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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 department

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.
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. That depends on the company. How about the 'growth engines' whose primary goal is to be acquired? I don't think these claims work in a world where the axiom 'the goal of a company is to make more money than it spends' is broken.
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  That's an interesting case and I think those jobs are likely to be legitimately bullshit.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> > For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget. > I don't think it works like that. I'll split the middle. Sometimes it works like that, but not nearly as often as proponents of the narrative say it does.
the_af 5y ago
> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. Some companies, maybe. I've known enough companies that tolerated and in some cases enjoyed fat, to understand as a rule what you're claiming doesn't hold. Including lots of fat shaped like management layers. Other forms of fat include "we don't want to fire these people, so let's give them symbolic work until they retire", "these are all friends of people in upper management, so don't fire them even though nobody knows what they actually do", "these people were hired as a PR stunt and now they really don't have much to do", "we have to go through the motions of doing this project, even though everyone knows it's doomed, it's just for show anyway", and many, many more. Companies can be very, very inefficient and still work.

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.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago

> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. That depends on the company. How about the 'growth engines' whose primary goal is to be acquired? I don't think these claims work in a world where the axiom 'the goal of a company is to make more money than it spends' is broken.

MillenialMan 5y ago
That's an interesting case and I think those jobs are likely to be legitimately bullshit.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> > For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget. > I don't think it works like that. I'll split the middle. Sometimes it works like that, but not nearly as often as proponents of the narrative say it does.

the_af 5y ago

> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. Some companies, maybe. I've known enough companies that tolerated and in some cases enjoyed fat, to understand as a rule what you're claiming doesn't hold. Including lots of fat shaped like management layers. Other forms of fat include "we don't want to fire these people, so let's give them symbolic work until they retire", "these are all friends of people in upper management, so don't fire them even though nobody knows what they actually do", "these people were hired as a PR stunt and now they really don't have much to do", "we have to go through the motions of doing this project, even though everyone knows it's doomed, it's just for show anyway", and many, many more. Companies can be very, very inefficient and still work.