10 ms·

The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

79 points by mjirv 8y ago

mc32 8y ago
The rise? It seems many have existed for some time, in one form or another. Maybe there has been an expansion, but not the rise. Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of "bullshit jobs" but other times, I think without them, the world would be a duller place. That's not to say I like SEOs, or telemarketers or inefficient charities, but they help at the margin and without that I think you get stagnation. Author also puts down compliance folks. I would disagree with that being bullshit. It ensures people follow the letter of the law --and if they don't AND they get audited, then there can be trouble. And that's the point. It's like saying firefighters are "bullshit jobs".
- SerLava 8y ago
  >That's not to say I like SEOs Even that has a skewed reputation as bullshit, which only used to be deserved. Now it's a much broader group of people who add a lot more value than 2010 SEOs did, by a mile.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    What kind of value? I still don't see any value a SEO person provides that a competent developer doesn't already do. SEO is not black magic (despite what the SEO scammers want you to believe). Google even gives you quite a bit of documentation on how to optimise your site for them.
    - davidivadavid 8y ago
      You're only talking about on-page SEO. That's about 5% of the job (generously).
    - SerLava 8y ago
      The term "SEO" is now used to encompass a much broader area of online marketing than it did in the past (tricking Googlebot and not fucking up Googlebot). You'll certainly run into lots of liars and conmen who use it to refer to outdated voodoo that worked ten years ago. But in most ecosystems it refers to planning and developing websites and web content for the purpose of satisfying the needs of people performing searches. And now the advice is "don't ever trick googlebot or googlebot will end you." As far as general human value goes, one aspect can be boiled down to "we found that 10,000 people look for such-and-such each month, but Google serves them all dogshit, and most of them go away knowing nothing. We will build a page that solves 5,000 peoples' problems a month, and it will be on your company website." A big chunk of the content on the web is there because of this process - and not just the spammy garbage. Without it, you see marketing teams throwing years of effort into the black abyss of outer space.
- repolfx 8y ago
  I think the perception that compliance officer is a bullshit job comes from a political belief that the laws being complied with are bullshit. For instance, compliance people spend lots of time on trying to enforce sanctions by e.g. blocking IP addresses. Have trade sanctions actually ever achieved much? Iran hasn't changed. North Korea is pretty much the same as it always was - if there's going to be any change there it'll come from Trump doing Trumpian things, not trade sanctions which have been in place for decades. And does anyone really think a nation state can't evade an IP address block? Really?! When you take a step back and ask "what is the actual goal here? is it going to achieve that goal?" it's at least very debatable whether the work is useful or merely bullshit.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    Or people think that compliance officers don't actually do anything to ensure that laws are complied with. A compliance officer's real job is to make sure that their employer doesn't get punished for not complying with the law.
isoskeles 8y ago
> Nobody ever reads these reports, they’re just there to flash around. It’s the equivalent of a feudal lord — I have some guy whose job is just to tweeze my mustache, and another guy who’s polishing my stirrups, and so forth. Just to show that I can do that. I imagine that there are some poorly-run larger companies that have elements of this, but this seems cartoonish for the most part.
- xapata 8y ago
  Ever worked in a megacorp? It's exactly like that. Working at one of the world's most respected companies, I met someone who had been doing the same job for 8 years, the sole responsibility was to create a quarterly report (in PowerPoint) which was the aggregation of a couple hundred other reports. She spent every day copy-pasting from one document into another. Every day, for years. Seemed happy enough. Arrived at 7am, left at 4pm. Earned reasonably well, since she had an MBA from a good school. When I was a management consultant, the cynical joke was that we stole your watch and told you the time. I learned that, yes, that was my job, but also that most companies are so incompetent that I was providing a useful service.
  - ACow_Adonis 8y ago
    Our joke when hiring management consultants is that we gave them the watch and asked them to tell us the time :P Its incredibly disheartening to everyone else in the company who already has the watch and can already tell the time and have already been telling everyone the time, but as people experience, that's everyday existence in large corporations.
    - nickpsecurity 8y ago
      "Its incredibly disheartening to everyone else in the company who already has the watch and can already tell the time and have already been telling everyone the time, but as people experience, that's everyday existence in large corporations." A guy I met consulted on improving company performance. He told me he went to the people on top to ask them what they thought and promised to investigate further to solve their problems. Then, he went straight to the workers in production and supportive positions asking what they thought about their job, what it entailed, what was needed, and what wasn't. He then asked the middle managers about their thoughts. He said the workers he asked usually had all the good ideas that he was paid to deliver to the higher-ups. Almost everyone doing that sort of thing knows that. One other thing he said that some people have to learn is that the people on the top couldn't use their workers' innovations. The way things work at lots of these organizations is that the people on the top want to look superior and control things top down. The visible effects have to look like that. If they let workers tell them, their model and egos break where they probably should let workers do a lot more. Instead, they often asked a consultant who invisibly asked workers. Then, they can say they solved the problem hiring a consultant who gave them options that they would enforce in a top down way. They get to feel in control while grabbing credit. Another way that helps when the situation isn't that bad is a tie-breaker between people or groups that can't agree. The consultant doesn't find the real solution. The consultant is just there to be the person that decides and gets the blame if it's bad. The consultant is cutting through the political bullshit that really run the company instead of the rational, economic, strategic choices that many folks pretend companies run on.
oceanghost 8y ago
I recently read this book-- it is nothing short of revolutionary.
- totemizer 8y ago
  I still think he should've mentioned the peter principle and hierarchiology
  - oceanghost 8y ago
    Hierarchiology?
chris_wot 8y ago
Some of these BS jobs aren't BS. Or at least, a subset of people maybe bullshitting their way through the system, but compliance personnel and corporate lawyers are necessary for reasons they don't give.
partycoder 8y ago
People that manage people that do not need management amount to a lot of people in tech.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jeffreyrogers 8y ago
The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen: > Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day. Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
- rayiner 8y ago
  Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided. The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    "The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided." It's far from incredibly misguided. I've personally witnessed countless examples of the kinds of things he described. The media even falsely reported on a lot of it. In each case, what's happening is political in the organization instead of rational, scientific management. There isn't a feedback loop saying this is the right thing to do or it's working. There's people in the middle or on top saying certain things will happen for certain reasons that are pretty arbitrary. Then, there's people that exist to make that happen, explain why it isn't, and so on. In most cases, investing in and listening to good people on the ground near the revenue-producing parts of the company seems to produce better results for a lot of stuff. Big companies particularly seem to have an emotional or cultural hatred for doing that minimizing those people as much as possible while dropping large sums on non-production people, companies, or projects with unproven value. I don't know how much it happens in legal, though, since law firms might collapse by playing it that dumb. Just too far out of my area to know. I have seen the things I describe play out in manufacturing, retail, food, general services, IT, and security. In each case, the workers had either arguments for why it was bullshit or straight-up numbers showing their opinions generated better results than the middle management. That's on top of examples showing middle management might have never done the production work at all or have any understanding of it.
cardboardshoe 8y ago
This article is missing a category: rain dancers. These people do something pointless but highly visible and take credit when something eventually goes right. Suppose you a project manager forces a team of coders to run scrums and track progress in JIRA. Unless you're one of the coders, how can you tell whether the PM increased productivity or simply wasted time on making them appear more productive? Either is possible.
- gitgud 8y ago
  That's a good phrase I haven't heard before. A good example of this is economists (not all) who continually make public predictions on TV, but are never held accountable for the results.
- EinIlithidBaron 8y ago
  lol! i just quit a job because a bullshit scrum master got in my way of taking the reigns of the project, and tried to muscle my capacity to operate oh i'm the lead role, and i'm only allowed to work on N number of points per week or i wreck the curve? what about zero points? huh? what about that? still like your burn down? yeah.
- taneq 8y ago
  "rain dancers" is brilliant, I've seen a few of these over the years.
hw 8y ago
There are also jobs/titles/positions that are created not out of necessity, but as a way to give someone a back-scratching, wealth-sharing 'promotion' without giving up someone else's, especially if the people involved are buddies or used to work at a same prior company. As employees, you sometime wonder 'Do we really need a Chief Retention Officer' ?
okket 8y ago
There are two previous discussion about David Graeber / 'Bullshit Jobs': On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (strikemag.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 (5 years ago, 349 comments) On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs (libcom.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 (4 years ago, 381 comments)
- dang 8y ago
  And more recently, since the book came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389
  - okket 8y ago
    > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 This was the huge, recent discussion (470 comments) I remembered but couldn't find instantly due to 'bullshit jobs' -> 'pointless jobs'. Thanks.
    - dang 8y ago
      Don't miss Graeber's appearance in the first thread I listed.
pinoyathletics 8y ago
This is right in line with the Tiny Homes explosion.
hackerpacker 8y ago
The way I see it, the higher up maslow's pyramid, the more BS it is, roughly speaking. This in terms of the function of the job, aside from your own survival and having a job.

79 points by mjirv 8y ago

mc32 8y ago

The rise? It seems many have existed for some time, in one form or another. Maybe there has been an expansion, but not the rise. Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of "bullshit jobs" but other times, I think without them, the world would be a duller place. That's not to say I like SEOs, or telemarketers or inefficient charities, but they help at the margin and without that I think you get stagnation. Author also puts down compliance folks. I would disagree with that being bullshit. It ensures people follow the letter of the law --and if they don't AND they get audited, then there can be trouble. And that's the point. It's like saying firefighters are "bullshit jobs".

SerLava 8y ago
>That's not to say I like SEOs Even that has a skewed reputation as bullshit, which only used to be deserved. Now it's a much broader group of people who add a lot more value than 2010 SEOs did, by a mile.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  What kind of value? I still don't see any value a SEO person provides that a competent developer doesn't already do. SEO is not black magic (despite what the SEO scammers want you to believe). Google even gives you quite a bit of documentation on how to optimise your site for them.
  - davidivadavid 8y ago
    You're only talking about on-page SEO. That's about 5% of the job (generously).
  - SerLava 8y ago
    The term "SEO" is now used to encompass a much broader area of online marketing than it did in the past (tricking Googlebot and not fucking up Googlebot). You'll certainly run into lots of liars and conmen who use it to refer to outdated voodoo that worked ten years ago. But in most ecosystems it refers to planning and developing websites and web content for the purpose of satisfying the needs of people performing searches. And now the advice is "don't ever trick googlebot or googlebot will end you." As far as general human value goes, one aspect can be boiled down to "we found that 10,000 people look for such-and-such each month, but Google serves them all dogshit, and most of them go away knowing nothing. We will build a page that solves 5,000 peoples' problems a month, and it will be on your company website." A big chunk of the content on the web is there because of this process - and not just the spammy garbage. Without it, you see marketing teams throwing years of effort into the black abyss of outer space.
repolfx 8y ago
I think the perception that compliance officer is a bullshit job comes from a political belief that the laws being complied with are bullshit. For instance, compliance people spend lots of time on trying to enforce sanctions by e.g. blocking IP addresses. Have trade sanctions actually ever achieved much? Iran hasn't changed. North Korea is pretty much the same as it always was - if there's going to be any change there it'll come from Trump doing Trumpian things, not trade sanctions which have been in place for decades. And does anyone really think a nation state can't evade an IP address block? Really?! When you take a step back and ask "what is the actual goal here? is it going to achieve that goal?" it's at least very debatable whether the work is useful or merely bullshit.
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  Or people think that compliance officers don't actually do anything to ensure that laws are complied with. A compliance officer's real job is to make sure that their employer doesn't get punished for not complying with the law.

isoskeles 8y ago

> Nobody ever reads these reports, they’re just there to flash around. It’s the equivalent of a feudal lord — I have some guy whose job is just to tweeze my mustache, and another guy who’s polishing my stirrups, and so forth. Just to show that I can do that. I imagine that there are some poorly-run larger companies that have elements of this, but this seems cartoonish for the most part.

xapata 8y ago
Ever worked in a megacorp? It's exactly like that. Working at one of the world's most respected companies, I met someone who had been doing the same job for 8 years, the sole responsibility was to create a quarterly report (in PowerPoint) which was the aggregation of a couple hundred other reports. She spent every day copy-pasting from one document into another. Every day, for years. Seemed happy enough. Arrived at 7am, left at 4pm. Earned reasonably well, since she had an MBA from a good school. When I was a management consultant, the cynical joke was that we stole your watch and told you the time. I learned that, yes, that was my job, but also that most companies are so incompetent that I was providing a useful service.
- ACow_Adonis 8y ago
  Our joke when hiring management consultants is that we gave them the watch and asked them to tell us the time :P Its incredibly disheartening to everyone else in the company who already has the watch and can already tell the time and have already been telling everyone the time, but as people experience, that's everyday existence in large corporations.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    "Its incredibly disheartening to everyone else in the company who already has the watch and can already tell the time and have already been telling everyone the time, but as people experience, that's everyday existence in large corporations." A guy I met consulted on improving company performance. He told me he went to the people on top to ask them what they thought and promised to investigate further to solve their problems. Then, he went straight to the workers in production and supportive positions asking what they thought about their job, what it entailed, what was needed, and what wasn't. He then asked the middle managers about their thoughts. He said the workers he asked usually had all the good ideas that he was paid to deliver to the higher-ups. Almost everyone doing that sort of thing knows that. One other thing he said that some people have to learn is that the people on the top couldn't use their workers' innovations. The way things work at lots of these organizations is that the people on the top want to look superior and control things top down. The visible effects have to look like that. If they let workers tell them, their model and egos break where they probably should let workers do a lot more. Instead, they often asked a consultant who invisibly asked workers. Then, they can say they solved the problem hiring a consultant who gave them options that they would enforce in a top down way. They get to feel in control while grabbing credit. Another way that helps when the situation isn't that bad is a tie-breaker between people or groups that can't agree. The consultant doesn't find the real solution. The consultant is just there to be the person that decides and gets the blame if it's bad. The consultant is cutting through the political bullshit that really run the company instead of the rational, economic, strategic choices that many folks pretend companies run on.

oceanghost 8y ago

I recently read this book-- it is nothing short of revolutionary.

totemizer 8y ago
I still think he should've mentioned the peter principle and hierarchiology
- oceanghost 8y ago
  Hierarchiology?

chris_wot 8y ago

Some of these BS jobs aren't BS. Or at least, a subset of people maybe bullshitting their way through the system, but compliance personnel and corporate lawyers are necessary for reasons they don't give.

partycoder 8y ago

People that manage people that do not need management amount to a lot of people in tech.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jeffreyrogers 8y ago

The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen: > Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day. Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...

rayiner 8y ago
Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided. The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  "The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided." It's far from incredibly misguided. I've personally witnessed countless examples of the kinds of things he described. The media even falsely reported on a lot of it. In each case, what's happening is political in the organization instead of rational, scientific management. There isn't a feedback loop saying this is the right thing to do or it's working. There's people in the middle or on top saying certain things will happen for certain reasons that are pretty arbitrary. Then, there's people that exist to make that happen, explain why it isn't, and so on. In most cases, investing in and listening to good people on the ground near the revenue-producing parts of the company seems to produce better results for a lot of stuff. Big companies particularly seem to have an emotional or cultural hatred for doing that minimizing those people as much as possible while dropping large sums on non-production people, companies, or projects with unproven value. I don't know how much it happens in legal, though, since law firms might collapse by playing it that dumb. Just too far out of my area to know. I have seen the things I describe play out in manufacturing, retail, food, general services, IT, and security. In each case, the workers had either arguments for why it was bullshit or straight-up numbers showing their opinions generated better results than the middle management. That's on top of examples showing middle management might have never done the production work at all or have any understanding of it.

cardboardshoe 8y ago

This article is missing a category: rain dancers. These people do something pointless but highly visible and take credit when something eventually goes right. Suppose you a project manager forces a team of coders to run scrums and track progress in JIRA. Unless you're one of the coders, how can you tell whether the PM increased productivity or simply wasted time on making them appear more productive? Either is possible.

gitgud 8y ago
That's a good phrase I haven't heard before. A good example of this is economists (not all) who continually make public predictions on TV, but are never held accountable for the results.
EinIlithidBaron 8y ago
lol! i just quit a job because a bullshit scrum master got in my way of taking the reigns of the project, and tried to muscle my capacity to operate oh i'm the lead role, and i'm only allowed to work on N number of points per week or i wreck the curve? what about zero points? huh? what about that? still like your burn down? yeah.
taneq 8y ago
"rain dancers" is brilliant, I've seen a few of these over the years.

hw 8y ago

There are also jobs/titles/positions that are created not out of necessity, but as a way to give someone a back-scratching, wealth-sharing 'promotion' without giving up someone else's, especially if the people involved are buddies or used to work at a same prior company. As employees, you sometime wonder 'Do we really need a Chief Retention Officer' ?

okket 8y ago

There are two previous discussion about David Graeber / 'Bullshit Jobs': On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (strikemag.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 (5 years ago, 349 comments) On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs (libcom.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 (4 years ago, 381 comments)

dang 8y ago
And more recently, since the book came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389
- okket 8y ago
  > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 This was the huge, recent discussion (470 comments) I remembered but couldn't find instantly due to 'bullshit jobs' -> 'pointless jobs'. Thanks.
  - dang 8y ago
    Don't miss Graeber's appearance in the first thread I listed.

pinoyathletics 8y ago

This is right in line with the Tiny Homes explosion.

hackerpacker 8y ago

The way I see it, the higher up maslow's pyramid, the more BS it is, roughly speaking. This in terms of the function of the job, aside from your own survival and having a job.