35 ms·

“Bullshit jobs” is a terrible, curiosity-killing concept

79 points by jger15 2y ago

amadeuspagel 2y ago
I like this idea of curiosity-killing concept. Signaling is another example. If someone likes/believes/does something you don't understand, they're just signaling.
- patrickmcnamara 2y ago
  Thought-terminating cliché is a similar idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
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- fallingknife 2y ago
  I don't really ever hear that said in that scenario. There are many things people do that I don't understand. But there is also something people do that I do understand, and that thing is signalling.
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- alephxyz 2y ago
  Big one right now is too use "enshittification" whenever a company does something unpleasant
- codeflo 2y ago
  People might use it that way, but the original idea of signaling is when people care about publicly displaying their belief in a thing. That’s an operable definition that’s independent of that thing’s merits.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    The fact signalling is independent of a thing's merits is part of the reason it's such a thought-terminating cliché. If someone asks why so many young dancers learn ballet, I can say "signalling" and consider the question answered without having to engage with the availability of instruction, tradition, structure and organisation, how ballet differs from other forms of dance, or really engage in any detailed exploration of the subject at all.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    I mean it's also completely worthless as a concept outside of being a thought-terminating cliche. Unless the user is stating they have psychic abilities and can ascertain with certainty someone is signaling of course, but that's not particularly likely. Outside of that, it's a completely non-falsifiable accusation that derails an argument into "you're just saying what you think you should say, not what you actually think" which is, again, completely unknowable with any certainty and also is completely irrelevant to whether the thing in question is good to be saying or not. Whether you actually believe, for example, a subjugated group in society should have all the rights and freedoms of it's majority, or simply believe saying that will net you social capital, doesn't change whether they do or not, and also doesn't change that such a message is probably, on balance, good to have repeatedly broadcast even if the speaker doesn't believe it with their heart and soul.
PaulHoule 2y ago
One thing I note is that many people I know who work in food service believe their job is "bullshit", however in food service jobs it is usually directly obvious how somebody benefits from your work. Those people don't like their work or the way they are treated and they seem to express that they personally find it meaningless.
- gota 2y ago
  If I recall the original 'Bullshit jobs' post, even before it was a book, food service jobs (and hairdressing) were specifically mentioned as not bullshit jobs; and that distinction between liking the job vs it being bullshit was stated
  - 1-more 2y ago
    yes, they are the example of the distinction between a shit job and a bullshit job. Furthermore they are the canonical example of the bullshit that every job has. As a teen Graeber worked in a kitchen. He and his team cleaned it one night. The boss told them to clean something that was already clean because he could not conceive of the job as being actually complete. I'm probably telling it shitty. There's a ton of nuance in the article and book that isn't in the title. Same with Debt. People just read other people's takes on his work and get busy imputing. A bullshit job of their own design, if you will.
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  - diox8tony 2y ago
    idk. i worked cleaning a lobby and found that my job could be replaced by customers being cleaner. you know, how 98% of humans are at their own home. Peanut shells on floor are not necessary(might even be more effort to hit the floor than your plate). They are going to walk past the garbage can on their way out, they could have carried the trash. servers today are easily replaced by either tech (ordering system on table, or a bar style ordering system where you get up and order from 2 wait staff). And if we trusted humans(far fetched), a self serve system: pour you own beer, and add it to your tab. If my task was something the customer could have easily done themselves (and often do for themselves the other 99$ of their life: cart return, bag groceries) I felt useless. Like I'm walking behind a person littering and picking their trash up. They could just not litter, you know?
vundercind 2y ago
Weird, since the book is very curious about the notion and, being more extended essay than scientific paper, leaves plenty more to be curious about.
- dnissley 2y ago
  The book is, but the readers...
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    I figured it was like 1984. Most of the people that love citing either online usually haven't read either.
pydry 2y ago
>That drives a lot of the empirical research in the book. He cites some surveys, which show that many workers ... don't believe their jobs are worth doing >There are people right now who are miserable at work because they'd much rather be hiking Yeah, but not worth doing and not fun are very much not the same thing are they? This article is absolute trash. The author sets out to deliberately mislead with the same straw man that always seems to crop up when somebody attacks bullshit jobs.
- pineaux 2y ago
  Agree. But I like the tendency to criticize celebrated thinkers. This article is just not doing a good job. You could say the writer of this article has done a bullshit job. In a way.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Graeber in particular seems to attract critical pieces by people who seem to have done a very poor job at reading the work in question. It’s so bad that I basically expect it when I see one, now. No idea why.
- piva00 2y ago
  The blog author also has quite a bullshit job, worked mostly in finance-adjacent (and seems to be quite into cryptocurrencies to top it off), and advertisement-related stuff.
fallingknife 2y ago
Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired 80% of it's staff. Twitter is still perfectly functional (other than scaring off advertisers, but that has nothing to do with head count). Let's not pretend that bullshit jobs are very much real.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  One of the reasons to believe AI adoption can’t be escaped
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Wait, are you saying that none of the fired people had anything to do with keeping advertisers happy? That seems wrong on its face.
  - mouse_ 2y ago
    80% of a company's workforce shouldn't be dedicated to marketing I understand that that's how things are right now, but let me tell you, I fucking hate it. Whatever or whoever will burn it all to the ground, or allow it to, I will support. Disingenuous or not. I don't like the guy and I think he's stupid and has a big ego. But I'm more interested in total marketing death.
    - wvenable 2y ago
      Twitter/X is an advertising company. They exist to sell content created by others to advertisers. Of course 80% of the company should be dedicated to doing the thing that brings in revenue. The technical side isn't terribly interesting or important by comparison. Elon, before he bought Twitter, thought of himself as the customer. He talked about all the things he would do to make his own experience better. But he was never the customer, he was the product. He fired everyone involved in making Twitter work for its real customers and revenue has suffered for it.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    Much of what made advertisers unhappy was due to a combination of policy and outside activism, not smaller headcount.
swatcoder 2y ago
People are under no obligation to be curious about anything in particular. Sure, there probably is some explanation to be found for why the 345th gear in the contraption improves the target production metric by 0.013% and some theory as to why that difference meaningfully impacts some member of society for 34 seconds on Tuesdays in May on odd numbered years. And sure, those who are curious to find that may be fascinated by it or may find some emotional grounding for the work they find themselves doing. But it's not especially tragic, and can sometimes be personally and societally valuable, to step back and look at that whole situation from further away and just say "Fuck it, I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that is" That's really all the antropoligic and oral history view of a "bullshit job" is
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that is How can you possibly make that claim unless you understand what they're doing, and how can you understand what they're doing unless you're earnestly curious about it?
  - bryant 2y ago
    > how can you understand what they're doing unless you're earnestly curious about it? The implied relationship between the two things mentioned here doesn't actually exist. It's perfectly possible to understand a system without ever being curious about it. E.g: 1) when food depends on it 2) when absorbed via osmosis or a byproduct of curiosity about an entirely unrelated topic. I have a robust understanding of quite a number of topics that I can promise you I've never been curious to learn anything about. I just soak it up like a sponge. Curiosity certainly helps. But to suggest that curiosity is a foundational requirement for understanding something misses the forest for the trees.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Sure. Neither (1) nor (2) will help you discern which jobs are bullshit and which are not.
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diox8tony 2y ago
> Graeber lists a few of these bogus occupations[1]: tax lawyers, marketing consultants, actuaries, HR consultants, financial strategists, etc. jeez, i was thinking cart returner, cashier, some landscaping jobs, ... Jobs that either could be easily replaced by tech(cashier, waitress), easily replaced by the customer themselves(shelf stockers vs costco style pallets, cart returner vs aldi style coin system), or things that society deems desirable but are not realistically valuable (landscaping is sometimes useless, but society sees it as valuable) actuary has 100% value, we NEED to know the percent chance of something happening, so we can account for billing(if not used for profit mongering, its still required to run an altruistic insurance). I'd say actuary, whether for insurance company or for studies, is a necessary job forever. (not accounting for AI)
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  I’ve consistently found that a good delineator is “does the job require non-trivial decision making, or are you just a robot following highly specified algorithm?”
  - foul 2y ago
    It has very big exceptions, like marketing VP vs paramedic.
- wvenable 2y ago
  I think even your list isn't bullshit jobs. The world needs cart returners, landscapers, etc. And replacing jobs with the customers doing the job doesn't seem particularly desirable either (and proves those job aren't bullshit). There are people with real bullshit jobs; you can find people describe them online. Where they are employed, they actually do work, but they know that work doesn't contribute anything. They are usually depressed about it.
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    I've had a couple of software-engineering jobs which qualified, and I sure was depressed about it at the time.
aaronbrethorst 2y ago
He presents an economic theory for how this happens, connecting it to the medieval practice of creating face-saving make-work jobs for talentless aristocrats Or “Hollywood mogul” for a college dropout/failed actor https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-ellison-paramount-skydance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-elli...
adamors 2y ago
Not sure where the author worked, but reading BS jobs resonated with me as someone living in a post-communist country. Most of the public sector jobs are worthless and people are literally paid to pretend to work. The same mentality seeps into the private sector as well, between morning coffee, lunch break and afternoon coffee then rushing home, people work a good 3-4 hours a day in an office. And that’s on a good day, add in a couple of meetings and that gets reduced to 2 hours. How is that not a BS job?
- diox8tony 2y ago
  sure some office jobs can be worthless....in defense of my own job that sometimes feels worthless (3-5 hrs per day)....the difference to me is, IF i worked a full 8 hrs, the work performed is useful. VS a job where I believe can be fully replaced by something else. (cashier is replaced by self-checkout, cart return is replaced by aldi style coin system. landscaper is replace by new societal norms(its not required, its desired by an ever-changing beauty standard).
- riskable 2y ago
  There's a difference between a bullshit job and a job that's 95% bullshit (which is a whole heck of a lot of jobs). For example, my company pays a highly skilled individual a six figure salary to do one thing that takes him five minutes once a week. Could this task be automated? Probably, but it would require a project (which means human resources, a budget, and compliance-related activities). Such a project would take at a minimum six months, three of which would just be setting up the project and codifying in writing precisely what needs to be done and how the automation needs to work. Then there would be two months figuring out who was going to create it and who was going to be responsible for maintaining it in production (which by policy must not be the same people that designed/created the automation!). Also, there's a limited number of project managers and skilled people to get things like this done so even if the company wanted to do it, it just won't happen for a long time unless such an automation gets a big upgrade in priority. Besides, some manager gets to say they have one more employee working under them and that's super important for a manager's career! (when interviewing at another company the first question they always ask is, "how many people did you have working under you?") So that guy basically has a stable job forever as long as that task he does needs to happen. When he's not doing that task the company gives him endless busywork to perform from mandatory corporate training (which changes constantly) to 72-page security surveys to endless meetings where he really isn't needed but he's there "just in case" something comes up that needs his expertise. Is that guy's job a "bullshit job"?
leftcenterright 2y ago
> This idea that rich people create fake jobs in order to have an impressive-looking number of economic dependents runs into a few other problems. The article does not really go into depth on this one. I think it happens quite often. I would expect over-hiring is a problem most of us might have experienced first hand, especially in bigger IT companies. Managers hiring more people to delivery faster ending up in more processes, meetings and even slower results. In some cases ven external experts get hired to make these processes more efficient. Once someone does get a "bullshit job", they find enough reasons to keep that job going for longer than necessary.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  It's the most direct status symbol in the workplace beyond your actual salary. You can flex your salary pretty easily by having expensive cars and meals. Flexing your professional "pull" in an organization is trickier, and the most straightforward way is to have more people underneath you in the org-chart. The more reporters you have, the more important you are.
  - therealdrag0 2y ago
    But it would be an incredibly dysfunctional org to just hire a bunch of people with no deliverables for them. IME people are hired to build and maintain things to produce product value. You may disagree on the necessity of the value, but that doesn’t mean no one else sees value in it.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      > But it would be an incredibly dysfunctional org to just hire a bunch of people with no deliverables for them They create bullshit jobs that sound important so that they can get to hire more, you are right nobody hires without such descriptions but that doesn't mean that such descriptions means they aren't bullshit jobs. Haven't you heard about the concept of "use your budget or lose it", that goes for headcount as well, managers are greatly encouraged to invent bullshit jobs to not get their budget shrunk. And no, managers don't get paid for delivering results, they get paid per headcount first and foremost. As long as they can convince their superiors that they are doing a good job it doesn't matter what the results are. And yeah, as you say this is dysfunctional, but most giant orgs are dysfunctional, that is the norm, otherwise small companies would have no chance in hell competing against the giant well oiled machines.
duxup 2y ago
I don't know what anyone means by 'bullshit jobs' at this point. The way it is often described to me, the ven diagram of what counts as a bullshit job and that person's lack of understanding / frustration with that job has so much coverage that I'm suspicious of any claim regarding it. I've certainly worked with people whose job is BS, and seen organizational dysfunction create lost of useless jobs. They exist. But I've almost zero confidence in other people to identify them correctly at scale or identify the reasons. It feels like a very emotional subject.
karaterobot 2y ago
I get a little skeptical when an article about a book says "don't bother reading this book" and then goes on to make a lot of claims about it. There aren't even any quotes from the text. I haven't read Graeber's book, but I just don't like the "trust me to have done the thinking about this topic for you" approach.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  It's genuinely one of my favorite books I've read. He has a very plain, straight-forward and matter-of-fact writing style. It reads like an informal, incredibly long but well researched and interesting blog post. His book Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a little denser and more academic but also excellent. He might be one of my favorite authors of all time, which makes it all the sadder that I missed a chance to meet him before he died.
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- wrs 2y ago
  I love this attitude in theory. It would ironically put a lot of writers out of a job, though, if you required their audience to read the primary source before reading their thoughts about it. I mean, the ratio of people reading opinions about Piketty to people actually reading Piketty must have been a million to one.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    Yeah, that wouldn't be feasible. But I'd be satisfied if they just included direct quotations rather than saying someone said something. The difference is that I can pretty easily track down the quote and the context around it if I have a string to include in a search, plus it's at least some defense against the reviewer just making things up out of whole cloth, or even just giving a less generous reading of something others might read differently. I'm not saying that happened here, I'm just saying that's the danger.
abeppu 2y ago
I haven't read the book, but I find it concerning that this article criticizes Graeber's unrepresentative data collection, and then proceeds to arm-chair about why Graeber is wrong without really introducing any empirical findings. There are surveys about both how much time workers actually 'work', and how much of that work they see as productive. They seem to suggest that a reasonable share of worker's time is not spent on actually doing anything: https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-report-only-12-percent-of-employees-are-fully-productive-at-work-the-reasons-why-may-surprise-you.html https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-report-only-12-perc... https://www.worklife.news/talent/hours-in-workday/ https://www.worklife.news/talent/hours-in-workday/ But also, Hobart's arm-chairing here seems to take the perspective of whether something is useful to the firm, rather than if something is useful overall. Medical billing apparently charges typically 4-10% of the value billed. Clearly for the medical billing firm, having workers knowledgeable about CPT codes etc is worth it, and medical providers find it more economical to hire such a firm than to keep their own billing specialists on staff -- but if we just moved to single-payer health care, the role could disappear entirely. It's a bullshit job because it's solving a problem that doesn't need to exist. https://neolytix.com/what-is-the-going-rate-for-medical-billing-services/ https://neolytix.com/what-is-the-going-rate-for-medical-bill... Similarly, Hobart mentions tax lawyers more than once. And certainly companies that having good tax advice can save them a lot of money. But I think most experts agree that a drastically simpler tax code would be more efficient overall, both because of the reduced need for tax lawyers and accountants, and because all the weird (inefficient) tax-minimization strategies could disappear. Being useful to a firm does not mean the job is not bullshit.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  Medical billing is a great example because it's insane that their are people employed on both sides of the transaction whos job is to maximize profits for their side while catching bad behavior from the other side. Everyone knows that medical billing is insane but once you know some of the specifics it's even more atrocious.
- overrun11 2y ago
  But these empirical findings do not contradict Coase's theory of the firm at all. Workers are paid to be available and do work as needed. Everything Graeber brings up has an explanation in basic economic theory but he makes no attempt to meaningfully engage with it or even show he is aware an alternative explanation exists.
caesil 2y ago
This is a pretty common thread throughout Graeber's work; incuriosity and stubbornly blinkered views of phenomena as part of a strained argument for left-anarchism. The criticisms of The Dawn of Everything are withering and along these lines.
xkcd-sucks 2y ago
Only assuming "Bullshit" to be a though-terminating cliche: It could also be treated as a starting point to understanding how these circumstances came to be, and how to go about effectively untangling them.
demondemidi 2y ago
This is the entire premise of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, which Douglas Adams wrote about 25 years earlier. But every conservative parent has made jokes about getting a degree "underwater basket weaving" for as long as I can remember. I think real bullshit jobs are, for example, how third-generation children of billionaires get CEO roles on fictional companies / non-profits only to receive insane compensation, while the board does all the work. Just look at any modern dynastic family in the US, ignoring even the famous names. [0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...
jnsaff2 2y ago
Odd Lots just had an episode [0] where they briefly discussed this book as well and the interviewee had some reasonably interesting opinions about why the premise of this book is flawed but was in other respects pretty complimentary of Graeber. The episode has other very interesting concepts like "accountability sinks". The author has a book[1] out about this as well. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/dan-davies-explains-why-accountability-sinks-are-everywhere-now https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/dan-davie... [1] https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/
why5s 2y ago
Some thoughts (from a very biased fan of the original article and book): > If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others. Graeber solicited testimonies from people who felt that they have a bullshit job. > public transportation workers can, indeed, shut some cities down if they decide not to work. But this is not a characteristic of the job, but of how employment is structured: if all the workers are declining to show up at once, the term is a "strike," and their employer can't just swap them for someone else. There are plenty of people who would do these jobs, at their current pay, if that were an option, so the ability to paralyze a city like this is a function of unions, not of the job itself Unions are intended to protect workers. If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed. > In a sense, the book is a work of pathological optimism about the capitalist system. Graeber estimates that roughly half of all work fits his fake job categorization, which implies that the economy's productive capacity is roughly twice the output we actually get. It would be a pretty big deal if this were true: we could have a lot more leisure, and a lot more stuff. I'd argue that I'd be able to produce 50% more value in my own role if my employer gave me 50% of my time back. But instead it's spent on politics, baby-sitting and duck tape. It's not their fault (nor my own) but rather a consequence of the system we're in. And I see no issue with having someone actively critiquing it.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I don’t get what’s hard to believe about this. Principal-agent problems are everywhere, we’re terrible at measuring effectiveness for tons of things including and especially management (the TL;DR of the research is that we damn near don’t know how to do it at all), zero-sum games abound (a great deal of advertising and marketing, to take one of Graeber’s examples), and there are tons of ways to throw money around in ways that are personally beneficial but net-harmful without falling afoul of the law. Of course a bunch of jobs are bullshit.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > Unions are intended to protect workers. But they actually don't. > If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, unions do not help to do this. In fact they hinder it. In one strike I personally observed (not of public sector employees but I think the case is fairly typical), the union and the company agreed on a deal on Day 92 of the strike that was identical to the deal the company proposed on Day 2 of the strike and the union indignantly rejected. Who suffered the most from all this? The very workers the union was supposed to be protecting, who got no pay during those 92 days and had trouble paying their bills and could not even seek alternate jobs temporarily because the union prohibited it. And in fact many of those jobs now are automated away, because it was easier for the company to do that than to keep dealing with the union. > This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed. Not necessarily "corporate" greed; in the public transportation case it's a government employing the workers. That said, unions themselves share many of the dysfunctional charateristics of large corporations, and for much the same reasons.
diffxx 2y ago
The irony of a substacker attacking the concept of bullshit jobs is a bit much...
vitalredundancy 2y ago
In anthropology there's distinctions between `emic` and `etic` perspectives(adopted from linguistics, so think of phonemic and phonetic here), etic denoting an outsider perspective and analysis of a culture, while emic is an analysis of the culture on the culture's own terms. Graeber's an anthropologist who took a broadly emic approach. He also happens to be an anarchist living in a capitalist, class-based society. This book is making a systemic critique of jobs and meaning under capitalism. While Graeber's a product of the culture he's critiquing, he doesn't buy what the culture is selling and diagnosing the symptoms he sees around him. This response here is by someone who's embedded in the power structures of that culture(he's a finance guy!), and the response is filled with hand-waving or justification of those symptoms as unavoidable or even positive features capitalism, without ever really engaging in the actual meat of Graeber's work, which is that the very structure of our economy, culture, and world is arbitrarily decided by those in power, and our job if we want to survive is ultimately to reproduce that structure, even if it's not really to our benefit or to outsized benefit to those in power. This blog isn't even a defense of the structure: it gestures to our current setup as normal or natural and the results of rational action, without making any effort to justify it besides saying that if it didn't work, we wouldn't have it. That's shallow at best. It's an emic defense to an emic critique, but it's not operating at the same level that Graeber is working at. At the very end it hand-waves any phenomenon that doesn't seem rational in our economy as merely 'weird', and seems to cross it's arms and say "that's just how it is!". This finance guy's response is too narrowly emic in this way, a result of being too deeply embedded in something to actually critique it. He can't incorporate negative data into any analysis of the system he(and us) are in, because he won't allow himself to critique it. You could say it's a terrible, curiousity-killing blog. Read more David Graeber instead.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > Read more David Graeber instead. For those who don't want to tackle the whole book, the original article by Graeber is online here: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
mmaniac 2y ago
Sounds like someone's mad about having a bullshit job.
overrun11 2y ago
I am apparently the only one that liked the article a lot. It's certainly a lot better than the original Graeber article which to me is a masterclass in stumbling over well known paradoxes and puzzles in economics and substituting in his own deranged ideas instead of the generally accepted answers among actual economists.
kara4151 2y ago
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79 points by jger15 2y ago

I like this idea of curiosity-killing concept. Signaling is another example. If someone likes/believes/does something you don't understand, they're just signaling.

patrickmcnamara 2y ago
Thought-terminating cliché is a similar idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
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fallingknife 2y ago
I don't really ever hear that said in that scenario. There are many things people do that I don't understand. But there is also something people do that I do understand, and that thing is signalling.
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alephxyz 2y ago
Big one right now is too use "enshittification" whenever a company does something unpleasant
codeflo 2y ago
People might use it that way, but the original idea of signaling is when people care about publicly displaying their belief in a thing. That’s an operable definition that’s independent of that thing’s merits.
- michaelt 2y ago
  The fact signalling is independent of a thing's merits is part of the reason it's such a thought-terminating cliché. If someone asks why so many young dancers learn ballet, I can say "signalling" and consider the question answered without having to engage with the availability of instruction, tradition, structure and organisation, how ballet differs from other forms of dance, or really engage in any detailed exploration of the subject at all.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I mean it's also completely worthless as a concept outside of being a thought-terminating cliche. Unless the user is stating they have psychic abilities and can ascertain with certainty someone is signaling of course, but that's not particularly likely. Outside of that, it's a completely non-falsifiable accusation that derails an argument into "you're just saying what you think you should say, not what you actually think" which is, again, completely unknowable with any certainty and also is completely irrelevant to whether the thing in question is good to be saying or not. Whether you actually believe, for example, a subjugated group in society should have all the rights and freedoms of it's majority, or simply believe saying that will net you social capital, doesn't change whether they do or not, and also doesn't change that such a message is probably, on balance, good to have repeatedly broadcast even if the speaker doesn't believe it with their heart and soul.

PaulHoule 2y ago

One thing I note is that many people I know who work in food service believe their job is "bullshit", however in food service jobs it is usually directly obvious how somebody benefits from your work. Those people don't like their work or the way they are treated and they seem to express that they personally find it meaningless.

gota 2y ago
If I recall the original 'Bullshit jobs' post, even before it was a book, food service jobs (and hairdressing) were specifically mentioned as not bullshit jobs; and that distinction between liking the job vs it being bullshit was stated
- 1-more 2y ago
  yes, they are the example of the distinction between a shit job and a bullshit job. Furthermore they are the canonical example of the bullshit that every job has. As a teen Graeber worked in a kitchen. He and his team cleaned it one night. The boss told them to clean something that was already clean because he could not conceive of the job as being actually complete. I'm probably telling it shitty. There's a ton of nuance in the article and book that isn't in the title. Same with Debt. People just read other people's takes on his work and get busy imputing. A bullshit job of their own design, if you will.
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- diox8tony 2y ago
  idk. i worked cleaning a lobby and found that my job could be replaced by customers being cleaner. you know, how 98% of humans are at their own home. Peanut shells on floor are not necessary(might even be more effort to hit the floor than your plate). They are going to walk past the garbage can on their way out, they could have carried the trash. servers today are easily replaced by either tech (ordering system on table, or a bar style ordering system where you get up and order from 2 wait staff). And if we trusted humans(far fetched), a self serve system: pour you own beer, and add it to your tab. If my task was something the customer could have easily done themselves (and often do for themselves the other 99$ of their life: cart return, bag groceries) I felt useless. Like I'm walking behind a person littering and picking their trash up. They could just not litter, you know?

vundercind 2y ago

Weird, since the book is very curious about the notion and, being more extended essay than scientific paper, leaves plenty more to be curious about.

dnissley 2y ago
The book is, but the readers...
- lawlessone 2y ago
  I figured it was like 1984. Most of the people that love citing either online usually haven't read either.

pydry 2y ago

>That drives a lot of the empirical research in the book. He cites some surveys, which show that many workers ... don't believe their jobs are worth doing >There are people right now who are miserable at work because they'd much rather be hiking Yeah, but not worth doing and not fun are very much not the same thing are they? This article is absolute trash. The author sets out to deliberately mislead with the same straw man that always seems to crop up when somebody attacks bullshit jobs.

pineaux 2y ago
Agree. But I like the tendency to criticize celebrated thinkers. This article is just not doing a good job. You could say the writer of this article has done a bullshit job. In a way.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Graeber in particular seems to attract critical pieces by people who seem to have done a very poor job at reading the work in question. It’s so bad that I basically expect it when I see one, now. No idea why.
piva00 2y ago
The blog author also has quite a bullshit job, worked mostly in finance-adjacent (and seems to be quite into cryptocurrencies to top it off), and advertisement-related stuff.

fallingknife 2y ago

Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired 80% of it's staff. Twitter is still perfectly functional (other than scaring off advertisers, but that has nothing to do with head count). Let's not pretend that bullshit jobs are very much real.

nextworddev 2y ago
One of the reasons to believe AI adoption can’t be escaped
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Wait, are you saying that none of the fired people had anything to do with keeping advertisers happy? That seems wrong on its face.
- mouse_ 2y ago
  80% of a company's workforce shouldn't be dedicated to marketing I understand that that's how things are right now, but let me tell you, I fucking hate it. Whatever or whoever will burn it all to the ground, or allow it to, I will support. Disingenuous or not. I don't like the guy and I think he's stupid and has a big ego. But I'm more interested in total marketing death.
  - wvenable 2y ago
    Twitter/X is an advertising company. They exist to sell content created by others to advertisers. Of course 80% of the company should be dedicated to doing the thing that brings in revenue. The technical side isn't terribly interesting or important by comparison. Elon, before he bought Twitter, thought of himself as the customer. He talked about all the things he would do to make his own experience better. But he was never the customer, he was the product. He fired everyone involved in making Twitter work for its real customers and revenue has suffered for it.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Much of what made advertisers unhappy was due to a combination of policy and outside activism, not smaller headcount.

swatcoder 2y ago

People are under no obligation to be curious about anything in particular. Sure, there probably is some explanation to be found for why the 345th gear in the contraption improves the target production metric by 0.013% and some theory as to why that difference meaningfully impacts some member of society for 34 seconds on Tuesdays in May on odd numbered years. And sure, those who are curious to find that may be fascinated by it or may find some emotional grounding for the work they find themselves doing. But it's not especially tragic, and can sometimes be personally and societally valuable, to step back and look at that whole situation from further away and just say "Fuck it, I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that is" That's really all the antropoligic and oral history view of a "bullshit job" is

llamaimperative 2y ago
> I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that is How can you possibly make that claim unless you understand what they're doing, and how can you understand what they're doing unless you're earnestly curious about it?
- bryant 2y ago
  > how can you understand what they're doing unless you're earnestly curious about it? The implied relationship between the two things mentioned here doesn't actually exist. It's perfectly possible to understand a system without ever being curious about it. E.g: 1) when food depends on it 2) when absorbed via osmosis or a byproduct of curiosity about an entirely unrelated topic. I have a robust understanding of quite a number of topics that I can promise you I've never been curious to learn anything about. I just soak it up like a sponge. Curiosity certainly helps. But to suggest that curiosity is a foundational requirement for understanding something misses the forest for the trees.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Sure. Neither (1) nor (2) will help you discern which jobs are bullshit and which are not.

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diox8tony 2y ago

> Graeber lists a few of these bogus occupations[1]: tax lawyers, marketing consultants, actuaries, HR consultants, financial strategists, etc. jeez, i was thinking cart returner, cashier, some landscaping jobs, ... Jobs that either could be easily replaced by tech(cashier, waitress), easily replaced by the customer themselves(shelf stockers vs costco style pallets, cart returner vs aldi style coin system), or things that society deems desirable but are not realistically valuable (landscaping is sometimes useless, but society sees it as valuable) actuary has 100% value, we NEED to know the percent chance of something happening, so we can account for billing(if not used for profit mongering, its still required to run an altruistic insurance). I'd say actuary, whether for insurance company or for studies, is a necessary job forever. (not accounting for AI)

Waterluvian 2y ago
I’ve consistently found that a good delineator is “does the job require non-trivial decision making, or are you just a robot following highly specified algorithm?”
- foul 2y ago
  It has very big exceptions, like marketing VP vs paramedic.
wvenable 2y ago
I think even your list isn't bullshit jobs. The world needs cart returners, landscapers, etc. And replacing jobs with the customers doing the job doesn't seem particularly desirable either (and proves those job aren't bullshit). There are people with real bullshit jobs; you can find people describe them online. Where they are employed, they actually do work, but they know that work doesn't contribute anything. They are usually depressed about it.
- marssaxman 2y ago
  I've had a couple of software-engineering jobs which qualified, and I sure was depressed about it at the time.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago

He presents an economic theory for how this happens, connecting it to the medieval practice of creating face-saving make-work jobs for talentless aristocrats Or “Hollywood mogul” for a college dropout/failed actor https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-ellison-paramount-skydance.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-elli...

adamors 2y ago

Not sure where the author worked, but reading BS jobs resonated with me as someone living in a post-communist country. Most of the public sector jobs are worthless and people are literally paid to pretend to work. The same mentality seeps into the private sector as well, between morning coffee, lunch break and afternoon coffee then rushing home, people work a good 3-4 hours a day in an office. And that’s on a good day, add in a couple of meetings and that gets reduced to 2 hours. How is that not a BS job?

diox8tony 2y ago
sure some office jobs can be worthless....in defense of my own job that sometimes feels worthless (3-5 hrs per day)....the difference to me is, IF i worked a full 8 hrs, the work performed is useful. VS a job where I believe can be fully replaced by something else. (cashier is replaced by self-checkout, cart return is replaced by aldi style coin system. landscaper is replace by new societal norms(its not required, its desired by an ever-changing beauty standard).
riskable 2y ago
There's a difference between a bullshit job and a job that's 95% bullshit (which is a whole heck of a lot of jobs). For example, my company pays a highly skilled individual a six figure salary to do one thing that takes him five minutes once a week. Could this task be automated? Probably, but it would require a project (which means human resources, a budget, and compliance-related activities). Such a project would take at a minimum six months, three of which would just be setting up the project and codifying in writing precisely what needs to be done and how the automation needs to work. Then there would be two months figuring out who was going to create it and who was going to be responsible for maintaining it in production (which by policy must not be the same people that designed/created the automation!). Also, there's a limited number of project managers and skilled people to get things like this done so even if the company wanted to do it, it just won't happen for a long time unless such an automation gets a big upgrade in priority. Besides, some manager gets to say they have one more employee working under them and that's super important for a manager's career! (when interviewing at another company the first question they always ask is, "how many people did you have working under you?") So that guy basically has a stable job forever as long as that task he does needs to happen. When he's not doing that task the company gives him endless busywork to perform from mandatory corporate training (which changes constantly) to 72-page security surveys to endless meetings where he really isn't needed but he's there "just in case" something comes up that needs his expertise. Is that guy's job a "bullshit job"?

leftcenterright 2y ago

> This idea that rich people create fake jobs in order to have an impressive-looking number of economic dependents runs into a few other problems. The article does not really go into depth on this one. I think it happens quite often. I would expect over-hiring is a problem most of us might have experienced first hand, especially in bigger IT companies. Managers hiring more people to delivery faster ending up in more processes, meetings and even slower results. In some cases ven external experts get hired to make these processes more efficient. Once someone does get a "bullshit job", they find enough reasons to keep that job going for longer than necessary.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
It's the most direct status symbol in the workplace beyond your actual salary. You can flex your salary pretty easily by having expensive cars and meals. Flexing your professional "pull" in an organization is trickier, and the most straightforward way is to have more people underneath you in the org-chart. The more reporters you have, the more important you are.
- therealdrag0 2y ago
  But it would be an incredibly dysfunctional org to just hire a bunch of people with no deliverables for them. IME people are hired to build and maintain things to produce product value. You may disagree on the necessity of the value, but that doesn’t mean no one else sees value in it.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    > But it would be an incredibly dysfunctional org to just hire a bunch of people with no deliverables for them They create bullshit jobs that sound important so that they can get to hire more, you are right nobody hires without such descriptions but that doesn't mean that such descriptions means they aren't bullshit jobs. Haven't you heard about the concept of "use your budget or lose it", that goes for headcount as well, managers are greatly encouraged to invent bullshit jobs to not get their budget shrunk. And no, managers don't get paid for delivering results, they get paid per headcount first and foremost. As long as they can convince their superiors that they are doing a good job it doesn't matter what the results are. And yeah, as you say this is dysfunctional, but most giant orgs are dysfunctional, that is the norm, otherwise small companies would have no chance in hell competing against the giant well oiled machines.

duxup 2y ago

I don't know what anyone means by 'bullshit jobs' at this point. The way it is often described to me, the ven diagram of what counts as a bullshit job and that person's lack of understanding / frustration with that job has so much coverage that I'm suspicious of any claim regarding it. I've certainly worked with people whose job is BS, and seen organizational dysfunction create lost of useless jobs. They exist. But I've almost zero confidence in other people to identify them correctly at scale or identify the reasons. It feels like a very emotional subject.

karaterobot 2y ago

I get a little skeptical when an article about a book says "don't bother reading this book" and then goes on to make a lot of claims about it. There aren't even any quotes from the text. I haven't read Graeber's book, but I just don't like the "trust me to have done the thinking about this topic for you" approach.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
It's genuinely one of my favorite books I've read. He has a very plain, straight-forward and matter-of-fact writing style. It reads like an informal, incredibly long but well researched and interesting blog post. His book Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a little denser and more academic but also excellent. He might be one of my favorite authors of all time, which makes it all the sadder that I missed a chance to meet him before he died.
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wrs 2y ago
I love this attitude in theory. It would ironically put a lot of writers out of a job, though, if you required their audience to read the primary source before reading their thoughts about it. I mean, the ratio of people reading opinions about Piketty to people actually reading Piketty must have been a million to one.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Yeah, that wouldn't be feasible. But I'd be satisfied if they just included direct quotations rather than saying someone said something. The difference is that I can pretty easily track down the quote and the context around it if I have a string to include in a search, plus it's at least some defense against the reviewer just making things up out of whole cloth, or even just giving a less generous reading of something others might read differently. I'm not saying that happened here, I'm just saying that's the danger.

abeppu 2y ago

I haven't read the book, but I find it concerning that this article criticizes Graeber's unrepresentative data collection, and then proceeds to arm-chair about why Graeber is wrong without really introducing any empirical findings. There are surveys about both how much time workers actually 'work', and how much of that work they see as productive. They seem to suggest that a reasonable share of worker's time is not spent on actually doing anything: https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-report-only-12-percent-of-employees-are-fully-productive-at-work-the-reasons-why-may-surprise-you.html https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-report-only-12-perc... https://www.worklife.news/talent/hours-in-workday/ https://www.worklife.news/talent/hours-in-workday/ But also, Hobart's arm-chairing here seems to take the perspective of whether something is useful to the firm, rather than if something is useful overall. Medical billing apparently charges typically 4-10% of the value billed. Clearly for the medical billing firm, having workers knowledgeable about CPT codes etc is worth it, and medical providers find it more economical to hire such a firm than to keep their own billing specialists on staff -- but if we just moved to single-payer health care, the role could disappear entirely. It's a bullshit job because it's solving a problem that doesn't need to exist. https://neolytix.com/what-is-the-going-rate-for-medical-billing-services/ https://neolytix.com/what-is-the-going-rate-for-medical-bill... Similarly, Hobart mentions tax lawyers more than once. And certainly companies that having good tax advice can save them a lot of money. But I think most experts agree that a drastically simpler tax code would be more efficient overall, both because of the reduced need for tax lawyers and accountants, and because all the weird (inefficient) tax-minimization strategies could disappear. Being useful to a firm does not mean the job is not bullshit.

Suppafly 2y ago
Medical billing is a great example because it's insane that their are people employed on both sides of the transaction whos job is to maximize profits for their side while catching bad behavior from the other side. Everyone knows that medical billing is insane but once you know some of the specifics it's even more atrocious.
overrun11 2y ago
But these empirical findings do not contradict Coase's theory of the firm at all. Workers are paid to be available and do work as needed. Everything Graeber brings up has an explanation in basic economic theory but he makes no attempt to meaningfully engage with it or even show he is aware an alternative explanation exists.

caesil 2y ago

This is a pretty common thread throughout Graeber's work; incuriosity and stubbornly blinkered views of phenomena as part of a strained argument for left-anarchism. The criticisms of The Dawn of Everything are withering and along these lines.

xkcd-sucks 2y ago

Only assuming "Bullshit" to be a though-terminating cliche: It could also be treated as a starting point to understanding how these circumstances came to be, and how to go about effectively untangling them.

demondemidi 2y ago

This is the entire premise of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, which Douglas Adams wrote about 25 years earlier. But every conservative parent has made jokes about getting a degree "underwater basket weaving" for as long as I can remember. I think real bullshit jobs are, for example, how third-generation children of billionaires get CEO roles on fictional companies / non-profits only to receive insane compensation, while the board does all the work. Just look at any modern dynastic family in the US, ignoring even the famous names. [0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Ship_B https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...

jnsaff2 2y ago

Odd Lots just had an episode [0] where they briefly discussed this book as well and the interviewee had some reasonably interesting opinions about why the premise of this book is flawed but was in other respects pretty complimentary of Graeber. The episode has other very interesting concepts like "accountability sinks". The author has a book[1] out about this as well. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/dan-davies-explains-why-accountability-sinks-are-everywhere-now https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/dan-davie... [1] https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

why5s 2y ago

Some thoughts (from a very biased fan of the original article and book): > If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others. Graeber solicited testimonies from people who felt that they have a bullshit job. > public transportation workers can, indeed, shut some cities down if they decide not to work. But this is not a characteristic of the job, but of how employment is structured: if all the workers are declining to show up at once, the term is a "strike," and their employer can't just swap them for someone else. There are plenty of people who would do these jobs, at their current pay, if that were an option, so the ability to paralyze a city like this is a function of unions, not of the job itself Unions are intended to protect workers. If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed. > In a sense, the book is a work of pathological optimism about the capitalist system. Graeber estimates that roughly half of all work fits his fake job categorization, which implies that the economy's productive capacity is roughly twice the output we actually get. It would be a pretty big deal if this were true: we could have a lot more leisure, and a lot more stuff. I'd argue that I'd be able to produce 50% more value in my own role if my employer gave me 50% of my time back. But instead it's spent on politics, baby-sitting and duck tape. It's not their fault (nor my own) but rather a consequence of the system we're in. And I see no issue with having someone actively critiquing it.

vundercind 2y ago
I don’t get what’s hard to believe about this. Principal-agent problems are everywhere, we’re terrible at measuring effectiveness for tons of things including and especially management (the TL;DR of the research is that we damn near don’t know how to do it at all), zero-sum games abound (a great deal of advertising and marketing, to take one of Graeber’s examples), and there are tons of ways to throw money around in ways that are personally beneficial but net-harmful without falling afoul of the law. Of course a bunch of jobs are bullshit.
pdonis 2y ago
> Unions are intended to protect workers. But they actually don't. > If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, unions do not help to do this. In fact they hinder it. In one strike I personally observed (not of public sector employees but I think the case is fairly typical), the union and the company agreed on a deal on Day 92 of the strike that was identical to the deal the company proposed on Day 2 of the strike and the union indignantly rejected. Who suffered the most from all this? The very workers the union was supposed to be protecting, who got no pay during those 92 days and had trouble paying their bills and could not even seek alternate jobs temporarily because the union prohibited it. And in fact many of those jobs now are automated away, because it was easier for the company to do that than to keep dealing with the union. > This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed. Not necessarily "corporate" greed; in the public transportation case it's a government employing the workers. That said, unions themselves share many of the dysfunctional charateristics of large corporations, and for much the same reasons.

diffxx 2y ago

The irony of a substacker attacking the concept of bullshit jobs is a bit much...

vitalredundancy 2y ago

In anthropology there's distinctions between `emic` and `etic` perspectives(adopted from linguistics, so think of phonemic and phonetic here), etic denoting an outsider perspective and analysis of a culture, while emic is an analysis of the culture on the culture's own terms. Graeber's an anthropologist who took a broadly emic approach. He also happens to be an anarchist living in a capitalist, class-based society. This book is making a systemic critique of jobs and meaning under capitalism. While Graeber's a product of the culture he's critiquing, he doesn't buy what the culture is selling and diagnosing the symptoms he sees around him. This response here is by someone who's embedded in the power structures of that culture(he's a finance guy!), and the response is filled with hand-waving or justification of those symptoms as unavoidable or even positive features capitalism, without ever really engaging in the actual meat of Graeber's work, which is that the very structure of our economy, culture, and world is arbitrarily decided by those in power, and our job if we want to survive is ultimately to reproduce that structure, even if it's not really to our benefit or to outsized benefit to those in power. This blog isn't even a defense of the structure: it gestures to our current setup as normal or natural and the results of rational action, without making any effort to justify it besides saying that if it didn't work, we wouldn't have it. That's shallow at best. It's an emic defense to an emic critique, but it's not operating at the same level that Graeber is working at. At the very end it hand-waves any phenomenon that doesn't seem rational in our economy as merely 'weird', and seems to cross it's arms and say "that's just how it is!". This finance guy's response is too narrowly emic in this way, a result of being too deeply embedded in something to actually critique it. He can't incorporate negative data into any analysis of the system he(and us) are in, because he won't allow himself to critique it. You could say it's a terrible, curiousity-killing blog. Read more David Graeber instead.

pdonis 2y ago
> Read more David Graeber instead. For those who don't want to tackle the whole book, the original article by Graeber is online here: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

mmaniac 2y ago

Sounds like someone's mad about having a bullshit job.

overrun11 2y ago

I am apparently the only one that liked the article a lot. It's certainly a lot better than the original Graeber article which to me is a masterclass in stumbling over well known paradoxes and puzzles in economics and substituting in his own deranged ideas instead of the generally accepted answers among actual economists.

kara4151 2y ago

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