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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 worth

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"?
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Is that guy's job a "bullshit job"? Yes. Consider if he were hit by a bus tomorrow, they wouldn't hire a new person to do that job, they'd just have someone already employed spend 5 minutes to do that job instead. Every job I've ever worked there have been tons of near retirement aged people doing jobs producing spreadsheets and reports that no one reads, mostly by copy and pasting all day. When they retire, either someone else figures out how to do the same job copy and pasting automatically or figures out that no one had been looking at those reports for years anyway.
  - riskable 2y ago
    Hah! The "once a week" job guy recently retired but instead of hiring someone new they handed the task to an existing employee without consulting that person (to see if they had the requisite knowledge). Now that task is failing and they're paying consulting fees to the previous guy (well, they did at least once now) to come back in to (re)run that task... Which apparently failed regularly before he left but he "just knew" how to correct things/massage whatever (data?) it was and then re-run the task by hand. That's the reason why I know about this situation... I know the guy that now has to do the old guy's "once a week" job (in addition to his existing one). He'll get the hang of it eventually... Probably. Maybe. :shrug: The replacement was given four days to train with the retiring person to learn how to do the job. It wasn't enough, obviously.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      That whole situation is a failure of management, but that's probably a whole nother discussion.

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"?

Suppafly 2y ago
>Is that guy's job a "bullshit job"? Yes. Consider if he were hit by a bus tomorrow, they wouldn't hire a new person to do that job, they'd just have someone already employed spend 5 minutes to do that job instead. Every job I've ever worked there have been tons of near retirement aged people doing jobs producing spreadsheets and reports that no one reads, mostly by copy and pasting all day. When they retire, either someone else figures out how to do the same job copy and pasting automatically or figures out that no one had been looking at those reports for years anyway.
- riskable 2y ago
  Hah! The "once a week" job guy recently retired but instead of hiring someone new they handed the task to an existing employee without consulting that person (to see if they had the requisite knowledge). Now that task is failing and they're paying consulting fees to the previous guy (well, they did at least once now) to come back in to (re)run that task... Which apparently failed regularly before he left but he "just knew" how to correct things/massage whatever (data?) it was and then re-run the task by hand. That's the reason why I know about this situation... I know the guy that now has to do the old guy's "once a week" job (in addition to his existing one). He'll get the hang of it eventually... Probably. Maybe. :shrug: The replacement was given four days to train with the retiring person to learn how to do the job. It wasn't enough, obviously.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    That whole situation is a failure of management, but that's probably a whole nother discussion.