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>no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless On the contrary, companies do this frequently. Sometimes it's simply because the job

>no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless On the contrary, companies do this frequently. Sometimes it's simply because the job is not "clearly useless" in the eyes of the management, even if it's obvious to other people. More often, the usefulness of the job to the organization itself, or to people inside it, has become disconnected from its actual usefulness. For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.

heisenbit 5y ago
Exactly. User story: As a manager I want to make decisions but maintain a layer of isolation from consequences. Being the fall guy is a bullshit job but having fall guys to sacrifice is imensely useful.
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  You have people who's entire role, not just part of it, is to be a fall guy? They do nothing but pretend to work and act as a scapegoat when you fail? Or do you have people who are still productive, but you keep around as insurance?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
MillenialMan 5y ago
This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate. Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. Beurocracy is inefficient, but it's rarely completely wrong. It's very easy to tell when an employee is contributing nothing, even for a monolith. What I think actually happens is that companies hire more people for a particular role than they need, because load balancing is difficult, or they have a structure that extracts productivity from the workforce in a way that's inefficient. But that's not the same as outright non-productivity. Those people are not useless - they're still productive, they just provide suboptimal (and maybe negative) return on investment. > For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget. I don't think it works like that. They may invest the excess staffing budget in a productive worker they otherwise wouldn't have hired, but that's not the same as hiring someone who provides no benefit. The return that employee brings may even be negative but it's very, very unlikely to be -100%.
- FatalLogic 5y ago
  >This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate No, it's very easy to demonstrate. The staff themselves will tell you. In fact, the article we are discussing begins by citing two surveys which show huge numbers of employees (tens of millions if the survey is accurate) believe they are not doing useful work or are not contributing meaningfully to the world.
  - MillenialMan 5y ago
    I think those employees are: A) Switching between the two definitions (is their job useless to their employer, or "the world"?) B) Usually wrong - the company knows why they were hired much better than they do (and the company guards this information, because it is strongly in the company's interest for an employee to have a poor understanding of their monetary value. For most positions, the company doesn't want you to know the point of your job.) Put it in perspective. Does the average cleaner think the floors need to be vacuumed daily? No, of course not. They probably think it's overkill, but they do it because that's their job. Is the company stupid for scheduling vacuuming once a day? No. They know exactly how clean they want their floors to be.
    - FatalLogic 5y ago
      "Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032908
      - MillenialMan 5y ago
        And that's a bullshit definition - because everyone reads it as "a job that is bullshit", not "a job that the worker believes is not 100% necessary". The whole thing is wordplay. I don't respect the methodology, and it's one of the reasons I don't trust his conclusions.

heisenbit 5y ago

Exactly. User story: As a manager I want to make decisions but maintain a layer of isolation from consequences. Being the fall guy is a bullshit job but having fall guys to sacrifice is imensely useful.

MillenialMan 5y ago
You have people who's entire role, not just part of it, is to be a fall guy? They do nothing but pretend to work and act as a scapegoat when you fail? Or do you have people who are still productive, but you keep around as insurance?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

MillenialMan 5y ago

This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate. Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. Beurocracy is inefficient, but it's rarely completely wrong. It's very easy to tell when an employee is contributing nothing, even for a monolith. What I think actually happens is that companies hire more people for a particular role than they need, because load balancing is difficult, or they have a structure that extracts productivity from the workforce in a way that's inefficient. But that's not the same as outright non-productivity. Those people are not useless - they're still productive, they just provide suboptimal (and maybe negative) return on investment. > For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget. I don't think it works like that. They may invest the excess staffing budget in a productive worker they otherwise wouldn't have hired, but that's not the same as hiring someone who provides no benefit. The return that employee brings may even be negative but it's very, very unlikely to be -100%.

FatalLogic 5y ago
>This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate No, it's very easy to demonstrate. The staff themselves will tell you. In fact, the article we are discussing begins by citing two surveys which show huge numbers of employees (tens of millions if the survey is accurate) believe they are not doing useful work or are not contributing meaningfully to the world.
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  I think those employees are: A) Switching between the two definitions (is their job useless to their employer, or "the world"?) B) Usually wrong - the company knows why they were hired much better than they do (and the company guards this information, because it is strongly in the company's interest for an employee to have a poor understanding of their monetary value. For most positions, the company doesn't want you to know the point of your job.) Put it in perspective. Does the average cleaner think the floors need to be vacuumed daily? No, of course not. They probably think it's overkill, but they do it because that's their job. Is the company stupid for scheduling vacuuming once a day? No. They know exactly how clean they want their floors to be.
  - FatalLogic 5y ago
    "Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032908
    - MillenialMan 5y ago
      And that's a bullshit definition - because everyone reads it as "a job that is bullshit", not "a job that the worker believes is not 100% necessary". The whole thing is wordplay. I don't respect the methodology, and it's one of the reasons I don't trust his conclusions.