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Review of _Bullshit Jobs_

brannerchinese 8y ago
Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser > As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense”. Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides, replaced by praise for “hardworking families”. The rightwing injunction to “get a job!” is mirrored by the leftwing demand for “more jobs!”
platz 8y ago
Off topic
- jwilk 8y ago
  From the HN guidelines: Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
knolan 8y ago
I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT75&dq=bull+shit+jobs+“duct+tape”&source=bl&ots=xL4O7mlGMW&sig=5d3WPf8btLridL9RopkQiqGCmno&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHiczZiaTbAhWksKQKHacYCz8Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=bull%20shit%20jobs%20“duct%20tape”&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT... My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff. My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for disruption by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer. Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.
- gravypod 8y ago
  Is a devops engineer who builds some microservice as a FaaS deployment in AWS just a 'duct taper'? Amazing to see someone say "taking existing things and creating something new is a bullshit job". That's a pretty insane position.
- sgt101 8y ago
  That sounds like a useful job to me - so long as said duct taping is conducted within a framework of strict architectural control...
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. Taking existing components and building something new by combining them? What on earth is wrong with that? That's great software engineering if it's possible to do for what you need.
  - ape4 8y ago
    Or a chemist who uses exiting molecules. The musician who uses existing notes.
    - rainbowmverse 8y ago
      People have no idea how much of their favorite music is built on the same handful of chord progressions. And it's fine because the real magic is in the notes you lay on it, the sound design, the way the different instruments work together.
- hendzen 8y ago
  In today's software profession we're all duct tapers to varying degrees. Everyone is using someone else's abstractions.
- noja 8y ago
  Like using software libraries together? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
jadedhacker 8y ago
Link to the original essay: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
IshKebab 8y ago
> people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. That is a pretty extraordinary claim!
thefsb 8y ago
Here are the first 3 paragraphs of the section on Duct-tapers from Chapter 2. https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I've authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that work. I always did. It's necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro-services, whatever) but it's still complex and I resent that.

Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser > As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense”. Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides, replaced by praise for “hardworking families”. The rightwing injunction to “get a job!” is mirrored by the leftwing demand for “more jobs!”

platz 8y ago

Off topic

jwilk 8y ago
From the HN guidelines: Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

knolan 8y ago

I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT75&dq=bull+shit+jobs+“duct+tape”&source=bl&ots=xL4O7mlGMW&sig=5d3WPf8btLridL9RopkQiqGCmno&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHiczZiaTbAhWksKQKHacYCz8Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=bull%20shit%20jobs%20“duct%20tape”&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT... My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff. My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for disruption by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer. Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.

gravypod 8y ago
Is a devops engineer who builds some microservice as a FaaS deployment in AWS just a 'duct taper'? Amazing to see someone say "taking existing things and creating something new is a bullshit job". That's a pretty insane position.
sgt101 8y ago
That sounds like a useful job to me - so long as said duct taping is conducted within a framework of strict architectural control...
chrisseaton 8y ago
> An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. Taking existing components and building something new by combining them? What on earth is wrong with that? That's great software engineering if it's possible to do for what you need.
- ape4 8y ago
  Or a chemist who uses exiting molecules. The musician who uses existing notes.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    People have no idea how much of their favorite music is built on the same handful of chord progressions. And it's fine because the real magic is in the notes you lay on it, the sound design, the way the different instruments work together.
hendzen 8y ago
In today's software profession we're all duct tapers to varying degrees. Everyone is using someone else's abstractions.
noja 8y ago
Like using software libraries together? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...

jadedhacker 8y ago

Link to the original essay: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

IshKebab 8y ago

> people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society. That is a pretty extraordinary claim!

thefsb 8y ago

Here are the first 3 paragraphs of the section on Duct-tapers from Chapter 2. https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK https://monosnap.com/file/L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I've authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that work. I always did. It's necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro-services, whatever) but it's still complex and I resent that.