24 ms·

Bullshit Jobs (2018)

127 points by tux1968 6y ago

perfunctory 6y ago
(2018) edit: I started a poll at the time to see if HN readers had BS jobs [0]. Unfortunately didn't get much traction. But with n=8, the answer was "Yes". Somebody, feel free to start a new poll. Hope it gets more popular this time around. I am really curious. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159
- war1025 6y ago
  How do you create a poll? I've never seen that before.
  - perfunctory 6y ago
    To be honest don't remember any more. I googled it.
  - noname120 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
lukifer 6y ago
I'm a big Graeber fan, and it's a good book; but one can get the gist of the phenomenon from the original viral essay: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
- new2628 6y ago
  This is quite common with many recent books: they are an extended essay. Most essays: an extension of one catchy phrase.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    And after that go on a speaking tour for big $ repeating the same points.
  - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    I tried reading the book, but stopped mid-way as it goes too far in unfounded deliberations. The essay is straight to the point. Read the essay, ditch the book.
sdenton4 6y ago
This is a 2018 book review of David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs.' It seems like an exceedingly interesting time to revisit this book, though! Keynes in the 1930's predicted fewer of us would be working today, but we still struggle to maintain low unemployment rates, presumably with lots of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs filling the gaps in people's times, and producing a huge amount of collective grief along the way. And now in the midst of a truly epic global slowdown, the food systems are still functioning, and people still have shelter, so long as we have laws to protect against evictions... Why not get rid of a lot of the bullshit: deploy Basic Income and live freer lives? What if we were working 10 hours a week to cover life's niceties, and had an extra 30 hours to write more music, invent more math, write our novels (and read the new deluge thereof), or truly master starcraft? Or pass on our skills to the next generation with a fraction of the class sizes?
- perfunctory 6y ago
  > What if we were working 10 hours a week Funny but this is the exact number of hours I am working per week at the moment.
  - omosubi 6y ago
    How do you do that? Are you able to pay all your bills?
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  An extra 30 hours to teach our children ourselves. The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. The number one way to prevent people from seeking the truth is to saddle them with financial stress.
  - vore 6y ago
    > The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. What does this even mean?
    - 6y ago
anm89 6y ago
You don't have a right to a subjectively not bullshit job. The purpose of your job as your employer sees it isnt to provide meaning in your life. If you think your job is bullshit, then search for a different one or quit, or suck it up and decided that your bullshit job is better than unemployment. The only bullshit I smell here is these peoples utopian views on the nature and purpose of employment and their entitled attitudes.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  I think you misunderstand the premise of the book. What they call a BS job is not the one you dislike, or find it a drudgery. It's rather the one you don't understand the purpose of.
  - anm89 6y ago
    I don't misunderstand the premise at all. Whether your job has purpose or not isn't for the employee to decide. Thats for the employer to decide. It's your job to decide whether you want to trade your time for their money. If they decide they want to pay you to do something, and you decide that you want to take their money, than your subjective evaluation of whether the job has purpose is irrelevant as long as you keep the job.
    - kennyadam 6y ago
      keep licking dem boots
      - anm89 6y ago
        By understanding the nature of the system I work in, i make a set off tradeoffs that work for me and its treated me very well over my life. I promise you I do a whole lot less boot licking than average and I'm happy to bootlick when I decide the trade off is in my favor on a case by case basis. The people who end up licking boots are the ones who can't see the reality of their situations and go in with unrealistic expectations. Then they complain when things aren't working out for them.
sremani 6y ago
I read the book and got the gist but this one getting blessing from Bloomberg feels more like foreshadowing of the white collar purge by wall street cabal. More often, the Messenger is part of the message!
commandlinefan 6y ago
Maybe I'm fortunate... I don't have a BS job, I'm a programmer. I would suspect that most programmers would feel the same. Maybe we have the last useful job?
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Eh. That depends what you're programming. I've definitely worked on some projects that left me wondering why it was considered useful.
  - kelvin0 6y ago
    I second that: Outlook forms design and it's VB 'macros\programming' circa 2001. Still gives me nightmares.
- christiansakai 6y ago
  What if you work at social media company? i.e., Facebook newsfeed algorithm.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  Be thankful. Most of us aren't that fortunate, but I haven't met many that would be OK with admitting that - work makes too big part of our lives, and admitting that it doesn't have any big meaning takes some guts
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  I and other people in my team work pretty hard but I have the feeling a lot of the projects we am working on are ultimately BS. A lot of companies are probably BS in total.
- cupofsludge 6y ago
  Yeah, doctors save lifes but it isn't as useful as being a programmer.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  When it comes to programming, a lot of the higher-paying positions are mostly bullshit around advertising/marketing or the infrastructure supporting that. There is non-bullshit programming out there, but it's usually hidden away because it's about supporting existing, real-world projects that often use "legacy" technologies that aren't considered cool anymore.
dougmwne 6y ago
Though this is an older article from back when the book "Bullshit Jobs" was being promoted, this topic is perhaps worth a new look. In the era of COVID office closings and lists of "essential workers," the past few months have amounted to a massive experiment in which jobs did productive work in our society, and which did not. Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place. In a related note, there's a front page news article about the PS4's manufacturing being almost completely automated by robots that have even replaced the fine motor skills of human hands, handling flexible tapes and ribbons. There is a series of photos of a factory with more robot arms than people. Much has been made over the past few years of automation and machine learning. Maybe, just maybe the prognosticators were not wrong, just early.
- throwaway7281 6y ago
  The crisis just illustrates our stratified, ossified society: the "essential" workers are those who barely get by. Supposedly important people ("I need to fly around all week") are not that important after all, but for many reasons some professions are able to extract much more value than they contribute (which is an essence of business, after all). Sad to see, but not very surprising. Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.
  - ngngngng 6y ago
    I'm quite young, and have gone from a minimum wage service worker to a well paid software engineer in a relatively short time. A couple years ago I remarked to my dad that it seemed the more I was paid, the less stressful my work was. He said that he had found the same in his career. At the same time, the more I am paid, the more difficult it is to find someone that knows how to do what I'm doing. I know it's been said before, but it seems pay is not dependent on how useful to society you are, but is instead dependent on two factors working in tandem. 1) Do those with money perceive you to have a use? 2) How difficult is it to find someone else that can replace your use? I can't help but wonder if stress to pay ratio works as an inverted bell curve. At the lowest levels of pay you find the most stress. Then we move to middle/lower-upper class levels of pay and find much less stress. To get above those levels of pay, you'll likely have to start your own company or work extreme hours at a high skill job and once again experience heightened levels of stress.
war1025 6y ago
The number one thing keeping me at my most-likely bullshit job is that health insurance in America is only affordable if you have an employer to foot the bill. If I was single, I don't think I would care much. But I'm married with three kids, and health insurance is a very effective retention tool.
- foogazi 6y ago
  > The number one thing keeping me at my most-likely bullshit job is that health insurance in America is only affordable if you have an employer to foot the bill. I’d say that is not the number one thing. Even though you consider your job to be “most-likely bullshit” your employer is willing to pay you to do it When your employer no longer wants you there, regardless of the cost of health insurance, you will not be employed
  - war1025 6y ago
    > I’d say that is not the number one thing. Well, that's sort of presumptuous of you. Also your response had nothing to do with my comment nor your rebuttal to my comment.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Yeah I can see that. Health insurance in this country is really expensive compared to what you actually get. If I had a whole family on my insurance then the out-of-pocket maximum would just barely not bankrupt me.
volument 6y ago
That website had too many annoyances and content blockers that I had to leave (which wasn’t easy either). I’ll remember Bloomberg. Same with Forbes.
- dang 6y ago
  "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
graycat 6y ago
Ah, maybe the cup is half full, and with Covid there is one more source of good opportunities added to the others: Net, if you want a good job and can't find one, that is, can't find someone to create a good job for you, then create a good job for yourself. Historic opportunities: Fantastic, historic, resources -- computing, computing infrastructure, software tools, mathematical methods, and digital communications, all essentially dirt cheap and often essentially for free. Exploit the resources and go for it! Create a great job for yourself!
zeveb 6y ago
I kinda thought the original article was BS. After all, who is more likely to be an authority about whether a job is useless or not: the person willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for it to be done, or some writer? OTOH, I think there are jobs which could be removed, but the explanation for their existence is far more boring than some great conspiracy to create BS jobs: it's just path-dependency.
- igammarays 6y ago
  The businesses willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands dollars for these bullshit jobs to be done are usually massive faceless corporations where the incentives are far more complicated than you think - and many of them are fed by the government money printer. See many of the corporations bailed out in 2008. Also, anyone in technology who has worked in the IT department of a non-Valley company knows how much utter stupidity and bullshit is wasted on IT simply because no one understands how to do it properly. Silicon Valley startups are far more efficient at IT and have fewer bullshit jobs, but their mission is often to attract more and more VC money to get acquired by some faceless corporation, or IPO to become a monopolistic rent-seeker. So they’re extremely efficient at working towards their bullshit end-goal.
spiritplumber 6y ago
Tiny anecdote: I run a prototyping lab. I have one office-type employee, two assembly/mechanical peeps, and myself (electrical engineer and, well, it's my shop so I'll do what I need to do). Due to COVID, I sent everyone home, and had to let go one of the assembly peeps, she found a new job so I'm not worried about her. So it's just me in the shop right now. The coding person is really happy about not having to commute and gets more done. The remaining assembly person was given a nice solderng station, drill press etc. by me, and passes by whenever when t's time to drop off finished units and pick up parts. This person now tells me that they are working mostly at night, because they want to since they're nocturnal by inclination. I am not looking at hiring someone else right now BECAUSE we are getting more done this way than how we used to!
- anm89 6y ago
  The important thing to note here, was that the jobs that existed before were not bullshit from the perspective of you when you hired for those positions. Now you may realize that those jobs may have not have had value and were possibly even counterproductive, and you seem to have done the rational thing given the info and eliminated those jobs. But the jobs didn't have no purpose before. The purpose was misguided which exposed itself over time.
pphysch 6y ago
The "job" has somehow been elevated to a divine entity in American politics. Just "job". No regards for the quality of labor or product or compensation. One cynical suggestion is that the economy is set up to keep people stressed with busywork and that it's not by accident.
dang 6y ago
In order of most comments to least: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9204922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9204922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607328 Don't miss the lively contributions of https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber. Hopefully we'll get him again!
- haecceity 6y ago
  Do you have a list of these at the ready?
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    If you click on past, just below the submissions title on this page, it will bring up all past submissions with the same title.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    It's a recurrent theme here on HN. I've also read more and more news and stories about Bullshit jobs.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
missedthecue 6y ago
I reject the premise of the book. Nearly all jobs are necessary or they wouldn't exist. The exception seems to be government excess and nepotism (these are a tiny minority of jobs). If a business could actually save money by laying people off that aren't doing anything, why don't they? Why don't their conpetitors? What about hiring someone to do nothing is more valuable than keeping that money instead? "It’s also phenomenological. If you feel your job is bulls---, it probably is.", says the author I disagree and maintain the view that the clear reason many people feel their jobs are "bullshit" is because they aren't fulfilled by them, because they aren't productive for a full 40 hours every week, and/or the work that they do accomplish goes unrecognized. Those all may very well be true, but it does not follow that those jobs might as well not exist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  There are a number of reasons to keep people around who aren't providing sufficient utility to a business (from the high-level business's notion of utility). 1. Fiefdoms. A manager is valued by the number of direct reports and charts they can direct upwards. As long as they aren't losing money, the business doesn't usually seek out perfect efficiency. 2. Historical. A position that had value 10, 20, 30 years ago continues to be filled (or is still filled by the same person or people) because "It's how we've always done it." No one with sufficient clout has stepped in to evaluate the situation and remove people. 3. Deliberate bullshitters. Ever seen a job done manually that you know a computer could do faster, more reliably, and with better accuracy? These people know the job isn't useful, or as useful as it should be, but they inhibit the improvement processes that should happen and retain their positions for a long time. They often make themselves important by inserting themselves into other critical business processes. 4. Regulatory. Does anyone really know what "QA" does? (Qualifier: Not testing, a specific person holding the QA title sitting over software and/or engineering) IME, this person usually just checks boxes when final qualification testing is done on critical systems, but few of the QAs I've known have actually brought value to the organization in this role. Most are there because the business knows they need it to meet legal or industry standards. Markets aren't perfectly efficient, and a belief in their perfect efficiency isn't going to make it so.
mempko 6y ago
I think COVID has essentially proven the theory behind the book.
ycombonator 6y ago
Most of the Federal government offices have been shut down since end of February barring a few “essential” services. Yet we seem to be functioning normally. Perhaps 70-80% of these jobs are bull shit jobs ?
- jdlegg 6y ago
  Tell the people who are still waiting for their federal stimulus checks that things are "functioning normally."

127 points by tux1968 6y ago

(2018) edit: I started a poll at the time to see if HN readers had BS jobs [0]. Unfortunately didn't get much traction. But with n=8, the answer was "Yes". Somebody, feel free to start a new poll. Hope it gets more popular this time around. I am really curious. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159

war1025 6y ago
How do you create a poll? I've never seen that before.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  To be honest don't remember any more. I googled it.
- noname120 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

lukifer 6y ago

I'm a big Graeber fan, and it's a good book; but one can get the gist of the phenomenon from the original viral essay: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

new2628 6y ago
This is quite common with many recent books: they are an extended essay. Most essays: an extension of one catchy phrase.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  And after that go on a speaking tour for big $ repeating the same points.
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  I tried reading the book, but stopped mid-way as it goes too far in unfounded deliberations. The essay is straight to the point. Read the essay, ditch the book.

sdenton4 6y ago

This is a 2018 book review of David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs.' It seems like an exceedingly interesting time to revisit this book, though! Keynes in the 1930's predicted fewer of us would be working today, but we still struggle to maintain low unemployment rates, presumably with lots of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs filling the gaps in people's times, and producing a huge amount of collective grief along the way. And now in the midst of a truly epic global slowdown, the food systems are still functioning, and people still have shelter, so long as we have laws to protect against evictions... Why not get rid of a lot of the bullshit: deploy Basic Income and live freer lives? What if we were working 10 hours a week to cover life's niceties, and had an extra 30 hours to write more music, invent more math, write our novels (and read the new deluge thereof), or truly master starcraft? Or pass on our skills to the next generation with a fraction of the class sizes?

perfunctory 6y ago
> What if we were working 10 hours a week Funny but this is the exact number of hours I am working per week at the moment.
- omosubi 6y ago
  How do you do that? Are you able to pay all your bills?
YinglingLight 6y ago
An extra 30 hours to teach our children ourselves. The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. The number one way to prevent people from seeking the truth is to saddle them with financial stress.
- vore 6y ago
  > The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought. What does this even mean?
  - 6y ago

anm89 6y ago

You don't have a right to a subjectively not bullshit job. The purpose of your job as your employer sees it isnt to provide meaning in your life. If you think your job is bullshit, then search for a different one or quit, or suck it up and decided that your bullshit job is better than unemployment. The only bullshit I smell here is these peoples utopian views on the nature and purpose of employment and their entitled attitudes.

perfunctory 6y ago
I think you misunderstand the premise of the book. What they call a BS job is not the one you dislike, or find it a drudgery. It's rather the one you don't understand the purpose of.
- anm89 6y ago
  I don't misunderstand the premise at all. Whether your job has purpose or not isn't for the employee to decide. Thats for the employer to decide. It's your job to decide whether you want to trade your time for their money. If they decide they want to pay you to do something, and you decide that you want to take their money, than your subjective evaluation of whether the job has purpose is irrelevant as long as you keep the job.
  - kennyadam 6y ago
    keep licking dem boots
    - anm89 6y ago
      By understanding the nature of the system I work in, i make a set off tradeoffs that work for me and its treated me very well over my life. I promise you I do a whole lot less boot licking than average and I'm happy to bootlick when I decide the trade off is in my favor on a case by case basis. The people who end up licking boots are the ones who can't see the reality of their situations and go in with unrealistic expectations. Then they complain when things aren't working out for them.

sremani 6y ago

I read the book and got the gist but this one getting blessing from Bloomberg feels more like foreshadowing of the white collar purge by wall street cabal. More often, the Messenger is part of the message!

commandlinefan 6y ago

Maybe I'm fortunate... I don't have a BS job, I'm a programmer. I would suspect that most programmers would feel the same. Maybe we have the last useful job?

nicoburns 6y ago
Eh. That depends what you're programming. I've definitely worked on some projects that left me wondering why it was considered useful.
- kelvin0 6y ago
  I second that: Outlook forms design and it's VB 'macros\programming' circa 2001. Still gives me nightmares.
christiansakai 6y ago
What if you work at social media company? i.e., Facebook newsfeed algorithm.
saiya-jin 6y ago
Be thankful. Most of us aren't that fortunate, but I haven't met many that would be OK with admitting that - work makes too big part of our lives, and admitting that it doesn't have any big meaning takes some guts
spaetzleesser 6y ago
I and other people in my team work pretty hard but I have the feeling a lot of the projects we am working on are ultimately BS. A lot of companies are probably BS in total.
cupofsludge 6y ago
Yeah, doctors save lifes but it isn't as useful as being a programmer.
Nextgrid 6y ago
When it comes to programming, a lot of the higher-paying positions are mostly bullshit around advertising/marketing or the infrastructure supporting that. There is non-bullshit programming out there, but it's usually hidden away because it's about supporting existing, real-world projects that often use "legacy" technologies that aren't considered cool anymore.

dougmwne 6y ago

Though this is an older article from back when the book "Bullshit Jobs" was being promoted, this topic is perhaps worth a new look. In the era of COVID office closings and lists of "essential workers," the past few months have amounted to a massive experiment in which jobs did productive work in our society, and which did not. Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place. In a related note, there's a front page news article about the PS4's manufacturing being almost completely automated by robots that have even replaced the fine motor skills of human hands, handling flexible tapes and ribbons. There is a series of photos of a factory with more robot arms than people. Much has been made over the past few years of automation and machine learning. Maybe, just maybe the prognosticators were not wrong, just early.

throwaway7281 6y ago
The crisis just illustrates our stratified, ossified society: the "essential" workers are those who barely get by. Supposedly important people ("I need to fly around all week") are not that important after all, but for many reasons some professions are able to extract much more value than they contribute (which is an essence of business, after all). Sad to see, but not very surprising. Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.
- ngngngng 6y ago
  I'm quite young, and have gone from a minimum wage service worker to a well paid software engineer in a relatively short time. A couple years ago I remarked to my dad that it seemed the more I was paid, the less stressful my work was. He said that he had found the same in his career. At the same time, the more I am paid, the more difficult it is to find someone that knows how to do what I'm doing. I know it's been said before, but it seems pay is not dependent on how useful to society you are, but is instead dependent on two factors working in tandem. 1) Do those with money perceive you to have a use? 2) How difficult is it to find someone else that can replace your use? I can't help but wonder if stress to pay ratio works as an inverted bell curve. At the lowest levels of pay you find the most stress. Then we move to middle/lower-upper class levels of pay and find much less stress. To get above those levels of pay, you'll likely have to start your own company or work extreme hours at a high skill job and once again experience heightened levels of stress.

war1025 6y ago

The number one thing keeping me at my most-likely bullshit job is that health insurance in America is only affordable if you have an employer to foot the bill. If I was single, I don't think I would care much. But I'm married with three kids, and health insurance is a very effective retention tool.

foogazi 6y ago
> The number one thing keeping me at my most-likely bullshit job is that health insurance in America is only affordable if you have an employer to foot the bill. I’d say that is not the number one thing. Even though you consider your job to be “most-likely bullshit” your employer is willing to pay you to do it When your employer no longer wants you there, regardless of the cost of health insurance, you will not be employed
- war1025 6y ago
  > I’d say that is not the number one thing. Well, that's sort of presumptuous of you. Also your response had nothing to do with my comment nor your rebuttal to my comment.
jschwartzi 6y ago
Yeah I can see that. Health insurance in this country is really expensive compared to what you actually get. If I had a whole family on my insurance then the out-of-pocket maximum would just barely not bankrupt me.

volument 6y ago

That website had too many annoyances and content blockers that I had to leave (which wasn’t easy either). I’ll remember Bloomberg. Same with Forbes.

dang 6y ago
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

graycat 6y ago

Ah, maybe the cup is half full, and with Covid there is one more source of good opportunities added to the others: Net, if you want a good job and can't find one, that is, can't find someone to create a good job for you, then create a good job for yourself. Historic opportunities: Fantastic, historic, resources -- computing, computing infrastructure, software tools, mathematical methods, and digital communications, all essentially dirt cheap and often essentially for free. Exploit the resources and go for it! Create a great job for yourself!

zeveb 6y ago

I kinda thought the original article was BS. After all, who is more likely to be an authority about whether a job is useless or not: the person willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for it to be done, or some writer? OTOH, I think there are jobs which could be removed, but the explanation for their existence is far more boring than some great conspiracy to create BS jobs: it's just path-dependency.

igammarays 6y ago
The businesses willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands dollars for these bullshit jobs to be done are usually massive faceless corporations where the incentives are far more complicated than you think - and many of them are fed by the government money printer. See many of the corporations bailed out in 2008. Also, anyone in technology who has worked in the IT department of a non-Valley company knows how much utter stupidity and bullshit is wasted on IT simply because no one understands how to do it properly. Silicon Valley startups are far more efficient at IT and have fewer bullshit jobs, but their mission is often to attract more and more VC money to get acquired by some faceless corporation, or IPO to become a monopolistic rent-seeker. So they’re extremely efficient at working towards their bullshit end-goal.

spiritplumber 6y ago

Tiny anecdote: I run a prototyping lab. I have one office-type employee, two assembly/mechanical peeps, and myself (electrical engineer and, well, it's my shop so I'll do what I need to do). Due to COVID, I sent everyone home, and had to let go one of the assembly peeps, she found a new job so I'm not worried about her. So it's just me in the shop right now. The coding person is really happy about not having to commute and gets more done. The remaining assembly person was given a nice solderng station, drill press etc. by me, and passes by whenever when t's time to drop off finished units and pick up parts. This person now tells me that they are working mostly at night, because they want to since they're nocturnal by inclination. I am not looking at hiring someone else right now BECAUSE we are getting more done this way than how we used to!

anm89 6y ago
The important thing to note here, was that the jobs that existed before were not bullshit from the perspective of you when you hired for those positions. Now you may realize that those jobs may have not have had value and were possibly even counterproductive, and you seem to have done the rational thing given the info and eliminated those jobs. But the jobs didn't have no purpose before. The purpose was misguided which exposed itself over time.

pphysch 6y ago

The "job" has somehow been elevated to a divine entity in American politics. Just "job". No regards for the quality of labor or product or compensation. One cynical suggestion is that the economy is set up to keep people stressed with busywork and that it's not by accident.

dang 6y ago

In order of most comments to least: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9204922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9204922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607328 Don't miss the lively contributions of https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber. Hopefully we'll get him again!

haecceity 6y ago
Do you have a list of these at the ready?
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  If you click on past, just below the submissions title on this page, it will bring up all past submissions with the same title.
- tartoran 6y ago
  It's a recurrent theme here on HN. I've also read more and more news and stories about Bullshit jobs.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago

missedthecue 6y ago

I reject the premise of the book. Nearly all jobs are necessary or they wouldn't exist. The exception seems to be government excess and nepotism (these are a tiny minority of jobs). If a business could actually save money by laying people off that aren't doing anything, why don't they? Why don't their conpetitors? What about hiring someone to do nothing is more valuable than keeping that money instead? "It’s also phenomenological. If you feel your job is bulls---, it probably is.", says the author I disagree and maintain the view that the clear reason many people feel their jobs are "bullshit" is because they aren't fulfilled by them, because they aren't productive for a full 40 hours every week, and/or the work that they do accomplish goes unrecognized. Those all may very well be true, but it does not follow that those jobs might as well not exist.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Jtsummers 6y ago
There are a number of reasons to keep people around who aren't providing sufficient utility to a business (from the high-level business's notion of utility). 1. Fiefdoms. A manager is valued by the number of direct reports and charts they can direct upwards. As long as they aren't losing money, the business doesn't usually seek out perfect efficiency. 2. Historical. A position that had value 10, 20, 30 years ago continues to be filled (or is still filled by the same person or people) because "It's how we've always done it." No one with sufficient clout has stepped in to evaluate the situation and remove people. 3. Deliberate bullshitters. Ever seen a job done manually that you know a computer could do faster, more reliably, and with better accuracy? These people know the job isn't useful, or as useful as it should be, but they inhibit the improvement processes that should happen and retain their positions for a long time. They often make themselves important by inserting themselves into other critical business processes. 4. Regulatory. Does anyone really know what "QA" does? (Qualifier: Not testing, a specific person holding the QA title sitting over software and/or engineering) IME, this person usually just checks boxes when final qualification testing is done on critical systems, but few of the QAs I've known have actually brought value to the organization in this role. Most are there because the business knows they need it to meet legal or industry standards. Markets aren't perfectly efficient, and a belief in their perfect efficiency isn't going to make it so.

mempko 6y ago

I think COVID has essentially proven the theory behind the book.

ycombonator 6y ago

Most of the Federal government offices have been shut down since end of February barring a few “essential” services. Yet we seem to be functioning normally. Perhaps 70-80% of these jobs are bull shit jobs ?

jdlegg 6y ago
Tell the people who are still waiting for their federal stimulus checks that things are "functioning normally."