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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 s

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).

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).