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I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bulls

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.

minipci1321 8y ago
> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations. Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer. IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations. The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over. Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
PavlikPaja 8y ago
I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful. Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.
a_bonobo 8y ago
Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts. I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor! Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.
- dantheman 8y ago
  True it takes a long time for formerly great organizations to die. I think a lot of the problems with this type of analysis are time scales and costs of switching. IBM is probably not the best solution for anything if you're starting something new; but if you already have something it's probably good enough and it would cost too much to change right now. So IBM can limp along until new organizations develop products that are sufficiently cheaper or better that it makes switching the logical move. Or the companies tied to IBM eventually fail and replaced by more nimble organizations.
- rland 8y ago
  The way I typically understand this is by Dunbar’s number: that 150 or so persons who are “real” in any given person’s head. Any org larger than ~75 has this type of multipolar dynamic where different sub-units are pulling different ways. It’s held together by the myth of money and/or organizational purpose, which is actually less immediately “real” than any one of those sub unit in-group people. It’s not that explicit, but it is certainly innate: large orgs all suffer the same way.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would." No, not in a lot of industries. Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient. For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified. Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later. Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves. Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat. Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams. Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit. The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue. I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch. I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.
- bena 8y ago
  I think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.
drunkpotato 8y ago
It has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they’re the problem (though middle or senior management might accidentally lay off a bad manager or two on rare occasions, but again never lay off themselves). Also I’ve seen in larger companies, no division head wants to get a smaller headcount unless they’re a new person specifically brought in to be a wrecking ball. Similarly, “the market” is a convenient fiction, a shorthand that occasionally exhibits describable collective behavior but ultimately is also composed of people. There is creative destruction but it takes place over decades, far too long for any individual activity to be pointed to and say that ruined the company except in the most extreme cases.
- dantheman 8y ago
  It's that businesses go out of business -- see Nokia, Blackberry, etc. Public organizations can't be easily replaced by a competitor -- I think being replaced by a competitor is more of an occurrence than fixing it from the inside.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A. Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and further to formation of more companies supporting those games. Consider the advertising industry, the poster child of wasteful negative-sum games: in saturated markets, it supports competition for fixed customer pool. To that end, it employs countless of creatives designing new texts, posters, videos, etc. It then employs printing shops and distribution centers to place all that material in the real world. All that effort, man-hours and fuel is wasted - in an attempt for one side to get more market to themselves, only for the other to cancel it out. If all parties agreed not to do this, everyone would be better off. But they can't, and so instead a whole industry of bullshit jobs is created. Those are, I believe, the two main sources of bullshit jobs - internal closed loops, and negative-sum games. (EDIT: in a sense, those two are actually facets of the same phenomenon.)
- dantheman 8y ago
  I agree with the first loop. I think there are very few markets where the 2nd loop actually exists. 1. There is constant innovation, even in the most established areas people are always trying new things. 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists. That's motte-and-bailey defense of advertising. Yes, it also serves to help people discover off-the-shelf solutions to their problems. But that's not its primary function, nor it's where most money is being made. The discovery part is easy - in fact, most of the times it's best done in pull fashion ("I have a problem, let me look for solutions") instead of push ("here is a solution for the problem you didn't know you had"). Most of advertising is about misleading people to make suboptimal choices - choosing the product whose vendor is best at advertising, instead of the one best suited for the need - and about fighting for a fixed-size pie of customers in a given market.
TelmoMenezes 8y ago
I think you overlook two important things. One, that has been pointed out already, is that companies are not hive minds. Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Bullshit jobs are a wealth (and status) redistribution mechanism that works almost as a force of nature under the current state of affairs. The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. Of course society cannot work like this, and democracies force politicians to align themselves with the interest of the general public -- to some small degree perhaps, but enough here to create enough pressure for such jobs to keep existing.
- lmm 8y ago
  > Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Sure, but there's competition there. If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry. > The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done. Remember that eliminating bullshit jobs wouldn't lower productivity (by definition), so redirecting that effort into productive work would massively boost overall productivity and be good for everyone. Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.
xapata 8y ago
Large companies like to mimic each other. They're perpetually asking consultants to give the inside scoop on how the competition works, not to beat them, but to copy. They're afraid of being worse, not trying to be better. Citation: I was a consultant.

minipci1321 8y ago

> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations. Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer. IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations. The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over. Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.

PavlikPaja 8y ago

I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful. Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.

a_bonobo 8y ago

Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts. I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor! Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.

dantheman 8y ago
True it takes a long time for formerly great organizations to die. I think a lot of the problems with this type of analysis are time scales and costs of switching. IBM is probably not the best solution for anything if you're starting something new; but if you already have something it's probably good enough and it would cost too much to change right now. So IBM can limp along until new organizations develop products that are sufficiently cheaper or better that it makes switching the logical move. Or the companies tied to IBM eventually fail and replaced by more nimble organizations.
rland 8y ago
The way I typically understand this is by Dunbar’s number: that 150 or so persons who are “real” in any given person’s head. Any org larger than ~75 has this type of multipolar dynamic where different sub-units are pulling different ways. It’s held together by the myth of money and/or organizational purpose, which is actually less immediately “real” than any one of those sub unit in-group people. It’s not that explicit, but it is certainly innate: large orgs all suffer the same way.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would." No, not in a lot of industries. Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient. For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified. Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later. Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves. Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat. Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams. Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit. The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue. I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch. I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.

bena 8y ago
I think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.

drunkpotato 8y ago

It has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they’re the problem (though middle or senior management might accidentally lay off a bad manager or two on rare occasions, but again never lay off themselves). Also I’ve seen in larger companies, no division head wants to get a smaller headcount unless they’re a new person specifically brought in to be a wrecking ball. Similarly, “the market” is a convenient fiction, a shorthand that occasionally exhibits describable collective behavior but ultimately is also composed of people. There is creative destruction but it takes place over decades, far too long for any individual activity to be pointed to and say that ruined the company except in the most extreme cases.

dantheman 8y ago
It's that businesses go out of business -- see Nokia, Blackberry, etc. Public organizations can't be easily replaced by a competitor -- I think being replaced by a competitor is more of an occurrence than fixing it from the inside.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A. Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and further to formation of more companies supporting those games. Consider the advertising industry, the poster child of wasteful negative-sum games: in saturated markets, it supports competition for fixed customer pool. To that end, it employs countless of creatives designing new texts, posters, videos, etc. It then employs printing shops and distribution centers to place all that material in the real world. All that effort, man-hours and fuel is wasted - in an attempt for one side to get more market to themselves, only for the other to cancel it out. If all parties agreed not to do this, everyone would be better off. But they can't, and so instead a whole industry of bullshit jobs is created. Those are, I believe, the two main sources of bullshit jobs - internal closed loops, and negative-sum games. (EDIT: in a sense, those two are actually facets of the same phenomenon.)

dantheman 8y ago
I agree with the first loop. I think there are very few markets where the 2nd loop actually exists. 1. There is constant innovation, even in the most established areas people are always trying new things. 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists. That's motte-and-bailey defense of advertising. Yes, it also serves to help people discover off-the-shelf solutions to their problems. But that's not its primary function, nor it's where most money is being made. The discovery part is easy - in fact, most of the times it's best done in pull fashion ("I have a problem, let me look for solutions") instead of push ("here is a solution for the problem you didn't know you had"). Most of advertising is about misleading people to make suboptimal choices - choosing the product whose vendor is best at advertising, instead of the one best suited for the need - and about fighting for a fixed-size pie of customers in a given market.

TelmoMenezes 8y ago

I think you overlook two important things. One, that has been pointed out already, is that companies are not hive minds. Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Bullshit jobs are a wealth (and status) redistribution mechanism that works almost as a force of nature under the current state of affairs. The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. Of course society cannot work like this, and democracies force politicians to align themselves with the interest of the general public -- to some small degree perhaps, but enough here to create enough pressure for such jobs to keep existing.

lmm 8y ago
> Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Sure, but there's competition there. If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry. > The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done. Remember that eliminating bullshit jobs wouldn't lower productivity (by definition), so redirecting that effort into productive work would massively boost overall productivity and be good for everyone. Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.

xapata 8y ago

Large companies like to mimic each other. They're perpetually asking consultants to give the inside scoop on how the competition works, not to beat them, but to copy. They're afraid of being worse, not trying to be better. Citation: I was a consultant.