3 ms·

How is that job adding value? Why does it exist?

• _aaed 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
• Ekaros 3y ago
  It doesn't. I think sometimes it comes to empire building in large corporations. Where value of managers is decided by how many people are under them. Not by what they actually produce. Or if the people are capable enough to make PKIs look good enough...
• jfengel 3y ago
  A job doesn't have to add value at each instant to add value. Companies can't spin up new workers in an instant. So for some jobs, they'll need to keep people on staff but not really working. They're there for specific tasks, or when more effort is needed, or for intermittent operations. A lot of office jobs aren't like factory lines, where output is constant and directly related to input. That doesn't make the job bullshit. It just means that "40 hours per week" is an arbitrary number, the result of centuries of conflict between labor and management, and there's nothing sacred about it. The amount that the job is worth depends on the job and the company, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with hours served. They need an employee to be prepared to fill that job, and the pay is negotiated on that basis. There's no reason to be expect it to be a straightforward function of prevailing hourly wage and 40 hours per week.
  • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    It seems like this shouldn't be a hard concept to explain to software devs. We're knowledge workers. The company hires us for our knowledge (knowing how to tell a computer what to do) and then retains us mostly for our knowledge (understanding the resulting code), so that when that knowledge is necessary, it doesn't need to be recreated.