8 ms·

Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job?

karaterobot 3y ago
> Graeber... [defines] a bullshit job as ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’ > Empirical data suggested that, in fact, relatively few people appear to consider their jobs as useless... > Graeber acknowledged that it was difficult for one person, or several, to determine universally what makes a job ‘useful’ or ‘necessary’. ‘There can be no objective measure of social value,’ he wrote. So basically the prediction is that a lot of people have bullshit jobs and are unwilling to admit it, and when you ask them whether their jobs are bullshit, they say "what, no way", which either proves or disproves the prediction, depending on your definition of bullshit job. Also, there is no definition of what a bullshit job is. Glad I know that now!
hcks 3y ago
> ‘I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting,’ he said. ‘The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point. 12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm. The feeling of bullshitness and alienation from corporate workers stems from the difference between what their time is worth to themselves (subjectively a lot, you only live once, etc) and what it’s worth to their employer (in $, nearly nothing to a multinational).
- ejb999 3y ago
  >>12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm. True, on the otherhand, that is one person - there are probably thousands and thousands of other people, at the same company, doing the same useless tasks - many of which costs a lot more. You could say the same thing about the project I just left - company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$ - and there are probably 50 or more of the same type of apps being developed by this same company - none of which have even a trivial amount of users, it is an open secret in the IT part of the company, but nobody wants to say anything, because everyone wants to keep their job.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    I once worked at an agency and was assigned to a project for a very big athletic shoe brand to create an app for a particular smart watch (no, not that one) to integrate with a run-tracking system they were building. We also built the mobile apps for it. We got the whole thing done. They paid a lot more than $12k for it, plus whatever else they were spending. After it was done, but before release, they bought another company that had the same stuff already, and scrapped the whole project. I’d say 90+% of the development work I’ve done has never made anyone any money, and almost as much has never helped a single person. It’s a weird industry.
    - dingnuts 3y ago
      The app you built was a hedge against the scenario where the deal with the other company fell through. It may have not been used in the end, but it might have been used as a bargaining chip in the deal, and it definitely provided security to the business in the case that the purchase had fallen through. I've worked on several projects that were experimental and built to validate business theories that turned out not to be true, and the projects were scrapped. Does that mean they were bullshit? No, it means the business learned something about the market with the experimental project that was never certain to begin with. People think they have bullshit jobs because they can't see the forest for the trees, and because of that viral book & thinkpieces surrounding it -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless. That's a dangerous thing to believe in a highly developed economy, frankly. And it's just wrong.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        The perception matters for the worker, economy be damned, and sure, this may have had some value as you suggest—or it may have been an accident of poor coordination or internal politics and power games in the company. Tons of these things companies do aren’t for some good, rational reason. They’re just mistakes, or results of games run amok. > Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless. The book version, at least, isn’t so simplistic or stupid.
- deleted 3y ago
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- paradoxyl 3y ago
  This is why the elites have to be overthrown, their insane structures destroyed. They are beyond greedy, they are simply stupid. Imagine, wasting 12k on a powerpoint while people in your country starve and struggle on the street with addiction. What sort of psychpathy have you ingested?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    The one thing has nothing to do with the other so.
- deleted 3y ago
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- zonethundery 3y ago
  I hear you, and have been in similar situations with an extra zero on the figure. At the end of the day, the value wasn't in the memo itself but rather in making the person who asked you for it look competent to their boss ("yes, this agenda item is covered, we are ready for the meeting"). I make no normative judgment on whether or not that is bullshit.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    > There are ‘flunkies’, such as administrative assistants or elevator operators, who do work solely to make other people feel more important From the article paraphrasing Graeber's work. Seems pretty close.
pierat 3y ago
Marx explained this quite well in his capitalist critiques (note: these are different than the communist manifesto). In analyzing Capitalism, Marx found that there's 4 primary types of alienation happening to the worker in a capitalist enterprise. This was expanded from Hegel's 3 types of alienation. Alienation 1: From a worker's product. Alienation 2: From the act of production Alienation 3: From a worker's human nature Alienation 4: From other workers Wikipedia has a great intro writeup here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation ----------------- But, what is a "bullshit job"? It's a job where you cannot see what you do, cannot see its impact on the whole of production, cannot see how others fit in with what you do, and siloed so that you do work in exclusivity of others. But there it is. Marx wrote about these problems, and there were starting to be these problems. Now, we have computation as its own force that serves to radically separate us from each other's contributions, so that *only* the management and owner class can see how things all go together. And as to Alienation 4, we see this explicitly with "gig workers", being pitted against each other. There's only so much work, and gig companies figured out they could make workers compete with each other to who will accept the least money for a parcel of work, all the while giving up essential social obligations workers fought in blood to get (workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc). People believe they're in bullshit jobs because they have been removed as far as possible from what they and their colleagues do, as a control point by the ownership and managerial class. In reality, almost all jobs are not bullshit.
- throwboatyface 3y ago
  Wait, so most workers are alienated, and alienation makes a job bullshit. But most jobs are not bullshit? > A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole. - Ursula Le Guin
  - 3y ago
danwee 3y ago
I think all the jobs I have had in the past (over a decade) as a software engineer were BS. - I have worked for a bank. You tell me why do we need yet another bank nowadays, and why on earth do we need to make a fancy SPA with effects and all? Anyway, they paid good money and I gained experience - I have worked for an e-commerce platform. Again, if it disappeared from the internet no one would complain. We were into "let's build more microservices" mindset. A waste of talent (the engineers I worked with were intelligent people) and time. But hey, I was a Staff engineer, and so I got a bunch of money in exchange for my wisdom in distributed systems (but I still wonder why do we need distributed systems when a one big machine or a couple of them would have done the job) - I have worked for a SAAS company. The classic pay per customer per month. Totally useless as well (there dozens SAAS companies like us out there). In this one we were more worried about using "boring technology" (PHP, nginx, Postgres) instead of asking ourselves why do we even exist as a company - And a long etc. In every company I have been I never felt we were doing something meaningful for the society. I don't feel bad, whenever I see around I see useless companies (not only in IT). I just take as granted, in the capitalist society we live in, that people just want to make money, send their kids to good schools, enjoy vacations in a sunny place, and then retire in peace... so useless jobs/companies are needed. What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, while we don't put the same amount of resources to solve a real problem like what's going in Israel/Palestine/Russia/Ukraine where people are dying.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Competition is meaningful. If you weren't there putting on the pressure, we'd have a bunch of fat lazy companies with expensive, crappy products.
  - malcolmgreaves 3y ago
    Competition isn’t sufficient: there already are fat, lazy companies with expensive, crappy products today. Multiple players in an arena don’t necessarily lead to a better product emerging either. It can, for instance, create an oversaturated market that leads to unsustainable prices or costs and no one wins.
lacker 3y ago
If you're wondering whether a job is worthwhile, the person who works at a job isn't the best person to ask. The person who is paying for that job to be done is the best person to ask. At a large corporation, that's the manager. Often there's a job that's important, but you can only understand why it's important if you understand how the whole organization works. Someone writes memos that get ignored 90% of the time? Works on projects that get canceled 90% of the time? Well, that can make sense, if the 10% is valuable enough that it pays off. As a manager, it's your responsibility to help make it clear to the people on your team why their work matters. By default, they won't understand this as well as you do.
- registeredcorn 3y ago
  I'm not saying that you're wrong, but isn't there also an obvious incentive for someone in a managerial position to insist that the people that they manage are doing important work, because it raises the profile/importance of their own position in turn? I suppose this thought is probably an overly pessimistic viewpoint, but generally speaking, many people want to justify the importance of their work so they can continue to be employed - it seems logical that if you're job is to manage others, then a very big part of what your job actually is, is hyping up the importance of those peoples work to justify them needing a manager.
  - MightyBuzzard 3y ago
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- pixl97 3y ago
  Eh, even that isn't a great metric at scale. Some managers just grow teams to have a large team size. Saying nothing about the job that needs done.
- jzb 3y ago
  If you're wondering whether a job is worthwhile, ask "what happens if this stops being done / being staffed?" And you can extrapolate to whatever level and timescale you like. That is, what happens if you stop doing your job? To the company, to the industry, to the world at large. What happens in a month, year, etc. (Assuming the function is not replaced.) Hell, what happens if your department or even company stops existing? Is there a negative effect overall on the world? If you're satisfied making a difference at the company level, and you see an immediate or even medium-term impact on stopping what you do - then congrats, your job isn't bullshit. If you need an impact beyond that, it may be harder to feel your job isn't bullshit. A job may be crucial to an organization but still feel like bullshit if you feel a need to contribute to the world overall. If you stop making / marketing / selling widgets, will that matter?
supportengineer 3y ago
It's a bullshit job when, if you don't do it, or don't do it well, there really aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone. There are other ways the job could be done, but your management doesn't want them done that way.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  That's a bad test. Sometimes the consequences are so nebulous and spread over thinly over large population or far in the future, etc. that it is hard to argue this test can be useful. For example, if you decide to stop doing research (say into genetics) then there are no immediate consequences to anybody. But we still think that genetics research is important and worthwhile cause. Even if not every researcher is able to provide ground breaking results, collectively they help us resolve important problems like improving our longetivity, drug research, etc.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    > Sometimes the consequences are so nebulous and spread over thinly over large population or far in the future, etc. that it is hard to argue this test can be useful. But they are consequences, so the research example passes OP's test. There are plenty of actual jobs out there where if they stopped being done, nothing bad would happen, at any scale and within any time frame. People writing reports that exactly zero people read. People making things that just get thrown away. People digging holes that other people just fill with dirt. That's what OP is getting at.
- fuzzfactor 3y ago
  >It's a bullshit job when, if you don't do it, or don't do it well, there really aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone. OTOH, sometimes if you do an outstanding job with great pride, performing beyond expectations, there aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone either. When both are true you've really got a double-ringer.
netbioserror 3y ago
I have the privilege of working at a smaller company, where I get to pick my tools and write software primarily solo in an engineering context, and where the requests of the peers and clients using my tools make their way to me with great detail. I have lengthy mathematical analysis discussions with my boss on a nearly daily basis. I can see the value I am creating almost directly. I consider myself incredibly lucky and count my blessings every day.
conqrr 3y ago
Simplest reason: The Incentives, pressure, ownership and motivation for work at most places do not justify the outcome, rewards and appreciation. Analogy: Making a burger end-to-end and handing to customer feels good. Assembly line where your part is just flipping buns all day is pretty meaningless.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
1. Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society. 2. Because even if they contribute something to the society, they don't see the connection between what they are doing and a worthy cause. Seeing connection between what you do and the goals of the company and then understanding those goals is not very common, according to my experience.
- oarabbus_ 3y ago
  >Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society. Well, according to you maybe. The customers/patrons of the company probably have a differing view.
  - henry2023 3y ago
    Gamblers and Casino Owners would agree that casinos are essential in our society.
    - noelherrick 3y ago
      And the biggest casino of all is the stock market.
      - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
        Stock market performs a very important, valuable role. It is companies that try to exploit the stock market who are problem...
        JohnFen 3y ago
        That might (or might not) be the case, but it doesn't take away from the fact that it's also a casino.
  - 3y ago
VancouverMan 3y ago
I'm not finding highly relevant terms such as "government", "public sector", "bureaucrat", and "union" in the article. I don't see how this situation can be discussed without considering the roles of government and unions. Both government and unions introduce significant distortions when it comes to people doing work. Most government "jobs" are a net loss to society as a whole. These government "jobs" typically involve decreasing the productivity of the private sector in some way, without providing any real (in the economic sense) value on their own. Thanks to these pointless government "jobs" and the burden they impose on society, the private sector gets stuck involuntarily creating more pointless "jobs" to try to deal with, or otherwise defend themselves from, the government "workers" and their interference. There's a multiplier effect going on, where one pointless government bureaucrat "job" can necessitate the creation of many other pointless private sector "jobs" just to deal with the pointless bureaucracy that that one bureaucrat creates. None of these "jobs" provide real value, and all are a burden on society because of how they destroy real wealth. Unions, especially public sector unions, just exacerbate the problem by interfering with the reduction of pointless government "jobs", and worse, by encouraging the creation of new pointless government "jobs" to increase their membership numbers. As government and public sector unions have gotten larger and more invasive over time, of course we should expect to see more and more people stuck doing jobs that are inherently valueless, or even outright harmful to society at large.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Those government jobs are there to protect the vultures of capitalism from destroying the world around us or leaving us a subservient rubes to corporate overlords. Damned straight the government should be yanking the corporate choke chain -- HARD.
  - VancouverMan 3y ago
    What you're describing there is typically the result of government-imposed regulations stifling free market competition, thus enabling the formation of monopolies (or oligopolies) that wouldn't naturally exist. It's another example of how pointless government "jobs" cause immense harm. Without the government interference that enables them, such monopolies/oligopolies simply wouldn't be able to survive, eliminating the problem you're worried about.
tr3ntg 3y ago
Even if you work at a fast-growing startup, that is making tons of money with few employees, and every single thing you do affects the bottom line, your own role is easily replaceable. I think this overall topic blurs with the concept of "I, as an individual, do not matter to the professional world."
ltr_ 3y ago
as a it contractor for financial institutions i would say that we earned a lot of money just filling holes made by the previous ones and making our own in the process for the next one. that's what it is, make up problems to solve it later. hell, this whole fucking cursed industry is just that. making holes to fill them up later to keep the wheel of incompetence and delusion spinning. sturgeon law all the way.
TheIronMark 3y ago
If I'm disconnected from the real-world impact of my job, I'm likely to think it's bullshit. That doesn't make it a bullshit job; that just means that I can't see how it fits into the bigger picture. Companies aren't going to keep people employed if they're not somehow contributing to profitability or growth.
markwkw 3y ago
I think the root cause is increased abstractness of jobs. A job where you cut and plane wood to make planks that are used to build houses has a straightforward connection to basic life. A job where you are trying to influence a group of people - so that they organize themselves to efficiently - make a change to a software tool - that affects a process for measuring of a collective endeavour - of a bigger group of people who are trying to optimize the selling and buying - of complex derivative financial contracts that are used to - increase the efficiency of a market of another financial product - which is a virtualization of actual trading of real world goods - so that incredibly complex entities (corporations) can get various and hard to grasp benefits - so that ultimately planks are cheaper ... such a job is virtually impossible to appreciate. We are transistors in a byzantine supercomputer of global economy.
jacurtis 3y ago
Maybe the real secret is to embrace the fact you have a bullshit job. Allow me to tell you a story of my corporate hero. I'm going to call this guy Jack to preserve his identity, because he continues this ruse to this day. To jump to the punchline, Jack has a bullshit job, but he embraces the bullshit. So I've had a few run-ins with Jack over the years at my Corp. He's always the guy that is sort of three degrees removed from several projects, but not really leading any projects. So you see him in the background a lot, but never in the foreground. Anyway, I never thought much of Jack. Nothing positive, nor negative. I was merely acquainted with his existence. One day, I am cleaning up some infrastructure and going through some of our cloud billing. I'm just cleaning up old infrastructure so I could make a mindless report and give it to someone who gives it to someone who eventually summarizes it for someone who then mentions it to another person, which I hope and assume turns into a bullet point on a presentation to someone "important" (you know, like we all do). Anyway, I stumble on some weird stuff that I don't recognize. Its been idle for years, never accessed, never used. This stuff is a great target for me to clean up and improve my metrics. I find this infrastructure and I don't recognize the project at all. I mention it to my team, no one's heard of it. So I go up the chain, no one's heard of it. I actually go up to the CTO and they had never heard of this project either. So I'm curious, I dig deeper. This is clearly abandoned. It hadn't been logged into in years. But I notice that it was created by Jack. I didn't really know Jack, but I looked him up to see if he even still worked at the company. I looked up his version control access and he still had an active account. I looked at his commit history and in the past 365 days he only had 4 commits. So I assume he was laid off, we recently had a round of layoffs (about 15% of the workforce). But sure enough Jack still works here according to our HRM. Somehow dodging layoffs. Interesting, he must be working on something important. So I coordinate a meeting with Jack before I disassemble his infrastructure. Jack was very elusive. Coordinating him was harder than scheduling time with my CTO. But I eventually get the meeting. So I start asking him about the project. He barely remembers the project in question (or was just playing dumb). He explained that the project was completed but never got integrated into the main application. So I asked him what he has been working on since then, and he gave me a list of projects, all of which had been cancelled and abandoned. I confirmed the existence and cancellation of 2 of those projects, the others I think he was either lying about or they never made it far enough off the ground to have any record of. I finally asked who he reports to and he gave me the name of someone that is different than someone in the HRM. So I asked about his current project and he told me several things he was doing. I was familiar with one of those projects is all (and I am generally familiar with every project since I am in those meetings). He then mentioned a project that was actually managed by my team. That's when I realized this guy was just bullshitting. I decided not to call him out on it initially. I ended up just laughing about the whole situation and sort of dropped it. I simply didn't care enough and I knew me bringing this up the chain would probably get him fired. So I just kept it in my back pocket for a little while. A few months later I went out to a whiskey bar with some guys from work. We ended up meeting up with a few people that got laid off in the layoffs. We had a few drinks and I ended up asking if anyone knows how Jack avoided layoffs. People were shocked, everyone had the same question, "what is he even working on now?". I said basically nothing. He has only made 4 commits in the last year! He's floating along but he stays in the background just enough that no one questions it. That's when one of the guys told me that Jack was involved in several projects years ago and he got really upset when he had several large and prominent project cancellations. He had made an enemy with the previous head of cybersecurity and the rumor was that he was going to be fired, but then the Head of Cyber got throat cancer unexpectedly and dissapeared. He said ever since then, Jack has been extremely uncooperative at work and no one really likes working with him, so he always gets pushed into the background. He summed it up the best way possible: > "Jack realized that all of his work was going unnoticed, so he stopped working and no one noticed". Ever since then I find ways to cross paths with Jack. I haven't done anything I just ask him questions and hear what lies and excuses he comes up with. I laugh inside everytime. I eventually drop breadcrumbs around the office about Jack's existence just to see how people react. I find the whole thing very entertaining. Jack still works here. He is extremely active on the Slack #pets channel and I see daily updates of his Corgi each day. Jack doesn't know that I know his secret. But Jack is in a weird way my hero. He realized he had a bullshit job, so instead of being bothered by it, he just embraced it. He treats his job like the bullshit that it treats him as. Maybe we can all learn from Jack.
frank_bb 3y ago
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nine_zeros 3y ago
I can tell my engineering management's job is utter BS. Their entire job is 0. Scope out work for the next quarter - done by PM and engineers 1. Track engineering work using JIRA points or some status reports - automatically generated 2. Perform some 9 point exercise to stack rank people every 6 months on the basis of JIRA points (automatically generated) and # of commits (also automatically generated) - most of this work is automatically generated 3. Give bonuses to the top of the stack and PIP the bottom - work actually done by HR 4. Open requisition for a backfill - work actually done by HR 5. Interview them for 6 months - also mostly done by engineers and recruiters 6. After they are hired, subject them to the same meat grinder - work done by engineers. All the work is actually done by someone else. This management role (and all the 7 managers above them) are all just this glue. Why not just automate all this work? Before someone responds with "people problems" and "management philosophies", please - all the above work is administrative assistant work that does not need higher salaries than engineers. And "people problems" can be handled by HR.
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hateful 3y ago
If the only reason for your job is to make money to feed yourself and your family - then isn't that important in and of itself? Because if you and many like you are all doing this, then you are benefiting society in a very direct way - one family at a time. I think it would be hard to eliminated these jobs, without any alternative (e.g. UBI or a completely different system altogether. Note: not directly arguing for another system myself here).
- isleyaardvark 3y ago
  That doesn’t mean they aren’t bullshit jobs. Otherwise you could say the same about the classic Keynesian “pay people to dig holes then fill them back up” job.
fuzzfactor 3y ago
>Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job? There is probably some truth to the rumor.
temp0826 3y ago
Of course most (all?) jobs are bullshit. No one should want to work for someone else's dream. You work for money or you're a fool.

> Graeber... [defines] a bullshit job as ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’ > Empirical data suggested that, in fact, relatively few people appear to consider their jobs as useless... > Graeber acknowledged that it was difficult for one person, or several, to determine universally what makes a job ‘useful’ or ‘necessary’. ‘There can be no objective measure of social value,’ he wrote. So basically the prediction is that a lot of people have bullshit jobs and are unwilling to admit it, and when you ask them whether their jobs are bullshit, they say "what, no way", which either proves or disproves the prediction, depending on your definition of bullshit job. Also, there is no definition of what a bullshit job is. Glad I know that now!

hcks 3y ago

> ‘I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting,’ he said. ‘The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point. 12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm. The feeling of bullshitness and alienation from corporate workers stems from the difference between what their time is worth to themselves (subjectively a lot, you only live once, etc) and what it’s worth to their employer (in $, nearly nothing to a multinational).

ejb999 3y ago
>>12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm. True, on the otherhand, that is one person - there are probably thousands and thousands of other people, at the same company, doing the same useless tasks - many of which costs a lot more. You could say the same thing about the project I just left - company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$ - and there are probably 50 or more of the same type of apps being developed by this same company - none of which have even a trivial amount of users, it is an open secret in the IT part of the company, but nobody wants to say anything, because everyone wants to keep their job.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I once worked at an agency and was assigned to a project for a very big athletic shoe brand to create an app for a particular smart watch (no, not that one) to integrate with a run-tracking system they were building. We also built the mobile apps for it. We got the whole thing done. They paid a lot more than $12k for it, plus whatever else they were spending. After it was done, but before release, they bought another company that had the same stuff already, and scrapped the whole project. I’d say 90+% of the development work I’ve done has never made anyone any money, and almost as much has never helped a single person. It’s a weird industry.
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    The app you built was a hedge against the scenario where the deal with the other company fell through. It may have not been used in the end, but it might have been used as a bargaining chip in the deal, and it definitely provided security to the business in the case that the purchase had fallen through. I've worked on several projects that were experimental and built to validate business theories that turned out not to be true, and the projects were scrapped. Does that mean they were bullshit? No, it means the business learned something about the market with the experimental project that was never certain to begin with. People think they have bullshit jobs because they can't see the forest for the trees, and because of that viral book & thinkpieces surrounding it -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless. That's a dangerous thing to believe in a highly developed economy, frankly. And it's just wrong.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      The perception matters for the worker, economy be damned, and sure, this may have had some value as you suggest—or it may have been an accident of poor coordination or internal politics and power games in the company. Tons of these things companies do aren’t for some good, rational reason. They’re just mistakes, or results of games run amok. > Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless. The book version, at least, isn’t so simplistic or stupid.
deleted 3y ago
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paradoxyl 3y ago
This is why the elites have to be overthrown, their insane structures destroyed. They are beyond greedy, they are simply stupid. Imagine, wasting 12k on a powerpoint while people in your country starve and struggle on the street with addiction. What sort of psychpathy have you ingested?
- hef19898 3y ago
  The one thing has nothing to do with the other so.
deleted 3y ago
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zonethundery 3y ago
I hear you, and have been in similar situations with an extra zero on the figure. At the end of the day, the value wasn't in the memo itself but rather in making the person who asked you for it look competent to their boss ("yes, this agenda item is covered, we are ready for the meeting"). I make no normative judgment on whether or not that is bullshit.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  > There are ‘flunkies’, such as administrative assistants or elevator operators, who do work solely to make other people feel more important From the article paraphrasing Graeber's work. Seems pretty close.

pierat 3y ago

Marx explained this quite well in his capitalist critiques (note: these are different than the communist manifesto). In analyzing Capitalism, Marx found that there's 4 primary types of alienation happening to the worker in a capitalist enterprise. This was expanded from Hegel's 3 types of alienation. Alienation 1: From a worker's product. Alienation 2: From the act of production Alienation 3: From a worker's human nature Alienation 4: From other workers Wikipedia has a great intro writeup here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation ----------------- But, what is a "bullshit job"? It's a job where you cannot see what you do, cannot see its impact on the whole of production, cannot see how others fit in with what you do, and siloed so that you do work in exclusivity of others. But there it is. Marx wrote about these problems, and there were starting to be these problems. Now, we have computation as its own force that serves to radically separate us from each other's contributions, so that *only* the management and owner class can see how things all go together. And as to Alienation 4, we see this explicitly with "gig workers", being pitted against each other. There's only so much work, and gig companies figured out they could make workers compete with each other to who will accept the least money for a parcel of work, all the while giving up essential social obligations workers fought in blood to get (workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc). People believe they're in bullshit jobs because they have been removed as far as possible from what they and their colleagues do, as a control point by the ownership and managerial class. In reality, almost all jobs are not bullshit.

throwboatyface 3y ago
Wait, so most workers are alienated, and alienation makes a job bullshit. But most jobs are not bullshit? > A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole. - Ursula Le Guin
- 3y ago

danwee 3y ago

I think all the jobs I have had in the past (over a decade) as a software engineer were BS. - I have worked for a bank. You tell me why do we need yet another bank nowadays, and why on earth do we need to make a fancy SPA with effects and all? Anyway, they paid good money and I gained experience - I have worked for an e-commerce platform. Again, if it disappeared from the internet no one would complain. We were into "let's build more microservices" mindset. A waste of talent (the engineers I worked with were intelligent people) and time. But hey, I was a Staff engineer, and so I got a bunch of money in exchange for my wisdom in distributed systems (but I still wonder why do we need distributed systems when a one big machine or a couple of them would have done the job) - I have worked for a SAAS company. The classic pay per customer per month. Totally useless as well (there dozens SAAS companies like us out there). In this one we were more worried about using "boring technology" (PHP, nginx, Postgres) instead of asking ourselves why do we even exist as a company - And a long etc. In every company I have been I never felt we were doing something meaningful for the society. I don't feel bad, whenever I see around I see useless companies (not only in IT). I just take as granted, in the capitalist society we live in, that people just want to make money, send their kids to good schools, enjoy vacations in a sunny place, and then retire in peace... so useless jobs/companies are needed. What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, while we don't put the same amount of resources to solve a real problem like what's going in Israel/Palestine/Russia/Ukraine where people are dying.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Competition is meaningful. If you weren't there putting on the pressure, we'd have a bunch of fat lazy companies with expensive, crappy products.
- malcolmgreaves 3y ago
  Competition isn’t sufficient: there already are fat, lazy companies with expensive, crappy products today. Multiple players in an arena don’t necessarily lead to a better product emerging either. It can, for instance, create an oversaturated market that leads to unsustainable prices or costs and no one wins.

lacker 3y ago

If you're wondering whether a job is worthwhile, the person who works at a job isn't the best person to ask. The person who is paying for that job to be done is the best person to ask. At a large corporation, that's the manager. Often there's a job that's important, but you can only understand why it's important if you understand how the whole organization works. Someone writes memos that get ignored 90% of the time? Works on projects that get canceled 90% of the time? Well, that can make sense, if the 10% is valuable enough that it pays off. As a manager, it's your responsibility to help make it clear to the people on your team why their work matters. By default, they won't understand this as well as you do.

registeredcorn 3y ago
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but isn't there also an obvious incentive for someone in a managerial position to insist that the people that they manage are doing important work, because it raises the profile/importance of their own position in turn? I suppose this thought is probably an overly pessimistic viewpoint, but generally speaking, many people want to justify the importance of their work so they can continue to be employed - it seems logical that if you're job is to manage others, then a very big part of what your job actually is, is hyping up the importance of those peoples work to justify them needing a manager.
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago
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pixl97 3y ago
Eh, even that isn't a great metric at scale. Some managers just grow teams to have a large team size. Saying nothing about the job that needs done.
jzb 3y ago
If you're wondering whether a job is worthwhile, ask "what happens if this stops being done / being staffed?" And you can extrapolate to whatever level and timescale you like. That is, what happens if you stop doing your job? To the company, to the industry, to the world at large. What happens in a month, year, etc. (Assuming the function is not replaced.) Hell, what happens if your department or even company stops existing? Is there a negative effect overall on the world? If you're satisfied making a difference at the company level, and you see an immediate or even medium-term impact on stopping what you do - then congrats, your job isn't bullshit. If you need an impact beyond that, it may be harder to feel your job isn't bullshit. A job may be crucial to an organization but still feel like bullshit if you feel a need to contribute to the world overall. If you stop making / marketing / selling widgets, will that matter?

supportengineer 3y ago

It's a bullshit job when, if you don't do it, or don't do it well, there really aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone. There are other ways the job could be done, but your management doesn't want them done that way.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
That's a bad test. Sometimes the consequences are so nebulous and spread over thinly over large population or far in the future, etc. that it is hard to argue this test can be useful. For example, if you decide to stop doing research (say into genetics) then there are no immediate consequences to anybody. But we still think that genetics research is important and worthwhile cause. Even if not every researcher is able to provide ground breaking results, collectively they help us resolve important problems like improving our longetivity, drug research, etc.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > Sometimes the consequences are so nebulous and spread over thinly over large population or far in the future, etc. that it is hard to argue this test can be useful. But they are consequences, so the research example passes OP's test. There are plenty of actual jobs out there where if they stopped being done, nothing bad would happen, at any scale and within any time frame. People writing reports that exactly zero people read. People making things that just get thrown away. People digging holes that other people just fill with dirt. That's what OP is getting at.
fuzzfactor 3y ago
>It's a bullshit job when, if you don't do it, or don't do it well, there really aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone. OTOH, sometimes if you do an outstanding job with great pride, performing beyond expectations, there aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone either. When both are true you've really got a double-ringer.

netbioserror 3y ago

I have the privilege of working at a smaller company, where I get to pick my tools and write software primarily solo in an engineering context, and where the requests of the peers and clients using my tools make their way to me with great detail. I have lengthy mathematical analysis discussions with my boss on a nearly daily basis. I can see the value I am creating almost directly. I consider myself incredibly lucky and count my blessings every day.

conqrr 3y ago

Simplest reason: The Incentives, pressure, ownership and motivation for work at most places do not justify the outcome, rewards and appreciation. Analogy: Making a burger end-to-end and handing to customer feels good. Assembly line where your part is just flipping buns all day is pretty meaningless.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

1. Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society. 2. Because even if they contribute something to the society, they don't see the connection between what they are doing and a worthy cause. Seeing connection between what you do and the goals of the company and then understanding those goals is not very common, according to my experience.

oarabbus_ 3y ago
>Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society. Well, according to you maybe. The customers/patrons of the company probably have a differing view.
- henry2023 3y ago
  Gamblers and Casino Owners would agree that casinos are essential in our society.
  - noelherrick 3y ago
    And the biggest casino of all is the stock market.
    - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
      Stock market performs a very important, valuable role. It is companies that try to exploit the stock market who are problem...
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        That might (or might not) be the case, but it doesn't take away from the fact that it's also a casino.
- 3y ago

VancouverMan 3y ago

I'm not finding highly relevant terms such as "government", "public sector", "bureaucrat", and "union" in the article. I don't see how this situation can be discussed without considering the roles of government and unions. Both government and unions introduce significant distortions when it comes to people doing work. Most government "jobs" are a net loss to society as a whole. These government "jobs" typically involve decreasing the productivity of the private sector in some way, without providing any real (in the economic sense) value on their own. Thanks to these pointless government "jobs" and the burden they impose on society, the private sector gets stuck involuntarily creating more pointless "jobs" to try to deal with, or otherwise defend themselves from, the government "workers" and their interference. There's a multiplier effect going on, where one pointless government bureaucrat "job" can necessitate the creation of many other pointless private sector "jobs" just to deal with the pointless bureaucracy that that one bureaucrat creates. None of these "jobs" provide real value, and all are a burden on society because of how they destroy real wealth. Unions, especially public sector unions, just exacerbate the problem by interfering with the reduction of pointless government "jobs", and worse, by encouraging the creation of new pointless government "jobs" to increase their membership numbers. As government and public sector unions have gotten larger and more invasive over time, of course we should expect to see more and more people stuck doing jobs that are inherently valueless, or even outright harmful to society at large.

nullindividual 3y ago
Those government jobs are there to protect the vultures of capitalism from destroying the world around us or leaving us a subservient rubes to corporate overlords. Damned straight the government should be yanking the corporate choke chain -- HARD.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  What you're describing there is typically the result of government-imposed regulations stifling free market competition, thus enabling the formation of monopolies (or oligopolies) that wouldn't naturally exist. It's another example of how pointless government "jobs" cause immense harm. Without the government interference that enables them, such monopolies/oligopolies simply wouldn't be able to survive, eliminating the problem you're worried about.

tr3ntg 3y ago

Even if you work at a fast-growing startup, that is making tons of money with few employees, and every single thing you do affects the bottom line, your own role is easily replaceable. I think this overall topic blurs with the concept of "I, as an individual, do not matter to the professional world."

ltr_ 3y ago

as a it contractor for financial institutions i would say that we earned a lot of money just filling holes made by the previous ones and making our own in the process for the next one. that's what it is, make up problems to solve it later. hell, this whole fucking cursed industry is just that. making holes to fill them up later to keep the wheel of incompetence and delusion spinning. sturgeon law all the way.

TheIronMark 3y ago

If I'm disconnected from the real-world impact of my job, I'm likely to think it's bullshit. That doesn't make it a bullshit job; that just means that I can't see how it fits into the bigger picture. Companies aren't going to keep people employed if they're not somehow contributing to profitability or growth.

markwkw 3y ago

I think the root cause is increased abstractness of jobs. A job where you cut and plane wood to make planks that are used to build houses has a straightforward connection to basic life. A job where you are trying to influence a group of people - so that they organize themselves to efficiently - make a change to a software tool - that affects a process for measuring of a collective endeavour - of a bigger group of people who are trying to optimize the selling and buying - of complex derivative financial contracts that are used to - increase the efficiency of a market of another financial product - which is a virtualization of actual trading of real world goods - so that incredibly complex entities (corporations) can get various and hard to grasp benefits - so that ultimately planks are cheaper ... such a job is virtually impossible to appreciate. We are transistors in a byzantine supercomputer of global economy.

jacurtis 3y ago

Maybe the real secret is to embrace the fact you have a bullshit job. Allow me to tell you a story of my corporate hero. I'm going to call this guy Jack to preserve his identity, because he continues this ruse to this day. To jump to the punchline, Jack has a bullshit job, but he embraces the bullshit. So I've had a few run-ins with Jack over the years at my Corp. He's always the guy that is sort of three degrees removed from several projects, but not really leading any projects. So you see him in the background a lot, but never in the foreground. Anyway, I never thought much of Jack. Nothing positive, nor negative. I was merely acquainted with his existence. One day, I am cleaning up some infrastructure and going through some of our cloud billing. I'm just cleaning up old infrastructure so I could make a mindless report and give it to someone who gives it to someone who eventually summarizes it for someone who then mentions it to another person, which I hope and assume turns into a bullet point on a presentation to someone "important" (you know, like we all do). Anyway, I stumble on some weird stuff that I don't recognize. Its been idle for years, never accessed, never used. This stuff is a great target for me to clean up and improve my metrics. I find this infrastructure and I don't recognize the project at all. I mention it to my team, no one's heard of it. So I go up the chain, no one's heard of it. I actually go up to the CTO and they had never heard of this project either. So I'm curious, I dig deeper. This is clearly abandoned. It hadn't been logged into in years. But I notice that it was created by Jack. I didn't really know Jack, but I looked him up to see if he even still worked at the company. I looked up his version control access and he still had an active account. I looked at his commit history and in the past 365 days he only had 4 commits. So I assume he was laid off, we recently had a round of layoffs (about 15% of the workforce). But sure enough Jack still works here according to our HRM. Somehow dodging layoffs. Interesting, he must be working on something important. So I coordinate a meeting with Jack before I disassemble his infrastructure. Jack was very elusive. Coordinating him was harder than scheduling time with my CTO. But I eventually get the meeting. So I start asking him about the project. He barely remembers the project in question (or was just playing dumb). He explained that the project was completed but never got integrated into the main application. So I asked him what he has been working on since then, and he gave me a list of projects, all of which had been cancelled and abandoned. I confirmed the existence and cancellation of 2 of those projects, the others I think he was either lying about or they never made it far enough off the ground to have any record of. I finally asked who he reports to and he gave me the name of someone that is different than someone in the HRM. So I asked about his current project and he told me several things he was doing. I was familiar with one of those projects is all (and I am generally familiar with every project since I am in those meetings). He then mentioned a project that was actually managed by my team. That's when I realized this guy was just bullshitting. I decided not to call him out on it initially. I ended up just laughing about the whole situation and sort of dropped it. I simply didn't care enough and I knew me bringing this up the chain would probably get him fired. So I just kept it in my back pocket for a little while. A few months later I went out to a whiskey bar with some guys from work. We ended up meeting up with a few people that got laid off in the layoffs. We had a few drinks and I ended up asking if anyone knows how Jack avoided layoffs. People were shocked, everyone had the same question, "what is he even working on now?". I said basically nothing. He has only made 4 commits in the last year! He's floating along but he stays in the background just enough that no one questions it. That's when one of the guys told me that Jack was involved in several projects years ago and he got really upset when he had several large and prominent project cancellations. He had made an enemy with the previous head of cybersecurity and the rumor was that he was going to be fired, but then the Head of Cyber got throat cancer unexpectedly and dissapeared. He said ever since then, Jack has been extremely uncooperative at work and no one really likes working with him, so he always gets pushed into the background. He summed it up the best way possible: > "Jack realized that all of his work was going unnoticed, so he stopped working and no one noticed". Ever since then I find ways to cross paths with Jack. I haven't done anything I just ask him questions and hear what lies and excuses he comes up with. I laugh inside everytime. I eventually drop breadcrumbs around the office about Jack's existence just to see how people react. I find the whole thing very entertaining. Jack still works here. He is extremely active on the Slack #pets channel and I see daily updates of his Corgi each day. Jack doesn't know that I know his secret. But Jack is in a weird way my hero. He realized he had a bullshit job, so instead of being bothered by it, he just embraced it. He treats his job like the bullshit that it treats him as. Maybe we can all learn from Jack.

frank_bb 3y ago

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nine_zeros 3y ago

I can tell my engineering management's job is utter BS. Their entire job is 0. Scope out work for the next quarter - done by PM and engineers 1. Track engineering work using JIRA points or some status reports - automatically generated 2. Perform some 9 point exercise to stack rank people every 6 months on the basis of JIRA points (automatically generated) and # of commits (also automatically generated) - most of this work is automatically generated 3. Give bonuses to the top of the stack and PIP the bottom - work actually done by HR 4. Open requisition for a backfill - work actually done by HR 5. Interview them for 6 months - also mostly done by engineers and recruiters 6. After they are hired, subject them to the same meat grinder - work done by engineers. All the work is actually done by someone else. This management role (and all the 7 managers above them) are all just this glue. Why not just automate all this work? Before someone responds with "people problems" and "management philosophies", please - all the above work is administrative assistant work that does not need higher salaries than engineers. And "people problems" can be handled by HR.

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hateful 3y ago

If the only reason for your job is to make money to feed yourself and your family - then isn't that important in and of itself? Because if you and many like you are all doing this, then you are benefiting society in a very direct way - one family at a time. I think it would be hard to eliminated these jobs, without any alternative (e.g. UBI or a completely different system altogether. Note: not directly arguing for another system myself here).

isleyaardvark 3y ago
That doesn’t mean they aren’t bullshit jobs. Otherwise you could say the same about the classic Keynesian “pay people to dig holes then fill them back up” job.

fuzzfactor 3y ago

>Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job? There is probably some truth to the rumor.

temp0826 3y ago

Of course most (all?) jobs are bullshit. No one should want to work for someone else's dream. You work for money or you're a fool.