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David Graeber had created an account here on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber),

• golergka 5y ago
  The fact that the person doing the job thinks so doesn't necessarily make it so. There's plenty of people who don't see any real purpose in safety belts in cars, too.
  • pydry 5y ago
    There's probably more people with bullshit jobs who think they are not bullshit than vice versa. Humans have an innate desire to be useful.
    • gpm 5y ago
      I agree with your second statement, but your first statement doesn't necessarily follow, it depends on the proportion of jobs that are bullshit.... If a human is 1% likely to think a not-bullshit-job is bullshit, and 10% likely to think a bullshit-job is bullshit, but 99% of jobs are not-bullshit, then for every bullshit job that the worker thinks is bullshit, there are 9.9 not-bullshit jobs that the worker thinks are bullshit. Edit: Repaired math (2 minutes after posting)
      • pydry 5y ago
        Your hypothetical would lead to roughly 98% thinking that their jobs are not bullshit when 99% actually were. At that level we wouldn't be having this discussion at all. The actual numbers are more like 60% non bullshit / 40% bullshit, though.
  • sascha_sl 5y ago
    I bet everyone in tech who has been around for a while has been in enough of _those_ meetings to be able to at least relate to what a bullshit job it. Most probably have also seen the type of manager that is less concerned with the work people underneath them do (because they don't understand or care) and more with the prestige, making sure people stay there, even if they contribute nothing - either because they can't or wouldn't. Worse, eventually the former turn into the later with enough time to resign to the situation.
    • addicted 5y ago
      You’re conflating a bad managers of which there are many, with a manager’s role not being needed at all.
      • hellbannedguy 5y ago
        Some teams don't need managers. Companies should use "not having a manager", as a perk? As long as the team produces. I don't think I have ever met a manager whom deserved the title. I have met talented employees whom are unofficially recognized as the leaders though.
      • sascha_sl 5y ago
        If you're not noticing a department of your company is defunct, did you need it in the first place?
    • crispyambulance 5y ago
      There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management. It's challenging in such organizations to have meaningful cross-functional communication between the people who do the actual work and who need to understand each other. Why? Because these management layers also [try to] mediate all cross-functional interaction in formalized meetings which they run like court proceedings-- they're called by various names: "hand-offs", "gates", etc. The point is they're one-direction process-flow "ceremonies" that don't have real discussion between the parties involved. What has to happen to workaround this is that the individuals who need to really communicate must seek each other out informally (or "offline" as the PM-derps would say), sometimes this works, sometimes it's a setup for one party getting snubbed by the other because they're beset with too many meetings. So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
• simonh 5y ago
  This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though. >They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”. In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" is vague aspirational follow your dreams guff. Who actually makes a world scale impact? You don't have to be Greta Thurnberg to be doing useful work that's valuable to those around you. The implication is if you're not changing the world, you're wasting your life. It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
  • lucideer 5y ago
    > the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” > In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" [...] It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question. You're right that Graeber's question is vague (it could do with improvement/narrowing) but the first question quoted above isn't so much worse but just completely irrelevant. They've asked an entirely different question unrelated to what Graeber was trying to get at. If I don't "have the feeling of doing useful work", does that mean my job is not useful, or my job is potentially useful but carried out inefficiently. Am I attempting useful work but blocked from doing so by some administrative or practical barrier? Do I consider myself insufficiently talented or qualified at my job to carry it out in a useful manner. Graeber's question, while in need of improvement, is at least asking about the right things: the jobs themselves. This new question is asking about the people's individual relationships to their jobs, not the actual purpose of the role.
    • simonh 5y ago
      I don't really follow you. A questionnaire can only find out what the respondents think about their job. If you want to objectively know whether their jobs are actually useful, independent of their opinions or feelings, a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask.
      • pinguin7 5y ago
        I think Graeber makes the assumption that the statement "my job makes no (net) contribution to society" is as closest to reality as we can possibly get. The interviewed person is probably the best to know if the job is valuable. Even if they falsely assume that their job makes no difference, the sentiment is a problem in itself. I am not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving my interpretation of the intent.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• horns4lyfe 5y ago
  I’m a big fan of Graeber, his book Debt is incredible and his death was a big loss. That said, he was always more of an activist and narrative-driven writer rather than data-driven, and his work should be considered in that context IMO.
  • rsj_hn 5y ago
    Debt, in particular, contains a lot of howlers and conspiracy theories (especially relating to the dollar as a reserve currency and descriptions of monetary systems) that really don't belong there and (in my opinion) don't strengthen the work. It's really mixed bag where there is some rich anthropological work and ambitious subject matter combined with highly politicized and tendentious claims. Definately read him, but just be aware that his concern for accuracy is about the same as Zinn's "A People's History", which has a similar density of howlers due to the political agenda getting in the way of the work. Both of these works would be vastly improved with some rigorous fact checkers cutting material out, and they would still have evidence left to support their thesis.
  • graphtrader 5y ago
    So basically his work is fiction?
• Proven 5y ago
  Sorry, but that's complete BS. If the person holding a "bullshit" job is the only one required to define the job as bullshit, they can easily eliminate the said job:if they think the job is bullshit they can quit and destroy the bullshit job.
• cbmuser 5y ago
  > a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist. So, he basically admitted that he had no objective and reproducible definition of what a „bullshit job“ actually is.
  • mananaysiempre 5y ago
    Because people are involved in measuring or even defining a thing does not make that thing non-objective, though it can make it stupidly hard to study. For example, when people are shown a round blobby image and an angular spiky image and asked to determine which one of them depicts a “buba” and which one a “kiki”, most people will apparently say that the blobby one is the “buba”, whatever culture they come from (Köhler, 1929, Spanish speakers on Tenerife; Ramachandran, Hubbard, 2001, English speakers in the US and Tamil speakers in India). More generally, people with synæsthesia agree to some extent on the correspondence between the sensations: if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones. A space alien would be entirely incapable of observing this phenomenon; when the human race is dead and gone, it will have ceased to exist; until an underlying mechanism is discovered, it is impossible to tell whether it extends to non-sapient species. It is nevertheless objective in every practical sense. Similarly, if most people that do J themselves believe that J is bullshit, then it’s reasonable to think that something is up with J. It might be that it’s not a property of J in isolation, and reliably getting at what people actually believe (as opposed to what they tell their employer they believe, what they tell you they believe, or what they tell themselves they believe) can be stupendously difficult, but the question itself is not meaningless or unscientific.
    • taneq 5y ago
      > if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones. Weird, I’d have thought brightness would map to volume and colour to pitch somehow.
  • ridaj 5y ago
    Well-designed survey results are objective and reproducible. There are margins of error as with all measurements, and maybe these margins are wider than in some fields and narrower than in others, but asking people for their opinions isn't necessarily bad science just because it happens to involve opinions.
• mjburgess 5y ago
  This is a standard rhetorical trick. Of course we are all too ignorant to say anything, however I have done some poor quality research/thinking, *INSERT OPINIONS**
  • fnordsensei 5y ago
    It’s not so much a rhetorical trick as it is how anthropology works. If you want to investigate something qualitative, you have to employ something like grounded theory[1]. Ie., collect enough qualitative data that patterns start to emerge. Then you can criticize various aspects of the way it was done of course, but that’s standard scientific method, and doesn’t necessarily reduce it to just rhetorics. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
    • mjburgess 5y ago
      He wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs", the rhetorical trick is to pretend to disown the role his own opinion is playing. It's essentially the same type of technique socrates used: "of course, well all know nothing, but let me tell you what we all don't know..."
      • contrast 5y ago
        I’m trying to figure out the point you’re trying to make. I’ve never heard of the Socratic approach as being incorrect or pointless, I just think if it as a completely standard rhetorical technique. Does using it render the argument invalid? Is it wrong to have an opinion on a subject after researching it? What’s your challenge to the substance of what he has found?
        • mjburgess 5y ago
          It's not incorrect or pointless, but it's disingenuous. It's a trick. You claim both that you do not know and others can not know before you make a large variety of knowledge claims. It is to make your project seem less dogmatic, and yourself more humble. Here, > Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else This is performatively false: he wrote a book on it.