7 ms·
All those articles about bullshit jobs are usually dull and only look at how far from the "action" you are, giving some moral high ground to the jobs that are c
by ironjunkie 8y ago
All those articles about bullshit jobs are usually dull and only look at how far from the "action" you are, giving some moral high ground to the jobs that are closer to it.
It is always the same thing repeated over. For a nurse for example:
A nurse is a real useful job.
The manager of the nurses, are semi-bullshit.
The team of consultants writing softwares to dispatch the nurses to the patients are almost completely bullshit.
The marketing people selling the software to dispatch the nurses are completely bullshit and non useful.
- tomc1985 8y agoThat's harsh, is it not? If the software fulfils its stated purpose and provides value then is it not useless? If the marketing people fulfil their duty to generate inbound leads are they not useless?
- whatshisface 8y agoIn the example, the idea is that nurses don't need minute-to-minute coordination - so having people in charge is mostly pointless except for performance evaluation, and software is completely useless.
- Trundle 8y agoI believe the commenter was criticising the concept not agreeing with it.
- ironjunkie 8y agoit's an oversimplified example, but indeed in this example it supposes that the nurses would be better off doing this themselves. As for marketing, this is the definition of bullshit job as I understood it: They generate leads, and it is needed only because every other company and competitors are doing marketing, as such it is defined as an "arm race", same thing for lobyists. If you removed all the marketers and lobbyist worldwide, the result would be exactly the same. as they are only needed to cancel each other but have no real effect on the end product or service
- davidivadavid 8y agoNo, generating leads is needed because without leads businesses make no money.
- ironjunkie 8y agoYou guys think too much inside the system as it is today. Without bullshit jobs there is no concept of "leads". People would just buy the service they need, and supposedly the best most utilitarian product would survive only based on that.
- davidivadavid 8y agoYeah? And what would your boss do? Wait for customers to come in?
- speedplane 8y agoYou make the best widget X in the market. Google's widget Y and Microsoft's widget Z are far inferior. You are in your bedroom, holding your newly invented widget X... now what?
- AstralStorm 8y agoIn the proposed lack of marketing system, you take geographically local position and sell the products to clients that find them. Knowledge about the improved product spreads by word of mouth. If it is not much better, you will obviously lose to established competition in the long run but probably not disappear, just like Amazon hasn't killed local shops yet. The endgame is very similar still - one with higher reach and budget wins. Unless the competition is vastly superior.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoYou post the news about it on your company's website. You show it on a trade show. People like it, buy it, the news spread, you get orders. Of course it won't work that way, because Google and Microsoft will spend shit ton of money spamming the Internet about their widgets, so yours dies in the noise. Therefore, you need to spend your money and time to shout louder and louder. This is what it means to be in a zero-sum game. Pure waste, which unfortunately cannot be stopped from within the system.
- devonkim 8y agoNothing about “make a boatload of money” is bullshit unless we treat capital / wealth as meaningless. The issues that structuralize incentives different from reality is what makes an activity bullshit. The marketing people are there to discover / address possible customers to feed back to sales, and sales’ purpose beyond simply “just sell” is to work personally (read: emotionally) with powerful decision makers into developing a relationship with the company. And that is the crux of it all - with power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at companies (mergers do not help here), there is a mass, highly lucrative industry of bullshitters so removed from reality and mostly interested in emotional responses trying to sway these specific people to make high-impact (in terms at least in dollars and real results ideally) decisions. It’s similar to a lot of real estate and car commercials catering to the tastes and cultural norms of the already-wealthy - working with those politically or capitally deficient is a sucker’s game, which only further reinforces the status quo of the powerful primarily accomplishing tasks through higher level relationships built indirectly on the backs of non-bullshitters than anything connected directly to material, concrete real world outputs (the less bullshit work). To me that is the bullshit, not sales and marketing jobs in itself (I have plenty of respect for sales and marketing as professions - the good ones make it clear there is a need and benefit for society to have them around). In practice, many higher level decisions are also meant to make one’s organization appear better than it really is whether it’s to impress outsiders or for internal political capital. But unfortunately for humans at scale, perception becomes reality because so many things get bootstrapped just because people believe in it working.
- linkregister 8y agoNurses are "dispatched" by the charge nurse or a triage nurse, not by software. Software in hospitals started as direct substitute for paper records, and now has expanded to cover inventory and compliance checklists.