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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,

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.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The point is that they think it's bullshit. The operation of copying rows itself exists for an intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts), but the dedicated role of "row copier" is a bullshit job from the vantage point of the people working it. No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
  - conjectures 3y ago
    Yes, this is thread is developing some weird capitalist inverse of marxist 'false consciousness' theory. Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist." The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
    - kapp_in_life 3y ago
      >The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded." The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
    - drewcoo 3y ago
      I think people mistake middle-brow contrarianism spoken with confidence with actual intelligence. I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
    - idopmstuff 3y ago
      It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we recognize the possibility that self-perception of the value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good measure of the value of that job.
      - waboremo 3y ago
        We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-perception because it doesn't align with our perception of their role. Further, how can we trust our perception is the better measure of the value of that job? If the person performing the role can't even assess the value properly, how are they providing that value?
        Klinky 3y ago
        Can't you simply test by asking what happens if the person stops doing their job? If nothing detrimental happens, then the job was probably bullshit.
  - rvba 3y ago
    The operation of copying rows might as well exist because some manager wants to have a big headcount and be important / promoted.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      This doesn't contradict what I've said!
  - Klinky 3y ago
    Then shouldn't the title be something like "Self-proclaimed Bullshit Jobs". Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could have variables that make the job of having an IT guy drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in many computers becoming broken costing more in money and downtime than having a trained professional drive in and move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few visits a year.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      It's an anthropological book; you, as a reader, are expected to understand that the framing is subjective. Compare The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1]: tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve any understanding of the contents, and would only make the author come across as smarmy. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You_Fall_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You...
      - Klinky 3y ago
        In the Preface, the earlier inspiration for what's a "Bullshit Job": > Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything... > This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible. > Clearly, then, we have an important social phenomenon that has received almost no systematic attention. There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?" It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary, including society's perspective, which goes beyond the personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.
        glasss 3y ago
        One of the first things he does in the book is define the term "bullshit jobs", and refine that definition to specifically include that the workers feel it is bullshit. I think it's fair to make a larger statement of social phenomenon using that definition, the same way many people can make statements of depression or poor mental health without everyone expressing those feelings being clinically diagnosed.
  - andrewmutz 3y ago
    The term "bullshit job" is confusing and probably intended just to be entertaining instead of informative. A more informative title would really be "boring jobs whose purpose isn't understood by the people doing them"
  - granshaw 3y ago
    As others have pointed out, “bullshit” is the wrong term here. More like “extremely tedious and mind numbing” How is this job that different from being on an assembly line and all you do is tighten the screws on something that passes by?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dekleinewolf 3y ago
      > More like “extremely tedious and mind numbing” To me it seems clear that that is not what this book is about. It's about the purpose, not the contents.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”
- 13of40 3y ago
  Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days. Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
- cylinder714 3y ago
  Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED BY A CRON JOB
- analog31 3y ago
  Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
bumby 3y ago
A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates “bullshit” jobs. Consider when someone is doing something simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done it” with no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. When business goals or processes change, these jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and more recent obsolescence)
- version_five 3y ago
  Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some things are the way that they are, but people with limited perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and it's hard to tell which is which.
  - bumby 3y ago
    Sure, but the chestertons fence scenario isn’t a bullshit job. It’s just not understanding the system. My point was more pressing back on the idea that someone can just be a cog without knowing the larger machine.
pharmakom 3y ago
Perfect example of how RPA with a sprinkling of LLMs will change the world of work.
sebastialonso 3y ago
bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty common scenarios: department and role duplicity, unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you mentioned. Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?
- esafak 3y ago
  That's an executive failure to communicate (the big picture). Sometimes they don't know that they're failing, and sometimes they're just beyond their depth.
esafak 3y ago
Carl Icahn offers a great illustration of the point that executives can think it's BS too. He once acquired a firm that had an office whose business purpose nobody was able to explain to him so he fired twelve floors of workers. https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-people-icahns-hostile-strategy-that-musk-could-emulate/ https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...
taskforcegemini 3y ago
in my experience the big picture is usually not given for bullshit reasons, for instance because someone thinks it is not required.

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.

woodruffw 3y ago
The point is that they think it's bullshit. The operation of copying rows itself exists for an intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts), but the dedicated role of "row copier" is a bullshit job from the vantage point of the people working it. No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
- conjectures 3y ago
  Yes, this is thread is developing some weird capitalist inverse of marxist 'false consciousness' theory. Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist." The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
  - kapp_in_life 3y ago
    >The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded." The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    I think people mistake middle-brow contrarianism spoken with confidence with actual intelligence. I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we recognize the possibility that self-perception of the value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good measure of the value of that job.
    - waboremo 3y ago
      We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-perception because it doesn't align with our perception of their role. Further, how can we trust our perception is the better measure of the value of that job? If the person performing the role can't even assess the value properly, how are they providing that value?
      - Klinky 3y ago
        Can't you simply test by asking what happens if the person stops doing their job? If nothing detrimental happens, then the job was probably bullshit.
- rvba 3y ago
  The operation of copying rows might as well exist because some manager wants to have a big headcount and be important / promoted.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    This doesn't contradict what I've said!
- Klinky 3y ago
  Then shouldn't the title be something like "Self-proclaimed Bullshit Jobs". Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could have variables that make the job of having an IT guy drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in many computers becoming broken costing more in money and downtime than having a trained professional drive in and move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few visits a year.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    It's an anthropological book; you, as a reader, are expected to understand that the framing is subjective. Compare The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1]: tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve any understanding of the contents, and would only make the author come across as smarmy. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You_Fall_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You...
    - Klinky 3y ago
      In the Preface, the earlier inspiration for what's a "Bullshit Job": > Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything... > This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible. > Clearly, then, we have an important social phenomenon that has received almost no systematic attention. There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?" It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary, including society's perspective, which goes beyond the personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.
      - glasss 3y ago
        One of the first things he does in the book is define the term "bullshit jobs", and refine that definition to specifically include that the workers feel it is bullshit. I think it's fair to make a larger statement of social phenomenon using that definition, the same way many people can make statements of depression or poor mental health without everyone expressing those feelings being clinically diagnosed.
- andrewmutz 3y ago
  The term "bullshit job" is confusing and probably intended just to be entertaining instead of informative. A more informative title would really be "boring jobs whose purpose isn't understood by the people doing them"
- granshaw 3y ago
  As others have pointed out, “bullshit” is the wrong term here. More like “extremely tedious and mind numbing” How is this job that different from being on an assembly line and all you do is tighten the screws on something that passes by?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dekleinewolf 3y ago
    > More like “extremely tedious and mind numbing” To me it seems clear that that is not what this book is about. It's about the purpose, not the contents.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”

13of40 3y ago
Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days. Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
cylinder714 3y ago
Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED BY A CRON JOB
analog31 3y ago
Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.

bumby 3y ago

A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates “bullshit” jobs. Consider when someone is doing something simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done it” with no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. When business goals or processes change, these jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and more recent obsolescence)

version_five 3y ago
Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some things are the way that they are, but people with limited perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and it's hard to tell which is which.
- bumby 3y ago
  Sure, but the chestertons fence scenario isn’t a bullshit job. It’s just not understanding the system. My point was more pressing back on the idea that someone can just be a cog without knowing the larger machine.

pharmakom 3y ago

Perfect example of how RPA with a sprinkling of LLMs will change the world of work.

sebastialonso 3y ago

bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty common scenarios: department and role duplicity, unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you mentioned. Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?

esafak 3y ago
That's an executive failure to communicate (the big picture). Sometimes they don't know that they're failing, and sometimes they're just beyond their depth.

esafak 3y ago

Carl Icahn offers a great illustration of the point that executives can think it's BS too. He once acquired a firm that had an office whose business purpose nobody was able to explain to him so he fired twelve floors of workers. https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-people-icahns-hostile-strategy-that-musk-could-emulate/ https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...

taskforcegemini 3y ago

in my experience the big picture is usually not given for bullshit reasons, for instance because someone thinks it is not required.