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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 no

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.
- cptaj 3y ago
  There definitely are bullshit jobs. But its super dangerous when charlatans, which in my opinion are far more common, take the "bullshit job" meme and start firing people that actually do important work and creating extremely toxic work environments. I feel you about the bullshit project you were on. I've been on similar projects and its such a grind. Helps to have a healthy work-life balance.
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    Well, charlatans can take over any term by misinterpreting. We do not need to get along with their misinterpretation, though.
- ohhdotgov 3y ago
  Imagine working for a 100M generic AI unicorn startup, with nothing but a hunch? That's my worst nightmare. Somebody elses dream But: Big corps need to learn and experiment. Sometimes it's ridiculously expensive. But it needs to be done. I quit a project (stayed in the company) that is currently running something like 10M euro. I quit when it was 1M. Because I felt my small role was tedious and stupid and not a big learning opportunity. But the job needs to be done. So now less capable people are doing it. And we (they organisation) will kind of maybe succeed. But the fact is: the project is mission critical for the company. So no choice but to do the job. But i can assure you most people working that project hates it. Think their job is bullshit etc. But really. It's just a really really important threadmill. What i am trying to say: sometimes it's not the job. Sometimes it's you.
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.

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.
cptaj 3y ago
There definitely are bullshit jobs. But its super dangerous when charlatans, which in my opinion are far more common, take the "bullshit job" meme and start firing people that actually do important work and creating extremely toxic work environments. I feel you about the bullshit project you were on. I've been on similar projects and its such a grind. Helps to have a healthy work-life balance.
- mejutoco 3y ago
  Well, charlatans can take over any term by misinterpreting. We do not need to get along with their misinterpretation, though.
ohhdotgov 3y ago
Imagine working for a 100M generic AI unicorn startup, with nothing but a hunch? That's my worst nightmare. Somebody elses dream But: Big corps need to learn and experiment. Sometimes it's ridiculously expensive. But it needs to be done. I quit a project (stayed in the company) that is currently running something like 10M euro. I quit when it was 1M. Because I felt my small role was tedious and stupid and not a big learning opportunity. But the job needs to be done. So now less capable people are doing it. And we (they organisation) will kind of maybe succeed. But the fact is: the project is mission critical for the company. So no choice but to do the job. But i can assure you most people working that project hates it. Think their job is bullshit etc. But really. It's just a really really important threadmill. What i am trying to say: sometimes it's not the job. Sometimes it's you.

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.