5 ms·

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.

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...
lmm 8y ago
> 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 Sounds like a bullshit task then. > 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. What's the mechanism that would cause this to happen? A manager could notice that they don't need as many people on their team - but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team?
- talltimtom 8y ago
  > but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team? What incentive does a manager have to increase the size? What incentive does he have to improve performance in general? Managers don’t exist in a vacuum, and just because you as an employee don’t see them talking to other managers, executives or owners, it doesn’t mean they are just kings of their own domain.
  - lmm 8y ago
    > What incentive does a manager have to increase the size? Personal satisfaction, looking more important, all the usual human motivations. > What incentive does he have to improve performance in general? The manager's own manager will likely notice increased output and reward it. Under normal circumstances an empire-building manager is kept in check by the need to justify their headcount in terms of their output (both of which are visible to their managers). It's only technological productivity increases (which are invisible to higher management, because they take effect in the technical details of the work) that gives managers cover to continue to employ people who have become redundant, or even add further redundant people (because the team is more productive): the overall team productivity (in terms of output/headcount) is going up, and so from the outside it looks like the team is simply performing well, when in fact the manager has siphoned off the fruits of technological advances.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> 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. And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The latter seems common, and I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair. Also note that in this article, the employee needed a note to bring their own chair to work, so it's essentially free for the employer anyway. > 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. I guess we have strongly different perspectives, because to me, most of the jobs I've seen in this industry are bullshit, in the sense that the world would be a better place if those jobs (often: companies) didn't exist in the first place.
- kamaal 8y ago
  Part of the big problem with IT isn't just limited to BS jobs, its also BS titles. Most managers could simply be called supervisors. And it would work just fine. The problem is once you start calling them supervisors, you have to pad a senior title every time you have to promote them, so you go like senior supervisor, senior senior supervisor ... etc. So they invent titles like manager, senior manager, general manager, director, senior director, AVP, VP, SVP, Exec .... There is also an overall dressing of 'leadership'. If you attend most of these company wide meetings, they are full of these words. 'We are trusting our leadership to do X', 'We congratulate our leadership for doing Y'. Making it look like highly laborious mental work involving a test of human spirit. They also have to establish the master-slave relationship inconveniencing you every step along the way to show you who the real boss is.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  > I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair. This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN. I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, crappy chairs, and old laptops. Three months later we had all the things. Productivity did not improve. It absolutely did not double. (It is a bit insane to even claim that it could.) Those things do not improve productivity in any meaningful way. At worst they are just status symbols. At best they are just signalling. "My company values me and I know that because I have two monitors". Their actual impact on productivity is minimal, despite the thousands of HN posts claiming otherwise.
hoophoop 8y ago
> I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector > As a manager
- dandare 8y ago
  Do you know what is Ad Hominem argument? For the record I don't manage people, that was a parable.
hrktb 8y ago
> 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. I think this could be the main point of contention from where a lot of things flow. It all depends on how we define 'actual work', but I think we can all agree that to do the same things as we did a century ago we need less effort and time. We need less time to build a bridge, less time and human energy to wash our clothes etc. From there, where did that time go ? Some of it wen to help our survival, but the rest of it could arguably fall into 'BS' jobs. We didn't get massively unemployed when we got better machines, we just found out other uses of our time that were seen as low priority before, but become good enough to be seen as 'work' afterwards. What was once considered a BS job becomes a standard job, the bar just gets lowered. To get back to the point, I believe less works doesn't lead to unemployment, just new 'jobs'.
Areading314 8y ago
If you dig into the bullshit jobs myth you will find it is all based on a survey from 2015. People were asked a yes no question, whether their own job made a "meaningful contribution to the world", 50% said yes and 37% said no. I think the real bullshit is all the blog posts about economics without presenting hard data or being peer reviewed.

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...

lmm 8y ago

> 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 Sounds like a bullshit task then. > 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. What's the mechanism that would cause this to happen? A manager could notice that they don't need as many people on their team - but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team?

talltimtom 8y ago
> but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team? What incentive does a manager have to increase the size? What incentive does he have to improve performance in general? Managers don’t exist in a vacuum, and just because you as an employee don’t see them talking to other managers, executives or owners, it doesn’t mean they are just kings of their own domain.
- lmm 8y ago
  > What incentive does a manager have to increase the size? Personal satisfaction, looking more important, all the usual human motivations. > What incentive does he have to improve performance in general? The manager's own manager will likely notice increased output and reward it. Under normal circumstances an empire-building manager is kept in check by the need to justify their headcount in terms of their output (both of which are visible to their managers). It's only technological productivity increases (which are invisible to higher management, because they take effect in the technical details of the work) that gives managers cover to continue to employ people who have become redundant, or even add further redundant people (because the team is more productive): the overall team productivity (in terms of output/headcount) is going up, and so from the outside it looks like the team is simply performing well, when in fact the manager has siphoned off the fruits of technological advances.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

> 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. And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The latter seems common, and I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair. Also note that in this article, the employee needed a note to bring their own chair to work, so it's essentially free for the employer anyway. > 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. I guess we have strongly different perspectives, because to me, most of the jobs I've seen in this industry are bullshit, in the sense that the world would be a better place if those jobs (often: companies) didn't exist in the first place.

kamaal 8y ago
Part of the big problem with IT isn't just limited to BS jobs, its also BS titles. Most managers could simply be called supervisors. And it would work just fine. The problem is once you start calling them supervisors, you have to pad a senior title every time you have to promote them, so you go like senior supervisor, senior senior supervisor ... etc. So they invent titles like manager, senior manager, general manager, director, senior director, AVP, VP, SVP, Exec .... There is also an overall dressing of 'leadership'. If you attend most of these company wide meetings, they are full of these words. 'We are trusting our leadership to do X', 'We congratulate our leadership for doing Y'. Making it look like highly laborious mental work involving a test of human spirit. They also have to establish the master-slave relationship inconveniencing you every step along the way to show you who the real boss is.
freddie_mercury 8y ago
> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair. This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN. I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, crappy chairs, and old laptops. Three months later we had all the things. Productivity did not improve. It absolutely did not double. (It is a bit insane to even claim that it could.) Those things do not improve productivity in any meaningful way. At worst they are just status symbols. At best they are just signalling. "My company values me and I know that because I have two monitors". Their actual impact on productivity is minimal, despite the thousands of HN posts claiming otherwise.

hoophoop 8y ago

> I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector > As a manager

dandare 8y ago
Do you know what is Ad Hominem argument? For the record I don't manage people, that was a parable.

hrktb 8y ago

> 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. I think this could be the main point of contention from where a lot of things flow. It all depends on how we define 'actual work', but I think we can all agree that to do the same things as we did a century ago we need less effort and time. We need less time to build a bridge, less time and human energy to wash our clothes etc. From there, where did that time go ? Some of it wen to help our survival, but the rest of it could arguably fall into 'BS' jobs. We didn't get massively unemployed when we got better machines, we just found out other uses of our time that were seen as low priority before, but become good enough to be seen as 'work' afterwards. What was once considered a BS job becomes a standard job, the bar just gets lowered. To get back to the point, I believe less works doesn't lead to unemployment, just new 'jobs'.

Areading314 8y ago

If you dig into the bullshit jobs myth you will find it is all based on a survey from 2015. People were asked a yes no question, whether their own job made a "meaningful contribution to the world", 50% said yes and 37% said no. I think the real bullshit is all the blog posts about economics without presenting hard data or being peer reviewed.