>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 usef

>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.