19 ms·

Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism

• Areading314 8y ago
  Lots of stuff just plain wrong, e.g.: > If you can’t afford to send your kid to a top college and then support them for 2-3 years doing unpaid internships in some place like New York or San Francisco, forget it, you’re locked out <s>Unpaid internships aren't a thing in the US, they are not even legal</s>Looks like they are a thing...maybe just outside of tech. Or: > Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no difference. The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it. Labor productivity is constantly increasing, if you measure it in a systematic, rather than anecdotal way. Here is an article about some trends in US labor productivity, notice that even though growth has slowed it is still steadily increasing: https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us-productivity-trends-from-the-bottom-up/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/understanding-us-producti...
  • paulcole 8y ago
    > You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it. Just because someone is getting rich off your work doesn’t mean it’s useful.
    • Areading314 8y ago
      Define useful... If someone is willing to pay its probably more useful than doing nothing right?
      • undreren 8y ago
        Yes. To the person or company paying. The entire tobacco industry thrives on destroying public health.
        • Areading314 8y ago
          That's a great example of an industry that's declining every year precisely for that reason.
          • undreren 8y ago
            It doesn't matter. A whole swath of people are employed to make a few rich people richer at the cost of the rest of society. The world would be better of without it.
          • coldtea 8y ago
            The only reason they're declining is changing trends. There are 10 equally harmful industries taking its place...
      • Franciscouzo 8y ago
        Only if ignoring externalities.
      • expertentipp 8y ago
        People are being paid for work at copyright and patent troll offices, for work at debt collecion where they process the cases regardless of how legit they are (ever relocated and had litigation with predatory service provider?), various intermediary agents (e.g. property) whose only job is to detect a transaction and put their feet in the door, plenty of examples really.
      • tjr225 8y ago
        If money is the only measure of usefulness, sure. Don't you think that's a bit stupid though?
      • coldtea 8y ago
        Well, I hear that crime cartels pay too.
      • kthejoker2 8y ago
        Actually this may be the real crux of the whole thing. Confusing money with value. If we could apply technology to create a frictionless barter system you'd see bullshit jobs drop real quick because nothing you produced could be turned into something valuable. Fiat money on the other hand can just slosh around and as an extremely imprecise measure of value allows things like bullshit jobs to exist.
    • droidist2 8y ago
      But that requires a value judgement doesn't it? If I don't think art is valuable, then I could consider art dealer as a useless job.
      • PaulAJ 8y ago
        Given that most art dealers "add value" by putting something in an expensive window and talking it up to people with money to burn, yes.
        • wool_gather 8y ago
          Same as any middle-/sales-person. Helping a producer, who may not have the skills or wherewithal, to get their product in front of a willing buyer.
      • davidgould 8y ago
        Almost everything requires a value judgment. However, in your example, if you don't think art is valuable, it seems unlikely that you would be an art dealer as you would have neither the training nor the inclination to learn enough about art and art markets to get such a job. So you would likely be doing something else, hopefully something you do value.
  • sien 8y ago
    Yeah. Graeber's theory of what jobs are BS doesn't really work. For instance, say a surgeon decides 'hey, y'know people are going to die anyway, my work is useless' then according to Graeber's definition their work is BS while most people would say it is useful work. But one that says that anything people pay for does't really work either. Say I'm rich and pay you $100K a year to go somewhere and do nothing. Surely that is useless. However, no doubt there really are quite a lot of jobs out there that don't need to be done. I've certainly had pretty pointless jobs. 37% of people say their job is pretty much useless which is remarkable. Graeber's book is worth a read, my review is here for anyone interested ( https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit-jobs-a-theory/ https://reviewsien.wordpress.com/2018/06/14/bullshit-jobs-a-... )
    • tokyodude 8y ago
      Sometimes I do wonder though, even "good" jobs (for some definition of "good"). For example, I can work on some tech, say mp5 (made that up), knowing full well it will be replaced in 5-10yrs by mp6. Now I get maybe the person/team who invented mp5 are bringing the world forward. But as some programmer on Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Safari, Chrome, or Firefox adding mp5 support to those OSes there's a part of me that knows my work is temporary and it bugs me for some reason. And that's not even at the point of BS for most people saying their job is BS. another random thought is when you know you're being asked to do something in an inefficient way. The job might not be useless but your time is being wasted and it feels awful.
      • nsgi 8y ago
        It's not really temporary in that example, though, if mp5 existed for some period of time there will always be mp5 files that some people will want to play and adding support ensures those files are never lost.
    • Ultimatt 8y ago
      Apart from surgeons dont say that, and people with bullshit jobs do. Your argument is even more baseless. Youve highlighted the problem with the metric but Im not convinced its more noise than signal. Plus if every surgeon found their work bullshit thats an even bigger problem in society!
  • bsder 8y ago
    Erm, except that if you strip out the weird way you account for increases in the value of computers, you see that things have pretty much imploded: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
  • cyberpunk0 8y ago
    Quite a capitalist view you have there
  • Areading314 8y ago
    Here is the data re. the claim that bullshit jobs are on the rise: https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/g0h77ytkkm/Opi_InternalResults_150811_Work_W.pdf https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... Notice its only ~800 adults, in one country (UK), and 50% said their job was meaningful. But crucially there was never any research to track this trend over time so there was never any quantitative study to see if this has changed or even gotten better over time. Instead it just assumes things are getting "worse" based on anecdotes.
    • notahacker 8y ago
      "Meaningful contribution to the world" is also a very high threshold to cross. If my job involved picking fruit for a living, I think I'd find it very hard to believe that I was individually "meaningfully contributing to the world", but I don't think we'd survive without a food supply chain and certainly don't think my doubt about the scale and interchangeability of my efforts would suggest that agriculture has seen an excess of workers added to it by empire-building managers in recent years. I'd expect that if better survey data existed there probably would be a trend rise in it, because educated people who've chosen a particular career path are probably more likely to be introspective and regretful over career choices than people who were always destined to take over the family trade or work in the big local industry. The grass is always greener on the other side, and it's not difficult to think of jobs which could have a more meaningful impact on wider society than your current one unless you're Norman Borlaug. But I'm not sure that one person's envy of their friend who chose a career path which helps cure cancer instead of doing prep work clients rarely use in court, or another's envy of their friend who helps sets legal precedent in landmark cases instead of handling patient consent forms for unpromising drug trials provides a better basis for assigning worth to jobs than someone thinking their work is important enough to pay them, and that's not because I fetishise markets or think principal/agent problems don't exist.
      • lovich 8y ago
        This is the second reference I've seen in this thread about bullshit jobs being something that actually does work everyday. Has no one here had a job that was literally useless? As in, if you dissapeared, there would be zero affect on anyone other than the company paying out less money every month. It's not a low skill job phenomena either. At one of my software jobs we we're tasked with generating reports that I later learned we're never read and we're actually auto trashed by the management it was sent to. The only reason we were still around was because the manager with authority to fire us didn't care about anything smaller than a few million, and it wasn't worth the effort for lower level managers to bring the issue through company politics. That's a bullshit job
  • myegorov 8y ago
    I think the concept of "bullshit job" is intuitively familiar to everyone. It's what you experience when you're just whiling your time away at work or in school. Can easily become the rule (khalyava in Soviet Union[1]), also characteristic in my experience of government/Fortune 500/unskilled labor in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalyava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalyava
  • _rpd 8y ago
    > The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? I think some of it is that people think about their job in the context of an ideal world. There are blizzards of paper that wouldn't be necessary if we were all philosopher kings, but there are bad actors of every type at every level to mitigate, not to mention the endless games of social status to play.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    >The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it. The ones paying the salary also get the profits. The question is not if these jobs make money for someone, but if they contribute anything to the society and/or if they have meaning.
    • Radim 8y ago
      False dichotomy. Money is the medium through which societies (attempt to) measure such contributions and meaning. And this includes abstract and indirect ways, like art, fun, future potential, etc.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        >Money is the medium through which societies (attempt to) measure such contributions and meaning. False axiom. Money is a very bad medium for that purpose. Money was created to measure exchange value, and it should stick to that role, and not even try to touch meaning. A person who made $10 billion selling poisonous crap to consumers, paying researches to mark it, and advertisers to brainwash them (e.g. a cigarette maker) does not contribute to society more than a doctor who found a cure for a disease that killed millions but made no profits off it.
        • Radim 8y ago
          "Valuable contribution according to coldtea" is not a thing. And without irony, I'll add thankfully. What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society). No single individual or small "central committee" can impose that judgement, simply because they do not know the final end result down the road. It's toothless virtue-signalling. Worse, if they try too hard, history teaches us to expect a murderous genocide.
          • coldtea 8y ago
            >"Valuable contribution according to coldtea" is not a thing. And without irony, I'll add thankfully. Here's where you're wrong though. "Valuable contribution according to coldtea" is a thing -- it describes my personal estimation of the worth of things. In fact not only it's a thing, but everybody has the same thing (their own value estimations of things), I'll add thankfully. And few would let money dictate their personal estimation of the worth of things especially (as we discuss here) concerning meaning (Ebenezer Skroutz comes to mind). It would influence their actions, sure, but not their idea of meaning and value in toto. It's "valuable contribution according to money" that's not a thing. Money just measure how much profit one can extract, not the value of how they extracted it. Crime, for one, generates tons of money as well. Few would agree it contributes lots of value, unless (as some do) we twist the meaning of value to be a tautology for demand. But while individuals sometimes do that thing (which you also seem to propose), that is constrained their definition of value to monetary profit, no society has ever done that. Value and meaning, for societies and for most individuals, are ethical considerations that go beyond "makes us money". >What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society). No single individual or small "central committee" can impose that judgement, simply because they do not know the final end result down the road. It's toothless virtue-signalling. Which is neither here not there. I didn't propose that "a single individual or small "central committee"" imposes their judgement. Just that money influx (or lack thereof) can't substitute for that judgement. To use your words, "What is a good vs bad contribution to society is played out over periods of time and using millions of independents actors (aka society)", and this involves moral considerations, collaboration, and personal judgement of those actors, not just their monetary exchanges -- that would be a caricature of reductionistic 18th century economics, where money defines all that's good.
  • carlmr 8y ago
    >The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it. I agree with you that the self-assessment will contain some false positives. That's pretty much inevitable. Assume for a second there are a lot of bullshit jobs. There could be two types of bosses paying for this. The ones that understand it's bullshit and still have a reason to employ the person (e.g. keeping the budget/headcount/department size high in a bureaucratic setting in order to cement their power), then there might be a lot of bosses who don't understand enough of what their underlings are doing and pay them because they believe they contribute value even if they don't. The incentive for the employee is not to cause big waves because they have a family to feed, a house to pay off, etc. I believe there are jobs that are at least a big part bullshit. In small companies they usually get weeded out quickly, but as soon as you have some kind of large bureaucracy (military or large company), you have a lot of people hiding. From my experience in large companies there are: a) A lot of people who are completely out of their element and don't contribute because they don't understand their job. They keep their job, because they don't cause big waves and are not on the radar of their bosses, or because of employment laws making it a too big hassle to fire them (especially true in unionized companies in Europe). Their position isn't useless, but they're useless. b) People that are good at their job and only need maybe 5-10h a week to complete their task. However they want to get paid, so they sit there for the full 40h week. They will probably see their own job as useless, while they do actually contribute as much as the mediocre people doing overtime. So they're technically not useless, but they could do a lot more, or work a lot less and earn the same money, but because the system doesn't allow this, they're stuck in a situation which causes bore out. c) people doing actually useless work (like described in the article). Government work must be even worse.
  • EliRivers 8y ago
    You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it. On that note, at a previous employer, the technical director hired a business analyst who subsequently told him to his face that she spent the days doing her nails, so he certainly knew the job wasn't useful. She went back to her desk. She quit out of boredom after about a year to pursue a job in teaching. He hired another one who spent the days working on a website for a local youth group. This happens, every day.
    • dazc 8y ago
      Reminds me of a job I once had where I would travel for an hour and a half each way just to try and find ways to occupy my time. Eventually I developed a routine of long walks in the parks and afternoon naps. It was soul destroying and eventually I quit. My boss phoned to ask why so I told him straight. His response was 'So what, you're getting paid for it? Obviously, he was doing more or less the same thing but for more money and better perks.
  • Patient0 8y ago
    Here's another way that an employee can misunderstand their own job: Suppose you have an employee who is working for Megabureaucracy Inc. Megabureaucracy is a company that's losing money. The employee witnesses waste and inefficiency throughout the company in everything they do. However, that individual employee may be doing work which means that Megabureaucracy is losing less money than it would if the employee did nothing. The employee might conclude that they are in a "bullshit job" - but actually what they are doing is adding value, even though they are part of an enterprise that as a whole is subtracting value. i.e. they are causing it to subtract less value than it otherwise would. The same logic applies for employees that are working in an inefficient department of a company that is efficient in aggregate. Helping an organization that is inefficient to be less inefficient is still economically valuable - but to the individuals concerned they may consider their own jobs as economically valueless.
    • bachbach 8y ago
      A great deal of civil servant jobs fall into that category of yours. A lot of jobs which could be classed as bullshit exist, formalized as 'jobs' because of something missing from somewhere else. Robin Hanson estimate half of US medical costs are not physical but people needing moral support/reassurance from others, dare I say if people feel unloved they crave attention? Another cause of bullshit jobs is sometimes moral responsibility. Who looks after the severely autistic and those born crippled? One perspective is that these are bullshit jobs because, like the Icelandic policy demonstrates, it is strictly speaking possible to prevent some classes of these people from being born. Other people are going to be angry to hear that, since those jobs obviously involve a lot of effort and stress and they would think them the archetype of useful work. I can understand that position but if your job exists mostly because of fetal alcohol syndrome then the moral high ground is due to be hit by tremors in the next economic crisis. This is the kind of thing we don't like to talk about much but, and I'm sure I'm delusional, but reasonable people could hash out sane solutions to prevent most harm. tldr; Bullshit jobs are going to exist on the contours of subjects we find to be touchy or gooey. This is why wedding planners exist.
      • lovich 8y ago
  • wool_gather 8y ago
    > You should really ask the people paying their salary whether the job is useful or not since they are the ones paying for it. I'm not sure that would be effective either. It would be a rare manager/exec who would admit (probably even to themselves) that they were wasting money paying for unneeded employees. I think the outside, objective measurements that you mention -- though they have their own limitations -- are as good as it gets.
  • commandlinefan 8y ago
    > If you can’t afford to send your kid to a top college and then support them for 2-3 years doing unpaid internships Well, it may not be the end of the world, but they're right that there's a plateau you'll hit if you didn't graduate from one of a very small number of colleges or have experience at one of a very small number of "prestigious" employers in your background (which you can generally only get by graduating from one of a very small number of colleges). Don't get me wrong, I've done just fine for myself, especially considering where I came from, but I've also rubbed elbows with some of the "elites" on their way up - LinkedIn lets me see how their careers progressed, and one thing they all have in common is impressive academic pedigree. As I'm raising two kids of my own, though, trying to groom them for the best college opportunities, I can't help but notice how carefully crafted entrance requirements are to perpetuate dynasties of "upper-crust" types. When I was applying to college, they looked a lot at things like extracurricular activities and volunteerism, which I didn't have any of. So now that I have kids of my own, I'm helping them with their application-stuffing things like sports, music, church - and I can't help but notice how expensive and time-consuming all of this is _for the parents_. You literally can't do it unless one parent makes enough money to let the other stay home and coordinate the kids' activities while _still_ making enough money to afford a house in a "top" school district (or worse, private school) and have enough money left over to pay for musical instruments, sports equipment, fees, private lessons, and on and on and on. In a roundabout but still very specific way, I'm trying to buy my kids a spot in a good enough college that they won't lose opportunities for going to a second (or third) tier college like their dad did.
    • linksnapzz 8y ago
      I have no doubt that your kids will eventually appreciate what you're doing for them...I can't feel anything but sorrow over how necessary that this is thought(or is!) to be.
  • wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    How is labor productivity relevant to whether or not a job is "bullshit"? If a ditch digger adopts new technology, their labor productivity increases, but that doesn't mean their job isn't bullshit
  • rahimnathwani 8y ago
    "Labor productivity" is a funny measure, as it can increase when people are being replaced by machines because machines are more productive. Imagine an economy which is producing 1 million widgets per hour, each worth $1, with 500 skilled employees. So labour productivity is $2000. Now imagine those 500 people are replaced with a machine that can produce the same output, and they all get jobs as baristas, each making $50 worth of coffee per hour. Now labour productivity has gone UP to $2050, even thoigh those people are doing less skilled work than before.
    • mercutio2 8y ago
      I’m not sure I understand your point. As far as I can tell, your objection is that labor productivity is mostly a function of level of automation, and you’re thinking people are confused and think it means “the people worked harder/smarter but weren’t allowed to make new machines to achieve that goal” or something like that? In the specific example you give, I’m really unclear why it would be bad to transition people from a mind-numbingly-boring-but-requires-constant-attention job working on an assembly line, to an essentially social job with a modicum of politeness/effort required. I guess I agree that this is fundamentally one of the flaws in Graeber’s analysis; if people’s only labor force options are “self actualized helping people with lot’s of autonomy and reasonably good pay” vs. “forced to serve others for essentially feudal reasons with slightly better pay”, obviously many if not most people would choose the former. But the reality is that the alternative to a service job are often assembly-line boring. It’s not obvious to me how many people would choose assembly-line over feudal retainer. Of course, there’s an alternate objection to analysis based on labor productivity, but it’s fundamentally Marxist: complete automation gives capital vastly more leverage and labor nearly zero. So yes, labor productivity says nothing about distribution of the gains from automation and is mostly about automation, not meaningfulness/autonomy for the worker.
      • rahimnathwani 8y ago
        My point is captured in your final sentence. (Labour productivity tells us nothing about whether jobs are BS, and neither do increases or decreases in labour productivity.)
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    > The whole idea of bullshit jobs is based on people's own assessment of their work? That's just considered a requirement for Graeber's classifications. It's not the only factor. I read the book and can vouch for his approach. He's really talking about bullshit jobs that any reasonable person would accept as being bullshit. It's the combination of self-assessment and looking at the details of the job to evaluate its bullshitness according to some quite sensible criteria that he still doesn't overly prescribe (it's all quite reasonably presented as an initial investigation that isn't complete by any measure).
• asimpletune 8y ago
  Has anyone read his book?
  • jacek 8y ago
    I tried (stopped in the middle). The author expanded the original article without adding any useful information. He did a bullshit job.
    • wott 8y ago
      I noticed it was often the case: I read (or listen to) an interview, or a short article by some author, and I tell myself "this is brilliant, I'd like to read a deeper development about this theory/point of view/..., oh, he's written a book, perfect!". Then I buy the book, and there are 30 pages about the specific point the author promoted in media (often with exact same sentences), and the other 200 pages are a disappointment. The data supporting the point is cherry-picked, or further development is fanciful, or there is a lot of page filling, or the other chapters seem (to me) mostly unrelated, or the author spends half of the time boasting and quoting himself (the books as full of notes and quotations from other authors as doctor theses are another evil).
      • thorin 8y ago
        That's how I felt about "thinking fast and slow" but it may be that I didn't grok it's meaning, or that I'd already been exposed to some of it's contents.
  • jostylr 8y ago
    He explored in detail his theory of five different kinds of bullshit jobs and supplied some very memorable anecdotes. He had some analysis of economic trends coinciding. For example, 40% of the workforce in the 1940s was in farming, now it is 1%. Automation happened and his theory is that instead of massive unemployment, our system basically created this bullshit jobs level. It is kind of a feudal capitalist version of a guaranteed job benefit. I found it quite enjoyable and particularly the explanation and relation to feudal ideas. Why are productive workers being squeezed out while the managerial class is expanding? Shouldn't the opposite actually happen (fewer workers with better automated oversight controls should need less managers, not more). His final chapter leads to a proposal about UBI as a way of walking out of this trap. He explores the explosion of administration in universities. Basically, lots of money flowing in and it has to go somewhere. So it goes to a level that can be easily cut (administrators) instead, of say, paying adjuncts more which is not easy to walk back from. It is a fast read and has some interesting ideas in it. It is not a definitive scholarly piece of work, but it provides a starting point for understanding how bs jobs arise when there is plenty of excess going on (lots of profits => bs jobs ) Some related readings: "Debt, A 5,000 Year History" and "The View from Flyover Country"
• molteanu 8y ago
  > Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were important. Is there really any reason to believe that this would amount to anything? Sure, there might be some people out there who would do useful or important work. But isn't there also the possibility that the majority of people would just feed their pleasure side all day long? Without any constraints, maybe we would just consume, have fun and go to the beach all day long? Maybe a rather unintended purpose of some of these bullshit jobs is to put a strain on the endless desires some of us might have.
  • jinfiesto 8y ago
    The whole argument is essentially that if we take people at their word and assume that 50% of the work being done today is bullshit do we believe that if we liberated everyone to do whatever they wanted, would 50% of what they do then be bullshit? I'm inclined to think not, but I'm fairly sanguine about people's desire to do meaningful work.
    • molteanu 8y ago
      Well, think about what people do on their holidays. Think about what people do on a Friday night or on weekends. Do they take one week vacation to do meaningful work or for "having a blast"? Are Friday nights usually reserved for reading Plato or for "going out for drinks"? On the other side of the argument, yes, this having fun in your free time might just be a way to blow off steam after a mindless, pointless day or year at work. Following this argument, then yes, taking out the boring work from the equation might also reduce or eliminate the need to feed your pleasure side. But I, for one, I'm not really convinced of this. It might still be true, but it's not a given in my view.
      • anewhnaccount2 8y ago
        Certainly it's not given for everyone, but UBI would change social norms. The real question is not whether anyone would feed their pleasure side as much, more, or even "full-time" but rather that aggregate happiness and life satisfaction would grow and thus society would benefit. EDIT: If you read the end of Gruber's book, there's an exploration of this and the associated moralising.
• zby 8y ago
  I think it would be useful to divide that between jobs that are 'zero-sum', jobs that are useless for the people who do it because they don't understand what they are doing and jobs that are really just accidents. The root cause of the increase of all these is the complexity of our lives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17263041 Some more on the 'zero-sum jobs' (a metaphor) - jobs that are useful to the direct employer but are useless to the bigger organism. This can happen on many levels: a manager employing someone just to have bigger department (manager is the employer the biggger organism is the company), army (the employer is the particular state the bigger organism is the whole civilization). There are also cases where something is useless only partially - like advertising which does a useful job of informing customers, but that job is kind of the least important for it. There are also cases where there is like a pair of jobs to it: like police and thieves.
  • AmericanChopper 8y ago
    The jobs you named are only useless in a hypothetical parallel universe. We could do without police if only there was no crime and we could do without armies if only there was no war, but neither of those things are possible.
    • zby 8y ago
      There is a range - some cases are hard like armies and police - others are kind of easier to get rid of - like managers adding people to their department only to grow their prestige.
  • bachbach 8y ago
    I do not believe our lives and systems are significantly more complex than than of our great-grandparents. Instead I believe we are under an illusion. The world has always been a complex place, but we manage that by many layers of abstraction, mostly innate but also by social organization. The failures of social organization and complex coordination are genuine, but they're not occurring because our world is much more complex. I have a speculation on the cause which can be convincingly demonstrated but it's the species of topic where HN is liable to change the colour of your text in its lalalalalalala-itsnothappening-mode. Under most lights our world is more simple than it used to be. You didn't have to fetch a pail of water from the well this morning. Your clothes: washed, possibly dried by machines in a process that used to take a day out of every week. Your food... you see the picture. Getting blitzed by streams of information on the internet isn't the same thing as the world becoming more complex, that's partly a choice and something people used to do with a library card - besides most of the web is not especially information dense and that's another illusion. When we do a lot of the human version of context switching it doesn't take much to overwhelm our sense of proportion.
• Jaruzel 8y ago
  Link to the original Essay: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
• wolfi1 8y ago
  somehow this reminds me of the telephone sanitizers of Golgafrincham
• troels 8y ago
  Not sure I buy in to the whole thesis here, but I really like the term "managerial feudalism" - Great little soundbite.
• EZ-E 8y ago
  A lot of full time bullshit jobs become this way because of the full-time 9-to-6 requirement. These jobs usually don't justify a full time position by themselves so it leads to people making up work and responsabilities to justify the job's existence. ie : a designer without assignment pushing an unneeded graphical revamp to avoid being laid off, a manager pushing new features which has almost no use to seem busy etc
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    I cannot imagine having a full time design job if you are not at a design agency... what would you even be doing 80% of the time?!
    • AmericanChopper 8y ago
      If you worked in a company where I used to, you’d be designing email internal email campaigns for our staff of 50.
      • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
        Ouch.
        • AmericanChopper 8y ago
          It gets worse actually. The CEO thought he could sell his email campaign design services to our customers, and convinced one to buy some from him. So he hired another two full time designers, and then never managed to sell the service again. For a year after that we got 3-5 internal news letters per week, each with extensive bespoke illustrations, until one day we were back to having 0 full time designers.
          • anoncoward111 8y ago
            Holy shit that's crazy lol. What's really sad is the designers were most likely trying hard and greatly wanted to succeed, but one day the CEO realized just how unprofitable his decision n months ago was and summarily corrected his mistake.
• ram_rar 8y ago
  Honestly, if it wasnt for health insurance benefits that comes with full time jobs. I would gladly work as a freelancer and build software that actually has a real world impact.
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    You can charge more and pay for your own insurance.
  • isolli 8y ago
    Hasn't Obamacare addressed that? Or are you worried that the exchanges may go away?
    • weiming 8y ago
      Speaking from experience, premiums go up every year, coverage decreases/copayments increase, and plans often get discontinued. I've had to switch to a different plan three times now.
    • malvosenior 8y ago
      Obamacare has greatly increased the cost of healthcare for most people (people without pre-existing conditions). It's become much harder to contract since its inception because more and more of your income gets diverted to insurance. Thankfully you can count what you pay toward insurance as an expense against your income but it's still such a major cost that not having employer supplied health insurance is a major burden to most freelancers.
    • jayess 8y ago
      It's pretty much a total disaster, so no.
  • vfc1 8y ago
    Have a look at how much getting your own insurance costs, you will be surprised. Actually, health insurance is not that expensive. A couple of years ago my wife was out of a job and checked what it would take to have health insurance on our own. Turns out a top-level plan for a family of 4 cost less than 200 USD a month. Given that as a contractor we typically make a lot more than with a full time job (between 1.5 and 2 times), health insurance is not a good reason for remaining full time.
• perfunctory 8y ago
  One of my most favorite essays on the subject: [0] In February 1968 New York City sanitation workers went on strike. After just six days a state of emergency was declared, and after nine days the city had to give up and give the strikers their way. In May 1970 Ireland’s bank employees decided to go on strike. At the outset, pundits predicted that life in Ireland would come to a standstill. > Heading into the summer of 1970, Ireland braced itself for the worst. > And then something odd happened. Or more accurately, nothing much happened at all. > In July, the The Times of England reported that the “figures and trends which are available indicate that the dispute has not had an adverse effect on the economy so far.” A few months later, the Central Bank of Ireland drew up the final balance. “The Irish economy continued to function for a reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for business,” it concluded. Not only that, the economy had continued to grow. In the end, the strike would last ... a whole six months! [0] http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/ http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b...
  • Roritharr 8y ago
    I always love to imagine the havoc it would wreak if Sysadmins went on strike...
    • Ntrails 8y ago
      Much like the bankers, the world would largely just keep running.
      • citation_please 8y ago
        I think we're merely highlighting the distinction between what level of responsivity a job actually requires. Those who deal with things that require near-immediate attention (janitors, sys admins, doctors) would stop the world. Everyone else the world can (by definition of responsibility) continue without any issue for awhile, and maybe at worst stagnate. I think this might be a completely orthogonal concept to measuring how "bull shit" a job is, despite how often it gets brought up in this context.
• PaulAJ 8y ago
  Reading about the choice between reasonable pay and rewarding work, I was reminded of this Dilbert cartoon. As usual, Scott Adams got there first. http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02 http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02
• dawidw 8y ago
  “People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference.” - That's the bullshit. I just want to make positive difference in my wallet. And then I can think about the rest of the world.
  • Hermel 8y ago
    Yes, the wallet is usually the first priority. However, I believe that doing work that has a deeper meaning is more satisfying. I've observed that it is for example very demotivating for employees if their work gets dismissed (i.e. when they worked hard on a project for months and then the project gets cancelled).
    • dawidw 8y ago
      Of course - if two jobs give similar income, you look at other factors. But if you can earn 10x more than now but in bullshit work (playing all day computer games etc. - as described in article) which job would you choose?
• theprotocol 8y ago
  >One thing it shows is that the whole “lean and mean” ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It’s not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies. This part resonated with me, having seen it first hand throughout my career. Some of the most productive people remained under constant threat of being downsized lest they increase their output even further in some way, disproportionately compared to those in other positions.
  • Noumenon72 8y ago
    I don't think you mean "lest" here -- they didn't threaten them to prevent them from increasing their output, they threatened them "unless" they increased their output.
    • theprotocol 8y ago
      Yep, I caught that a while after posting and kicked myself for it but failed to edit it as I got distracted. Thanks nonetheless. :)
• mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  As a UX UI designer my profession is total bullshit. It would be meaningful if I were helping design educational apps for kids or information hubs to enrich the world around me but the bulk of my work consists of helping companies sell more shit to people who don’t actually need it. SaaS, ecommerce, web, most of mobile apps - all bullshit toxic parasitic garbage that does not need to exist and yet I help drive that industry. My life has had no professional purpose to this point and if I dropped dead today the world would be non the wiser. To make up for all the bullshit I produce, I try to work as little as possible to spend as much time as possible with my family. I’ve got it down to 5 working hours a week so far and we are getting by fine. If I can get it down to 1 hour a week I will feel more satisfied.
  • wool_gather 8y ago
    I'm very sympathetic. The project that I'm on is building software for a company that I detest. > 5 working hours a week Nice that you're able to live out your priorities! Is this contract work? That would be quite remarkable if you were a (nominally, apparently) full-time employee somewhere. Does your family have another person with income?
    • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      Design and business consulting. I am not cheap but returns are worth it. Family has additional real estate income but we are not dependent on it.
  • perfunctory 8y ago
    > 5 working hours a week That's quite impressive. Well done. Now I have a goal to strive for.
  • germinalphrase 8y ago
    Do you believe this disinterest is a product of the kind of work you do? The employer? Lack of interest in the work itself? Or is it simply that you believe the work doesn’t matter?
• cyborgx7 8y ago
  >“People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference.” This sounds like people are just rediscovering alienation[1] again. 1.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
• black_puppydog 8y ago
  The General Intellect Unit podcast also discusses Graeber's work [1]. They call themselves 'Cybernetic Marxists' so don't expect this to be neutral. :P [1]: http://generalintellectunit.net/e/013-alternatives/ http://generalintellectunit.net/e/013-alternatives/
• golergka 8y ago
  > Something like 37-40% of workers according to surveys say their jobs make no difference. I'm simply not convinced that if a worker believes that his job makes no difference it really is so. Most people I ran into don't really understand importance of such things as safety, maintenance, record-keeping and other things that don't give instant gratification. Taxi drivers are constantly surprised that I buckle up in the rear seat (while they don't buckle up themselves in the drivers') and tell me that I shouldn't worry about the police - without giving any thought to actual security. Junior developers that I mentor always have to be reminded about good practices and not cutting corners - and I am certain that they're much brighter than average developer out there. It's very easy to imagine how such people would see their jobs as meaningless while they're actually performing a neccessary, although not often needed, function.
  • perfunctory 8y ago
    In my anecdotal experience it's actually the highly educated people, very well aware of what they do, who often find their jobs meaningless.
• granshaw 8y ago
  There’s a difference between the position itself being useless and someone being underutilized. Businesses often staff up to be able to react quickly if needs change, although most of the time some staff might be given just busywork, leading to the impression that they have a bullshit job.
• redleggedfrog 8y ago
  I think the article makes some really good points about the bullsh*t jobs and their effect, but I ponder the final two paragraphs in which this is said: "Just think what kind of culture, music, science, ideas might result if all those people were liberated to do things they actually thought were important." Would this really be true? I've heard that an artist needs something to struggle against, something to constrain the medium they're working in, to inspire the creation. Just having it be wide open is not optimal. I think it's much the same for any field. You have to be challenged to have your spirit moved to take action. You have to have a focus for your intent. Just having copious amounts of free time might not be the cornucopia of wonderful ideas and creations proposed in the article.
  • ra1n85 8y ago
    “Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.” Carl Jung I share the same thinking. Innovation and art are the product of many things, and not just free time. I won’t claim to know what those things are, but to suppose free time alone is enough seems to be a shallow insight.
    • yifanl 8y ago
      I can't speak for everyone, but for me and I imagine some others, free time is a difficulty in of itself. I can't stand sitting idle for long, I'd try just about anything to fill it up.
  • Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    I make art. I have very few struggles. I've had a few, sure, but so do other folks that don't make art. If i want to fuel my creativity, all that is really necessary is learning about things. More stuff in, more stuff out. Simple life experience is enough for some folks. Simply getting out of one's comfort zone is enough. I'd hardly call this stuff struggling, though, as one can thoroughly enjoy every minute of this stuff. I'm also at a point where I'm only working seasonally. Some folks will create things, some folks won't. It depends on what their own drive is and whether or not they have the money to do the things they are interested in. Lots of folks have stories, few are authors and are usually not interested in actually writing. Same with art and music and science.
• habosa 8y ago
  Many times when we believe a job is bullshit we are falling victim to the paradox of the library. Go to your favorite library. Take one book and destroy it. Is it still a library? Yes, of course. Destroy three more ... still a library. But what if you keep going? Clearly one book is not a library. So ... where is the crossing point? The same is true of many jobs. Yes if I was vaporized tomorrow my team would still function pretty fine. But that doesn't mean my job is bullshit. It means that we're overstaffed for the average demand. It probably also means that 9-5 is a bit silly. But if you got rid of all of us you'd have a problem, and the company can afford a bit of slack capacity.
  • FussyZeus 8y ago
    For a medium sized business you're probably right, but for a huge C-Corp? What possible project is Bank of America going to undertake that will actually, to borrow a metaphor from cars, redline their staff? Where everyone is coming in and working nonstop from open to close to get something done?
    • vec 8y ago
      Is BofA going to redline all of their staff? No. But absorbing a spike at a single department or branch is another story, and it wouldn't surprise me if having excess capacity already on hand is more efficient overall than trying to reassign individual workers on demand. Besides, actually working on a team that's redlined is exhausting, and doing it for more than a few weeks is a recipe for burnout. There's real business value in high employee morale and a low turnover rate, and having some amount of built in slack at normal operating capacity seems like a relatively cheap and reliable mechanism to safeguard that value long term.
      • FussyZeus 8y ago
        Except the article is saying that employee morale in these places is in the toilet, so apparently it's not all that effective.
  • quadrangle 8y ago
• ryandrake 8y ago
  I’ll leave this here: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” - R. Buckminster Fuller
  • snarf21 8y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree. But how do all these non-workers afford a new iPhone X and a Netflix subscription and apartment? I have no idea but it is a non trivial thing to solve.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • maxander 8y ago
      An apartment is fairly easy; if you don't have to live near a big city in order to work, land and construction labor is relatively cheap. A Netflix subscription is just data. A subscription and the broadband access to go with it is within most peoples' means now; broadband to the far-flung reaches people go to live when, as mentioned, they're not constrained to urban areas might be a challenge, but before too long LTE data will be sufficient for most purposes (especially in regions with lower population densities!) People don't need a new iPhone X. Period! There's cheap alternatives that do 90% of the same thing. People who would be likely to spring for universal-income-based life are unlikely to be able to afford one in either case. More broadly; food and housing is (given some geographic freedom) trivially accessible and cheap, internet access is almost at the same level, and most of what we consider "nice things" are trivially replaceable with much cheaper "nice things" that simply haven't had the same level of advertisement support. There's no material barrier to people living good lives on universal-basic-income-level resources.
• alexandercrohde 8y ago
  I found this aside really interesting, it helped me understand other perspectives: "Everyone hates the political class who they see (in my opinion, quite rightly) as basically a bunch of crooks. But all the other resentments make it very difficult for anyone to get together to do anything about it. To a large extent, our societies have come to be held together by envy and resentment: not envy of the rich, but in many cases, envy of those who are seen as in some ways morally superior, or resentment of those who claim moral superiority but who are seen as hypocritical. "
• haaen 8y ago
  David Graeber doesn't even acknowledge that most bullshit jobs are in governments. The man is really an intellectual: he lacks common sense. Also, when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with other pitfalls in his reasoning, he walked out of the room twice. https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongelooflijke-hoeveelheid-dode-tijd-bijgekomen-~bcc09392/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongeloof...
• holografix 8y ago
  I’d love to see a study of whether so called “bullshit jobs” rise in percentage to real jobs at a business when the number of employees goes up. Ie: 100 employees = 10% bs 1000 employees = 25% bs I’ve deal with whole groups at people at certain organisations that I simply used to call: “corporate politicians”. They don’t produce anything, they get information from A, manipulate it to make them look good, then broadcast it or send it straight to B. A good way to test for one is to tell them at an appropriate time that “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. If you get smiles and nods and winks, you’re dealing with one. I guess they never stop to consider that if everyone thought like that, no one would know anything.
• lurcio 8y ago
  vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas