21 ms·

Bullshit Jobs (2018)

441 points by TotalCrackpot 3y ago

paulpauper 3y ago
I see parallels between the Unabomber manifesto and his 'bullshit jobs' thesis. Although over a decade a part, they both sorta came to the same conclusion about how humans are being alienated. Both works are fundamentally critiques of modernity.
- abhiminator 3y ago
  Unabomber manifesto reads more like an unhinged rant written by some resentful, middle-aged Anon on 4chan than a piece of academic literature -- Ted Kaczynski somehow managed to fill 32 pages of it with racist, misogynistic and incomprehensible rambling with zero citations. Also, the fact that he literally had to threaten people to force the publication of his "manifesto" says it all to me. [0] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/11/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-manifesto-published/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/11/ted-kaczyn...
- msla 3y ago
  [flagged]
- msla 3y ago
  The Unabomber manifesto is the work of someone who wants to "cleanse the world" of the impure so only the "right" people can live.
_cenw 3y ago
This is my goto book to recommend when people are scared about being replaced by GPT.
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  The article was great. The book was insufferable and didn't add substance.
  - esquire_900 3y ago
    Exactly. Like so many popular non-fiction books these days, there's about 15 pages of content fluffed up with 200 pages of anecdotes to be able to sell it as a book.
    - arrowsmith 3y ago
      I thought the same of Graeber's book about Debt. It's not a bad book and I feel like I learned something from it but Christ it was like 5x longer than it needed to be and felt very unstructured.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      Ironically, a bullshit job.
- esafak 3y ago
  What consolation is that? At least a BS job pays the bills.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    You misunderstand my point. A BS job wasn't necessary in the first place, so it's unlikely to be replaced by GPT. The market is pretty bad at optimizing the amount of labor large corporations need, and this isn't going to change this.
    - medvezhenok 3y ago
      Rather, I would say that with added capacity for work, what we choose to do is make things safer. And safety demands regulations which increase regulatory work and bureaucratic overhead to get anything done. So the jobs become observing all of the laws that we passed in the name of safety and equity (look at workplace accident rates since early 1900s. Or child labor rates). When you look at it this way, there's no stopping, since there will always be more "dangerous" or "unfair" things to optimize away with added labor.
    - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
      I don’t think this is very convincing. The higher ups might think a job is necessary even though it isn’t. So they may still invest in automating it even if it wasn’t necessary in the first place.
- clnq 3y ago
  Hmm... a lot of jobs being displaced by ML are technical, and not very bullshit.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  This article relates the two: https://compactmag.com/article/a-i-might-not-steal-your-bullshit-job https://compactmag.com/article/a-i-might-not-steal-your-bull...
0xr0kk3r 3y ago
[flagged]
- ryuhhnn 3y ago
  Consumed by anger? Graeber was an anthropologist, it was literally his professional job to make anthropological observations about society and form them into a coherent theory, which, as someone who read this book in its entirety, he did an excellent job. To say something like “well that’s just the way things are” is tautological nonsense and adds nothing to the conversation he jumpstarted, you’re basically just saying “suck it up, these things won’t change”. One of the most compelling argument of this book was how we got to where we are by socially engineering such a system. If we can come to the conclusion that we got to where we are by deliberate choice, we can unwind all of what we’ve built and do something better for ourselves.
- apsurd 3y ago
  Graeber is an anthropologist. If anything, I would say he _loves_ humans, and humanity.
jdm2212 3y ago
I love that this guy is a leftist Occupy Wall Street guy who wrote a whole book whose fundamental premise is "what if capitalism was not actually ruthlessly profit-seeking, but actually kept millions upon millions of people employed doing nothing basically out of charity". It sort makes sense in the context of tightly state-controlled capitalist economies like Japan, but in a US context it's just comical. The same evil corporate managers who get lambasted for laying people off to satisfy Wall Street's demand for quarterly profit growth are supposedly keeping loads of other people employed just for funsies.
- _cenw 3y ago
  I mean, both can be true at the same time? I think the point is more that working a bullshit job is like an evolved form of Marx's alienated labor. Instead of not seeing yourself in whatever you create, you create nothing, but are told to keep a charade of productivity up anyway.
  - jdm2212 3y ago
    It's not a charade of productivity if it is producing value for some stakeholder. "some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are generating no value at all.
    - spencerflem 3y ago
      Depends on your perception of value. Plenty of things are valuable for a company but clearly useless for the world. Some things aren't even valuable for the company but is to a manager, etc.
      - badpun 3y ago
        Some things are clearly valueless. For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless. There are a lot of jobs which have components like that in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due dilligence etc. For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.
kristianc 3y ago
Tyler Cowen’s review at the time nails it I think: > He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day. > A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make for a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him report back to us. > At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
- spencerflem 3y ago
  What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves describe their own job as bullshit. The introduction to the book makes it very clear. Graeber is not decreeing which jobs are pointless, he's describing what it feels like to work such a job based on interviews.
  - louwrentius 3y ago
    I can’t stress this point enough, having read the book. I feel that “our industry” is also rife with bullshit jobs, I think we aren’t exempt, but I wonder how others feel about this. I had a bullshit job once: a project of 30M euro was clearly failing hard. 60 people were working every day and we didn’t deliver anything suitable for production. I kept my corner neat, but the writing was on the wall. It felt so surreal, trying to care and do work, but on the other hand knowing the project was doomed. After a year or so I couldn’t stand it anymore, I felt physically ill and I quit. My manager was fired a month after I left. The project got canceled 6-8 months later.
benoliver999 3y ago
I was quite shocked to hear that Graeber died quite suddenly back in 2020.
- louwrentius 3y ago
  Really sad! His book “Debt, the first 5000 years” is a hefty listen, but provides a very interesting perspective on debt and money.
- mempko 3y ago
  Covid got him. Like so many others.
  - BenFeldman1930 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - henry2023 3y ago
      Is this funny to you?
      - BenFeldman1930 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    Further context: > Graeber died suddenly from necrotic pancreatitis on September 2, 2020 while on vacation with his wife and friends in Venice. ... His wife, Dubrovsky, attributed the pancreatitis to COVID-19, saying they both had strange symptoms for months beforehand, and she said there was a connection between COVID-19 and pancreatitis. (From Wikipedia)
Eliezer 3y ago
Directly productive jobs are often easier to automate than jobs produced by coordination difficulties. Just as we saw sectoral shift from manufacturing to service as manufacturing became easier to automate, we have been seeing a shift from service to bullshit - or so I would wildly guess.
napierzaza 3y ago
[dead]
alphanullmeric 3y ago
Another category of bullshit jobs are the pyramid scheme academic degrees. It’s one thing to work a useless job in private industry where nobody is forced to fund you, but it’s a significantly bigger problem when your publicly funded philosophy degree only qualifies you to teach philosophy on a taxpayer tenure.
- rndmwlk 3y ago
  I really dislike this take. It's an oversimplified view of the world and a sad evaluation of what is important in the world. I'd much rather my taxes go to funding someone learning & teaching philosophy than subsidizing Lockheeds latest and greatest kill-bot. And to preempt the inevitable assumption, no I'm not a philosophy grad I work in finance. I did, however, take philosophy courses when I was a student and I believe I benefited greatly from them.
  - alphanullmeric 3y ago
    I didn’t say you couldn’t take philosophy courses, the fundamental issue that that you’re trying to force others to fund it for you. The same way I don’t support subsidies for Lockheed. This is a big thing I experienced in my undergraduate, it was always arts students trying to force things onto others. They simultaneously force their courses onto everyone else through breadth requirements while not having any breadth requirements themselves.
    - rndmwlk 3y ago
      We just fundamentally disagree about what is important in life. If education does not become a public funded "burden" then it becomes a luxury of the rich. And yes, education can *and should* be more than just preparation for your role as a cog in society. I cannot take courses in philosophy if there is no one to teach those courses. I never experienced anything like what you're talking about. I was happy to have elective courses because that meant I was able to study things that interested me outside of my planned career path. It sounds like you view education as some purely transactional profit driven, ROI, productivity is the only measure of success nonsense and to my previous comment - that is sad to me.
mynegation 3y ago
I thought about this a lot. I believe to a large extent the feeing of a job being “bullshit” is driven by ultra-specialization while at the same time wider context is increasingly complex and hard to grasp. Another factor is increased regulatory burden and jobs associated with it. Having said that I do believe that there are some areas where influx of money causes the empire building (some teams at large tech companies and ballooning admin staff in universities are probably two examples I immediately think of).
jmyeet 3y ago
This was a concern among some economists in the 20th century: what would happen to society when 20% of the people produced all the goods and services? With increasing automation, it seemed like that would happen eventually. Now it didn't happen in the 20th century. Most jobs we did in 2000 simply didn't exist in 1900. That same principle is extended ad infinitum to argue there's no problem with the current economic order. Bullshit jobs are really a response to that problem (IMHO). Automation could be a paradise. A future where people don't have to worry about time off task in an Amazon warehouse or work extra jobs delivering food could be fantastic. Or this could be a dystopian hell as automation allows the capital-owning class to capture even more of the labor value so we can further concentrate into a class of hyper-wealthy. In our current political climate, the dystopian hellscape of subsistence living at one end and trillionaires at the other seems more likely. The problem is capitalism.
OldManRyan 3y ago
I was talking about this book with a friend and they worked for the state qualifying people for government benefits. Think food stamps, welfare, etc etc. They said their job was a bullshit job. Why? Their reasoning was if you eliminated all the people who have to qualify people for benefits and just gave benefits to anyone who applied, you would end up spending less time and money.
- myshpa 3y ago
  So ... UBI
- TheFreim 3y ago
  This would just cause more people to apply.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    The point is the increase in spending due to both more applicants and all applicants succeeding in getting the support would be less than the reduction in spending on the being of them. This is very likely true marginally in most benefits systems: there's a bias towards avoiding any case of someone getting an "undeserved" benefit, because this is politically unpopular, even though the system will spend more money than the benefit costs to make sure that rejection happens (not to mention the additional cost to society of the incorrect rejections: ironically the more admin overhead you add to getting benefits the less accurate it becomes, as people who do not have the time or capability to navigate the bureaucracy drop out despite meeting the requirements, but those exploiting the system jave all the time in the world to find the cracks). (The UK has a particularly extreme version of this: the benefits department is hellbent on rejecting as many applicants as possible, and they lose a huge amount of court cases because of it, at great cost to the taxpayer and the lives of those affected)
- medvezhenok 3y ago
  They're neglecting the fact that if you eliminated the checks, a lot more people would apply for benefits (and you would have to deal with much more fraud - look at the COVID relief fraud which had fairly little supervision). Induced demand, if you will. It's the same as the TSA - they're not very good at catching people bringing things through at airports, but their mere presence there acts as a pretty good deterrent for people trying funky things.
jl6 3y ago
I honestly think the author doesn’t understand the jobs that are presented as bullshit jobs, and here’s an example: > In some countries, such as Brazil, such buildings still have uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you. There is a continuum from explicit feudal leftovers of this type to receptionists and front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them. This example speaks to me because I recall many years ago using an elevator in Rio de Janeiro which had an operator, and although his job was ostensibly to push the buttons, he was in fact part of the security apparatus - the friendly outer layer of a defence-in-depth strategy. Not bullshit at all. Now that’s not to say that organizational dysfunction doesn’t exist. I’ve seen people get hired and then the project that motivated the hiring has lost funding and the person has been idle. I’ve seen managers go on long-term sick leave and their +1 being too busy to find a replacement or provide supervision themselves, leaving teams directionless. I’ve seen people work really hard on bad ideas that didn’t fail fast enough. Those people absolutely described their jobs as bullshit, but it was circumstantial bullshit, not an intrinsic property of the job. The other angle here is grand purpose. The author denigrates some jobs because they achieve some allegedly amoral outcome. You might think that cosmetics shouldn’t exist, or that if they exist they shouldn’t be advertized. But that’s a value judgment to say the least, and a wholly different argument to declaring the whole supply chain to be made of bullshit jobs.
- asah 3y ago
  +1 same in NYC.
- waboremo 3y ago
  Ask yourself: what problem is that job solving and how effective is the solution? A security guard who has to manually press elevator buttons is not solving the problem effectively. Are you more secure that the guard manually presses the elevator button? Hell there could be an assault in the elevator and he wouldn't know a damn thing because he spent time away from watching cameras to press the elevator button. Therefore, it is a bullshit job.
  - t-writescode 3y ago
michaelt 3y ago
I have no doubt there are a great many people employed doing things like maintaining and policing the boundaries between organisations. For example, the process of making retail purchases and delivering the right item is highly automated - think of what happens when you place an order on amazon or ebay or any other major retailer. But when a big corporation wants to make a purchase it's manual, manual, manual, manual. Manual e-mail to ask the supplier for a quote. Manually send that to the purchasing department, who'll manually copy it into a purchase order, then manually e-mail it to the person who wants the items, who'll manually forward it to the supplier, who'll dispatch the goods to the customer, who'll manually e-mail someone to say they've been received, then the supplier will create an invoice and send it by e-mail, to someone who'll manually enter it into the finance system where it'll eventually get paid (After 30 days? 90 days? Who knows) then the supplier will get e-mailed a PDF and they'll manually match the payment up with the invoice. A great deal of manual labour, in other words, to accomplish what Amazon can do for a cent or two. And a lot more opportunities for human error too, when for some unfathomable reason the item descriptions are reworded for the purchase order, or the product is dispatched without the recipient's name or to the wrong building. Why? It's certainly not to save money, the suppliers who'll deal with this stuff understandably mark up the products for their trouble. To spot fraud perhaps - but if you've been doing the job for years without spotting any fraud, I can well believe the job would seem pointless.
justin66 3y ago
David Graeber was such an interestingly polarizing personality, since the people who like him and the people who dislike him seem at times to fall under politically unconventional lines - or maybe the polarization isn't about politics at all. Some people react to public figures based on those figures' strong personalities, but it's surprising that that might be the case with Graeber, since he was pretty damn mild mannered and affable when one actually observed him in interviews. The guy who rants maniacally about Graeber in every. single. thread. about Greaber's work hasn't commented yet. I hope he's okay.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Anarchism is polarizing, even within the left. (Not that anarchism is leftist - it’s not.) It’s also widely misunderstood. I hope you’re talking about me btw
  - justin66 3y ago
    > I hope you’re talking about me btw Indeed no. The guy isn't here, although a quick scan reveals one or two pretenders to the throne.
siliconc0w 3y ago
Working in a large company, 50-80% of the work seems like bullshit but often plausibly necessary because the projects are large and complex and there are a lot of coordination headwinds across so many teams with large adverse effects of building the wrong thing or getting things wrong at scale. So you have a lot of meetings, a lot of planning, and a lot of middle management. It's pretty easy to go too far in the wrong direction though where you can see a 1:1 ratio or even worse of administrative/managerial overhead where a project might have only 1-2 actual engineers doing work but a heavy dose of project/program/product managers, 'leadership', or other overhead. Basically this is the ratio you have to watch, ideally you have <=10% overhead, 20-30% is maybe workable but as soon as you have 50%+ overhead it's pretty obvious something is wrong.
- kurthr 3y ago
  If you have a highly profitable company you can go a really long way. Stability breeds instability... and any sufficiently complex system is operating at the limit of some instability. To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads), Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!) probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the lifetime of the product. It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way to higher profits is to kill the whole division. Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when you're profitable post IPO.
snitzr 3y ago
I read half of Graeber's book Debt before realizing he was always taking the most pessimistic opinion every chance he got for no real reason. I had to stop reading it.
sylware 3y ago
Post-pandemic, it is now even worse: There are tons of bullshit jobs... in the "essential and key sectors".
adamgordonbell 3y ago
I read this book and then started asking devs about BS projects. Turns out there are a lot. I even wrote it up. I remember someone talking about the nth attepted rewrite of the company's main project. Where all the devs were certain it would fail like the last one but the new CTO had a new plan. Just like the last CTO. So there are definitely lots of people working at jobs they beleive are pointless though somewhere up the hierarchy it's beleived to be important. Which fits grabers definition. The crazy thing is these jobs can be hard. Deadlines to hit and the like, but also they are pointless. It's a path to burnout. https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/ https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Just because they are “certain” it will fail doesn’t mean it will. Often the leaders of a company are more entrepreneurial than the ICs so it make sense the beliefs would behave this way. In my 20 year career it’s often happened that I thought something was doomed to failure and yet it succeeded. So I don’t put too much stock in my own predictions. And anyway a bullshit job should be bullshit because of the fundamental work of the job, not because of a specific risky project it’s doing for a specific time period. Like all the devs laid off this year didn’t have bullshit jobs just because their companies are fine without them.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    There's definitely a certain irony to the oft-repeated mantra that software estimation is so hard, when you also have so many comments like this one where people are absolutely certain that projects are going to fail miserably! The lack of a clear definition for bullshit jobs is my biggest problem with these sorts of discussions. The term seems to generic that everyone can apply it to something in their lives. For some it's "the job I'm personally doing is unfulfilling", while for others it seems to be "I don't see societal value in my work", and for others it's more about whole classes of jobs or work that could be removed for a better society.
reso 3y ago
I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. It changed my whole view of the social role of money and property. I have bought copies of it for multiple people. I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, because from the press tour around it it seemed to me Graeber's position was one I'd already considered and rejected. It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to the organization is still larger than the employee's salary. I could be wrong, however, either about Graeber's thesis or about his conclusion. Either way, brilliant author and great man. Lost too soon in Summer 2020, likely due to rare covid complications. Debt will always have a place on my bookshelf.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  That’s one of those books that I read and enjoyed but don’t remember a damn thing about. Do you remember enough to mention a few things you learned?
  - blueline 3y ago
    there's an interview with graeber about the book that covers a good deal of the book's content pretty succinctly: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-jamie-stern-weiner-debt-slavery-and-our-idea-of-freedom https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-ja...
  - reso 3y ago
    Its one of those books that has so shifted my thinking that it feels like the things I learned in it I always knew, but I'll try to write a few of them down. I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft". The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures. There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist. He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability. I'm due for a re-read myself sometime soon.
mo_42 3y ago
Keynes proposed to let people dig holes and let these be filled by again by people. Basically, the ultimate description of a bullshit job. Keynes proposed this as a counter measure against a depression. I'm absolutely certain that he understood that it does not make society any richer. So for an economist, bullshit jobs are especially bad because they think about what people could be doing instead. Basically, bullshit jobs come at an opportunity cost. Governments should be fighting this phenomenon. Just thinking about creating jobs is a bit shortsighted.
- pydry 3y ago
  Keynes never actually suggested doing that. He merely said it would be sufficient to escape from a liquidity trap. He advocated for productive work to escape them - like the US did by for example building the Lincoln tunnel. If he were around today to see e-digging holes and filling them up - bitcoin - he'd be horrified.
- coolhand2120 3y ago
  I would argue Keynesian economists are bullshit but not the entire astrological field of economics.
  - mo_42 3y ago
    And what would be your exact argument for that?
    - coolhand2120 3y ago
      The main predictions and suggestions mentioned in the article is a good starting point. I’m not sure what endeavor is the best for human labor but digging and filling the same ditch is not it. You would be hard pressed to convince me that anyone making such suggestions should be taken seriously. Much of our “money isn’t real” monetary policy is thanks to this thinking. There are alternatives that don’t require you to believe in silly things like the example above. Check out Thomas Sowell: Basic Economics.
coolhand2120 3y ago
Security is a bullshit job? Would be a shame if anyone was to ever commit a crime and completely invalidate that argument. Why would you say “pizza delivery is bullshit” when some non ambulatory people rely on it as a life line. Then I hear “oh it’s these people who SAY their job is bullshit” to that I say ipse dixit. This whole line of thought is bullshit. There’s a profit shark at every company looking to eliminate bullshit jobs. I’m sure this author would call that job bullshit too.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  So you didn’t read it / are talking to a point you made up in your head
  - coolhand2120 3y ago
    I quoted the link. Yes I read it. I read it 1.5 times and again when it came out so long ago. Instead of assuming bad faith just let me know where I’m off or you disagree?
devnull255 3y ago
Maybe one reason a job becomes a bullshit job is because the objectives such a job is defined to achieve are themselves bullshit. And whoever has stated the objectives are critical to the mission of the enterprise is either bullshitting themselves or believes the bullshit premises of the objectives. But then again, it's probably important to truly know what bullshit is. Is it, as expressed in the book "On Bullshit" intentional deception or even lying to advance the bullshitter's own interest? Or is it an unfounded or unsubstantiated belief in a value or goal that has not been subjected to enough careful scrutiny or deliberation?
drno123 3y ago
Elon Musk’s Twitter experiment with firing over jakf od the workforce is very interesting in regards of this book
- electriclove 3y ago
  Yeah, I feel like a lot of people in the comments don’t want to consider that they may have a bullshit job.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  We can’t know the counterfactual so we can never be sure. Perhaps some of those people were doing “long term” work that would have yielded more benefit in the next 5 years than Musk will get. I don’t think we can argue that just because the corporation didn’t collapse immediately that all those jobs were BS.
Quinzel 3y ago
I haven’t read the entire book yet, but this is a great read. Thanks for sharing.
- kneebonian 3y ago
  I got the book on audible because I liked the article. I wouldn't recommend the book. It is the article stretched out to the length of a book resulting in everything being spread thin without much substance.
whiplash451 3y ago
Great article but to be fair, there's a huge seasonality in the way people feel about their job. Asking people how they feel about their job on Jan 5th right after they come back from vacation in the darkest days of the winter is guaranteed to yield the worse possible response.
aj7 3y ago
Any job where 80% of the output can come from an LLM.
dools 3y ago
The only truly bullshit job that Graeber identifies in this whole book is anthropologist.
sfblah 3y ago
Let's assume for sake of argument that the author's thesis is more or less accurate. What types of BS jobs will the GAI revolution produce? I'm assuming the thesis can be extended to suggest the same thing will happen as with technology-related productivity gains across the 20th century.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I think the prediction of the Bullshit Jobs thesis with regard to AI is that jobs that are lost to AI automation will be replaced by Mechanical Turk-style labeling/human reinforcement jobs. The "bullshittified" version of being a customer service representative becomes marking up a transcript of a conversation between a frustrated customer and a bot failing to do the job you used to have. If you buy the Bullshit Jobs thesis (to be clear I'm somewhere in the middle here, I don't fully buy it), then mechanical turks would be the ideal way to create a backchannel full employment program. There will never be any shortage of data to label, and the same piece of data can be redundantly labeled two, three, four times, to improve accuracy. Then you can create positions for people to train those labelers, people to manage those people, et cetera. If your goal was to provide a job for literally every person, this wouldn't be a bad industry to start with. I think there will also be quite a bit of demand for it; the world will change, the distributions models predict over will shift, and they'll need new data/feedback to maintain their performance (to say nothing of competitive pressures to train models with even better performance).
maxbond 3y ago
Graeber had an HN account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24367226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24367226
IsaacL 3y ago
In memory of the olden days when Hacker News focused on discussions for entrepreneurs, here's a question: I have no doubt that hundreds of millions of BS jobs exist, but isn't that what management consultants are supposed to fix? Whether or not management consultants actually do fix wasteful jobs is another issue. But my understanding of the sector was that it was aimed to fix these issues. Organisational refactoring, if you will. Likewise, everyone complains about bad management, but good management is supposed to be able to fix the kind of issues Graeber describes. Steve Jobs' return to Apple in the late 90s is a famous example. Years ago on this site someone who worked in senior management in a tech company told a story. It went something like this: there were two teams in the company, who were always complaining, not very productive, and seemed to waste enormous amounts of time and energy on pointless busywork or trying to coordinate tasks. Everyone on team A blamed team B, everyone on team B blamed team A, etc, etc. The manager realised this needed to be fixed, talked to the relevant people on both teams, figured out what the problem was, and ... fixed it. (I have no recollection of what the actual problem was -- let's suppose it was some kind of communication or process issue.) After that, things ran smoothly. Is this story realistic? No doubt -- after all anyone who has worked in engineering is familiar with chronic technical problems that can be fixed with very small amounts of work -- if one has the requisite knowledge. And no doubt there are chronic human problems that are similarly solvable. Anyway - after many rounds of such management fixes you would have an organisation that ran like a swiss watch. In such places, good managers, like good sysadmins, fade into the background and become invisible. Google in the 2000s may have been a good example. But eventually either the organisation grows, or the good managers leave, or -- most likely -- people decide they no longer need to worry about good management, the organisation begins to rot, and eventually they're forced to bring in bad management. Corporate entropy proceeds in the usual way, and you end up with waste, bad practices, poor communication, doomed projects, crappy output, politics, and -- BS jobs. This is why I'm skeptical of political intellectuals like Graeber who note a problem but misidentify the solution. Some of the things he categorises as "BS jobs" are themselves intended to fix BS jobs. But I do not have much experience working in large organisations, so perhaps someone else can chime in.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  He didn’t identify even one job as BS. So back to the drawing board for your comment.
z3t4 3y ago
I feel cheated that I have to work more then 15 hours per week just to afford a home for my family and put food on the table.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  You should. Productivity is way up. It was stolen from you.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  I think if you wanted to live at a 1920 level of wealth you could do it on 15 hours/week (depends on your job of course).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - z3t4 3y ago
    How do you define wealth, and how would you describe 1920 level of wealth ? Sure there where a lower class that didn't have toilets etc, but what about middle class?
marcod 3y ago
>1st Bob: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers? >Tom: Yes, yes that's right. >2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people? >Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not good at dealing with customers... >1st Bob: So you physically take the specs from the customer? >Tom: Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed. >2nd Bob: So then you must physically bring them to the software people? >Tom: Well... No. ah sometimes. >1st Bob: What would you say you do here? >Tom: Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
- louzell 3y ago
  I watched Office Space for the first time in like 20 years this week. Some of the stuff I never noticed as a teenager cracked me up. My favorite was a whiteboard in the back of the meeting with the Bobs with "Planning to Plan" scrawled on it. That hit home so hard.
Conscat 3y ago
If HackerNews started a government, it could be utopia.
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  Lol
itissid 3y ago
You know one job that has become largely a bullshit but it affects the entire country. The job of a junior congressman in the US House of Representatives. Just two activities that were told to me by a guy who works for a congressman: 1. They have to spend a LOT of time raising money and they are tired a lot doing things around it. This means just convincing a lot of people what they stand for and what the other guy does not, organizing or going to fundraisers. And its a 2 year term which is so short that time gets eaten up. If senators had this crazyness the average senator could not be practically as old as they are. 2. They also have to tow party lines by letting bills they may not have read or don't know about and spend time getting lobbied about why they should or should not support a bill because some donor funded their campaign. I was told by someone in govt that lot of what the govt does is subcontracted out and the government action is just a lot of Procurement[1]. But the US govt is of course very important and has done useful things like the Clean Air and Water act or Social Security or Maintaining Public infrastructure we take for granted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement
- x86x87 3y ago
  Small correction: it's toe the party line, not tow. This is probably a typo or fat fingers on a device with small virtual keyboard.
nologic01 3y ago
Bullshit jobs are as old as humanity[1]. The obsession with "purpose" is an enlightenment thingy, while the obsession with "efficiency" and cogs-in-the-machine capitalism also a newbie pursuit. While Graeber much resended it and argued its not inevitable, humanity tends to get organized in hiearchical power pyramids. Now guess what: Being part of the pyramid gives you identity, maybe even gives you some purpose. But you can't always fill the pyramid with "proper jobs". And it is not needed either. Bullshit jobs are the fillers needed to create the intended structure. (1) Which one was the very first bullshit job? Probably some acolyte of a Babylonian priest moving around made-up religious symbols sixty times per day to keep the Sun moving.
laurex 3y ago
Having recently read this book, it’s worth noting that the last 3 chapters, which are great and could potentially stand alone as a meta analysis of the phenomena the book discusses, are not included in the Anarchist Library version of the book.
- mch82 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, what chapters are missing? My 3rd edition copy only has 7 chapters.
whiddershins 3y ago
I loved some of Graeber’s books. Changed my life. Opened my eyes. Then I interacted with him on Twitter where I saw him lying, brazenly. They I reread his books and realized, sadly, they were bullshit. So I guess he really did understand pointless jobs.
oriettaxx 3y ago
border police inside the EU before the elimination of borders found out their job was kind of useless: they got into depression even: I think they made a movie about it
deleted 3y ago
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nazgulnarsil 3y ago
Bullshit jobs are often about obfuscating liablity with extra layers such that the information that would render someone liable can be split up between several different people.
realjhol 3y ago
This ill-conceived essay is a big source of fuel for the march toward UBI
black_13 3y ago
[dead]
meehow 3y ago
overview: https://blog.2read.net/posts/book-overview-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber/ https://blog.2read.net/posts/book-overview-bullshit-jobs-a-t...

441 points by TotalCrackpot 3y ago

I see parallels between the Unabomber manifesto and his 'bullshit jobs' thesis. Although over a decade a part, they both sorta came to the same conclusion about how humans are being alienated. Both works are fundamentally critiques of modernity.

abhiminator 3y ago
Unabomber manifesto reads more like an unhinged rant written by some resentful, middle-aged Anon on 4chan than a piece of academic literature -- Ted Kaczynski somehow managed to fill 32 pages of it with racist, misogynistic and incomprehensible rambling with zero citations. Also, the fact that he literally had to threaten people to force the publication of his "manifesto" says it all to me. [0] [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/11/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-manifesto-published/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/11/ted-kaczyn...
msla 3y ago
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msla 3y ago
The Unabomber manifesto is the work of someone who wants to "cleanse the world" of the impure so only the "right" people can live.

_cenw 3y ago

This is my goto book to recommend when people are scared about being replaced by GPT.

PeterStuer 3y ago
The article was great. The book was insufferable and didn't add substance.
- esquire_900 3y ago
  Exactly. Like so many popular non-fiction books these days, there's about 15 pages of content fluffed up with 200 pages of anecdotes to be able to sell it as a book.
  - arrowsmith 3y ago
    I thought the same of Graeber's book about Debt. It's not a bad book and I feel like I learned something from it but Christ it was like 5x longer than it needed to be and felt very unstructured.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Ironically, a bullshit job.
esafak 3y ago
What consolation is that? At least a BS job pays the bills.
- _cenw 3y ago
  You misunderstand my point. A BS job wasn't necessary in the first place, so it's unlikely to be replaced by GPT. The market is pretty bad at optimizing the amount of labor large corporations need, and this isn't going to change this.
  - medvezhenok 3y ago
    Rather, I would say that with added capacity for work, what we choose to do is make things safer. And safety demands regulations which increase regulatory work and bureaucratic overhead to get anything done. So the jobs become observing all of the laws that we passed in the name of safety and equity (look at workplace accident rates since early 1900s. Or child labor rates). When you look at it this way, there's no stopping, since there will always be more "dangerous" or "unfair" things to optimize away with added labor.
  - zeroonetwothree 3y ago
    I don’t think this is very convincing. The higher ups might think a job is necessary even though it isn’t. So they may still invest in automating it even if it wasn’t necessary in the first place.
clnq 3y ago
Hmm... a lot of jobs being displaced by ML are technical, and not very bullshit.
arrowsmith 3y ago
This article relates the two: https://compactmag.com/article/a-i-might-not-steal-your-bullshit-job https://compactmag.com/article/a-i-might-not-steal-your-bull...

0xr0kk3r 3y ago

[flagged]

ryuhhnn 3y ago
Consumed by anger? Graeber was an anthropologist, it was literally his professional job to make anthropological observations about society and form them into a coherent theory, which, as someone who read this book in its entirety, he did an excellent job. To say something like “well that’s just the way things are” is tautological nonsense and adds nothing to the conversation he jumpstarted, you’re basically just saying “suck it up, these things won’t change”. One of the most compelling argument of this book was how we got to where we are by socially engineering such a system. If we can come to the conclusion that we got to where we are by deliberate choice, we can unwind all of what we’ve built and do something better for ourselves.
apsurd 3y ago
Graeber is an anthropologist. If anything, I would say he _loves_ humans, and humanity.

jdm2212 3y ago

I love that this guy is a leftist Occupy Wall Street guy who wrote a whole book whose fundamental premise is "what if capitalism was not actually ruthlessly profit-seeking, but actually kept millions upon millions of people employed doing nothing basically out of charity". It sort makes sense in the context of tightly state-controlled capitalist economies like Japan, but in a US context it's just comical. The same evil corporate managers who get lambasted for laying people off to satisfy Wall Street's demand for quarterly profit growth are supposedly keeping loads of other people employed just for funsies.

_cenw 3y ago
I mean, both can be true at the same time? I think the point is more that working a bullshit job is like an evolved form of Marx's alienated labor. Instead of not seeing yourself in whatever you create, you create nothing, but are told to keep a charade of productivity up anyway.
- jdm2212 3y ago
  It's not a charade of productivity if it is producing value for some stakeholder. "some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are generating no value at all.
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    Depends on your perception of value. Plenty of things are valuable for a company but clearly useless for the world. Some things aren't even valuable for the company but is to a manager, etc.
    - badpun 3y ago
      Some things are clearly valueless. For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a report on something, and then the document is never even opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless. There are a lot of jobs which have components like that in public administration, in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like compliance, due dilligence etc. For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public administration officials who hired us to do the audit never seemed interested in the contents of our audit report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that provided no value to them.

kristianc 3y ago

Tyler Cowen’s review at the time nails it I think: > He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day. > A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make for a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him report back to us. > At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-shit-jobs-theory.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...

spencerflem 3y ago
What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves describe their own job as bullshit. The introduction to the book makes it very clear. Graeber is not decreeing which jobs are pointless, he's describing what it feels like to work such a job based on interviews.
- louwrentius 3y ago
  I can’t stress this point enough, having read the book. I feel that “our industry” is also rife with bullshit jobs, I think we aren’t exempt, but I wonder how others feel about this. I had a bullshit job once: a project of 30M euro was clearly failing hard. 60 people were working every day and we didn’t deliver anything suitable for production. I kept my corner neat, but the writing was on the wall. It felt so surreal, trying to care and do work, but on the other hand knowing the project was doomed. After a year or so I couldn’t stand it anymore, I felt physically ill and I quit. My manager was fired a month after I left. The project got canceled 6-8 months later.

benoliver999 3y ago

I was quite shocked to hear that Graeber died quite suddenly back in 2020.

louwrentius 3y ago
Really sad! His book “Debt, the first 5000 years” is a hefty listen, but provides a very interesting perspective on debt and money.
mempko 3y ago
Covid got him. Like so many others.
- BenFeldman1930 3y ago
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  - henry2023 3y ago
    Is this funny to you?
    - BenFeldman1930 3y ago
      [flagged]
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  Further context: > Graeber died suddenly from necrotic pancreatitis on September 2, 2020 while on vacation with his wife and friends in Venice. ... His wife, Dubrovsky, attributed the pancreatitis to COVID-19, saying they both had strange symptoms for months beforehand, and she said there was a connection between COVID-19 and pancreatitis. (From Wikipedia)

Eliezer 3y ago

Directly productive jobs are often easier to automate than jobs produced by coordination difficulties. Just as we saw sectoral shift from manufacturing to service as manufacturing became easier to automate, we have been seeing a shift from service to bullshit - or so I would wildly guess.

napierzaza 3y ago

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alphanullmeric 3y ago

Another category of bullshit jobs are the pyramid scheme academic degrees. It’s one thing to work a useless job in private industry where nobody is forced to fund you, but it’s a significantly bigger problem when your publicly funded philosophy degree only qualifies you to teach philosophy on a taxpayer tenure.

rndmwlk 3y ago
I really dislike this take. It's an oversimplified view of the world and a sad evaluation of what is important in the world. I'd much rather my taxes go to funding someone learning & teaching philosophy than subsidizing Lockheeds latest and greatest kill-bot. And to preempt the inevitable assumption, no I'm not a philosophy grad I work in finance. I did, however, take philosophy courses when I was a student and I believe I benefited greatly from them.
- alphanullmeric 3y ago
  I didn’t say you couldn’t take philosophy courses, the fundamental issue that that you’re trying to force others to fund it for you. The same way I don’t support subsidies for Lockheed. This is a big thing I experienced in my undergraduate, it was always arts students trying to force things onto others. They simultaneously force their courses onto everyone else through breadth requirements while not having any breadth requirements themselves.
  - rndmwlk 3y ago
    We just fundamentally disagree about what is important in life. If education does not become a public funded "burden" then it becomes a luxury of the rich. And yes, education can *and should* be more than just preparation for your role as a cog in society. I cannot take courses in philosophy if there is no one to teach those courses. I never experienced anything like what you're talking about. I was happy to have elective courses because that meant I was able to study things that interested me outside of my planned career path. It sounds like you view education as some purely transactional profit driven, ROI, productivity is the only measure of success nonsense and to my previous comment - that is sad to me.

mynegation 3y ago

I thought about this a lot. I believe to a large extent the feeing of a job being “bullshit” is driven by ultra-specialization while at the same time wider context is increasingly complex and hard to grasp. Another factor is increased regulatory burden and jobs associated with it. Having said that I do believe that there are some areas where influx of money causes the empire building (some teams at large tech companies and ballooning admin staff in universities are probably two examples I immediately think of).

jmyeet 3y ago

This was a concern among some economists in the 20th century: what would happen to society when 20% of the people produced all the goods and services? With increasing automation, it seemed like that would happen eventually. Now it didn't happen in the 20th century. Most jobs we did in 2000 simply didn't exist in 1900. That same principle is extended ad infinitum to argue there's no problem with the current economic order. Bullshit jobs are really a response to that problem (IMHO). Automation could be a paradise. A future where people don't have to worry about time off task in an Amazon warehouse or work extra jobs delivering food could be fantastic. Or this could be a dystopian hell as automation allows the capital-owning class to capture even more of the labor value so we can further concentrate into a class of hyper-wealthy. In our current political climate, the dystopian hellscape of subsistence living at one end and trillionaires at the other seems more likely. The problem is capitalism.

OldManRyan 3y ago

I was talking about this book with a friend and they worked for the state qualifying people for government benefits. Think food stamps, welfare, etc etc. They said their job was a bullshit job. Why? Their reasoning was if you eliminated all the people who have to qualify people for benefits and just gave benefits to anyone who applied, you would end up spending less time and money.

myshpa 3y ago
So ... UBI
TheFreim 3y ago
This would just cause more people to apply.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The point is the increase in spending due to both more applicants and all applicants succeeding in getting the support would be less than the reduction in spending on the being of them. This is very likely true marginally in most benefits systems: there's a bias towards avoiding any case of someone getting an "undeserved" benefit, because this is politically unpopular, even though the system will spend more money than the benefit costs to make sure that rejection happens (not to mention the additional cost to society of the incorrect rejections: ironically the more admin overhead you add to getting benefits the less accurate it becomes, as people who do not have the time or capability to navigate the bureaucracy drop out despite meeting the requirements, but those exploiting the system jave all the time in the world to find the cracks). (The UK has a particularly extreme version of this: the benefits department is hellbent on rejecting as many applicants as possible, and they lose a huge amount of court cases because of it, at great cost to the taxpayer and the lives of those affected)
medvezhenok 3y ago
They're neglecting the fact that if you eliminated the checks, a lot more people would apply for benefits (and you would have to deal with much more fraud - look at the COVID relief fraud which had fairly little supervision). Induced demand, if you will. It's the same as the TSA - they're not very good at catching people bringing things through at airports, but their mere presence there acts as a pretty good deterrent for people trying funky things.

jl6 3y ago

I honestly think the author doesn’t understand the jobs that are presented as bullshit jobs, and here’s an example: > In some countries, such as Brazil, such buildings still have uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you. There is a continuum from explicit feudal leftovers of this type to receptionists and front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them. This example speaks to me because I recall many years ago using an elevator in Rio de Janeiro which had an operator, and although his job was ostensibly to push the buttons, he was in fact part of the security apparatus - the friendly outer layer of a defence-in-depth strategy. Not bullshit at all. Now that’s not to say that organizational dysfunction doesn’t exist. I’ve seen people get hired and then the project that motivated the hiring has lost funding and the person has been idle. I’ve seen managers go on long-term sick leave and their +1 being too busy to find a replacement or provide supervision themselves, leaving teams directionless. I’ve seen people work really hard on bad ideas that didn’t fail fast enough. Those people absolutely described their jobs as bullshit, but it was circumstantial bullshit, not an intrinsic property of the job. The other angle here is grand purpose. The author denigrates some jobs because they achieve some allegedly amoral outcome. You might think that cosmetics shouldn’t exist, or that if they exist they shouldn’t be advertized. But that’s a value judgment to say the least, and a wholly different argument to declaring the whole supply chain to be made of bullshit jobs.

asah 3y ago
+1 same in NYC.
waboremo 3y ago
Ask yourself: what problem is that job solving and how effective is the solution? A security guard who has to manually press elevator buttons is not solving the problem effectively. Are you more secure that the guard manually presses the elevator button? Hell there could be an assault in the elevator and he wouldn't know a damn thing because he spent time away from watching cameras to press the elevator button. Therefore, it is a bullshit job.
- t-writescode 3y ago

michaelt 3y ago

I have no doubt there are a great many people employed doing things like maintaining and policing the boundaries between organisations. For example, the process of making retail purchases and delivering the right item is highly automated - think of what happens when you place an order on amazon or ebay or any other major retailer. But when a big corporation wants to make a purchase it's manual, manual, manual, manual. Manual e-mail to ask the supplier for a quote. Manually send that to the purchasing department, who'll manually copy it into a purchase order, then manually e-mail it to the person who wants the items, who'll manually forward it to the supplier, who'll dispatch the goods to the customer, who'll manually e-mail someone to say they've been received, then the supplier will create an invoice and send it by e-mail, to someone who'll manually enter it into the finance system where it'll eventually get paid (After 30 days? 90 days? Who knows) then the supplier will get e-mailed a PDF and they'll manually match the payment up with the invoice. A great deal of manual labour, in other words, to accomplish what Amazon can do for a cent or two. And a lot more opportunities for human error too, when for some unfathomable reason the item descriptions are reworded for the purchase order, or the product is dispatched without the recipient's name or to the wrong building. Why? It's certainly not to save money, the suppliers who'll deal with this stuff understandably mark up the products for their trouble. To spot fraud perhaps - but if you've been doing the job for years without spotting any fraud, I can well believe the job would seem pointless.

justin66 3y ago

David Graeber was such an interestingly polarizing personality, since the people who like him and the people who dislike him seem at times to fall under politically unconventional lines - or maybe the polarization isn't about politics at all. Some people react to public figures based on those figures' strong personalities, but it's surprising that that might be the case with Graeber, since he was pretty damn mild mannered and affable when one actually observed him in interviews. The guy who rants maniacally about Graeber in every. single. thread. about Greaber's work hasn't commented yet. I hope he's okay.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Anarchism is polarizing, even within the left. (Not that anarchism is leftist - it’s not.) It’s also widely misunderstood. I hope you’re talking about me btw
- justin66 3y ago
  > I hope you’re talking about me btw Indeed no. The guy isn't here, although a quick scan reveals one or two pretenders to the throne.

siliconc0w 3y ago

Working in a large company, 50-80% of the work seems like bullshit but often plausibly necessary because the projects are large and complex and there are a lot of coordination headwinds across so many teams with large adverse effects of building the wrong thing or getting things wrong at scale. So you have a lot of meetings, a lot of planning, and a lot of middle management. It's pretty easy to go too far in the wrong direction though where you can see a 1:1 ratio or even worse of administrative/managerial overhead where a project might have only 1-2 actual engineers doing work but a heavy dose of project/program/product managers, 'leadership', or other overhead. Basically this is the ratio you have to watch, ideally you have <=10% overhead, 20-30% is maybe workable but as soon as you have 50%+ overhead it's pretty obvious something is wrong.

kurthr 3y ago
If you have a highly profitable company you can go a really long way. Stability breeds instability... and any sufficiently complex system is operating at the limit of some instability. To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads), Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!) probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the lifetime of the product. It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way to higher profits is to kill the whole division. Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when you're profitable post IPO.

snitzr 3y ago

I read half of Graeber's book Debt before realizing he was always taking the most pessimistic opinion every chance he got for no real reason. I had to stop reading it.

sylware 3y ago

Post-pandemic, it is now even worse: There are tons of bullshit jobs... in the "essential and key sectors".

adamgordonbell 3y ago

I read this book and then started asking devs about BS projects. Turns out there are a lot. I even wrote it up. I remember someone talking about the nth attepted rewrite of the company's main project. Where all the devs were certain it would fail like the last one but the new CTO had a new plan. Just like the last CTO. So there are definitely lots of people working at jobs they beleive are pointless though somewhere up the hierarchy it's beleived to be important. Which fits grabers definition. The crazy thing is these jobs can be hard. Deadlines to hit and the like, but also they are pointless. It's a path to burnout. https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/ https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Just because they are “certain” it will fail doesn’t mean it will. Often the leaders of a company are more entrepreneurial than the ICs so it make sense the beliefs would behave this way. In my 20 year career it’s often happened that I thought something was doomed to failure and yet it succeeded. So I don’t put too much stock in my own predictions. And anyway a bullshit job should be bullshit because of the fundamental work of the job, not because of a specific risky project it’s doing for a specific time period. Like all the devs laid off this year didn’t have bullshit jobs just because their companies are fine without them.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  There's definitely a certain irony to the oft-repeated mantra that software estimation is so hard, when you also have so many comments like this one where people are absolutely certain that projects are going to fail miserably! The lack of a clear definition for bullshit jobs is my biggest problem with these sorts of discussions. The term seems to generic that everyone can apply it to something in their lives. For some it's "the job I'm personally doing is unfulfilling", while for others it seems to be "I don't see societal value in my work", and for others it's more about whole classes of jobs or work that could be removed for a better society.

reso 3y ago

I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt: the first 5000 years. It changed my whole view of the social role of money and property. I have bought copies of it for multiple people. I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, because from the press tour around it it seemed to me Graeber's position was one I'd already considered and rejected. It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to the organization is still larger than the employee's salary. I could be wrong, however, either about Graeber's thesis or about his conclusion. Either way, brilliant author and great man. Lost too soon in Summer 2020, likely due to rare covid complications. Debt will always have a place on my bookshelf.

therealdrag0 3y ago
That’s one of those books that I read and enjoyed but don’t remember a damn thing about. Do you remember enough to mention a few things you learned?
- blueline 3y ago
  there's an interview with graeber about the book that covers a good deal of the book's content pretty succinctly: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-jamie-stern-weiner-debt-slavery-and-our-idea-of-freedom https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-ja...
- reso 3y ago
  Its one of those books that has so shifted my thinking that it feels like the things I learned in it I always knew, but I'll try to write a few of them down. I think for me, at the place politically that I was when I read it, the most impactful concept in Debt was about how property is a social relationship that often emerges through power/violence relationships. I remember there's a passage where he says something like "It impossible to have a relationship with an inanimate object", where the implication is: if something is "yours", that is a fact about your relationship with other human beings, not a fact about the universe. This idea is a rephrasing of Proudhon's line "Property is theft". The intro chapter has an anecdote about discussing IMF loan forgiveness which also is an amazing demonstration about how debt relationships often reflect existing power relationships between people, and are used to perpetuate those existing structures. There's a chapter wherein he describes how in french colonies, the administration convinced the locals to use their currency, having used none before. The method was to impose a debt (through a tax) on the population, payable only in that currency. Then the population will be forced to carry out whatever economic activities get them that currency (such as selling their crops to Frenchmen). This chapter also serves as a counterargument to the right-libertarian/laissez-faire view that states and markets are opposed forces--in fact it is often states which cause markets to exist. He has a thesis I can't quite recall about why different periods of history are dominated by gold/instrinsically valuable currency vs. forms of IOUs, I can't immediately recall the details. Maybe stability. I'm due for a re-read myself sometime soon.

mo_42 3y ago

Keynes proposed to let people dig holes and let these be filled by again by people. Basically, the ultimate description of a bullshit job. Keynes proposed this as a counter measure against a depression. I'm absolutely certain that he understood that it does not make society any richer. So for an economist, bullshit jobs are especially bad because they think about what people could be doing instead. Basically, bullshit jobs come at an opportunity cost. Governments should be fighting this phenomenon. Just thinking about creating jobs is a bit shortsighted.

pydry 3y ago
Keynes never actually suggested doing that. He merely said it would be sufficient to escape from a liquidity trap. He advocated for productive work to escape them - like the US did by for example building the Lincoln tunnel. If he were around today to see e-digging holes and filling them up - bitcoin - he'd be horrified.
coolhand2120 3y ago
I would argue Keynesian economists are bullshit but not the entire astrological field of economics.
- mo_42 3y ago
  And what would be your exact argument for that?
  - coolhand2120 3y ago
    The main predictions and suggestions mentioned in the article is a good starting point. I’m not sure what endeavor is the best for human labor but digging and filling the same ditch is not it. You would be hard pressed to convince me that anyone making such suggestions should be taken seriously. Much of our “money isn’t real” monetary policy is thanks to this thinking. There are alternatives that don’t require you to believe in silly things like the example above. Check out Thomas Sowell: Basic Economics.

coolhand2120 3y ago

Security is a bullshit job? Would be a shame if anyone was to ever commit a crime and completely invalidate that argument. Why would you say “pizza delivery is bullshit” when some non ambulatory people rely on it as a life line. Then I hear “oh it’s these people who SAY their job is bullshit” to that I say ipse dixit. This whole line of thought is bullshit. There’s a profit shark at every company looking to eliminate bullshit jobs. I’m sure this author would call that job bullshit too.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
So you didn’t read it / are talking to a point you made up in your head
- coolhand2120 3y ago
  I quoted the link. Yes I read it. I read it 1.5 times and again when it came out so long ago. Instead of assuming bad faith just let me know where I’m off or you disagree?

devnull255 3y ago

Maybe one reason a job becomes a bullshit job is because the objectives such a job is defined to achieve are themselves bullshit. And whoever has stated the objectives are critical to the mission of the enterprise is either bullshitting themselves or believes the bullshit premises of the objectives. But then again, it's probably important to truly know what bullshit is. Is it, as expressed in the book "On Bullshit" intentional deception or even lying to advance the bullshitter's own interest? Or is it an unfounded or unsubstantiated belief in a value or goal that has not been subjected to enough careful scrutiny or deliberation?

drno123 3y ago

Elon Musk’s Twitter experiment with firing over jakf od the workforce is very interesting in regards of this book

electriclove 3y ago
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people in the comments don’t want to consider that they may have a bullshit job.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
We can’t know the counterfactual so we can never be sure. Perhaps some of those people were doing “long term” work that would have yielded more benefit in the next 5 years than Musk will get. I don’t think we can argue that just because the corporation didn’t collapse immediately that all those jobs were BS.

Quinzel 3y ago

I haven’t read the entire book yet, but this is a great read. Thanks for sharing.

kneebonian 3y ago
I got the book on audible because I liked the article. I wouldn't recommend the book. It is the article stretched out to the length of a book resulting in everything being spread thin without much substance.

whiplash451 3y ago

Great article but to be fair, there's a huge seasonality in the way people feel about their job. Asking people how they feel about their job on Jan 5th right after they come back from vacation in the darkest days of the winter is guaranteed to yield the worse possible response.

aj7 3y ago

Any job where 80% of the output can come from an LLM.

dools 3y ago

The only truly bullshit job that Graeber identifies in this whole book is anthropologist.

sfblah 3y ago

Let's assume for sake of argument that the author's thesis is more or less accurate. What types of BS jobs will the GAI revolution produce? I'm assuming the thesis can be extended to suggest the same thing will happen as with technology-related productivity gains across the 20th century.

maxbond 3y ago
I think the prediction of the Bullshit Jobs thesis with regard to AI is that jobs that are lost to AI automation will be replaced by Mechanical Turk-style labeling/human reinforcement jobs. The "bullshittified" version of being a customer service representative becomes marking up a transcript of a conversation between a frustrated customer and a bot failing to do the job you used to have. If you buy the Bullshit Jobs thesis (to be clear I'm somewhere in the middle here, I don't fully buy it), then mechanical turks would be the ideal way to create a backchannel full employment program. There will never be any shortage of data to label, and the same piece of data can be redundantly labeled two, three, four times, to improve accuracy. Then you can create positions for people to train those labelers, people to manage those people, et cetera. If your goal was to provide a job for literally every person, this wouldn't be a bad industry to start with. I think there will also be quite a bit of demand for it; the world will change, the distributions models predict over will shift, and they'll need new data/feedback to maintain their performance (to say nothing of competitive pressures to train models with even better performance).

maxbond 3y ago

Graeber had an HN account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24367226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24367226

IsaacL 3y ago

In memory of the olden days when Hacker News focused on discussions for entrepreneurs, here's a question: I have no doubt that hundreds of millions of BS jobs exist, but isn't that what management consultants are supposed to fix? Whether or not management consultants actually do fix wasteful jobs is another issue. But my understanding of the sector was that it was aimed to fix these issues. Organisational refactoring, if you will. Likewise, everyone complains about bad management, but good management is supposed to be able to fix the kind of issues Graeber describes. Steve Jobs' return to Apple in the late 90s is a famous example. Years ago on this site someone who worked in senior management in a tech company told a story. It went something like this: there were two teams in the company, who were always complaining, not very productive, and seemed to waste enormous amounts of time and energy on pointless busywork or trying to coordinate tasks. Everyone on team A blamed team B, everyone on team B blamed team A, etc, etc. The manager realised this needed to be fixed, talked to the relevant people on both teams, figured out what the problem was, and ... fixed it. (I have no recollection of what the actual problem was -- let's suppose it was some kind of communication or process issue.) After that, things ran smoothly. Is this story realistic? No doubt -- after all anyone who has worked in engineering is familiar with chronic technical problems that can be fixed with very small amounts of work -- if one has the requisite knowledge. And no doubt there are chronic human problems that are similarly solvable. Anyway - after many rounds of such management fixes you would have an organisation that ran like a swiss watch. In such places, good managers, like good sysadmins, fade into the background and become invisible. Google in the 2000s may have been a good example. But eventually either the organisation grows, or the good managers leave, or -- most likely -- people decide they no longer need to worry about good management, the organisation begins to rot, and eventually they're forced to bring in bad management. Corporate entropy proceeds in the usual way, and you end up with waste, bad practices, poor communication, doomed projects, crappy output, politics, and -- BS jobs. This is why I'm skeptical of political intellectuals like Graeber who note a problem but misidentify the solution. Some of the things he categorises as "BS jobs" are themselves intended to fix BS jobs. But I do not have much experience working in large organisations, so perhaps someone else can chime in.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
He didn’t identify even one job as BS. So back to the drawing board for your comment.

z3t4 3y ago

I feel cheated that I have to work more then 15 hours per week just to afford a home for my family and put food on the table.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
You should. Productivity is way up. It was stolen from you.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
I think if you wanted to live at a 1920 level of wealth you could do it on 15 hours/week (depends on your job of course).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- z3t4 3y ago
  How do you define wealth, and how would you describe 1920 level of wealth ? Sure there where a lower class that didn't have toilets etc, but what about middle class?

marcod 3y ago

>1st Bob: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers? >Tom: Yes, yes that's right. >2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people? >Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not good at dealing with customers... >1st Bob: So you physically take the specs from the customer? >Tom: Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed. >2nd Bob: So then you must physically bring them to the software people? >Tom: Well... No. ah sometimes. >1st Bob: What would you say you do here? >Tom: Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!

louzell 3y ago
I watched Office Space for the first time in like 20 years this week. Some of the stuff I never noticed as a teenager cracked me up. My favorite was a whiteboard in the back of the meeting with the Bobs with "Planning to Plan" scrawled on it. That hit home so hard.

Conscat 3y ago

If HackerNews started a government, it could be utopia.

UtopiaPunk 3y ago
Lol

itissid 3y ago

You know one job that has become largely a bullshit but it affects the entire country. The job of a junior congressman in the US House of Representatives. Just two activities that were told to me by a guy who works for a congressman: 1. They have to spend a LOT of time raising money and they are tired a lot doing things around it. This means just convincing a lot of people what they stand for and what the other guy does not, organizing or going to fundraisers. And its a 2 year term which is so short that time gets eaten up. If senators had this crazyness the average senator could not be practically as old as they are. 2. They also have to tow party lines by letting bills they may not have read or don't know about and spend time getting lobbied about why they should or should not support a bill because some donor funded their campaign. I was told by someone in govt that lot of what the govt does is subcontracted out and the government action is just a lot of Procurement[1]. But the US govt is of course very important and has done useful things like the Clean Air and Water act or Social Security or Maintaining Public infrastructure we take for granted. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement

x86x87 3y ago
Small correction: it's toe the party line, not tow. This is probably a typo or fat fingers on a device with small virtual keyboard.

nologic01 3y ago

Bullshit jobs are as old as humanity[1]. The obsession with "purpose" is an enlightenment thingy, while the obsession with "efficiency" and cogs-in-the-machine capitalism also a newbie pursuit. While Graeber much resended it and argued its not inevitable, humanity tends to get organized in hiearchical power pyramids. Now guess what: Being part of the pyramid gives you identity, maybe even gives you some purpose. But you can't always fill the pyramid with "proper jobs". And it is not needed either. Bullshit jobs are the fillers needed to create the intended structure. (1) Which one was the very first bullshit job? Probably some acolyte of a Babylonian priest moving around made-up religious symbols sixty times per day to keep the Sun moving.

laurex 3y ago

Having recently read this book, it’s worth noting that the last 3 chapters, which are great and could potentially stand alone as a meta analysis of the phenomena the book discusses, are not included in the Anarchist Library version of the book.

mch82 3y ago
Out of curiosity, what chapters are missing? My 3rd edition copy only has 7 chapters.

whiddershins 3y ago

I loved some of Graeber’s books. Changed my life. Opened my eyes. Then I interacted with him on Twitter where I saw him lying, brazenly. They I reread his books and realized, sadly, they were bullshit. So I guess he really did understand pointless jobs.

oriettaxx 3y ago

border police inside the EU before the elimination of borders found out their job was kind of useless: they got into depression even: I think they made a movie about it

deleted 3y ago

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nazgulnarsil 3y ago

Bullshit jobs are often about obfuscating liablity with extra layers such that the information that would render someone liable can be split up between several different people.

realjhol 3y ago

This ill-conceived essay is a big source of fuel for the march toward UBI

black_13 3y ago

[dead]

meehow 3y ago

overview: https://blog.2read.net/posts/book-overview-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber/ https://blog.2read.net/posts/book-overview-bullshit-jobs-a-t...