38 ms·

Bullshit Jobs

• baxtr 8y ago
  Let me take the opposing view (not just for fun’s sake): I think one reason why BS jobs exist is to keep everybody busy. if there were no bullshit jobs, what would we do with all the people? Maybe we end up with many more people unemployed, maybe watching TV all day?
  • mergejoin 8y ago
    I'd rather see those people using their time hiking mountains, watching tv shows, doing arts... than go spend their day at a useless job that will make them feel unhappy because of the lack of accomplishment.
  • zolthrowaway 8y ago
    Would some people watch TV all day? Sure. However, there are tons of people that are trapped at a desk for 8 hours a day browsing the internet and watching Youtube videos anyway. I don't see all that much of a difference outside of freedom. "Busy" in this context just essentially means must keep their butt in their seat for 8 hours. Giving people freedom with their time allows people to write books, make music, paint pictures, learn skills, create products, etc. Is it all positives? Probably not. I could see issues with people isolating themselves with no requirement to go into an office. But personally, I don't think unemployment is worse than bullshit jobs. Being busy is not a good metric to go by. If I carry buckets of water back from the river all day, I'm busy. But that's incredibly stupid to do if I have running water.
• normalhuman 8y ago
  I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation. As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse. It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.
  • tim333 8y ago
    >3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. I'm all in favour of us having a life of leisure or fun jobs (actor, ski explorer etc) and everyone having a basic income from the state. Sadly though the AI robots are not here and getting someone to fix your plumbing is still a pain, plus many other jobs. Maybe in the future we can go that way.
    • TelmoMenezes 8y ago
      AI is not a binary event. Technological progress gradually removes the need for labor. Consider simple unsexy things such as automatic cashiers at supermarkets, McDonald's, etc. How many jobs have they made redundant? And do you know that "computer" used to be a profession? Do you know that the majority of blue collar work in 2018 will be made redundant by self-driving vehicles? And so on. You say I am overestimating technological progress. Ok, then explain to me why work hours are increasing. They should at the very least be staying the same right?
      • toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Work hours are increasing because of the decline in unions, and along with it, worker bargaining power.
        • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
          They are not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?country=BEL+FRA+ITA+CHE+USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/work-hours-per-week?count...
          • toomuchtodo 8y ago
            They are for the US, while they're declining for the EU countries you selected (which your graph shows).
    • wool_gather 8y ago
• kamaal 8y ago
  From the article: In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable? and It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? bosses? investors? People aren't exactly that stupid. Its really more on the lines of malice. I remember in my first job, it was a big IT services company in Bangalore, India. Our manager created some project initiatives to align corporate initiatives on the lines of 'Promoting Green Technologies'. Two or three people in the evening/night would stay behind and check if people's desktops were on. Mostly people just locked the computers and went home. This was necessary because many people kept IDE's and many other work related stuff running, coming back morning and redoing all that for an hour or two was a waste of time. But these bunch of three would go around and see if someone's desktop was still powered on. They could then turn off the switch(hard turn off) on the wall socket. Next day people would come and then be mightily surprised finding all their unsaved work, or work state itself wiped out. After a lot of fights and arguments. They decided they would just send reports instead of turning it off. The reports would then act as way of shaming people for 'wasting energy'. They eventually even got around to automating it. Months later we saw, It was nothing about promoting green technologies or saving the earth or anything. The three people who were doing it were the manager's pet, and he wanted to promote them. He thought having a line item on 'corporate goal achievement' on their promotion packets would further their cause well. Then we saw those three get promoted over the real people were actually building stuff and delivering things. Generally when these things happen in a company you need to think on the opposite lines of Heinlein's Razor. Some one somewhere has hiring quotas and budgets, some one is getting promoted, or getting a bonus or getting paid well for bringing up these stupid policies and jobs. Things exist because there is an incentive for them to exist.
• nnq 8y ago
  ...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a bullshit society: our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect of having the productivity of the people that actually choose (and are able to!) to be productive being lowered by being surrounded by slackers etc.. Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and you can't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible! You might end up with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun" or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark tendencies. "Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.
  • selimthegrim 8y ago
    Finally, someone who understands New Orleans.
• sophistication 8y ago
  It looks like psychiatry, especially psychotherapy, is bullshit to a far greater extent than what was discussed in this blog post: --- For real patients, there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/an-analysis-of-psychotherapy-versus-placebo-studies/08C6F3704103BE1DE8737138D61BE66B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain... (Prioleau 1983) Meta-analysis shows antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy. No significant difference between the studies with and those without a placebo condition. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26169475 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26169475 (Cuijpers 2015) Negative results in phase III trials of complex interventions https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/negative-results-in-phase-iii-trials-of-complex-interventions-cause-for-concern-or-just-good-science/188FDEFC70880724315045EC8D773AA2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-... (Crawford 2016) Therapy experience in naturalistic observational studies is associated with negative changes in personality https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656616302410 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661... (Philip 2016) Does psychotherapy work? An umbrella review of meta‐analyses of randomized controlled trials finds only 7% of studies provided convincing evidence that psychotherapy is effective. These pertained to cognitive behavioural therapy (n = 6), meditation therapy (n = 1), cognitive remediation (n = 1), counselling (n = 1) and mixed types of psychotherapies (n = 7). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acps.12713?campaign=wolearlyview https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acps.12713?c... More experience and training do not improve outcome of psychotherapy. http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-46640-006 http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-46640-006 (Erekson 2017) Trauma and victimhood have also been way overstated, overlooking that most people recover from traumatic experiences; that duration and and frequency of trauma are uncorrelated with subsequent disorder. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735818300539 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581... (Küenzlen 2016) Young children emerge from single potentially traumatic events psychologically unharmed https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405629.2016.1150174 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405629.2016.11... (Galatzer-Levy 2018) People with moderate life adversity have the fewest stress symptoms, are the most satisfied with life and the least affected by recent traumata. https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/2512-8442/a000011 https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/2512-8442/a0000... (Höltge 2018) How to spot hype in the field of psychotherapy: A 19-item checklist https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXZ75sEnpTpqExb_KP0buaL6V2yZagvE/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXZ75sEnpTpqExb_KP0buaL6V2y...
• Gys 8y ago
  I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.' Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ? We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.
  • asmithmd1 8y ago
    Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.
    • majewsky 8y ago
      A more nuanced approach might work there. Some people are up at night because their projects keep them engaged, and delivering pizza to those people is not a bullshit job. What Graeber alludes to is when people have pizza delivered because they need to work their own bullshit job and thus do not have time to cook. In other words: If there were less bullshit jobs, there would be less pizza delivery. Hence, to a certain extent, pizza delivery is also a bullshit job. I'm not sure I subscribe to this reasoning, but I think this is a more honest representation of Graeber's argument.
    • Gys 8y ago
      > His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job. That is a very subjective definition.
• firefoxd 8y ago
  "Nothing we do in this large department of ours is really very important, and there’s never any rush. On the other hand, it is important that we let people know we do a great deal of it." General Peckem - Catch 22
• d--b 8y ago
  > people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals There's something about the idea of ritual indeed. Well found
• varunpant 8y ago
  Well, not everyone needs a meaningful job, like all the time.
• PeterStuer 8y ago
  "why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable". The short answer: they might not be doing anything valuable, but that doesn't mean they aren't valuable. I'm not a sociologist, so this is 'anecdotal', but I have consulted in and worked with a large number of companies during my professional 'career. First key insight I gained is that [b]the larger the company, the greater the distance between personal action and institutional success[/b]. In a very small business, your own actions directly influence and visibly contribute to the success or failure of the company. As the company gets larger, your own actions or even complete lack their-off will for the vast majority of employees not visibly influence the needle. In absence of this tight coupling between personal actions and company outcomes, the majority of people will be optimizing decisions in terms of the outcome for [i]themselves[/i], something their direct actions most certainly influence, rather than for some nebulous and intangible 'for the benefit of the enterprise'. As large companies invariably have a multi-layered hierarchical structure, the lack of objective measurement in company contribution will not counterbalance the 'career-optimizing' forces, and so the average 'me'-focused person will tend to 'out-compete' a more holistic 'company-minded' individual when it comes to climbing the hierarchy. Optimizing for personal gain does not align with company efficiency unless by accident. It often even contradicts it as 'small but efficient' solutions are the exception as their creation might benefit the one person that can claim the credit for it at some point and rise to the next level, yet burn that bridge for everyone 'coming behind' as they now are just heading a small division instead of shepherding over a large number of warm bodies and the size of the spending-budget they 'control', the universal career success measure for management. Second key insight: [b]companies are legal entities, but don't [i]realy[/i] exist as a conscious entity.[/b] Let me explain what I mean. As an external consultant, you never work for company X, you work for person A, the person that hires you. Same (but different), as an employee, you don't realy work for company Y, you work for the benefit of persons B and C, people that got you onto their team to improve their situation. Combined, both of these insights lead to the realization that a vast number of people do not work because they create by their work actions, their 'job', a focused benefit to 'the company', the 'customers/clients' or 'society at large', all of which are typical personal 'value' related vectors. They work because they are foot-soldiers that provide 'value' in the managerial hierarchy wars, which is something most people will not recognize as 'value' but as 'bullshit'. A third key realization(I promise, I'll keep it at that), and the one that answers [b]'but why are these inefficient behemoths not put to rest by highly efficient competitors[/b], is that a lot of people tend to misinterpret Darwinian dynamics, a common popular conceptual model in thinking about 'markets' and 'efficiencies'. Popular interpretation that of the 'survival of the fittest'. They imagine animals (enterprises and businesses in this context), to be in an eternal struggle (red in tooth and claw), resulting in the leanest and meanest, the most efficient providing the best 'fit', rising to the top. The invisible hand of the market will create optimal, highly efficient companies in each sector. Unfortunately this model and the interpretation there-off are deceiving. Rather than selecting for the best, a Darwinian dynamic 'just' selects for a sufficient fit to a niche, and only works by weeding out the bottom, those that fail to find a place in any niche at all. In 'static' systems running for a sufficiently long time, promoting the top or weeding out the bottom can lead to the same outcome. In 'dynamic' systems, where 'niches' change over time, both mechanisms can have very different outcomes. Theoretically speaking, top selection tends to efficient but 'over-fitted' solutions, bottom removal does not favor efficiency but resilience, doing 'good-enough' to survive under very many circumstances. Companies that truly 'solve' a problem (something that is definitely on the 'value' scale when people think about 'is my job meaningful'), either eliminate the very basis of their existence by eradicating the 'problem' they solve. It's hard to think of such things or companies, because both they and their reason for 'existence' have disappeared. A more stable solution in terms of company (and thus job) existence must have an ongoing number of cases to 'solve', ideally (in terms of stability) by having the 'solution' create it's own demand for more 'solution', a dependency. People think we as a society weed these out, because they are culturally immediately conditioned to think of 'heroin' or 'illegal substances' as the example of the archetype of of the dependency inducing concept. Thing is that our whole socio-economic market system is based on creating and sustaining ongoing dependency.So once again, people seeing that the company they work for doesn't solve but even plays a role in creating the problems it pretends to solve, again find their job 'meaningless' at best. Sorry for the long post.
• mehrdadn 8y ago
  Regarding the doctor's note thing, isn't it just to present a hurdle that the majority of people wouldn't jump over unless they actually needed to? So as to prevent people arbitrarily demanding an unlimited variety of conveniences that they don't really need?
  • dood 8y ago
    Another example: if somebody asks you to do a random task (which is essential, very important, top priority), then a tiny amount of push back - e.g. sending an email asking for clarification of what is needed and why - often makes the task suddenly become unnecessary. The broader principle is that if a request for expenditure of time/effort/money has minimal cost or risk to the requester, they are incentivized to request unlimited expenditure if it has any potential to benefit to them.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Maybe, but then I'd argue this story proves the hurdle is way too big, if it ends up people asking psychiatrists for back pain diagnosis. Instead, why not ask them to explain the need for the chair, in writing, to the HR or procurement department? But then I guess outsourcing the decision - and all the related social risks - to doctors is safer.
• jahaja 8y ago
  So for example, with regards to startups growing rapidly on VC funding: What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise, and thus create a lot of bullshit jobs.
• dangom 8y ago
  Reminds me of an internship I did at a large organization, where the computer I was assigned to was partially unusable (even after formatting it would hang and freeze all the time), but procedures stated that I couldn't change it because it wasn't 3 years old. Procedures also stated that I wasn't allowed to bring my own computer to my workplace, so I ended up spending a lot of time sitting there drinking coffee and reading books, instead of actually doing the work I was supposed to. Nobody cared.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • NoobPwner 8y ago
    You first-worlders are damn lucky. In my country, it is considered a good day when you get paid half the money you were promised for doing some hardcore high-skill job. Which is still like 10 times lower than what you would get in the first-world, living-costs adjusted. Real elephant in the room is the resource flow from the colonies to the first-world and the Western financial institutions that enable it. That's probably the thing allowing you to bore yourself to death with bullshit jobs. No one likes talking about it though. "Why do we have every resource and service available but half the population has to do bullshit jobs? Probably because of technology - yes, that must be it."
• nouripen 8y ago
  I contributed to David Graeber's new Bullshit Jobs book. And this week published: "Dissecting two academic trolls’ review of 'Bullshit Jobs: A Theory'": https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-academic-trolls-review-of-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-e2782559becb https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-academ... The OP asks a key question: "In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?" Anyone wondering this should skim the book, which squarely addresses this concern: "This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. The last thing a private firm, competing with other private firms, would do is to hire people it doesn’t actually need. If anything, the usual complaint about capitalism is that it’s too efficient, with private workplaces endlessly hounding employees with constant speed-ups, quotas, and surveillance." Don't know if I should spoil the explanations. :)
• RobertSmith 8y ago
  Most bullshit jobs are well paid
• rusk 8y ago
  I was listening to Feynman's lectures on Quantum Mechanics this morning, and he was talking about the lattice structure of materials and how different lattice structures permeate EM waves and stuff. You've got this repeating atomic structure. Each of them is carbon, or hydrogen or iron or whatever. I suppose in essence you could say on their own each of these is "bullshit" but it's the repeating lattice structure that gives a material it's properties. This reductionist view of "bullshit" jobs is kind of silly - some jobs are unfulfilling, or seemingly pointless but you can only really evaluate them in the overall structure and productivity of the organisation. It's the emergent lattice that counts, not the individual elements. In the case of this article, author is looking at a single aspect of a larger organisation, and like the blind men and the elephant [0] can only guess at the reasons. There could well be good reasons for these processes and procedures. Could be to do with management accountability, or insurance (more likely). The fact that in isolation it seems "silly" is notwithstanding that there might a reason in a larger organisational context. Kind of like a traffic light hardwired to red because at scale, operationally it just makes more sense to do it that way [1] (this article is a bad example because it doesn't go into the explanation as to "why" - operationally, which when I actually heard it seemed quite reasonable - can't find it now). The way I look at management is like this - a LED produces light by way of spontaneous emission, which is all well and good, but to produce a LASER you need all these photons to be emitted in phase which requires a whole heap of extra bullshit circuitry to create to produce stimulated emission. There is a curve of cost/efficiency where you can go "oh well why am I spending all this money when all I want is light" - but if you don't do all this extra "inefficient" stuff, well then you can't have optical communication, CDs or a fancy lightshow. Don't get me wrong, there are inefficient organisations that produce little, or even do damage, but IMHO by looking at individual jobs we're looking in the wrong place. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant [1] https://www.thelocal.de/20150615/there-is-a-light-that-never-goes-out https://www.thelocal.de/20150615/there-is-a-light-that-never...
• dandare 8y ago
  This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here. Some of the arguments I keep hearing: 1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but the author jumps into conclusion without really understanding why are employees not allowed to bring whatever chair they wish to the office. Then he jumps to another conclusion, that nobody really cares because his psychiatrist note is usually accepted. As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day. 2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs. 3/ "There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations." True and totally unrelated. What is the argument? 4/ "Managers like to have large teams." True, and economic forces push against that. This does not explain the apparent pandemic of BS jobs (that I don't see anywhere). etc. If you won't mind, I will try some anecdotal evidence and jumping to conclusions myself: 5/ I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would be great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible for compliance is not doing a BS job. 6/ Automation and technology saved us from slaving in the fields and sweatshops. Driving a truck full of confectionery across the US is pretty much a BS job if you ask me. Same as "Shirley, make me 5 copies of this contract before the lunch" - on a typewriter. 7/ BS jobs pandemics is nothing else but a variation of the "Grass was greener when I was young". Developed countries (maybe with the exception of the US) have safer environments than ever, more disposable income than ever and people live longer than ever.
  • kamaal 8y ago
    Your comment reminds of the total surprise hierarchies of supervisors and managers had in Indian public sector companies post the 92 reforms when they discovered their jobs were not needed, or even needed to exist. Apparently managers(of managers of managers...) suddenly came to terms with the fact that the only thing they were doing is passing memos and approving leave requests. Generally a small additional meta responsibility existed which required them to make an entry into some register(Issuing a tool to a shop worker etc). They also realized approving leaves, passing around memos and filling tables wasn't exactly a skill set anybody was looking to hire when they were fired. Most of them were in 40s, unprepared for retirement and angry there wasn't a market for their sort of entitlement. Additional reading: Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded. After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems. "That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do." http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
• prepend 8y ago
  I worked in an organization with lots of processes. I was in an office with no windows, a bit of a hole or maybe even oubliette. You couldn’t tell time of day, weather, etc but it was better than a cubicle. My door opened to a 10 foot hallway with and about 5 feet down there was a large window. It was a weird L-shape and no one else’s office or cube or anything was in the hallway to nowhere. So it was kind of nice that no one walked by and it was off the beaten path. The window in the hallway was closed with blinds. But if I opened them it was possible to get some ambient light effects so while I couldn’t see out it from inside my office, I could tell if it was day or night. So it was better. A few weeks went by and the blinds were closed one day. That’s weird, no one comes by here. I asked some nearby coworkers if they knew who closed and why and they didn’t know. No one knew. The entire floor is probably the size of a football field and has 100 offices around the edge with 200 cubes and conference rooms and stuff in the middle. My team is probably 10 people and there’s lots of other groups. No one I knew knew and didn’t really care. I maybe spent 2-3 minutes because I was surprised that anyone walked by here, much less cared. I opened the blinds and when about my business. About a week later, the blinds were closed again. Weird, but again I checked and no one I knew cared. I opened them again. 3 days later, they were closed. Repeat a few times and now I was opening them every day and someone else was closing them. Weird and funny. This went on for a few days and the blinds would close in the middle of the day. I spend about 3-6 hours out of my office doing different stuff so I come and go. So I would now open them whenever I noticed them back down during the day. Finally, I’m in my office and I hear the metallic zip sound of blinds closing. I stick my head of of my office and say hello to someone from a different floor and group, I’ll call her Betty. I ask Betty what’s up and she tells me that she’s closing the blinds. I ask why and she says because they are supposed to be closed. I explain why I like them open and that there’s no one else who sees this window and she again says the blinds must be down. Interesting. I love arbitrary rules as a big board game fan. I ask about why, and she says that no building things can be changed without a business justification as required by OSHA, fire marshalls, and emergency coordinators. I tell her that I think this wouldn’t apply to something as minor as a window blind, but assured me it’s for everything. I try a different tack and propose that the natural state is open, and that she is actually the one who needs a justification to close. But she’s too smart for that, she produces an inventory of the building that she makes each January that clearly shows the blinds closed for the past few years. She is not joking or being ironic. She’s serious. So I ask how business justifications are evaluated and she says that they are submitted to her and she evaluates them. There’s no template or format and no one has ever submitted one in the 10 years she was in this role. Wow, ok. I go ahead and tell her I’ll write one and ask how to submit them. This is funny to me, so later that evening, I spend a few minutes and write up a justification email. It’s pretty bullshit and basically says “Window blinds open makes me happier, and thus more productive. Closed blinds reduce productivity and thus reduce organization impact. Yadda Yadda Yadda.” It’s maybe two paragraphs. She replies that my justification is insufficient and blinds will stay closed. This is now less funny. So I look her up in the company director. She is a random workgroup’s Secretary and is a contractor who has been in the building forever. She has contracted for three different organization, but has always sat there. She schedules appointments and orders staples and stuff for about 20 of the hundreds of people in the building. She’s on a different floor than me. There’s five floors. Her group is entirely on a different floor. This is bizarre. With this knowledge, I resubmit a revised justification. She denies it again. I respond copying her contracting monitor or whatever you call the person who organizes the contract, pointing out this bizarre process. The contracting person is confused and responds that this is not in any contract, they don’t give a shit, and question why this is done. Then there’s silence for via email for a few days. The contracting person responds that the blinds will stay open. I never hear from Betty again. I moved out of that office about 5 years ago. The blinds stayed open while I was there. About a year or two ago, I was in that building and I walked by my old area to talk to some former co-workers and noticed the blinds were down. I gave a quick recap and the current occupant didn’t care and hadn’t noticed. But they did say that Betty was still there. I think people get really invested in a process they think is important, but is only important to them. A co-worker called this “building imaginary castles in the sky.” It was really cool to them, but meaningless to any observer. Sometimes it’s useful in the long run for something else, but hard to tell immediately. There’s confusion that gets compounded and you have real stuff wrapped around it. It seems like it may be bullshit.
• collyw 8y ago
  I did something a few months ago and pulled something in my back. Went to the doctor when the pain hadn't gone after a few days and it was exactly as described. He made me do a few movements until i triggered it, then told me i had lumbago, take some painkillers. I got home and googled lumbago, which basically told me I had back pain. (As a side note I had some kratom, which worked wonderfully for this, better than the ibuprofen I was prescribed. Fortunately my pain went away after a few days, but I see that the DEA wants to ban kratom in the US. That would be pretty bad for many who use it for chronic pain).
  • slfnflctd 8y ago
    My understanding of the kratom situation is that the worst danger is how it's all too easy for it to become habitual. I absolutely do not think it ought to be banned (nor any psychoactive plant for that matter), but interested parties should be forewarned. Many advocates may only use it occasionally and/or in consistently low doses, but there are plenty of accounts out there of users ramping up dosage and then having a really hard time getting off it. Withdrawals from heavy use read a lot like similar accounts of kicking a Vicodin habit.
    • collyw 8y ago
      Agreed, I subscribe to some kratom subreddits and some people do seem a bit irresponsible with their use. And after two or three weeks of daily use I could see it getting addictive. Though it wasn't hard to cut back on at all, but I wasn't using particularly high amounts.
• JepZ 8y ago
  Well, I think Dr. Alexander is doing a great job. I mean, he is protecting the mental health of his patients by using the authority he has been given and I think that is what his job is about. Nevertheless, he might do even better if he would recommend to his patients someone who is better qualified to help them with treating the origin of their physical problems (while still providing them with the letter they require).
  • ChairmanLmao 8y ago
    As I understand it the majority of back pain cases have unknown/undiagnosable causes (and the only "treatment" is either more or less exercise and painkillers),so unless there is an actual physical deformity a psychiatrist is as qualified as anyone to diagnose it.
• fouc 8y ago
  Reminds me of https://www.fastcompany.com/3036728/office-roleplay-meet-the-people-who-pretend-to-work-at-an-office-together-for-fun https://www.fastcompany.com/3036728/office-roleplay-meet-the...
• mathattack 8y ago
  I’ve been at offices that require notes like this. (The company paid for special chairs) The reason listed was “we want to introduce some friction - enough that we are not using VC money to buy special equipment for everyone”
• asoplata 8y ago
  Why does working a Bullshit Job have to be about ritual or tribal identity or anything else, when the most important thing in that person's life is putting food on the table? Even if a job is bullshit, there isn't enough of a social safety net in most/all of the world to provide for one's needs without taking a job. For an employee with no financial cushion and trying to avoid homelessness/starvation, what the job does or its contribution to society is secondary to the income it provides that allows that person their basic necessities. Similarly, if those basic needs were met a la Universal Basic Income or a Star Trek society, there'd probably be less bullshit jobs of people doing something, ANYTHING, just to earn enough to live and provide for their family.
• facetube 8y ago
  There's a well-known reason for these requirements: they are an attrition tactic. It erects barriers to obtaining insurance benefits. Many give up, reducing the costs to the insurance company. It happens with WAY more than chairs, and is fundamentally unethical.
• village-idiot 8y ago
  I actually hold the view that we no longer live in a capitalistic society per se, but a neofeudal one. A lot of modern companies, especially the really big ones, seem to be less interested in competing in the open market and more interested in rent extraction.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  If you buy in to Yuval Noah Harari's narrative than the limiting factor has been and is flexible cooperation within group, at scale. It is what out highly developed sences of politics and religion are for. Its what money is for, caste systems, popes, grand admirals, corporations and premium fashion brands. In any case... a lot of traditional "bullshit jobs" are about. Middle management. Lawyering, reporting, coordinating, administrating, bureaucratic procedure management....etc. Maybe we should think of these as extremely inefficient ways of solving that neverending "problem" of flexible cooperation in large groups. Even though the low hanging fruit is gone and the marginal efforts are extremely inefficient... throwing resources at bottleneck is ... to be expected. Just a thought. Not sure that I'm convinced myself. I think it might explain the chair rule though.
• jeandejean 8y ago
  Bullshit jobs are the new "I closed my Facebook account" articles these days. Everybody talks about it and tries to say it's a symptom of our society going wrong. I personally prefer bullshit than dangerous jobs. And technology allowed us to switch from the latter to the former. That's good news to me!
• jakidud 8y ago
  Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office. For 4 months now. Let that sink in. What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means that I might have access to privelaged insider information,which means I can't sit with the public teams. But there isn't any seat in the private rooms. So I'm sitting in the cafeteria, reading books, playing on the PlayStation, etc etc. I ask my manager every single day when I'm going to get a new spot. It's usually 'next week for sure' or 'friday for sure'. Hasn't happened yet. During the first month, I stayed for 8 hours each day, doing nothing. I've gradually stopped giving a fuck anymore and am looking for other jobs now, even though this is a pretty sweet gig.
  • tyleo 8y ago
    Have you considered staying at the current job, not showing up, AND getting another job? I realize this is unethical but is it actually illegal? One of my friend’s coworkers did this but I didn’t know the coworker well enough to see how it turned out. I have always been curious.
    • jakidud 8y ago
      Pretty sure this is illegal as well, what with non competes and all
      • village-idiot 8y ago
        Depends on your state. In places like CA, you'd probably be fine to offer services to a company that's completely unrelated to your nominal employer, as long as you don't use privileged information from your "main" job. That being said, have a friendly chat with your own lawyer before doing this.
      • pc86 8y ago
        Only if you actually violate the non compete (and even then it will be state-specific).
• eximius 8y ago
  In addition to all of the other valid observations, I think some of the impetus to create these bullshit jobs is to maintain a certain level of employment we wouldn't have otherwise only because thr alternative jobs wouldn't be excepted. I.e., take all your excess administrators and TSA employees and offer them jobs that are in demand but unwanted like construction or something. I doubt they'd take them. People want office jobs, so we find ways to make office jobs.
• ransom1538 8y ago
  You need a note to bring in a chair? At all the startups I have worked for - as long as it isn’t illegal you can bring it in. At zynga they moved my desk to install a keg. (Edit 2008 zynga)
• groby_b 8y ago
  Bullshit jobs are created just like the comments on this article demonstrate. The proper response is "This is bullshit, let's fight it". Yet, it's not of personal importance, and really, how many fights can you fight, so somebody somewhere comes up with a way to circumvent the system. Others help refine the step for that - because you know it's bullshit, and circumventing bullshit feels satisfying. From there, this will no doubt spread, and be further refined. The ultimate outcome is a content free form that allows everybody to take no personal risk, and simply trades the actual decision making for signing a form that you know will never harm you. And voila, there will, at some point, be a specialization where you just see large volumes of people, and sign their slip. The insurance will press to make it lower skill and less expensive. Since no actual skill is needed, it won't stop at being delegated to nurses. Sooner or later, it's a minimum wage job. At this point, companies will start bringing it in-house - why would you want people taking half a day off for signing a bogus form? And after a while, there's huge demand for this - each company needs it - but really, they're not needed fulltime. And so there will be an agency that has these people travel to your office. At this point, backpain form signer certainly is a new job. And the decisions at every step of the way were entirely rational. I want to end this with a rousing call to fight bullshit where you see it, but realistically, it would be an all day job. So we'd get bullshit fighters. Who probably at some point just sign forms.
• cafard 8y ago
  Meh. Didn't John Stuart Mill describe the Indian empire as "indoor relief for the British middle classes"?
• xivzgrev 8y ago
  I don't think requiring a doctor's note is necessarily bullshit. Special chairs are more expensive so it's a shallow cut to prevent everyone wanting one just because it's available. If they are more comfortable and the two people sitting next to you have one, wouldn't you want one too? Now obviously there is potential for fraud and so there is some bs as the author notes. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater I can see a reason the company would have this process.
  • khafra 8y ago
    > Special chairs are more expensive The patient wanted to bring in his own special chair, not get one purchased by the company.
  • ry4nolson 8y ago
    The note is to allow the employee to bring their own chair to work. How does this cost the company anything extra?
• anonfounder747 8y ago
  Two mutually-reinforcing reasons why bullshit jobs exist in companies: * managers are of the power-seeking kind. to expand your power base, hire hire hire * employees on average tend to underperform to their potential and tout the important of their work as there's incentive to look busy and look good The result: an army of folks doing mediocre or meaningless work
• jancsika 8y ago
  I don't understand how this is a bullshit job. A manager foresaw a problem. Right or wrong, that manager didn't have the time or inclination to do a grad-level research project on back pain diagnosis and foolproof verification systems. Instead, they delegate to people who are trained in medicine and make a process by which someone else receives and stores the doctor's note. This solves the perceived "cowboy" chair problem where everyone brings a custom chair and ends up tearing up the carpet or whatever. Pretty much nobody wants to risk their job by outright forging a note. So few people risk the higher levels of cheating-- like the psychiatrist example-- that the manager can just assume those people have back pain. And, in the event that one of these assumptions are broken by a bad faith actor, someone can go back and read some or all of the doctors' notes. I would think the bar for "bullshit job" is the 2nd and 3rd boss Peter has in Office Space who parrot the criticism that the first boss gave him. Unless you invoke magic those jobs have no value whatsoever. In other words, bullshit jobs should be the ones that add no value but cannot be removed because the structure of the organization suppresses the tools necessary to officially measure the employee as ineffective. It's like the king's idiot son-- everyone just has to pretend he isn't an idiot. Edit: clarification
• megaman8 8y ago
  The explanation for BS jobs is that the economy is not nearly as "efficient" as we hope that it may be. Incumbents at the top, stay at the top, regardless of how inefficient they may become. A number of forces including government and regulation, and barriers to entry confound to reinforce the position of mega incumbents that simply stay at the top forever. On the plus side, I'm hopeful that the rise of BS jobs will increase work life balance.
• rajacombinator 8y ago
  Keep in mind, most of tech is bullshit jobs that have no impact on product, business or customers. Tech for tech’s sake.
• cwperkins 8y ago
  Since this is an entrepreneurial crowd here on HN, if this is such an issue than why not create meaningful jobs! Use your creativity and help spread entrepreneurship and create products and services that people love, enjoy or makes someone else's life easier! Or better yet do some research and find cheap energy or new treatments for diseases!
• advertising 8y ago
  Makes me think of every 1st tier support interaction I’ve ever had where a person can’t answer a single question and just refers you to online resources you’ve already read and couldn’t find the answer to.
• voidhorse 8y ago
  Proceedures are like a web of safety nets. Companies want to avoid risk, so they focus on making the nets tighter and tighter. Eventually, the nets are so densely woven that the possibility of injury for any tightrope walker dancing on the line becomes nil. You can see while this is only for the best interests of the circus as a whole (they can’t afford to replace tightrope walkers all the time) and for the tightrope walker himself (he won’t get injured) it saps his vocation of any risk, excitement, and thrill, and effectively eradicates everything that made the circus a circus and exciting place to be in the first place. Such is the field of pencil-pushing work today—except the massive corporations have captive audiences, so in spite of the incredibly flaccid shows they put on, the crowd can’t help but pay for a ticket anyway.
• microcolonel 8y ago
  Awful that people have to wait until after they develop back pain before they can be allowed to bring in a chair of their own. I bought a Herman Miller Embody (used, I'm not insane) in my... fifth month of working full time (in my life), and just won't work in an office where I'm asked to sit in their deathtrap chairs.
• rmetzler 8y ago
  Regarding the back pain from sitting to much: IKEA has an electrical standing desk called BEKANT for a little more than 500 EUR. This was life changing for me.
• ajsharp 8y ago
  This is wonderfully concise and spot-on. With respect to the American health care system, it's painfully accurate. An unbelievable amount of economic activity in the US health care system ultimately boils down to a whole lot of ceremony in order to fit a square peg into a medical billing code sized hole.
• mwsherman 8y ago
  What allows a firm to stay competitive if there are many apparently wasteful tasks being done? Should that firm not be superseded by competitors offering better efficiency (reflected in prices) or consumer benefit? I keep coming back to theory-of-the-firm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm An industry that accommodates a lot of bullshit work is an industry with high transaction costs. The author hints at that at the end of the article, but leaves it an open question.
• perfunctory 8y ago
  It would be interesting to see what's the distribution of BS jobs in the HN community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159
• dumbfounder 8y ago
  Can't he just write a letter "So-and-so wants to bring his own chair to work, and it is important to him. Will you let him?" It is a note from their doctor. It isn't a medical opinion.
• jokoon 8y ago
  I have been unemployed for the most of my life, and i now have a 9to5 job. I think I hate jobs. I love working with code and projects, but it's very difficult or impossible to find a job, even in programming, that has some kind of meaning, good sense, or is stimulating. Jobs feel like you're playing the role of a robot. It has no soul. It just shows how society has become so mechanized and lifeless and dead boring. It's not all jobs, but I really feel alien to the society of labor. I might be unable to adapt and do work I don't like, but at least this article is agreeing that I'm not 100% of the problem. On the other hand, creating a project by one self and making it happen seems hard, but it really shouldn't. My view is that society doesn't really like struggling artists.
• jl6 8y ago
  For all the talk about bullshit jobs, I don’t recall seeing a single example of one that made me think “yep, that job is clearly creating no value for anyone”. Dog washer is mentioned. Sure it’s a luxury, but bullshit? There are clearly people willing to pay for that service.
• moon4u 8y ago
  There is a thing that I don't understand from the original article[1]: > The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them. Does the author really mean that if you don't work you still deserve something in return? That one kinda sounds like bullshit. Has that been expanded upon somewhere? Also, the author mentions that this was already attempted during the 60s and that it ended in a disaster but doesn't tell what that was. I am not from America, so I don't really know the history of the country during the 60s. What happened? [1] http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
• JamesAdir 8y ago
  As some mentioned before bullshit jobs exist because the corporate world still thinks in terms of hours instead of production. People have zero incentive to reduce or automate their work, something that every solo freelancer is struggling to do daily if he wants to survive. Since they need to fill their hours quota somehow they create meetings and procedures and more job functions that are needed in order to be in line with those new procedures. The bigger the corporate the bigger the time and money waste. Meeting become global team meetings that costs tons of money, jobs that can be easily automated become complete departments and so on. Only in a corporate culture where the only thing measured and compesnated is output - there you will see almost zero bullshit.
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? investors? I don’t know. Direct supervisors? I don't think someone inventing or enforcing a procedure like this is trying to satisfy investors. They're mostly concerned with their own job security and chances of promotion. I propose that a big chunk of the economy is made of such chains of people trying to please their direct bosses.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    >Direct supervisors? I don't think someone inventing or enforcing a procedure like this is trying to satisfy investors. You'd be surprised. There are a lot of procedures and changes changed when a company tries to attract investors...
• ainar-g 8y ago
  The article[1] linked in the OP is an interesting read of its own. [1] http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
  • erikb 8y ago
    This is not a top-down problem, but a bottom-up problem. People want to feel meaningful, so they make up stories of why their job is important, why this or that task needs to get done right now, etc. The only things that are really urgent is when you are a focus point of a political game between two managers. Then you really need to struggle, work overtime, etc. Otherwise usually nobody cares about your existence and you can do whatever you want, as long as you do it in the office building.
  • jgtrosh 8y ago
    Isn't copying content from the article just a bullshit comment??? Joking aside, your comment made me read the article. I agree with it almost entirely, except I don't believe there needs to be a conscious decision to invent bullshit jobs for them to appear everywhere. I believe people are capable of hiring other people for bullshit jobs and not questioning why they do it without some kind of conspiracy.
  • 0ld 8y ago
    Thanks, I was reluctant to read the article which censored word "shit"
  • jwilk 8y ago
    Discussed on HN in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478
• dmurray 8y ago
  It would be ok to replace "Mr Smith tells me he has chronic back pain" with "Mr Smith has chronic back pain", if the former is enough evidence to make that diagnosis. If he was diagnosing Mr Smith with cancer, or depression, the doctor's note wouldn't include a scan of the tumour or a transcript of the interview: the doctor should abstract those away and just present the conclusion.
  • jgtrosh 8y ago
    This is especially true for pain diagnosis which is inherently subjective and if possible relies on self evaluation (even though some methods exist to complement or replace self evaluation with external observation).
  • darawk 8y ago
    True, but the presumption in the case of cancer is that: a) The doctor in question is qualified to diagnose cancer. b) The doctor has made that diagnosis, in the medical sense. In this case, Scott is a psychiatrist, who is unqualified to diagnose back pain or recommend any course of treatment on the matter. He believes his client when they say that they are in pain, but that belief is a personal, not professional, opinion.
    • dmurray 8y ago
      He's a medical doctor. He's qualified to diagnose back pain and recommend (professionally, not just personally) the patient tries using his own chair. As I understand it the AMA would be OK with this, while they wouldn't be OK with, say, me (not a medical professional) writing the same letter and presenting it as a professional diagnosis. He knows the limits of his abilities and wouldn't recommend the patient take 2 weeks off work, undergo back surgery or prescribe opiates. If any of those were in the discussion, he'd tell his patient he really does need to see a specialist.
  • boomlinde 8y ago
    I think that the point is that it isn't enough evidence to make a diagnosis. The article expands on why it is inappropriate for a psychiatrist to make a recommendation related to back pain. He's not just "the doctor", he's a specialist with a license to practice a limited set of medicine. What should a psychiatrist write on a doctor's note if his patient claims to suffer from cancer, no other evidence given than the claim itself? Now, depression, that's something a psychiatrist can legitimately diagnose.
• a012 8y ago
  Reminds me of a distant previous job where I requested a 24" LCD for monitoring and doing other tasks, the response was why I need such a large LCD while everybody in company just have 17"? Though it's no written in paper but generally you can't be different than all other employees unless you have a very strong reference. And this case it's doctor's note.
  • nikanj 8y ago
    I use monitors as a surprisingly good heuristic for measuring the values of an organization. If you make your rockstar ninja unabomber programmers stare at a single 24" screen all day, you're basically paying for Wayne Gretzky and then skimping on skates.
• jgtrosh 8y ago
  I felt that the note could be understood as mildly passive aggressive. Maybe adding something like “I have no reason not to believe him/her” would remove any interpretation that you're writing this note out of obligation but do not believe the patient. Good post btw; I have no input on ethics and would be stumped as well.
  • netsharc 8y ago
    But he does want to help the patient, does he not? But to write something else would be to take the burden of proof into his hands. "Obligation" also makes it sound like he's forced to do it, it's more like without further tests which would inconvenience the patient, he can't be sure the patient is reporting the truth (even with the patient in front of him, he wouldn't be able to objectively observe pain, and he can only ask and believe the answer). But the note fixes the stupid problem of "The rules say no special chairs without a doctor's note"...
    • dmurray 8y ago
      I think the "burden of proof" part is exactly what's holding him up. As a skeptic, and an analytically minded person, and perhaps even as a blogger - he's uncomfortable writing "Mr Smith has chronic back pain" without a little more concrete evidence. I'm arguing that as a doctor he shouldn't require more evidence in this case. It's fine to write "Mr Smith has chronic back pain and I recommend he can use his own chair" and be right only 80% of the time, and introduce a process whereby sneaky chair-seeking miscreants can reliably get a doctor's note even if they don't have back pain. It's fine because the consequences of being wrong are extremely low. In practice doctors should be, and often are, OK with making diagnoses of much more serious conditions that are only 80% or 90% or 99% likely to be correct, even when some other test could reduce the uncertainty further. If he's waiting to be 100% certain a patient has bipolar disorder or anorexia before prescribing any treatment, he's doing them a disservice. The level of certainty required should be in line with the severity of the condition being diagnosed, and of the recommended treatment. And when writing a note to an employer, it's correct to say "Mr Smith has cancer" or just "Mr Smith has a medical condition", not "I'm 94% sure Mr Smith has cancer, perhaps the next scan will be more conclusive".
• allthenews 8y ago
  I've always wondered if my various general practitioners had primarily bullshit jobs following the rise of the internet.
  • feintruled 8y ago
    Having gone to the Internet for advice (and I don't mean just Googling symptoms and taking a guess, I mean those actual pay for medical advice sites), I have a handle on what your GP is for - they provide some sort of accountability and responsibility. Once, at my wits end with a problem with my child I went to one such site even though I knew it was a bad idea - it's basically a stackoverflow but staffed by real doctors (apparently) and you pay per answer. It's not terribly expensive, but literally any advice you have will be totally vague and contain the instruction to "see your GP". No reputable professional would put their nuts on the line for a remote diagnosis.
• avip 8y ago
  I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward: 1. Wu appears in work with a chair 2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X 3. X asks Wu to remove the chair 4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code 5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it
  • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    If you are in a large company then it will accrete these rules until it is almost impossible to get anything done.
    • snaky 8y ago
      To get anything done large companies hire contractors.
      • groestl 8y ago
        Or buy startups.
        • snaky 8y ago
          That was mostly true until startups started to hire contractors too, to get anything done.
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        They also hire contractors for external validation. Their internal team knows they should do X, but they won't get buy-in from management until an external contractor comes in and tells the company needs to do X.
        • snaky 8y ago
          In big companies it's often easier to get decision to pay six-figure to external consultants than to not even pay four-figure to employees for the same job but sometimes to even accept the job which is already done by employees just for salary.
• erikb 8y ago
  > In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable? There are lots of reasons for bullshit tasks, I found. And let's call it tasks, not jobs. Because a job is something regular that pays a monthly income, and there ARE certainly complete bullshit jobs! One reason, as mentioned here, is process. Everything needs a process, so that it's clear (or rather that it's unclear, but more about that later) who's responsible, what needs to be done, and that there is an objective checklist to show that something is done when it's done. It sounds stupid but it makes complex things work. In a relatively big company for this chair topic a number of separate, independent units, who might not even know each others existence, need to cooperate on a task that is split in organisational, financial and temporal terms. That is hard. But with a process it's possible to get finished at some point. The second thing is that each company that is still alive had a time of growth and a time when they where stuck. When you are stuck, you can't just fire everybody. And you can't allow people to just browse Facebook all day. So what do you do? You create bullshit tasks. That keeps the juice flowing. And if an interesting, profitable opportunitiy comes up you still have people, orgs, etc setup so you can start approaching it. It also makes sense, to some degree. The third one I can immediately think about might come as shock to some people. We grow up with the believe that things are equal and supposed to be fair. Truth is, the world sucks and is an unfair place. Therefore power hierarchies really exist, even in the seemingly most open places. Even at the cool company you heard about and really want to work at. And what do people do who achieved some powers in these virtual pyramids? They create obstructions for the people below them so they can't follow them upstairs and maybe even take their seat. Bullshit processes, bullshit tasks, and bullshit jobs help greatly with that. This might look inefficient, but in fact might actually be the most efficient system in existence. Because it works. It worked in the stone age, in the medieval times, in modern dictatorships, and also (sadly) in modern democracies. Like the invisible hand that governs the resource allocation in free markets, power structures are always there and make things work. Maybe not like you want it, but you are also not at the top of the pyramid, right? Alright, that's what I can think off. They do valuable things, just that the value is not obvious to you nor is the value shared with you. That's why it looks like bullshit.
• Radim 8y ago
  People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"? Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement? I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you), but whether something is sustainable and makes sense on a larger, super-human scale (organization, society, species) is tough to determine by any single actor. It's typically left to be played out and then (hopefully) analyzed and learned from. Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. If a drone-like society turns out to be the most efficient in this sense, full of silly rituals which nevertheless make it more cohesive / stable / whatever, then that's where we're headed. Even though it currently doesn't seem that way, with individualism, science and articulation scoring some spectacular victories.
  • IanSanders 8y ago
    >Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons >term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. >Although common resource systems have been known to collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing)... Especially check the "examples" section
    • Radim 8y ago
      I am familiar with both; what's the connection in particular? That patterns organize along least-energy principles and propagate by extracting resources from surrounding energy gradients is almost a tautology. I'm genuinely curious what you're disagreeing with.
• Animats 8y ago
  University administrators.[1] Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff. Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development. ... Three of the university's eight vice presidents will have their offices at Stanford Redwood City.[2] [1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administ... [2] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/frequently-asked-questions https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/frequently-asked-questions
  • bagospanners 8y ago
    http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Sh...
  • shoo 8y ago
    "the purpose of a system is what it does" "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"
  • ur-whale 8y ago
    This is what happens when a human organization becomes too successful: it generates more money than it knows what to do with and the parasites do take notice.
  • draw_down 8y ago
    I never understood what all those new administrators... do.
  • Liron 8y ago
    What does administration work mostly consist of?
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
• reacweb 8y ago
  Welcome in bureaucraty world! This patient needed a medical note so that his employer authorizes him to bring his own chair. This medical note is completely fancy and does not contain any assesment about health. For bureaucratic procedure, it is perfect.
• rwmj 8y ago
  A test of a bullshit job (or procedure) is whether we could get rid of it. Could we get rid of the doctor's note requirement, or of the compliance officers in the company insisting on one? In a start-up or small company, yes. Bring your own chair to work day! In a larger company where people don't know each other or there are many employees on low pay or short contracts, not so much. They'd be worried about people stealing the furniture, or bringing in furniture that was not fire safe and then getting sued.
  • paulie_a 8y ago
    If stealing office furniture is an actual concern and ongoing problem that company has some incredibly fundamental problems. Personally i would just bring the damn chair in and play dumb.
    • rwmj 8y ago
      I know if you have worked only in software companies where everyone is paid six figure salaries then you will think that stealing stores and company property must be incredibly rare and deviant behaviour, but at most companies this is a very real concern of management and something that happens regularly.
      • paulie_a 8y ago
        I understand people steal stuff at pretty much every company, but a chair? That's kinda hard to just walk out with.
• fapjacks 8y ago
  Those bullshit jobs which pull the great bulk of humanity together to pay the mortgage and buy groceries and degrees and Beanie Babies and cocaine... They are the substrate from which real progress grows.
• wjnc 8y ago
  The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've got real problems on their hands. But every now and again a No bullshitters should pop up and say stop this local incident of BS. It just does not happen. I'm one of those that tries to make senior management aware of total time and energy sinks in the corporation. Often it just doesn't click and I move on. Why don't cultures change (fast) enough?
  • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    At my university which is also a heavily endowed top ten, and it's hard to not imagine that they were intentionally aiming to waste money. In my opinion the purpose of this was to justify increasing costs which internally is then seen as a measurement of growth. You would regularly see buildings, fully functional and usable buildings, being completely demolished and replaced with new buildings to no end. The only real changes would be snazzier looking architecture and some nicer desks because, ya know, you have to tear down a building to stick in some nicer desks. What I think people forget when we speak of monolithic institutions, be they institutions of learning, corporations, or even governments is that they aren't really monoliths. They're just made up of lots of individuals who are mostly just interested in themselves. So who is the person whose motivation is to reduce costs? Go look at the regularly flaunted bios and list of achievements of presidents of any major university. You're not going to find reducing costs anywhere in there. Instead you'll just find a whole slew of different ways they managed to find to spend even more money. Here [1] is the president of Stanford's bio. Lo and behold, among his amazing achievements include 'Dr. Tessier-Lavigne worked with faculty, students, staff and trustees to develop and execute a ... a $500 million / 2 acre campus expansion project in the heart of Manhattan that broke ground in 2015.' Literally managing to spend half a billion dollars of other peoples money for a 2 acre expansion is, in and of itself, regarded as a noteworthy achievement. [1] - https://president.stanford.edu/biography/ https://president.stanford.edu/biography/
  • notahacker 8y ago
• vfc1 8y ago
  The creation of bullshit jobs probably comes from a combination of 3 things: - the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc. - the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager of 10 persons and not 4, so it will keep hiring to fill all positions regardeless of true need - its his social status and his career, and not his money - the huge amount of automation introduced in the last few decades, making many jobs unnecessary. There have always been bullshit jobs, just not that many as today.
  • varjag 8y ago
    also close to your last point, - abundance of people with good social and low practical skills
    • majewsky 8y ago
      In a world with 80% service jobs, social skills are practical skills.
      • varjag 8y ago
        Social skills are practical skills for "bullshit jobs" as they are presented in the article, so it's really no contradiction.
  • mmsimanga 8y ago
    Agreed. On automation, another to look at it is corporate companies literally print money without doing anything. Once upon a time when the company was starting out everyone had a real job. The retail chain with over 3000 shops only cares if the POS is up and stock is in the store. It doesn't matter how ineffient other business units are.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• citation_please 8y ago
  Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?". In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove it, and then it's too late. If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...
  • groestl 8y ago
    It seems, for lack of unit tests, real-life almost never removes code from bureaucracies, and achieves efficiency only by replacing the whole organization.
    • majewsky 8y ago
      By the way, I think this is why communism failed. I don't think their error was for companies to be state-owned. The problem was that, in the pursuit of efficiency, they merged all companies in a sector into one combine, thus making it impossible to replace (today we would say "too big to fail"). Maybe the communist/socialist bloc would've been more successful if they had retained multiple state-owned corporations in each sector and allowed for competition between them. Disclaimer: I was born in 1989, so everything I know about communist/socialist economy, I know from books or from talking to my parents.
      • lmm 8y ago
        You might like to read Red Plenty. The problem isn't the size of the companies as such, it's the notion of planning the economy. If you allow multiple corporations but oblige them to follow the same plans, that does nothing to address the problem. If you allow the corporations to compete in a market economy then, well, you have a market economy.
  • slx26 8y ago
    sure, you can build a rube goldberg machine, and removing any of the parts might break it. this still doesn't mean the machine is efficient or makes much sense. adding a piece you usually also create interdependencies, which lead to adding even more pieces later. it's not about something breaking, it's about something being already broken in its current state, and priorities (I understand your point, just adding this as a thought)
• bbcbasic 8y ago
  Efficient market. Spherical sheep!
• aedron 8y ago
  Maybe it's simply that companies aim for a certain aesthetic, and letting people bring random chairs in would go against it.