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What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in G

• overgard 8mo ago
  I think this is extremely common and nobody wants to admit to it!
• kittbuilds 8mo ago
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• groundzeros2015 8mo ago
  And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely. Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a common mistake.
  • bubblewand 8mo ago
    What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC.
    • thesmtsolver2 8mo ago
      How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.
      • bubblewand 8mo ago
        The parts that are only done to maintain status quo with a competitor aren’t productive, and that’s quite a bit of it. Two (or more) sides spend money, nothing changes. No good is produced. The whole exercise is basically an accident. Like when a competing country builds their tenth battleship, so you commission another one to match them. The world would have been better if neither had been build. Money changed hands (one supposes) but the aim of the whole exercise had no effect. It was similar to paying people to dig holes a fill them back in again, to the tune of serious money. This was so utterly stupid and wasteful that there was a whole treaty about it, to try to prevent so many bullshit jobs from being created again. Or when Pepsi increases their ad spending in Brazil, so Coca Cola counters, and much of the money ends up accomplishing little except keeping things just how they were. That component or quality of the ad industry, the book claims, is bullshit, on account of not doing any good. The book treats of several ways in which a job might be bullshit, and just kinda mentions this one as an aside: the zero-sum activity. It mostly covers other sorts, but this is the closest I can recall it coming to declaring sales “bullshit” (the book rarely, bordering on never, paints even most of an entire industry or field as bullshit, and advertising isn’t sales, but it’s as close as it got, as I recall)
        • groundzeros2015 8mo ago
          You’re describing redundant effort from competition as waste. Is it a waste of effort when both people try to get the same job and only one succeeds? Is it a waste of effort when two companies try to make the best electric car? If it is wasteful what does aw orld look like where nobody ever spends resources on a goal which overlaps with someone else?
          • bubblewand 8mo ago
            I think you’ve misunderstood what I’ve written here. Graeber’s book might make it clearer for you, he probably did a better job of explaining it than I do. It’s about spendy Red Queen’s races, not just trying to make something better or trying to compete in general. The application of the idea to military spending is pretty much standard and uncontroversial stuff (hell, it was 100-plus years ago) while his observation of a similar effect in some notable component of ad spending is novel (at least, I’d not seen that connection made before).
    • groundzeros2015 8mo ago
      > And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this. > advertising I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend money to make you more aware of something. You can limit some modes, but that kind of just exists. I don’t see how they aren’t performing an important function.
      • tehjoker 8mo ago
        It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.
        • dns_snek 8mo ago
          > Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". There's nothing inherent to socialism that would preclude advertising. It's an economic system where the means of production (capital) is owned by the workers or the state. In market socialism you still have worker cooperatives competing on the market.
        • Wilder7977 8mo ago
          Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty.
          • wolvesechoes 8mo ago
            Yeah, guy states that in multiple places, and yet here we are, with an impression that most people referencing the book apparently didn't read it.
• emp17344 8mo ago
  The thesis of Bullshit Jobs is almost universally rejected by economists, FYI. There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.
  • gzread 8mo ago
    Why should I believe "economists" over "David Grabber"?
  • wolvesechoes 8mo ago
    Not surprising, because thesis is not about economy. > There’s not much of value to obtain from the book. Anthropological insight has much more value than anything economists may produce on economy.
  • simonask 8mo ago
    As a layman, I have to say the collective credibility of economists does not inspire confidence.
    • topocite 8mo ago
      I love economics but it is a field of study that we don't have the proper tools to properly study the subject yet. Modern economics is literally a bullshit job generating process or complex system.
      • imtringued 8mo ago
        What's particularly ironic is that economists are redundant from a mainstream economics perspective. They'd be the first job to cut.
  • bubblewand 8mo ago
    … what’s the thesis?
• hattmall 8mo ago
  I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a bit more idle time at the desk because you always tap some wall that's out of your control. Maybe AI saves you a Google search or a doc lookup here and there. You still need to check everything and it can cause mistakes that take longer too. Here's an example from today. Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records. AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong address because it's for a different doctor with the same name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes like this happening at scale is making the other time savings pretty close to a wash.
  • nradov 8mo ago
    LLMs might not save time but they certainly increase quality for at least some office work. I frequently use it to check my work before sending to colleagues or customers and it occasionally catches gaps or errors in my writing.
    • toraway 8mo ago
      But that idealized example could also be offset by another employee who doubles their own output by churning out lower-quality unreviewed workslop all day without checking anything, while wasting other people's time.
      • sunrunner 8mo ago
        Something I call the 'Generate First, Review Never' approach, seemingly favoured by my colleagues, and which has the magical quality of increasing the overall amount of work done through an increased amount of time taken by N receivers of low-quality document having to review, understand and fact check said document. See also: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity [1] [1] https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-...
• protocolture 8mo ago
  Would hardly drag Graeber into this, theres a laundry list of issues with his research. Most "Bullshit Jobs" can already be automated, but can isnt always should or will. Graeber is a capex thinker in an opex world.
• jama211 8mo ago
  I think it’s more likely that the same amount of work is getting done, just it’s far less taxing. And that averages are funny things, for developers it’s undeniably a huge boost, but for others it’s creating friction.
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  > but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book. That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society. He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else. That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.
  • ccortes 8mo ago
    > It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society. > Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world
  • DiggyJohnson 8mo ago
    Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.
    • 8mo ago
• nradov 8mo ago
  Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is some level of empire building where managers hire more workers than necessary just to inflate their own importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors.
  • ccortes 8mo ago
    > in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors This is not true at all. You can find plenty of examples going either way but it’s far from truth from being a universal reality
  • busterarm 8mo ago
    It's only after decades of experience and hindsight that you realize that a lot of the important work we spend our time on has extremely limited long-term value. Maybe you're lucky enough to be doing cutting edge research or do something that really seriously impacts human beings, but I've done plenty of "mission critical right fucking now" work that a week from now (or even hours from now, when I worked for a content marketing business) is beyond irrelevant. It's an amazing thing watching marketing types set money on fire burning super expensive developer time (but salaried, so they discount the cost to zero) just to make their campaigns like 2-3% more efficient. I've intentionally sat on plenty of projects that somebody was pushing really hard for because they thought it was the absolute right necessary thing at the time and the stakeholder realized was pointless/worthless after a good long shit and shower. This one move has saved literally man years of work to be done and IMO is the #1 most important skill people need to learn ("when to just do nothing").
  • wiseowise 8mo ago
    > Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone, especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you think that people are laid off because they’re unproductive.
• fdefitte 8mo ago
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  • wiseowise 8mo ago
    Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.
    • yoyohello13 8mo ago
      Your claim and the claims that all white collar jobs are going to disappear in 12-18 months cannot both be true. I guess we will see.
      • beeflet 8mo ago
        I think they can both be true. Perhaps the innovation of AI is not that it automates important work, but because it forces people to question if the work has already been automated or is even necessary.
      • onion2k 8mo ago
        It's possible to automate the pointless stuff without realising it's pointless.
        • therein 8mo ago
          Made me think of this. https://imgur.com/T4DAGG8 https://imgur.com/T4DAGG8
          • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
            Imgur is banned on UK. I recommend using https://catbox.moe/ https://catbox.moe/ which can even use remote-links so pasting the imgur link in it can also work. https://files.catbox.moe/4dhvok.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/4dhvok.jpeg
• lolive 8mo ago
  We made an under-the-radar optimization in a data flow in my company. A given task is now much more freshData-assisted that it used to. Was a LLM used during that optimization? Yes. Who will correlate the sudden productivity improvement with our optimization of the data flow with the availability of a LLM to do such optimizations fast enough that no project+consultants+management is needed ? No one. Just like no one is evaluating the value of a hammer or a ladder when you build a house.
  • camgunz 8mo ago
    But you would see more houses, or housing build costs/bids fall. This is where the whole "show me what you built with AI" meme comes from, and currently there's no substitute for SWEs. Maybe next year or next next year, but mostly the usage is generating boring stuff like internal tool frontends, tests, etc. That's not nothing, but because actually writing the code was at best 20% of the time cost anyway, the gains aren't huge, and won't be until AI gets into the other parts of the SDLC (or the SDLC changes).
  • ViewTrick1002 8mo ago
    Is there a productivity improvement resulting tangible economic results coming from that optimization? It’s easy to convince yourself that it is, and anyone can massage some internal metric enough to prove their desired outcome.
  • fragmede 8mo ago
    CONEXPO, World of Concrete, and NAHB IBS is where vendors go to show off their new ladders and the attendees totally evaluate the value of those ladders vs their competitors.
• jen729w 8mo ago
  Have had job. Can confirm.
• weatherlite 8mo ago
  > What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).
  • cucumber3732842 8mo ago
    Exactly. Even if they're doing bullshit it's a "bullshit make number go up" situation. Society as a whole is no better off since no value or wealth was generated, but the number did go up. A whole bunch of our economy is broken windows like this to varying degrees.
• MeteorMarc 8mo ago
  David Graeber is the correct spelling.https://davidgraeber.org/books/ https://davidgraeber.org/books/
• ksec 8mo ago
  This is what I have been saying for sometime. Working inside different Goverment department you see this happening every day. Email and report bouncing back and forth with no actual added value while feeling extremely productive. That is why private sector and public sector generally don't mix well. It is also one reason why I said in some of my previous post LLM could replace up to 70% of Goverment's job. Edit: If anyone haven't watched Yes Minster, you should go and watch it, it is a documentary on UK Government that is still true today as it was 40-50 years ago.
• t43562 8mo ago
  That would be a way to get "the right answer." i.e. it's not the LLM, it's that they're not being used properly. I get accused of the no true Scotsman argument because I think agile can be done right, for example. Is work bullshit because an LLM doesn't help it?
  • jama211 8mo ago
    Exactly. So much terrible usage is out there and no one is talking about it. It takes skill to use, and I bet accountants were way slower when they were learning how to use spreadsheets for the first time too.
• mguerville 8mo ago
  And in the type of work where AI arguably yields productivity gains the workers have high agency and may pay for their own tooling without telling their employers. Case in point, me, I have access to CoPilot via my employer but don't use it because I prefer my self-paid ChatGPT subscription. If Ai-lift in productivity is measured on the condition that I use Copilot then the resulting metric misses my AI usage entirely and my productivity improvement are not attributed to their real cause.
• blitzar 8mo ago
  > the work itself simply has no discernable economic value i'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on sunday
• epiccoleman 8mo ago
  At least in my experience, there's another mechanism at play: people aren't making it visible if AI is speeding them up. If AI means a bugfix card that would have taken a day takes 15 minutes, well, that's the work day sorted. Why pull another card instead of doing... something that isn't work?
• butlike 8mo ago
  But they're not optimizing the average worker's productivity. That's a silicon valley talking point. The average worker, IF they use AI, ends up proofreading the text for the same amount of time as it would take to write the text themselves. And it is of this lowly commenter's opinion that proofreading for accuracy and clarity is harder than writing it yourself and defending it later.
• _DeadFred_ 8mo ago
  And the reason the position and the busy work exist is to have someone who is knowledgeable on the topic/relationship/requirements/whatever for the edge cases that come up (you don't pay me to push the button, you pay me to know when to push the button). AI could be technically filling a roll while its defeating the whole point (familiarity, background knowledge) for a lot of these roles.