8 ms·

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 wh

• 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...
• dasil003 8y ago
  So in other words, 99.99% of all modern day programmers.
• heydenberk 8y ago
  Other 'bullshit jobs' including making trains and toasters and ladders by taking existing components like nuts and bolts and simply welding them together. I've always wanted to like David Graeber. Superficially, he seems like a smart, rigorous, heterodox left-wing thinker. But his work is intellectually bankrupt more often than not. Brad DeLong has been doing the hard work of breaking down Graeber's facile arguments and incorrect information for years. Here's one blog post to look at if you're curious. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-th...
  • davidgraeber 8y ago
    Why are people such suckers? Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. He for some unfathomable reason decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met him or interacted with him in my life; he started by spewing outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure out) until I pointed out false personal aspersions were actionable; so then he appears to have decided to go after the book instead. The first time I tried to correct one of the obviously false statements about my work that appeared on his blog, providing irrefutable evidence (he claimed Giovanni Arrighi had never said something I'd attributed to him, I produced a quote from Arrighi saying exactly what I'd claimed), he simply cut the part with the evidence out of my response (he carefully edits the comment section). After that I blocked him on twitter and stopped even looking at his blog. I thought eventually he'd get bored and go away, but bizarrely, he kept it up for literally years. He stalked me online, showing up to attack me whenever my name was mentioned prominently in a public debate, on twitter, he made up dummy eggshell accounts to try to trick me into engaging with him, he'd pretend I was arguing with him, knowing I couldn't see his tweets (people showed them to me later), he'd take tweets I'd made in arguments with others and putting them on his blog pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a totally and frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally, again, knowing I'd blocked him and had refused to interact with him for years at that point, he created a twitter bot to attack me every day for a month, each tweet ending with "stay away!" - i.e., pretending he wasn't the one stalking me but the other way around. So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about my scholarly work if you like. In fact, most of the "factual errors" he claims to have found are either differences of interpretation, downright misrepresentations of my position, or points so trivial it's somewhat flattering that's the best he managed to find. Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my interpretation of the Sumerian principles called "me" was incorrect. When I showed this to one of my best friends, who is a Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out loud. Nobody, he said, really knows what the "me"s are. There are a half dozen interpretations. The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure, he said, lots of people have other ones. I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The difference between 1 and 3 had absolutely no bearing on the point I was making in the sentence in question. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this again and again as proof that I'm an ignoramus. In other words, he's still not managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book. Frankly, this is a transparent and rather pathetic game. Anyone who goes through a long book on diverse topics will be able to find some things they can hold out and say are "errors." Just to show how easy the game is to play, just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong managed to himself make more glaring errors than he managed to come up with in 544 pages of text. Some were genuinely embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand: 1. he claimed that Switzerland doesn't have an air force (it does) 2. he claimed that Jeremy Bentham's body is preserved in London School of Economics (everyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his body is in University College London, LSE didn't even exist when he died - and this guy is an economic historian?) 3. he was completely unaware that the bubonic plague struck Medieval Europe more than once - which, again, for a professional economic historian, is incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very very basic Medieval History 101 stuff. And he was just totally clueless. I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England. Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.
• doktrin 8y ago
  what a completely weird criteria for a 'bullshit' job, and one that's also totally at odds with the stuff described in OP's article.
• fredsanford 8y ago
  Some call them "Taco Bell Programmers" as in take the same 6 ingredients and mix them up slightly differently and give the result a new name. I used this with a recruiter in South Florida a few years ago and it started popping up in listings...
  • swyx 8y ago
    ha, sounds like there's demand then... while not technically interesting, burrito assembly is still economically useful :)
• jonhendry18 8y ago
  "Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new." You mean like in electronics?
• mrfusion 8y ago
  That’s all software engineering these days.