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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

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.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    For DevOps/Platform Engineering, I found that companies are either ridiculously overstaffed and are developing their own database orchestration from scratch (fun, but not effective in most organizations) or 3 people do everything related to running software somewhere as soon as someone shouts at them. And probably all kinds of permission clicking. Worst when someone in one of those small teams goes off the rails and uses something cause they want to have fun with it (ask me about the bare metal ceph cluster we barely use and nobody knows how to fix when it inevitably breaks)
    - ravenstine 3y ago
      That reminds me of a buklshit project I was involved with at a previous company. The short of it was they wanted some way to exchange articles between affiliated journalism outlets, and so they spent $6+ million to build what was effectively a clone of CouchDB from scratch. No, I am not making that up. I knew how silly that project was from the get-go, but thought nothing of it because, as far as I knew, it was an organizational pet project that didn't cost that much. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted when I was told how much had been spent on it over a period of a few years. I know at least a significant portion of that budget went to some staff engineers, and it wouldn't surprise me that some blood sucking consultants fed from the trough as well. This was clearly one of those things that may have started out as some developers identifying a problem, having fun with it, and then management decided it to throw a bunch of money its way thinking it was going to give them a big name.
      - garbagecoder 3y ago
        I was ordered once (because I had previously ordered my staff to not do this) to have my staff make a certain internal website comply with accessibility requirements. Except the only authorized users were soldiers and airmen who would be discharged if they had any of the disabilities this was for. They didn't believe that bird colonel JAG who told them there was no way the law applied. By the time it all got sorted out, we had it done. Apparently, a memo went around that this was required everywhere all the time and the distinction wasn't made between public-facing websites (where this is true) and this one.
- pyb 3y ago
  Yes. Tyler conveninently ignores one of the central points of the book.
- version_five 3y ago
  I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions, but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    I think you're right that line employees often lack the "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not required. An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."
    - idopmstuff 3y ago
      Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced, presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not - maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more likely that not, there is an actual reason that task needs to be done. I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The problem is that the phenomenon of feeling your own job is bullshit is not as common as he says, and on wider ranging surveys this feeling is negatively correlated with the kind of jobs he posits are more likely to be bullshit: it's much rarer for someone working in an admin role in an office to feel like their work contributes nothing useful to the world than for someone doing manual labour for some essential service, like refuse collection.
- refurb 3y ago
  Are people the best judge of whether or not their job is bullshit? Doubtful. Some people might complain about all the data they need to analyze and forms to fill out and say "my job is bullshit", but it's all needed for compliance with some industry regulations (that HN seems to love so much). Is that a bullshit job? I'd say no, even if the person doing the work thinks so.
  - pydry 3y ago
    The thing is if you look at the results and assume at least 20% of people do this then theyre still bad. Moreover, I think most people have a better idea of how bullshit their job is than an outside observer. Theyre doing it.
  - zosima 3y ago
    But the industry regulation may be what is bullshit. The job can be still bullshit, even though it serves a purpose for a specific company in a specific environment. Corporate lawyer is the archetypal graeberian bullshit job.
    - refurb 3y ago
      Corporate lawyer is bullshit? I'd say legal representation is a really important. His definition of bullshit seems to have no resemblance to what people would think of bullshit jobs.
      - kqr 3y ago
        The argument is that corporate lawyers exist (mainly) to satisfy a demand generated by their own profession. Any such profession is a category of bullshit job in the book, whether or not you personally think corporate lawyers produce value to the world.
        realjhol 3y ago
        > The argument is that corporate lawyers exist (mainly) to satisfy a demand generated by their own profession. That would apply to any profession which involves competing in a zero sum game. Zero-sum games exist, therefore these professions exist to enable players to win them
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  >What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves describe their own job as bullshit. Tbf this isn't that great of a metric and the book itself relies on it a lot. I've personally seen a few of doctors and surgeons describe their job as mostly bullshit because they're not satisfied with it.
  - chucksmash 3y ago
    I can totally imagine that they don't consider the core task they do bullshit but the volume of hours they spend on everything else and what they put up with is what makes them feel it is bullshit. I don't think many computer programmers think programming computers in itself is bullshit, but everything around that core task can feel like bullshit very easily, and a lot of programming jobs feel like nothing but bullshit. Do you feel they're describing "healing people" as bullshit, or that they're describing existing in the framework we've built up around healing people as bullshit?
    - lannisterstark 3y ago
      Although I'm sure you didn't mean it, your comment sorta reads like "they obviously couldn't have meant it that way, They obviously meant it this particular way." Not everyone likes being a doctor. This isn't a US exclusive thing.
- abandonliberty 3y ago
  >What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves describe their own job as bullshit. The author uses a very broad definition of bullshit, then pivots to their own personal view. You'll see this tactic in a lot of manipulative/dishonest content. “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.” Are the Internet, phones, cars, planes, processed food, restaurants, sporting areas, payroll, loans necessary? Many would argue that some of these are downright pernicious. It comes down to the evaluation and perspective of the employee, and thus is very much a feeling of bullshit, rather than a fact of bullshit - contrary to what the author argues. This is mostly a misinterpreted job satisfaction survey. This person has no actual domain expertise, but instead they set out to confirm their mostly naive belief.
  - incone123 3y ago
    In the book he interviews several people who do almost nothing all day. That was my takeaway when I read it. It's not about jobs where the employee does not see their work as valuable to the organization.
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      > In the book he interviews several people who do almost nothing all day. How horrifying, did he specify which terrible industries they were stuck in, and whether they were still hiring??
    - abandonliberty 3y ago
      Cherry picking. Sure, a few of these jobs exist, but nowhere near the claimed scale. Do you know anyone in a job where they do literally nothing? Anyone, feel free to comment if you do literally nothing at work :)
- pierat 3y ago
  Alienation from the act of production- In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labor power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labor and the wages paid to him for the labor. The worker is alienated from the means of production via two forms: wage compulsion and the imposed production content. The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not "voluntary but coerced" (forced labor). The worker is only able to reject wage compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family. The distribution of private property in the hands of wealth owners, combined with government enforced taxes compel workers to labor. In a capitalist world, our means of survival is based on monetary exchange, therefore we have no other choice than to sell our labour power and consequently be bound to the demands of the capitalist. The worker "[d]oes not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself;" "[l]abor is external to the worker,"[12]: 74 it is not a part of their essential being. During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work "mortifies his body and ruins his mind." The production content, direction and form are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production, "labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being.[12]: 74 A person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed by the capitalist, "the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another."[12]: 74 This means he cannot freely and spontaneously create according to his own directive as labor's form and direction belong to someone else. ------------------ There it is, "bullshit jobs". And it was written by Karl Marx over 150 years ago, regarding the 4 types of capitalist alienation.
  - pastacacioepepe 3y ago
    > The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself Simple yet very effective way to put it.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  Looking at the HR or PR examples, it would totally make sense that they see their job as fundamentally unneeded, and would prefer if people stopped doing stupid/harmful things or made their homework and came to the right institutions by themselves, or the org didn't rely on promoting itself. But the thing is, that won't happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not in 10 years. There will still be HR and PR departments to deal with humans and the stupid ways things need to work. That's like a teacher saying that fundamentally if the kids just opened their book, read the lesson and did their exercise they wouldn't be needed in the first place. But we all know why that's only one ideal scenario and in practice you still need a teacher.
- sien 3y ago
  The thesis of 'Bullshit Jobs' was also dubious at best. https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullshit-jobs-thesis-may-be-well-bullshit https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh... "In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”. and : "Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers." In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005." Link to the paper discussed by the article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  Activities can be very useful and not psychologically satisfying.
jdm2212 3y ago
Cowen's review misses the point, which is that Graeber is probably right about academia (not coincidentally, that's where he worked). Academia has no profit motive so all the money gets sunk into an ever-expanding bureaucracy rather than lowering prices or paying dividends to shareholders. The thing is, Graeber is wrong about the entire rest of the economy, where 99% of people live and work.
- spencerflem 3y ago
  The book is based of interviews, so certainly some people feel that way. Anecdotally, plenty of people I talk to (in industry) question the usefulness of whatever widget they're building.
  - jdm2212 3y ago
    I don't think he got a book deal to write this doorstop about the utterly banal claim that some people find their jobs unfulfilling. Like, duh, that's why they pay you. He got the book deal because his pitch is that the jobs are actually bullshit, i.e. the kind of jobs some salarymen have in Japan where the company is expected to keep you employed and you are expected to show up for 12 hours a day but whether actual work gets done productively is sort of beside the point.
    - spencerflem 3y ago
      I'm glad you don't feel your job is that way. This book, however, is an anthropology of people who Themselves, feel that their job is pointless. You can argue that they are incorrect, but Graeber's point is - Who is more likely to know whether a job is valuable: you, or the person actually working it?
      - jdm2212 3y ago
        I'd trust their manager or skip-level manager more than I'd trust them. Lots of rank-and-file workers really have no idea how they generate value for the organization. Until you've spent a lot of time managing people or at least sitting in on management decisions, it's hard to understand the kinds of concerns that drive corporate decision-making. The fact that a corporate minion thinks their job is pointless means the job actually is pointless like 10% of the time, or that the minion just has no idea how the org works like 90% of the time.
constantcrying 3y ago
"Tyler Cowen (/ˈkaʊən/; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department.[2] He hosts the economics blog Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education." I think it is pretty safe to assume that at the very least in this case Graeber was correct.
- seizethecheese 3y ago
  Cowan is wrong purely based on his bio? What a facile argument. I can’t even tell if you think so for political reasons or something else. For what it’s worth, Cowan is quite prolific, so not a bullshit job holder if that’s what you’re implying.
- strokirk 3y ago
  I can’t tell from your comment which of these accolades you think is problematic. Can you expand?
in3d 3y ago
UC Berkeley has 400 full and part-time staff to run DEI programs, might be a better example.
- ForHackernews 3y ago
  Everyone thinks inclusion is bullshit until they're the ones being excluded. Talk to some older devs and you might learn they've latterly come see the value in "bullshit" HR policies against discrimination.
  - in3d 3y ago
    FYI DEI rarely includes ageism.
    - ForHackernews 3y ago
      Most students in the UC system are youngish. Ageism is just a relevant example because it's one that many straight, white male developers will eventually face first-hand. I've observed peers who were historically dismissive of "special treatment" (aka antidiscrimination measures) for women and members of underrepresented racial groups develop an case of late-onset empathy once they find themselves on the other side of that "not a good culture-fit" line.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        That's an interesting observation. Here's a thought... after growing up in a culture that tells them that no one is special and that everyone's just out on their own to fend for themselves, they're bombarded with this firm an unrelenting message that some do deserve special treatment and that it's only fair. But they're not included. And then, when something unfair happens to them, and they hint that maybe they deserve this special treatment too, they're told to "fuck off, go eat shit and die patriarchy!". I wonder why they're so keen to watch Fox News in retirement. Some mysteries we'll never figure out, I suppose.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Perhaps an organization that requires such tremendous overhead just to exist should've failed long ago. It's not the anarchist's job to design improvements, but to make the evolution of improved systems possible by dismantling what's in the way. If Graeber had wanted to make contributions to management theory, he presumably would've written a different sort of book.
- ryuhhnn 3y ago
  You must not have read the book because Graeber was pretty clear that he wasn’t making suggestions of what ought to be, he was simply diagnosing the issue and providing a framework to think of something better.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    You're right. It's on my list. My familiarity with Graeber comes from Debt. But is a diagnosis not a declaration of: "there should be less of this in the world"?
    - ryuhhnn 3y ago
      > make the evolution of improved systems possible by dismantling what's in the way. I think you already answered that question for me. I’ll also add that I don’t think this book was meant to be a contribution to management theory at all, I think the broader point is that we as a society have valued jobs more than we value humanity, so we now have hundreds of thousands of people performing meaningless work just for the sake of having a job. This isn’t an issue of management, it’s an issue of values.
- kristianc 3y ago
  In Britain we've had over a decade of political leaders questioning "Hmm is this political institution / job role / arm of government / publicly funded service really necessary" and most here are of the consensus that it's essentially gutted the place. Easy to be the one in the ivory tower declaring other people's jobs to be worthless...
mempko 3y ago
Cowen is an economist while Graeber was a scientist. Graeber's book based off his article was well researched and has a lot of empirical data. While Cowen just makes stuff up in his criticism. So who do we listen to? Economists (a very dubious and arguably the most bullshit profession?) or an anthropologist who creates well researched and thoughtful works? Cowen completely missed Graeber's point in his criticism.
- alphanullmeric 3y ago
  Anthropology is not science and economics is far more quantitative than any humanities ever will be. And more importantly, economists usually have the honesty to call their opinion an opinion and separate it from the statistics, whereas any metric used by a humanities person usually comes in the form of a number they attached to their opinion to present as a fact.
  - butlerm 3y ago
    Economics is rather dodgy as a science as well, at least compared to the physical sciences. e.g. (as has been said of philosophers) is there anything more predictable than two economists who will give the opposite recommendations on nearly any question of consequence? That is not science, that is politics. Or at least the science is still in its infancy on questions like that.
    - kristianc 3y ago
      This is a pretty common misconception. Nearly all economics agree that free markets are good, immigration is a net benefit, rent controls are bad, congestion pricing is good, lowering corporate tax rates are good, the gold standard is a bad idea. Politicians disagree on all or most of these things, but nearly all economists are in consensus about this stuff.
      - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        Well yeah. If you're trying to make a career as an economist, you have to uphold the status quo. Pepsi or the Wall Street Journal aren't interested in what a Marxist economist thinks of the economy. There are other forms of economic thought, but, IMO, they all start from different fundamentals. If the goal is profit and productivity, there's various ways to organize an economy to pursue that goal. If the goal is human flourishing, then alternative economic models are needed.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
I literally own and operate a business in that headcount and it operated exceptionally well for the last decade with zero hr staff. We are considering hiring an hr person now and that isn't driven by business need, it's driven by increasing risk from bad government liability policy basically forcing us to develop policy documents we can point at if two or more employees get into a beef unrelated to work on premise or if one or more employees do something stupid that leads to their or others injury, among other government mandated risk vectors. In a sense government bullshit jobs are creating private sector bullshit jobs.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  I wouldn’t hire someone for that now. The cost of lightly customized documents is taking a hard turn towards zero.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Who is handling on and offboarding of employees? Contracts? To be honest I don't recall working without HR above a dozen employees.
  - throwaway675309 3y ago
    Anecdotal but I worked for a smallish company of about 40 people in total for several years , and we had a single person handling HR.
  - kazen44 3y ago
    also, in some countries having HR above a very small size (25 people or so) is a requirement because of the addition of work councils. workers have legal representation with the company above a certain size, and HR is required as a counter party for a lot of the stuff worker councils co-decide on.
  - crtified 3y ago
    In a small business with low staff turnover - which amply describes any number of small city outlets - most of that stuff is ad-hocable. It's not efficient, but it's such a small part of the work involved that few cares are given.
Aperocky 3y ago
He's very confident in his assessment but never even took any possibility that things maybe automated away or done differently. We're heading in that direction - just because everybody rode a horse doesn't mean a car won't find market.
justin66 3y ago
If someone were to ask me to guess which academic is more likely to have a good grasp on organizational structures and efficiency, a philosopher/economist or an anthropologist, I think rather than pondering the question and their qualifications, I'd make a rude noise. (Cowen's review, characterizing the book as "entertaining," isn't bad)
goodpoint 3y ago
Cowen's review is very poor. Graeber famously interviewed a lot of people and they described their own jobs as bullshit and explained why. Graeber's work might be opinionated but his evidence is stronger than Cowen's flippant comeback. >> At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job. This almost reads as Cowen is claiming that Graeber's job is bullshit. Graeber is a prize winning and successful writer and academic.
- unmole 3y ago
  Graeber was a successful bullshit artist. Sure, he didn't have a bullshit job according to his vague and peculiar definition. But this was a man who wrote a door stopper of a book on Debt which blitley conflates credit with benevolence.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  I don’t think winning prizes that academics themselves create is proof that the academic jobs are valuable. Of course we could say the same thing about Tyler.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    With enough mental gymnastic you can say that.
daniel-cussen 3y ago
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coldtea 3y ago
>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. I've been in a couple organizations of around 100 people with no HR at all. They did just fine. One of them got one HR person when it got to 120 employees, mainly because it wanted to sell and potential buyers would see them as "more serious" that way - not because it was needed for daily functioning (and growing just fine). HR mostly became necessary in the litigious happy countries as a means of ass covering. Even in the US such sized companies used to work just fine without HR or with just a person or so back in the day.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Hmm I've worked in a startup that had around 80 people when I joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what? They totally had HR. It was just one person whose job wasn't officially HR and they soon got a whole HR department as they expanded to 400 people. HR is definitely not a "bullshit job". Who do you think deals with payroll and pensions and hiring and firing and contracts and complaints and m/paternity leave and ....
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >Hmm I've worked in a startup that had around 80 people when I joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what? They totally had HR. It was just one person whose job wasn't officially HR Still refutes kristianc's/Cowen's case, about a company absolutely needing HR so much that "one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all" is in serious trouble. Apparently the company can servive not just with an understaffed HR deparment, but even with no HR department at all. Even with just a person (as in your example) unofficially doing some related tasks part time, alongside their real main role (which is not the same case as "having HR but just calling it something else - for starters it's just an ocassional task, and second it's not formal nor seen in some aggrandizing view). And not only survive, but, if I get you story right expand to 80 people, and from there to 400 people, before even setting up an actual HR department. The parent quotes Tyler writing: "let him [the person considering much of HR redundant] 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." Well, I've discussed various stages of the companies growth with the people managing such companies, and the lack of HR was never considered a problem. And if they lied to me, considered the objective proof of that: if it was they'd have prioritized creating one, like they had estalibshed other departments, but they never cared of it. One only did it in the end, after getting close to 120 people, to appease potential buyers. So this "let him manage one (...) and report back to us", as if this will make him see the error of his idea, is already shot down by that. People have managed more than one, and never saw the issue even with not having a HR at all, much less with having an adequately stuffed one.
aaron695 3y ago
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Mouthfeel 3y ago
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wazoox 3y ago
There are tables in the book that make it very clear that the phenomenon is real : the number of administrative jobs has literally exploded in Universities, particularly private Universities, while the number of diplomas delivered augmented much less. Where is our "productivity improvement"? Here are the numbers (1982 - 2005) : Administrative personnel : +240% Management : +85% Students : +56% Teachers : +50% Diplomas delivered : +47% Also a banker notice than his job can be 100% automatized, and according to his own evaluation, at least half the jobs in his bank (60,000) can be 100% automatized.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Administrative requirements at universities have skyrocketed over the past decades. These admin positions don't exist for fun, but rather to address a plethora of new regulations and needs [1]: > Perhaps most controversial is an increasing raft of federal and state regulations that universities must abide by: the Clery Act, which requires campuses to report their crime activity; new Title IX regulations that govern the handling of sexual assault; and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requirements for providing educational records. > In 2013 and 2014 alone, the Department of Education released rules and directives on 10 new sets of issues, ranging from proposed rules on teacher preparation programs to Net Price Calculator requirements to specific regulations for FAFSA verification. Complying with all these rules requires additional staff and additional money. The resources required are not insignificant: a Vanderbilt study of 13 colleges and universities found that regulatory compliance comprises 3 to 11% of schools’ nonhospital operating expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff’s time. > “It is pages and pages and pages of regulations that require more sophisticated professionals,” says Penny Rue, vice president for Campus Life at Wake Forest University and board chair-elect of the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals. Rue adds that incidents on college campuses, such as the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, contributed to a need for administrative spending that often goes unnoticed, from case management services to threat assessment teams. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats-and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/?sh=2ca4824b456a https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
suction 3y ago
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cyanydeez 3y ago
My new employer has a single HR person and they just push HR out to other departments
knowledge-clay 3y ago
> 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 This all sounds to me like DG's definition of 'bullshit'. David Graeber is an anthropologist, ie, he takes a wide view of humanity: many societies, including societies not that alien to us, manage to function without this kind of work. Why is it suddenly indispensable? It is not a business advice book about running an individual institution, it is a wider social critique about how we have set up our society and economy. > let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist and would critique the idea of a top-down capitalist firm itself (ie, the deeper question: why do we insist on structuring labor this way?). He is not telling anyone the best way to run it.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Absolutely. Thanks for being elaborate. I try to get to this point talking about insurance specialist working in the medical field in the US. Those jobs are vastly more present in the US than in other places that provide adéquat level of care and also have a concept of healtcare. Going to the ER you sign a lot of paperwork thougt your admission. I think of it as the eastern island moais. Something society is choosing to do, and focus on. While effort could be directed elsewhere in order to enhance our futur.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  We don’t “insist” on structuring labour this way, it’s what arose as efficient from a market of voluntary private actors. Very “anarchist” in that sense. I would hope that Graeber is familiar with basic texts like Theory of the Firm.
  - knowledge-clay 3y ago
    > arose as efficient Capitalism does not drive towards 'efficiency' in some general sense. It is full of dead weight, destruction, forced scarcity, waste, and bloat. This is not accidental, it is essential to how the system functions.
steve1977 3y ago
I was working in organizations with 60-80 employees. One had a one-person HR „department“, the other one part-time (or rather a guy who did other stuff as well). Worked fine.
vogon_laureate 3y ago
The irony is that many people might say that an anarchist anthropologist is a “bullshit job”.
bigger_inside 3y ago
this misses the structural analysis. As Zizek says, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Critiques like this are thinking deep inside the box. The freezer protection inside the bubble wrap inside the box inside the shipping box. in our current system, do these jobs serve a function? Yes, sure. The institutions have to be fed statitics about the corporation because that's how money is generated; the lawyers have to keep an eye on admissions and lawsuits because there are constant legal challenges, or the threat of them. The point is that modern capitalism is set up to require them. It's not necessary. The nurses reporting numbers to number-collector jobs is actively harmful to medical care. A system where students sue universities is very often actively harmful to education. Our system has been set up to support and require all these support desk jobs that add no value to the thing these institutions actually make.
firebirdn99 3y ago
These jobs can and will all be replaced with ChatGPT. The many number of them like all other professions will be reduced to a single or a couple workers doing the oversight. All tasks that use repeatable actions and/or pattern matching, some analysis, will be done in parallel and more efficiently by ChatGPT like apps. And therefore many jobs that required 9-5 corporate or knowledge work which required essentially simple but tedious tasks, like in excel will be obsolete. That involves a large chunk of the American middle class I think. Unfortunately, I think there are only a small percentage of corporate jobs that are safe from it. Even leadership, or decision making you can argue would be a place where GPT tools play a massive part.
roguas 3y ago
I have not read Graeber's book in full, but his umbrella statements seemed off putting(childish). If you can operate a company with good outcomes on half the staff by all means go do that. It will be extremely easy to compete. I think his blind spot is that some people are doing exploratory work that has 10% chance to be impactful. With enough bad luck this person can work 10 years without meaningful results and even when the results come, you will be happy for 3-4 months before drowning again. Still if you skip it all together you will have a company that will fall out of relevance in 3-5 years due to lack of progress. Basically he fails to see novel progress is really rare and assumes the optic of worker, but manager's optics is: 10% is fine, I am just gonna hire 10 people, pay them well and have meaningful progress every year.

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.
- _cenw 3y ago
  For DevOps/Platform Engineering, I found that companies are either ridiculously overstaffed and are developing their own database orchestration from scratch (fun, but not effective in most organizations) or 3 people do everything related to running software somewhere as soon as someone shouts at them. And probably all kinds of permission clicking. Worst when someone in one of those small teams goes off the rails and uses something cause they want to have fun with it (ask me about the bare metal ceph cluster we barely use and nobody knows how to fix when it inevitably breaks)
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    That reminds me of a buklshit project I was involved with at a previous company. The short of it was they wanted some way to exchange articles between affiliated journalism outlets, and so they spent $6+ million to build what was effectively a clone of CouchDB from scratch. No, I am not making that up. I knew how silly that project was from the get-go, but thought nothing of it because, as far as I knew, it was an organizational pet project that didn't cost that much. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted when I was told how much had been spent on it over a period of a few years. I know at least a significant portion of that budget went to some staff engineers, and it wouldn't surprise me that some blood sucking consultants fed from the trough as well. This was clearly one of those things that may have started out as some developers identifying a problem, having fun with it, and then management decided it to throw a bunch of money its way thinking it was going to give them a big name.
    - garbagecoder 3y ago
      I was ordered once (because I had previously ordered my staff to not do this) to have my staff make a certain internal website comply with accessibility requirements. Except the only authorized users were soldiers and airmen who would be discharged if they had any of the disabilities this was for. They didn't believe that bird colonel JAG who told them there was no way the law applied. By the time it all got sorted out, we had it done. Apparently, a memo went around that this was required everywhere all the time and the distinction wasn't made between public-facing websites (where this is true) and this one.
pyb 3y ago
Yes. Tyler conveninently ignores one of the central points of the book.
version_five 3y ago
I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions, but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization. Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I think you're right that line employees often lack the "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not required. An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced, presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not - maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more likely that not, there is an actual reason that task needs to be done. I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
rcxdude 3y ago
The problem is that the phenomenon of feeling your own job is bullshit is not as common as he says, and on wider ranging surveys this feeling is negatively correlated with the kind of jobs he posits are more likely to be bullshit: it's much rarer for someone working in an admin role in an office to feel like their work contributes nothing useful to the world than for someone doing manual labour for some essential service, like refuse collection.
refurb 3y ago
Are people the best judge of whether or not their job is bullshit? Doubtful. Some people might complain about all the data they need to analyze and forms to fill out and say "my job is bullshit", but it's all needed for compliance with some industry regulations (that HN seems to love so much). Is that a bullshit job? I'd say no, even if the person doing the work thinks so.
- pydry 3y ago
  The thing is if you look at the results and assume at least 20% of people do this then theyre still bad. Moreover, I think most people have a better idea of how bullshit their job is than an outside observer. Theyre doing it.
- zosima 3y ago
  But the industry regulation may be what is bullshit. The job can be still bullshit, even though it serves a purpose for a specific company in a specific environment. Corporate lawyer is the archetypal graeberian bullshit job.
  - refurb 3y ago
    Corporate lawyer is bullshit? I'd say legal representation is a really important. His definition of bullshit seems to have no resemblance to what people would think of bullshit jobs.
    - kqr 3y ago
      The argument is that corporate lawyers exist (mainly) to satisfy a demand generated by their own profession. Any such profession is a category of bullshit job in the book, whether or not you personally think corporate lawyers produce value to the world.
      - realjhol 3y ago
        > The argument is that corporate lawyers exist (mainly) to satisfy a demand generated by their own profession. That would apply to any profession which involves competing in a zero sum game. Zero-sum games exist, therefore these professions exist to enable players to win them
lannisterstark 3y ago
>What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves describe their own job as bullshit. Tbf this isn't that great of a metric and the book itself relies on it a lot. I've personally seen a few of doctors and surgeons describe their job as mostly bullshit because they're not satisfied with it.
- chucksmash 3y ago
  I can totally imagine that they don't consider the core task they do bullshit but the volume of hours they spend on everything else and what they put up with is what makes them feel it is bullshit. I don't think many computer programmers think programming computers in itself is bullshit, but everything around that core task can feel like bullshit very easily, and a lot of programming jobs feel like nothing but bullshit. Do you feel they're describing "healing people" as bullshit, or that they're describing existing in the framework we've built up around healing people as bullshit?
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    Although I'm sure you didn't mean it, your comment sorta reads like "they obviously couldn't have meant it that way, They obviously meant it this particular way." Not everyone likes being a doctor. This isn't a US exclusive thing.
abandonliberty 3y ago
>What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves describe their own job as bullshit. The author uses a very broad definition of bullshit, then pivots to their own personal view. You'll see this tactic in a lot of manipulative/dishonest content. “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.” Are the Internet, phones, cars, planes, processed food, restaurants, sporting areas, payroll, loans necessary? Many would argue that some of these are downright pernicious. It comes down to the evaluation and perspective of the employee, and thus is very much a feeling of bullshit, rather than a fact of bullshit - contrary to what the author argues. This is mostly a misinterpreted job satisfaction survey. This person has no actual domain expertise, but instead they set out to confirm their mostly naive belief.
- incone123 3y ago
  In the book he interviews several people who do almost nothing all day. That was my takeaway when I read it. It's not about jobs where the employee does not see their work as valuable to the organization.
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    > In the book he interviews several people who do almost nothing all day. How horrifying, did he specify which terrible industries they were stuck in, and whether they were still hiring??
  - abandonliberty 3y ago
    Cherry picking. Sure, a few of these jobs exist, but nowhere near the claimed scale. Do you know anyone in a job where they do literally nothing? Anyone, feel free to comment if you do literally nothing at work :)
pierat 3y ago
Alienation from the act of production- In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labor power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labor and the wages paid to him for the labor. The worker is alienated from the means of production via two forms: wage compulsion and the imposed production content. The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not "voluntary but coerced" (forced labor). The worker is only able to reject wage compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family. The distribution of private property in the hands of wealth owners, combined with government enforced taxes compel workers to labor. In a capitalist world, our means of survival is based on monetary exchange, therefore we have no other choice than to sell our labour power and consequently be bound to the demands of the capitalist. The worker "[d]oes not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself;" "[l]abor is external to the worker,"[12]: 74 it is not a part of their essential being. During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work "mortifies his body and ruins his mind." The production content, direction and form are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production, "labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being.[12]: 74 A person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed by the capitalist, "the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another."[12]: 74 This means he cannot freely and spontaneously create according to his own directive as labor's form and direction belong to someone else. ------------------ There it is, "bullshit jobs". And it was written by Karl Marx over 150 years ago, regarding the 4 types of capitalist alienation.
- pastacacioepepe 3y ago
  > The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself Simple yet very effective way to put it.
makeitdouble 3y ago
Looking at the HR or PR examples, it would totally make sense that they see their job as fundamentally unneeded, and would prefer if people stopped doing stupid/harmful things or made their homework and came to the right institutions by themselves, or the org didn't rely on promoting itself. But the thing is, that won't happen. Not today, not tomorrow, not in 10 years. There will still be HR and PR departments to deal with humans and the stupid ways things need to work. That's like a teacher saying that fundamentally if the kids just opened their book, read the lesson and did their exercise they wouldn't be needed in the first place. But we all know why that's only one ideal scenario and in practice you still need a teacher.
sien 3y ago
The thesis of 'Bullshit Jobs' was also dubious at best. https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullshit-jobs-thesis-may-be-well-bullshit https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh... "In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”. and : "Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers." In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005." Link to the paper discussed by the article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
thebigwinning 3y ago
Activities can be very useful and not psychologically satisfying.

jdm2212 3y ago

Cowen's review misses the point, which is that Graeber is probably right about academia (not coincidentally, that's where he worked). Academia has no profit motive so all the money gets sunk into an ever-expanding bureaucracy rather than lowering prices or paying dividends to shareholders. The thing is, Graeber is wrong about the entire rest of the economy, where 99% of people live and work.

spencerflem 3y ago
The book is based of interviews, so certainly some people feel that way. Anecdotally, plenty of people I talk to (in industry) question the usefulness of whatever widget they're building.
- jdm2212 3y ago
  I don't think he got a book deal to write this doorstop about the utterly banal claim that some people find their jobs unfulfilling. Like, duh, that's why they pay you. He got the book deal because his pitch is that the jobs are actually bullshit, i.e. the kind of jobs some salarymen have in Japan where the company is expected to keep you employed and you are expected to show up for 12 hours a day but whether actual work gets done productively is sort of beside the point.
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    I'm glad you don't feel your job is that way. This book, however, is an anthropology of people who Themselves, feel that their job is pointless. You can argue that they are incorrect, but Graeber's point is - Who is more likely to know whether a job is valuable: you, or the person actually working it?
    - jdm2212 3y ago
      I'd trust their manager or skip-level manager more than I'd trust them. Lots of rank-and-file workers really have no idea how they generate value for the organization. Until you've spent a lot of time managing people or at least sitting in on management decisions, it's hard to understand the kinds of concerns that drive corporate decision-making. The fact that a corporate minion thinks their job is pointless means the job actually is pointless like 10% of the time, or that the minion just has no idea how the org works like 90% of the time.

constantcrying 3y ago

"Tyler Cowen (/ˈkaʊən/; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department.[2] He hosts the economics blog Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education." I think it is pretty safe to assume that at the very least in this case Graeber was correct.

seizethecheese 3y ago
Cowan is wrong purely based on his bio? What a facile argument. I can’t even tell if you think so for political reasons or something else. For what it’s worth, Cowan is quite prolific, so not a bullshit job holder if that’s what you’re implying.
strokirk 3y ago
I can’t tell from your comment which of these accolades you think is problematic. Can you expand?

in3d 3y ago

UC Berkeley has 400 full and part-time staff to run DEI programs, might be a better example.

ForHackernews 3y ago
Everyone thinks inclusion is bullshit until they're the ones being excluded. Talk to some older devs and you might learn they've latterly come see the value in "bullshit" HR policies against discrimination.
- in3d 3y ago
  FYI DEI rarely includes ageism.
  - ForHackernews 3y ago
    Most students in the UC system are youngish. Ageism is just a relevant example because it's one that many straight, white male developers will eventually face first-hand. I've observed peers who were historically dismissive of "special treatment" (aka antidiscrimination measures) for women and members of underrepresented racial groups develop an case of late-onset empathy once they find themselves on the other side of that "not a good culture-fit" line.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      That's an interesting observation. Here's a thought... after growing up in a culture that tells them that no one is special and that everyone's just out on their own to fend for themselves, they're bombarded with this firm an unrelenting message that some do deserve special treatment and that it's only fair. But they're not included. And then, when something unfair happens to them, and they hint that maybe they deserve this special treatment too, they're told to "fuck off, go eat shit and die patriarchy!". I wonder why they're so keen to watch Fox News in retirement. Some mysteries we'll never figure out, I suppose.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

Perhaps an organization that requires such tremendous overhead just to exist should've failed long ago. It's not the anarchist's job to design improvements, but to make the evolution of improved systems possible by dismantling what's in the way. If Graeber had wanted to make contributions to management theory, he presumably would've written a different sort of book.

ryuhhnn 3y ago
You must not have read the book because Graeber was pretty clear that he wasn’t making suggestions of what ought to be, he was simply diagnosing the issue and providing a framework to think of something better.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  You're right. It's on my list. My familiarity with Graeber comes from Debt. But is a diagnosis not a declaration of: "there should be less of this in the world"?
  - ryuhhnn 3y ago
    > make the evolution of improved systems possible by dismantling what's in the way. I think you already answered that question for me. I’ll also add that I don’t think this book was meant to be a contribution to management theory at all, I think the broader point is that we as a society have valued jobs more than we value humanity, so we now have hundreds of thousands of people performing meaningless work just for the sake of having a job. This isn’t an issue of management, it’s an issue of values.
kristianc 3y ago
In Britain we've had over a decade of political leaders questioning "Hmm is this political institution / job role / arm of government / publicly funded service really necessary" and most here are of the consensus that it's essentially gutted the place. Easy to be the one in the ivory tower declaring other people's jobs to be worthless...

mempko 3y ago

Cowen is an economist while Graeber was a scientist. Graeber's book based off his article was well researched and has a lot of empirical data. While Cowen just makes stuff up in his criticism. So who do we listen to? Economists (a very dubious and arguably the most bullshit profession?) or an anthropologist who creates well researched and thoughtful works? Cowen completely missed Graeber's point in his criticism.

alphanullmeric 3y ago
Anthropology is not science and economics is far more quantitative than any humanities ever will be. And more importantly, economists usually have the honesty to call their opinion an opinion and separate it from the statistics, whereas any metric used by a humanities person usually comes in the form of a number they attached to their opinion to present as a fact.
- butlerm 3y ago
  Economics is rather dodgy as a science as well, at least compared to the physical sciences. e.g. (as has been said of philosophers) is there anything more predictable than two economists who will give the opposite recommendations on nearly any question of consequence? That is not science, that is politics. Or at least the science is still in its infancy on questions like that.
  - kristianc 3y ago
    This is a pretty common misconception. Nearly all economics agree that free markets are good, immigration is a net benefit, rent controls are bad, congestion pricing is good, lowering corporate tax rates are good, the gold standard is a bad idea. Politicians disagree on all or most of these things, but nearly all economists are in consensus about this stuff.
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      Well yeah. If you're trying to make a career as an economist, you have to uphold the status quo. Pepsi or the Wall Street Journal aren't interested in what a Marxist economist thinks of the economy. There are other forms of economic thought, but, IMO, they all start from different fundamentals. If the goal is profit and productivity, there's various ways to organize an economy to pursue that goal. If the goal is human flourishing, then alternative economic models are needed.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

I literally own and operate a business in that headcount and it operated exceptionally well for the last decade with zero hr staff. We are considering hiring an hr person now and that isn't driven by business need, it's driven by increasing risk from bad government liability policy basically forcing us to develop policy documents we can point at if two or more employees get into a beef unrelated to work on premise or if one or more employees do something stupid that leads to their or others injury, among other government mandated risk vectors. In a sense government bullshit jobs are creating private sector bullshit jobs.

travisjungroth 3y ago
I wouldn’t hire someone for that now. The cost of lightly customized documents is taking a hard turn towards zero.
nicbou 3y ago
Who is handling on and offboarding of employees? Contracts? To be honest I don't recall working without HR above a dozen employees.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  Anecdotal but I worked for a smallish company of about 40 people in total for several years , and we had a single person handling HR.
- kazen44 3y ago
  also, in some countries having HR above a very small size (25 people or so) is a requirement because of the addition of work councils. workers have legal representation with the company above a certain size, and HR is required as a counter party for a lot of the stuff worker councils co-decide on.
- crtified 3y ago
  In a small business with low staff turnover - which amply describes any number of small city outlets - most of that stuff is ad-hocable. It's not efficient, but it's such a small part of the work involved that few cares are given.

Aperocky 3y ago

He's very confident in his assessment but never even took any possibility that things maybe automated away or done differently. We're heading in that direction - just because everybody rode a horse doesn't mean a car won't find market.

justin66 3y ago

If someone were to ask me to guess which academic is more likely to have a good grasp on organizational structures and efficiency, a philosopher/economist or an anthropologist, I think rather than pondering the question and their qualifications, I'd make a rude noise. (Cowen's review, characterizing the book as "entertaining," isn't bad)

goodpoint 3y ago

Cowen's review is very poor. Graeber famously interviewed a lot of people and they described their own jobs as bullshit and explained why. Graeber's work might be opinionated but his evidence is stronger than Cowen's flippant comeback. >> At that point we’ll see who really has the bullshit job. This almost reads as Cowen is claiming that Graeber's job is bullshit. Graeber is a prize winning and successful writer and academic.

unmole 3y ago
Graeber was a successful bullshit artist. Sure, he didn't have a bullshit job according to his vague and peculiar definition. But this was a man who wrote a door stopper of a book on Debt which blitley conflates credit with benevolence.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
I don’t think winning prizes that academics themselves create is proof that the academic jobs are valuable. Of course we could say the same thing about Tyler.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  With enough mental gymnastic you can say that.

daniel-cussen 3y ago

[dead]

coldtea 3y ago

>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. I've been in a couple organizations of around 100 people with no HR at all. They did just fine. One of them got one HR person when it got to 120 employees, mainly because it wanted to sell and potential buyers would see them as "more serious" that way - not because it was needed for daily functioning (and growing just fine). HR mostly became necessary in the litigious happy countries as a means of ass covering. Even in the US such sized companies used to work just fine without HR or with just a person or so back in the day.

IshKebab 3y ago
Hmm I've worked in a startup that had around 80 people when I joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what? They totally had HR. It was just one person whose job wasn't officially HR and they soon got a whole HR department as they expanded to 400 people. HR is definitely not a "bullshit job". Who do you think deals with payroll and pensions and hiring and firing and contracts and complaints and m/paternity leave and ....
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Hmm I've worked in a startup that had around 80 people when I joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what? They totally had HR. It was just one person whose job wasn't officially HR Still refutes kristianc's/Cowen's case, about a company absolutely needing HR so much that "one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all" is in serious trouble. Apparently the company can servive not just with an understaffed HR deparment, but even with no HR department at all. Even with just a person (as in your example) unofficially doing some related tasks part time, alongside their real main role (which is not the same case as "having HR but just calling it something else - for starters it's just an ocassional task, and second it's not formal nor seen in some aggrandizing view). And not only survive, but, if I get you story right expand to 80 people, and from there to 400 people, before even setting up an actual HR department. The parent quotes Tyler writing: "let him [the person considering much of HR redundant] 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." Well, I've discussed various stages of the companies growth with the people managing such companies, and the lack of HR was never considered a problem. And if they lied to me, considered the objective proof of that: if it was they'd have prioritized creating one, like they had estalibshed other departments, but they never cared of it. One only did it in the end, after getting close to 120 people, to appease potential buyers. So this "let him manage one (...) and report back to us", as if this will make him see the error of his idea, is already shot down by that. People have managed more than one, and never saw the issue even with not having a HR at all, much less with having an adequately stuffed one.

aaron695 3y ago

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Mouthfeel 3y ago

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wazoox 3y ago

There are tables in the book that make it very clear that the phenomenon is real : the number of administrative jobs has literally exploded in Universities, particularly private Universities, while the number of diplomas delivered augmented much less. Where is our "productivity improvement"? Here are the numbers (1982 - 2005) : Administrative personnel : +240% Management : +85% Students : +56% Teachers : +50% Diplomas delivered : +47% Also a banker notice than his job can be 100% automatized, and according to his own evaluation, at least half the jobs in his bank (60,000) can be 100% automatized.

crazygringo 3y ago
Administrative requirements at universities have skyrocketed over the past decades. These admin positions don't exist for fun, but rather to address a plethora of new regulations and needs [1]: > Perhaps most controversial is an increasing raft of federal and state regulations that universities must abide by: the Clery Act, which requires campuses to report their crime activity; new Title IX regulations that govern the handling of sexual assault; and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requirements for providing educational records. > In 2013 and 2014 alone, the Department of Education released rules and directives on 10 new sets of issues, ranging from proposed rules on teacher preparation programs to Net Price Calculator requirements to specific regulations for FAFSA verification. Complying with all these rules requires additional staff and additional money. The resources required are not insignificant: a Vanderbilt study of 13 colleges and universities found that regulatory compliance comprises 3 to 11% of schools’ nonhospital operating expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff’s time. > “It is pages and pages and pages of regulations that require more sophisticated professionals,” says Penny Rue, vice president for Campus Life at Wake Forest University and board chair-elect of the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals. Rue adds that incidents on college campuses, such as the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, contributed to a need for administrative spending that often goes unnoticed, from case management services to threat assessment teams. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats-and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/?sh=2ca4824b456a https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

suction 3y ago

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cyanydeez 3y ago

My new employer has a single HR person and they just push HR out to other departments

knowledge-clay 3y ago

> 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 This all sounds to me like DG's definition of 'bullshit'. David Graeber is an anthropologist, ie, he takes a wide view of humanity: many societies, including societies not that alien to us, manage to function without this kind of work. Why is it suddenly indispensable? It is not a business advice book about running an individual institution, it is a wider social critique about how we have set up our society and economy. > let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist and would critique the idea of a top-down capitalist firm itself (ie, the deeper question: why do we insist on structuring labor this way?). He is not telling anyone the best way to run it.

dopidopHN 3y ago
Absolutely. Thanks for being elaborate. I try to get to this point talking about insurance specialist working in the medical field in the US. Those jobs are vastly more present in the US than in other places that provide adéquat level of care and also have a concept of healtcare. Going to the ER you sign a lot of paperwork thougt your admission. I think of it as the eastern island moais. Something society is choosing to do, and focus on. While effort could be directed elsewhere in order to enhance our futur.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
We don’t “insist” on structuring labour this way, it’s what arose as efficient from a market of voluntary private actors. Very “anarchist” in that sense. I would hope that Graeber is familiar with basic texts like Theory of the Firm.
- knowledge-clay 3y ago
  > arose as efficient Capitalism does not drive towards 'efficiency' in some general sense. It is full of dead weight, destruction, forced scarcity, waste, and bloat. This is not accidental, it is essential to how the system functions.

steve1977 3y ago

I was working in organizations with 60-80 employees. One had a one-person HR „department“, the other one part-time (or rather a guy who did other stuff as well). Worked fine.

vogon_laureate 3y ago

The irony is that many people might say that an anarchist anthropologist is a “bullshit job”.

bigger_inside 3y ago

this misses the structural analysis. As Zizek says, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Critiques like this are thinking deep inside the box. The freezer protection inside the bubble wrap inside the box inside the shipping box. in our current system, do these jobs serve a function? Yes, sure. The institutions have to be fed statitics about the corporation because that's how money is generated; the lawyers have to keep an eye on admissions and lawsuits because there are constant legal challenges, or the threat of them. The point is that modern capitalism is set up to require them. It's not necessary. The nurses reporting numbers to number-collector jobs is actively harmful to medical care. A system where students sue universities is very often actively harmful to education. Our system has been set up to support and require all these support desk jobs that add no value to the thing these institutions actually make.

firebirdn99 3y ago

These jobs can and will all be replaced with ChatGPT. The many number of them like all other professions will be reduced to a single or a couple workers doing the oversight. All tasks that use repeatable actions and/or pattern matching, some analysis, will be done in parallel and more efficiently by ChatGPT like apps. And therefore many jobs that required 9-5 corporate or knowledge work which required essentially simple but tedious tasks, like in excel will be obsolete. That involves a large chunk of the American middle class I think. Unfortunately, I think there are only a small percentage of corporate jobs that are safe from it. Even leadership, or decision making you can argue would be a place where GPT tools play a massive part.

roguas 3y ago

I have not read Graeber's book in full, but his umbrella statements seemed off putting(childish). If you can operate a company with good outcomes on half the staff by all means go do that. It will be extremely easy to compete. I think his blind spot is that some people are doing exploratory work that has 10% chance to be impactful. With enough bad luck this person can work 10 years without meaningful results and even when the results come, you will be happy for 3-4 months before drowning again. Still if you skip it all together you will have a company that will fall out of relevance in 3-5 years due to lack of progress. Basically he fails to see novel progress is really rare and assumes the optic of worker, but manager's optics is: 10% is fine, I am just gonna hire 10 people, pay them well and have meaningful progress every year.