3 ms·

The world is full of bulls**t jobs and you might have one

17 points by colinprince 9y ago

mojoe 9y ago
it's always seemed to me that a likely endgame of automation is government bureaucracy continuing to make more and more busywork jobs in order to keep people doing something for their income. I think it's a more likely outcome (although distasteful to me, personally) than universal basic income, given historical political trends. This is all assuming we'll reach a level of automation where the majority of humans don't actually have to work to produce goods.
- nerdwaller 9y ago
  I don’t know how to say this lightly, but it seems to me that many of the “administration” type jobs have become this. Admin jobs seem to have proliferated most industries I can think of that otherwise may not need quite so many (medical, legal, financial, increasingly technical with some of the “Agile frameworks”). Most the of those are likely unnecessary, but they’re there to supposedly abstract away some BS.
- joeblow9999 8y ago
  A lot of govt jobs are already this. Glorified welfare/sine cure, whatever you want to call it.
BigHatLogan 9y ago
Some variant of this seems to happen to organizations after they reach a certain size of people. I used to work at a startup that raised a massive round of funding and began a hiring spree. I joined one of the satellite offices shortly afterwards, excited and eager to get to work. What I found was that the vast majority of our 50-person office was more or less spinning the hamster wheel, so to speak. The work that needed to be done was parsed and diluted across so many people that there was hardly any work to fill a full 8-hour workday. I recall missing a day of work once and forgetting to notify my boss (I had a midterm and was likely in some sort of panic mode). The next day as I walked in he greeted me by saying, "Hey! Nice job yesterday." He wasn't being sarcastic either. The amount of work to do was so minimal that my boss forgot (or didn't even notice) that I wasn't at the office. I've read some articles recently stating that Netflix and Facebook experience increases in traffic during traditional work hours. It's an interesting data point. I think most jobs don't need to exist. They exist for a variety of reasons: signaling (the company must signal growth), incompetence, inefficiency, etc.
boznz 8y ago
I dont think there is enough karma in the world to upvote this topic. I've seem it in every organisation I have worked at and scratch my head in wonder at the number of meetings, powerpoints and spreadsheets I see that achieve nothing. To me it looks like a lot of the pointless jobs are formatting datasets that nobody reads

17 points by colinprince 9y ago

it's always seemed to me that a likely endgame of automation is government bureaucracy continuing to make more and more busywork jobs in order to keep people doing something for their income. I think it's a more likely outcome (although distasteful to me, personally) than universal basic income, given historical political trends. This is all assuming we'll reach a level of automation where the majority of humans don't actually have to work to produce goods.

nerdwaller 9y ago
I don’t know how to say this lightly, but it seems to me that many of the “administration” type jobs have become this. Admin jobs seem to have proliferated most industries I can think of that otherwise may not need quite so many (medical, legal, financial, increasingly technical with some of the “Agile frameworks”). Most the of those are likely unnecessary, but they’re there to supposedly abstract away some BS.
joeblow9999 8y ago
A lot of govt jobs are already this. Glorified welfare/sine cure, whatever you want to call it.

BigHatLogan 9y ago

Some variant of this seems to happen to organizations after they reach a certain size of people. I used to work at a startup that raised a massive round of funding and began a hiring spree. I joined one of the satellite offices shortly afterwards, excited and eager to get to work. What I found was that the vast majority of our 50-person office was more or less spinning the hamster wheel, so to speak. The work that needed to be done was parsed and diluted across so many people that there was hardly any work to fill a full 8-hour workday. I recall missing a day of work once and forgetting to notify my boss (I had a midterm and was likely in some sort of panic mode). The next day as I walked in he greeted me by saying, "Hey! Nice job yesterday." He wasn't being sarcastic either. The amount of work to do was so minimal that my boss forgot (or didn't even notice) that I wasn't at the office. I've read some articles recently stating that Netflix and Facebook experience increases in traffic during traditional work hours. It's an interesting data point. I think most jobs don't need to exist. They exist for a variety of reasons: signaling (the company must signal growth), incompetence, inefficiency, etc.

boznz 8y ago

I dont think there is enough karma in the world to upvote this topic. I've seem it in every organisation I have worked at and scratch my head in wonder at the number of meetings, powerpoints and spreadsheets I see that achieve nothing. To me it looks like a lot of the pointless jobs are formatting datasets that nobody reads