big armys today are still there to enforce various interests, for a long time mostly only as a potential threat, but more and more in active engagement. And even though I appreciate honesty, I am a bit concerned, that they more and more drop the facade. (Still, the german president had to resign a few years ago because he said that the german military is also there to protect german economic interests outside of germany, and he did not mean fighting pirates. But it is still highly illegal here (in theory), to make war for any other reasons than to defend, so he had to go, even though the public outcry was completley hypocrite)
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• vfc1 8y ago
  This is true, I've seen this over the years in several corporate jobs, typically in large companies. Teams are overstaffed, and each person ends up not having much to do. Managers keep the team size high because it's not their money to spend, and they prefer being a team lead of 5 persons instead of 2, looks better on the CV. People spend their day in their desktop trying to invent things to do, looking busy, surfing the web discretely, waiting for the clock to hit 6 oclock. Then something "urgent" comes around that needs to be done for tomorrow, and you stay in the office until 9 to finish it. The software gets delivered, but its not deployed until 3 months down the line, and the users hardly use the application at all.
• neilwilson 8y ago
  The point of a job is to allow you to put your own time beyond your own use and use it to serve others. This simple 'proof of burn' of your finite life is what gives the money exchange value. If you want others to give up their time to produce a surplus for you then you need to do the same. Otherwise they'll just take the productivity themselves and have Friday off.
• sureaboutthis 8y ago
  Almost related. Perhaps outdated. I worked in television for 10 years as a broadcast engineer. In a large city this is a union job. I was given the task of testing and repairing some equipment that had been in a back room for a while. I was the new kid so I didn't know the routines of the day but one of my duties was to operate the camera for a five-minute newscast in the afternoon. This only entailed rolling the camera into place, pointing at the news person, focus and I was done till the newscast was over. I was poking around the equipment in the backroom when one of the scruffy old men quickly came into the room. "Hey, you're supposed to be on the set for that newscast!", he said. I must have lost track of time cause I didn't know it was so late. I rushed to the news set, got everything ready, put on my headphones and looked around to see no one else was there and it was still an hour before the news was to be broadcast. Thinking the old man was the one who got the time wrong, I went back to my other work, thinking I could get a few things done but, minutes later, the same old man came in to chew me out. "Do you know how long it took us to get your job into our union contract?! If management looked through the window and saw no one out here, we'd be in big trouble. You get out there now!!" So I went back on the set, now understanding that I was required to stand there for 53 minutes, headset on, waiting for work to begin.
• ExpiredLink 8y ago
  >> if no one had an army, armies would not be needed. Lol, the US has an army because they need to attack other countries!
• k__ 8y ago
  They had full emplyoment in the German Democratic Republic. As far as I know you HAD TO work. But. The state HAD TO give you work. Hilarity ensued.
• jtcond13 8y ago
  Pointless jobs abound in both the public and private sectors, but I think these articles resonate because so many white collar workers are largely occupied with projects that will be cancelled before they're finished or whose end product will eventually be ignored by the people who are intended to use it. Most companies just aren't managed very well...
• grosjona 8y ago
  As companies get bigger and they monopolize industries, they can afford to be extremely inefficient without any negative repercussions. It makes the system fundamentally unfair. Money is supposed to be a representation of the debt that society owes an individual for contributions that the individual has made to society but its not like that - It doesn't matter how useless you are to society, you can still make a lot of money. In fact, it's easier to make money if you are useless to society; smart people let other people create value and they spend all their energy on coming up with strategies to capture the value created by others.
• innagadadavida 8y ago
  Going by this example, blog writers reports should also be added the list. Their sole existence is to get clicks to articles talking about stuff that we all know about but there is nothing we can act on in an effective way.
• profalseidol 8y ago
  Pretty sure there's a ton of pointless job in capitalism
• adultSwim 8y ago
  Pointless jobs are much wider than this. Most jobs I can get are to perform a useful role in a useless pursuit. Capitalism is supposed to be all about efficient resource allocation. However having the smartest people of a generation work on putting little text ads next to your search results and stock market chicanery is highly inefficient. There is so much real work to be done. We shouldn't be wasting our time with fruitless pursuits in order to literally not die.
• bluecalx 8y ago
  Some ppl work hard for getting a pointless job so they can get money by doing nothing. Don't break their dreams