16 ms·

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

• dnautics 12y ago
  "Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty" Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank. A lot of laws also require people to be at their desks for 40 hours - because there's a categorical definition of 'full-time equivalent' - whether or not that person is actually (instead of nominally) working all 40 of those hours. "where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers" Graber misses quite a bit here (read on for the full context); Republicans are not resentful of teachers in general, just public sector teachers.
  • coldtea 12y ago
    >Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank. Yeah, part of this is because few have inherited or other wealth, so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets.
    • logicchains 12y ago
      >so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets That pretty much doesn't happen in any western country now, due to welfare. If the desire is to prevent starvation and homelessness, transfer payments do a fine job; there's no need for intervention in the labour market or monetary system.
      • TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        Quite a lot of people have died or committed suicide in the UK recently, because the government decided to change the rules around disability and chronic illness. It hired a shill organisation to declare that the disabled, chronically ill, and dying were fit for work. So bedridden terminal cancer patients have had all benefits cut and told to look for work. This is not an exaggeration, by the way. Graeber has missed something very obvious. We do not have a market economy. What we have is a <i>status</i> economy. People who get useful stuff done have low status, because in the bullshit economy the ability to get and hold status is the most valuable of all skills. So all transactions become a test of relative status, and people who have to do productive work have lower status than people who move status tokens (i.e. 'money' and 'power') around. And the weak - the homeless, the ill, the disabled, the outsiders and minorities - have the lowest status of all.
        • arethuza 12y ago
          "What we have is a <i>status</i> economy" Which actually sounds rather like the original definition of "meritocracy": http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
          • crpatino 12y ago
            How can a system dominated by posers be called a "meritocracy"? I am sure it looks superficially the same, but in essence is the exact opposite.
      • coldtea 12y ago
        >That pretty much doesn't happen in any western country now, due to welfare. You'd be surprised. Visit any western country (US, the UK, France, ...) and see it happening. >If the desire is to prevent starvation and homelessness, transfer payments do a fine job; there's no need for intervention in the labour market or monetary system. Not sure what those "transfer payments" are. Anything like Western Union money transfers?
• esquivalience 12y ago
  This seems to me like an employee's opinion, rather than that of a founder. I mean that the worker's view of a company is as a job-creator, whereas a company founder sees a company as a tool to fill a market niche (and usually generate profit). The argument against the article's proposal is quite simple - if people will pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'? It's not that either's wrong and I don't know anything about the author's backgound. Just interesting to think from the other person's POV.
  • pedrosorio 12y ago
    "There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)"
    • dnautics 12y ago
      Isn't it interesting that the one example Graeber comes up with is possibly the profession writ large whose demand is largely influenced by a social structure outside of the free-market? Likewise, a over promulgation of workers in finance is suggestive that maybe there is some non-free-market force is incentivising individuals to go into that field...
      • cstross 12y ago
        "A social structure outside of the free-market" describes, by some estimates, over 75% of all human interactions. Non-market interactions are invisible to conventional economics because they're not priced, but they're by no means insignificant. They range from developing-world peasants farming land to which they simply have no title deeds, through to the form of communist praxis which is the dominant social structure of the supposedly free-market west -- the nuclear family. (Or do you present your kids with a bill for their personal care and feeding? Non-dysfunctional families run along lines Marx described as, "to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities": sharing without reference to individual wealth is explicit in state-recognized marriage vows. That the power/money relationship often reverses a generation later, as adult children support or nurse their aged parents through their last year, just underlines the pattern.) Graeber, as an anthropologist, is interested in all human interactions, not just marketized ones. And his particular field has been the intersection of the market sector with the non-marketized greater cloud of human relationships.
• wallflower 12y ago
  Related: An epic Reddit answer to 'Why Americans get so little vacation time' Short answer: Communism lost http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d8eiv/why_do_americans_get_so_little_vacation_time/c0ybdup http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d8eiv/why_do_ameri...
  • confluence 12y ago
    That answer is complete bullshit. > In the United States, socialism is virtually nonexistent. Except for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Unemployment. And don't forget the military.
    • lentil_soup 12y ago
      Sorry if I am being ignorant, but how's the military a socialist thing?
      • confluence 12y ago
        > Every day before dawn, brave men and women of different races and backgrounds rise as one, united by a common cause. They march together in formation, kept in step by their voices joined in song. These workers leave their communal housing arrangements and go toil together “in the field.” While they are out doing their day’s labor, their young are cared for in subsidized childcare programs. If they hurt themselves on the job, they can count on universal health care. Right under your nose, on the fenced-in bases you drive past on your way to work or see on the TV news, a successful experiment in collectivization has been going on for years. -- http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/21/troops-of-the-uniform-unite-the-military-is-a-socialist-paradise.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/21/troops-of-t... > The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. This is a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it continues with a veterans’ health care system that has much lower costs than the American system as a whole. -- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... I'm surprised this isn't obvious to most people. I also find libertarian soldiers extremely amusing.
• tmylk 12y ago
  Graeber's idea on the solution to the problem: "revolt of the caring classes" instead of mass dropout is even more interesting in this interview. http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/ http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1... To put it in a naive tech twist - maybe there should be an online tool that allows me to distribute a proportion of my wages to a list of "people who care for me and things I care about". Basically, can I create my own tax system and transact most of my affairs in it? Would anyone be interested in joining? Has DogeCoin already tried to do that? I would never live completely outside of state taxation, because of obvious practicalities like the military. (By the way, Graeber has an argument that army is the reason for existence of both money and taxes in his book on Debt.) In technical terms, post-bitcoin there is no reason for the state to be involved in the tax system. DogeCoin was a close attempt at an ecosystem where money goes around and contributes to good causes, not sure what is going on with it now. There are successful local currencies(Brixton pound) that support local city councils, can the same thing be done on a global scale?
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • vanderZwan 12y ago
    Off-topic: I've seen that link a few times, and have yet to figure out why it reads "help us thomas piketty the 1s sick and twisted new scheme"
    • pjc50 12y ago
      Cry for help from the person running the CMS?
• netcan 12y ago
  I think he's talking about jobs where this is arguable (though never entirely provable) from any perspective: employee, employer or consumer. What is the point of FMCG marketing people? Do they really serve a purpose in society or do they just funnel funds from the competitive process (which as a whole might be productive) into different hands, including their own. There are some positive externalities like television, but that kind of incidental value is hard to find meaning in. How about all the lawyers playing zero sum games? Social media people for office supply companies? Paparazzi? Are reward programs offering blenders in exchange for credit card miles really necessary? I think the point he's making is somewhat valid, especially from a personal intuitive perspective. The wider question is can society work differently? Can we trade work for leisure? Can we find self definitions and motivation outside of work?
  • sunnybg 12y ago
    Leisure doesn't have to be indulgent. It simply gives a lot more possibilities. If you could work on any project or interest or hobby you wanted to right now, what would you work on? If you could learn any new thing you wanted, what would you learn about? Any family, friends, neighbors, or others going through a hard time right now, how would you like to help them? This is the sort of stuff we should be teaching kids in schools too, about the possibilities of free time. It can be about a lot more than just recovering from the exhaustion of work.
    • netcan 12y ago
      I think we might be talking about different things. My understanding of this articles is: (A) A lot of work is bullshit from either a 'gives your life meaning' or a 'is useful to the world' perspective. (B) Everyone working full time is such a foundational part of our society that we don't know how to change it without breaking the world. Work is our identity, our drive to get good grades in preschool, the way money is distributed in society, a politically stabilizing force, etc. You're talking about what we could do if we lived in that world.
      • sunnybg 12y ago
• spindritf 12y ago
  How is this weak political agitation on top of HN? It reads like a paroody. You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) Yes, yes, if you disagree with our good professor here then you must be a tabloid-reading simpleton. A person of any sophistication would easily recognize the value of this largely fact-free critique of capitalism. Where capitalism is represented by the academia, the most competitive of industries. Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments The whole thing is nothing but ideological signalling. if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers Let me just say (before I go back to reading Daily Mail and bashing teachers) that I can totally understand why he spent so much time thinking about bullshit jobs.
  • ludoo 12y ago
    Actually, he's a well known anthropologist and author of an excellent book, which you should maybe read before labelling him as a political agitator...[1] [1] and given it's freely available, it won't cost you anything... http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years
  • jeremy6d 12y ago
    What in the hell is wrong with political agitation? Had no idea the system was working so well for you! :)
• mianos 12y ago
  A funny thing about this story is the photo is of the SSE. The very same place where I worked on the trading system and got down voted for '2300 a second sustained. I was doing that on PA RISC under HPUX in 1995. BFD'. More relevant to the story at hand, when the bell went for lunch, most of those people crossed their arms and put their heads down on them for a nap. I am sure many never left their desk.
  • tmylk 12y ago
    Did you find working there meaningful? Half of the time I found playing with cool HFT tech fun just for the tech part of it and no thoughts about meaning at all. But when there is a boring patch, the meaningful/meaningless question is tantalising.
• binarymax 12y ago
  I just had a great trip to a cousins wedding and saw a lot of family. My Parents' generation are now just past the 'age of retirement' and are in their late 60s and early 70s. The majority of them are still working in their bullshit jobs. I asked several if they were going to retire soon and they all replied the same. If they retire what would they do? Even though their work is mostly pointless from a job function perspective, it gives them something to do and keeps them active and social. It is not stressful for them and they enjoy it for the most part. I wonder if we are all working these jobs because there is nothing better to do.
  • ishener 12y ago
    I think the problem is not that there is nothing better to do, is that there is no one to oversee you when you are doing your hobby
    • agumonkey 12y ago
      The psychological roots of work are interesting.
    • innguest 12y ago
      Bingo! Hence the human craving for hierarchy, someone above me to tell me what to do with all this free time.
  • tomp 12y ago
    I can't help but pity people who say "there is nothing better to do" (but then again, maybe that's because I'm employed, working 10 hours a day). We live at a time when "I have nothing to do" is a really bullshit excuse. You have the whole internet available! - learn languages (e.g. Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish - to cover most of the world's population) - learn new stuff (statistics/machine learning, quantum mechanics, chemistry/biology, philosophy, programming, ...) - do crowd-funded science (https://www.zooniverse.org/ https://www.zooniverse.org/) - help with open source projects (they need both programmers and non-programmers) - teach people English (or any other language you know) - entertain yourself (chat, watch movies, read books, play games) Even for older generations, who might not be so comfortable with technology, there are plenty of useful things they can do in the real world. - mentor kids - tidy up parks and other public spaces - participate in or organize hackatons/hardware hackatons/makerspaces - experiment with learning/science/research in your home (make a spice garden, grow plants using hydroponics, prototype using 3D printing, redecorate your home with cheap materials) - hang out with lonely (often elderly) people - (learn to) cook - work out (bodyweight exercises - you'll live longer) I seriously cannot imagine ever being bored with nothing useful to do (except when I get home after work, I'm tired and I only have an hour or two of free time, so there's not much time to start anything meaningful - but even so, I spend a lot of time programming my personal projects).
• JLB25 12y ago
  Interesting article and a strong feeling that there is something there that we all know but we don't say, declare to ourselves and to the others. So I think there another point to add here: everything manages to stick together not because of an not well explained hate for 'real workers' (I can see that it exists, but how does it contribute to keep everyone in its place?). On one hand it is the most stupid of all the answers: its' because of money, the salary that you get paid to do this pointless jobs. And on the other hand it is because of something less clearly perceivable, yet profound and 'democratized': a part from the 'real' jobs mentioned in the article - physical labor jobs, agriculture, health services - almost all the other workers are equated by the secret perception of being paid more instead of the value of their job, the value of their real work effort and contribution. But this perception alone won't do the job. It works because it is matched by a counter-perception, almost as unmentionable: if most of the employees feel they manage to get paid more than what they do (not of what they deserve because this implies other personal, political, social, intellectual considerations), most of the employers do feel that are paying their employees less than what they contribute to the wealth of the company or organization, less of what their contribution's value is. I believe that this is at the parallel combination of these perceptions is, at least one, of the main reasons why everything keep staying the way it is, why we don't work less. What to do? Organize the work differently. Start-ups have the potential to structure a division of labour, responsibilities and remuneration that provides a better sense of empowerment, equal contribution to the common aim of that the organization/company has, fair returns from the effort done. It doesn't last long thou. As soon as the start-up become institutionalized, e.g. direct control is lost over certain operations and processes, the company/organization become bigger, certain part of the work done is captured only with quarterly reports or similar simplification, tales of the work done, the objective achieved, it tend to become as any other existing company, recreating that dual perception that I've mentioned before. Bottom line is (probably): perception for perception, let's ask more often and with less fear(?) to our colleagues, to the other people in general how much do they earn? what does really involve their job? It may sound a futile exercise but I believe that by communicating to each other, by spelling it out, we will play around with other possibilities, with alternative organizations and modes of labour.
• jcfrei 12y ago
  The author himself notices half way through the text that he might have gone out on a limb. If his description of "bullshit jobs" was at least followed by some statistics on marginal valued added (to a product, service) by that particular job (and how this margin has become lower and lower) then we could start a serious discussion about it. But now his extraordinary claims just stand there as a shallow rant, more like a romantic anecdote to Victorian economics than a fundamental analysis of capitalism.
  • coldtea 12y ago
    So, essentially he has to add some bullshit statistics to his description of bullshit jokes... I find those kind of statistics pointless. Most of the time they are based on incomplete data and as much guesswork as any rant. An intelligent opinion on the other hand, based on observation and with a coherent point of view, is worth more than all those statistics (to paraphrase Alan Kay, who said "A point of view is worth 80 IQ points").
    • jcfrei 12y ago
      Statistics help in testing and validating an author's claims. Eloquent deductive reasoning can easily lead to wrong conclusions, which is why we need to test them with empirical results. This author in particular appears to put a prohibitively large value on physical goods over any kind of service. He dismisses the fundamental transition from an industrial economy to a service economy, simply labeling most of the new jobs as pointless. while his arguments might be convincing for a few jobs such as telemarketing, he appears to forget about the highly increased complexity of a modern economy, which requires people working in corporate law, financial services and the administrative sector. in my opinion those regulations weren't just invented because The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger [...] but rather because: 1) modern technologies require a more extensive management (with an entire workforce dedicated to maintaining them). 2) because globalization creates a much more complex framework for corporations (different local laws). 3) there are much more financial options available today to both individuals and corporations. a small company from Utah can today raise money from investors in Abu Dhabi and an individual from Europe can invest in Australian mining companies - just to name a few examples. this range of services is unprecedented and requires an accordant workforce.
• artursapek 12y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478
• ilamont 12y ago
  Reading this, I was reminded of the "B Ark" from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: (1) The B Ark is technically named "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B". The Golgafrincham civilization hatched a plan to eliminate its society of its most useless workers, namely its service sector and its paper shufflers. The Golgafrinchans created a legend that their world was about to be destroyed and they needed to build three arks. In Ark A they would put all the high achievers, the scientists, thinkers, artists, and important leaders. In Ark C they would put all the blue-collar workers, the people that build and make things. In Ark B they would put everyone else: hairdressers, TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants. The B Ark was constructed, loaded up, and launched first. However, it was automatically set for a collision course with Earth's sun, to finally rid Golgafrincham of these twits. And naturally, no A or C ark was ever made. The presence of useless B Ark people in company settings has generated a lot of thought, including this person (2) who suggests dealing with them by "hiring another “B” Ark person to have meetings with them. Demand that accurate minutes are kept and that they should meet at least twice day until the problem is resolved" and engaging them in a useless, circular project. 1. http://everything2.com/title/B+Ark http://everything2.com/title/B+Ark 2. http://infinite-shades.com/2011/02/14/golgafrincham-b-ark-what-to-do-when-you-dont-have-one-handy/ http://infinite-shades.com/2011/02/14/golgafrincham-b-ark-wh...
  • JulianMorrison 12y ago
    I hate that particular joke because of how it so casually blames the victim. Awful jobs exist in the system and people are crammed into them by economic force.
    • tartuffe78 12y ago
      They are vindicated by the fact that all of the smug high achievers and those they let live are wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone, since they killed off the telephone sanitizers.
    • thaumasiotes 12y ago
      B Ark jobs aren't awful jobs, though. A chinese woman once started talking to me in a bakery, saying she wanted to practice her english. She'd spent time in Australia and recently come back to China to look for a job. "What kind of job are you looking for?" I ask. "I want to get a job in an office." When "working in an office" is the height of your ambition, a B Ark job is as good as things get. If you're looking for awful jobs people get crammed into by economic force, look at obviously-productive C Ark jobs, like being a miner or a peasant.
• deleted 12y ago
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• rakoo 12y ago
  > The answer clearly isn’t economic I beg to differ. I totally agree with the paradox (with the advances in technology, humans should be working less) but the problem, today, is economic: - In order to live you need money - In order to obtain money you need to work (except for the lucky too few) - Therefore, work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of creating "useless" jobs if needs be How are you going to remove jobs if it so directly means no more revenue for those people ? The problem here is that we're conflating revenue with work. The only answer is to decouple them, and introduce something like basic income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • crdoconnor 12y ago
    This is preferable to Basic Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee For the following reasons: * It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression. * We actually do have a lot of infrastructure which needs rebuilding and projects which would make all of our lives better (high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.) * People actually like to work - to feel useful. Basic Income will prevent the unemployed from starving but nearly ALL of them would rather have a guarantee of meaningful, stable, reasonably paid and respectable work than just getting paid to stay at home all day. The PWA provided that. There is actually a good example of a public works program that was turned into basic income (Plan Jefes in Argentina). Unexpectedly, large numbers of the people who were part of it CONTINUED to work at the jobs (things like caregiving) even though under the new basic income rules they no longer had to go.
    • rakoo 12y ago
      > People actually like to work - to feel useful. There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money, but for the actual effect it has. Your example shows it. You can also ask yourselves if chefs, musicians, programmers, mechanics would just grab the money and stay home; I don't believe so. Only those who do their job purely for revenues will stop... At least, that's my prediction (and hope). In other words, useless jobs (as in, not useful for others) will vanish.
• insickness 12y ago
  What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on. The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what people do. And with hierarchy, there is also more chance of waste and having a bullshit job. But those bullshit jobs can come at almost any level. My first job out of college was at an environmental firm with extensive government contracts. The firm got paid for every hour they logged under my name on maintenance of projects that didn't require much maintenance except on paper. So the firm got paid for me showing up and doing nothing. But I can confirm that it was horrible. At first I liked that I could come in at 10 and leave at 3. After a while though, it killed me inside.
  • michas 12y ago
    I understand your point about managing nurse's jobs, but think about this: in the last century we went from doing manager's work by means of pen and paper to computers with software that can do planning, managing, accounting etc. Given the technological advances it should take less and less managers to organize jobs of the same number of workers. Mystery lies in the fact that we have more managerial jobs than we used to.
  • VLM 12y ago
    "After a while though, it killed me inside." Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week. 1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him. 2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some. 3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.
• protonfish 12y ago
  The simple social rule that explains this is pecking order. One of the most basic human desires is dominance over others. When you have the money, you hire as many submissive minions as you can. "Bullshit jobs" are just an entourage. Then you display dominance over them by making them do meaningless work - the more humiliating the better. If you hired people that were actually useful, you'd be reliant on them so only get as many as you actually need to keep your organization from going under.
• furyg3 12y ago
  While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking about a taboo. White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours. There are exceptions, and HNers may deny this fact (because the demographic is different or because the taboo is more powerful in this circle), but Graeber's inebriated cocktail party confessions match my own discussions with friends. However... We've learned a skill, learned the job, and are available for 40 hours. Western culture really doesn't allow us to just show up for the 15-20 hours we really work and get paid the same salary as the 40 we say we do. So instead of going home early and cooking, working in the garden, bettering themselves, or watching tv, many show up to work and have strange meetings about nothing, conversations at the coffee corner, work unproductively on a tasks that could be done efficiently if they hadn't already been at work for 7 hours, or fuck around online while nobody is looking. It's great for eBay and Facebook, not so much for the kids in day care. To some extent, everybody knows this. Employers are starting to tolerate working from home a lot more, which I think is a tacit acknowledgement of the situation. I hope that our culture can come to grips with this and acknowledge that most people in creative jobs can't really put in a solid 40 hours of truly productive work, while at the same time not condemning them to work as consultants with no savings or pensions.
  • jug6ernaut 12y ago
    I am not going to deny anything you said, its almost 100% true. But I believe your missing an important "fact"(maybe). That is its not really physically/physiologically/mentally possible to put in 40 hours of true "work". Not consistently anyways. So as much as it is we not truly putting in 40 hours, its the entire effort to be available for 40 hours IMO that you are getting paid for.
    • ams6110 12y ago
      It is possible and commonplace in jobs where you physically work. Construction, any of the trades, factory work, food service... if you work 40 hours you have actually worked very close to 40 hours. There isn't any real opportunity to slack off or stand around in those jobs. Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.
• 7952 12y ago
  In more professional settings certain job titles seem pointless but actually add a diversity of thinking that would otherwise be lacking. For example, you may not really need a lawyer to check something. But good lawyers have a knack of identifying logical inconsistancies and always find spelling mistakes which is useful. Or an IT expert operating in an office of social scientists will think about problems in an entirely different way. Sometimes maintaining a multi disiplinary team is more important than being 100% efficient on an individual level.
• hammerzeit 12y ago
  This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics. Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance? To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value? Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2]. Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all consumer startups and no b2b/enterprise startups. [1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-an... -- 167,400 musicians [2] see http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php#sotflf http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php... -- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw
  • decode 12y ago
    > There are more musicians employed in this country than there are people in biglaw. Is "number of lawyers employed at the 100 largest law firms" a good proxy for the number of corporate law specialists? I don't know that much about corporate lawyers, but it seems like a lot of them might be employed by corporations or smaller law firms. Since there are somewhere around 1 million lawyers in the US [3], it seems reasonable to me that at least %17 of them would be corporate law specialists, making the original assertion true. [3] http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php#nusl http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php...
  • shkkmo 12y ago
    > Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance? The way I understand it, these pointless 'arms-race' jobs are jobs tend to also produce little to no value to society. They may produce value for their bosses in the form of making the boss look good to the uber-bosses, or they may provide value to their company as a means of maintaining competitive advantage in the market place. These is less a direct function of the skills of the workers than a function of the roles in which those workers are placed. Some corporate lawyers clearly do provide non 'arms-race' value, some IT professionals only provide 'arms-race' value. I don't think the existence of these jobs is a direct effort to "keep-the-masses-down", but it has the effect of mostly wasting worker's time in roles where the main value is how they help maintain the wealth of that 1%. Of course, this an all or nothing proposition. Many jobs produce some mix of actual value vs 'arms-race' value. Separating these is not necessarily straight forward. > Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2] I... don't think those statistics show what you want them to show. Does that number of "musicians" only include those for whom it is their only/main source of income? I also don't see any breakdown in those statistics on lawyers for "area of specialization" but based on where they are employed. I don't know if Graeber's specific claim is true, but there do appear to be 5-10 times more lawyers than musicians in our country.
• rmsaksida 12y ago
  Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop building bullshit and focus on real problems. An engineer at Kittygram is likely to be working on a bullshit, ultimately irrelevant job, but few people would question the value of an engineer's work if he's doing groundbreaking medical software. Of course, people don't always choose to have bullshit jobs, and getting to the level where you can build something of impact is not easy. I'm far from there myself. But I have the feeling many of us don't really look for meaningful jobs - truth be told, we don't even _think_ about these things.
  • heydenberk 12y ago
    It's not quite that simple. Engineers at Kittygram might build a new, open source system for efficient object recognition which then revolutionizes medical imaging. ImportantMedicalCo, with its government contract to modernize medical records, might go over budget and out of business, having a chilling effect on investment in medical record modernization. People do think about these things, but they're hard to reason about.
    • rmsaksida 12y ago
      Very good point. Isn't this kind of innovation restricted to the Kittygrams that operate at large scales, though? Kittygram will need to reach a large mass of users, get bought out, face the need to extract specialized data from images, and finally hire expert engineers to work on that problem before they can innovate. How many startups get to that point? Even if the Kittygram founder had a vision of building an innovative object recognition solution and merely used Kittygram as the means to an end, it feels as if there must be a more efficient way to solve these problems.
• tpeo 12y ago
  Graeber makes no distinction between "useful" as in: a) creator of exchange value to it's maker; b) creator of utility to it's holder; b) psychologically "meaningful" to the worker. And while the core of the article deals with the latter, by not making this distinction he dangerously suggests the two former. As much I'd like to believe that managers are stupid, they're not crazy to hand out free money. If an employee generated no additional income to it's employer, there would be no reason to hire him in the first place. Similarly, if the holder of a good derived no enjoyment from it, it would be of no value at all to him. It's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no social value. The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the first place. The job of a corporate lawyer is to ensure corporations are compliant with all the paperwork necessary to their operation. For sufficiently large corporations, they're a necessary condition for it's functioning. For me, the only reason why his argument might seem personally intuitive is because the majority of things in capitalism are of no use at all to any given particular person, even if all of them are "useful" in some way. Paparazzi, dog-washers and all-night pizza deliverymen are useless for all but the people who demand their services. It's not hard to see why consumers would have little interest in contract law if they deal so little with it, and when they do, their job of understanding it has already been cushioned by a specialist. I see little point in coffee shops. Nonetheless, people flock to places with well-developed service economies that offer such things (e.g. New York, San Francisco) along with dog-washers. Perhaps because they know they'll cater to their bullshit tastes too.
  • crdoconnor 12y ago
    >It's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no social value. It REALLY isn't that hard. >The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the first place. Right, they run the full gamut from avoiding legal battles with communities that are trying to shut down polluting factories that damage their health to avoiding legal battles with people who have suffered injury, incapacitation or even death from using their products. Using every trick available. Their job is to make sure that large corporations are protected from us and they are paid handsomely for it. You consider this 'social value'?
• osehgol 12y ago
  Glad that it's shared, the Economist talked about it last year, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0 http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m.... Don't think these jobs exist because there's some scheme to keep people free and happy "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s)." Just that not many people actually build things. Currency and paper money also has a role to play here. I'd like to see that many people are encouraged to build things on a level playing field.
• xpto123 12y ago
  Workers in the beginning of the 20th century worked 70 hour 6-7 days weeks, now in many countries we are down to 35h / 5 days. In the next 10 years we will get to 30 or less, we are at a threshold of the 4 day work week that's why its taking longer to cut down on the work hours. The 4 day work week will imply social changes, and therefore the resistance but it will come in the next 20 years. The author understands that its a slow process and it takes time, but congratulations on talking about a taboo. Concerning the value of jobs, in the Philippines, go to a restaurant: one guy comes and set the dishes, the other the glasses, the other takes the order, etc. The root cause for this is I believe overpopulation unprecedented in the history of mankind. Not to defend lawyers, but who would solve disputes? Everybody bashes lawyers, but the day an employer tries to make you sign an indemnity paper that is less than you have right, you are glad that there is a lawyer there to defend you.
  • jahaja 12y ago
    I don't think those rationalisations hold ups. The facts of workforce expansion and productivity & efficiency gains can't simply be shrugged off by "overpopulation". This is intentional political policy, nothing else.
    • kissickas 12y ago
      So you agree with this statement?: > The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). I was with him until there... I'd like to believe things like that and blame it all on the "evil politicians," but I'm really not sure the "ruling class" is that organized. Then, at the end of the article, he says something that seems much more reasonable to me, although contradictory: > Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. So I'm not sure what exactly he's trying to say is the cause.
      • shkkmo 12y ago
        I believe he is implying that the goal, "keep the general population employed/occupied to prevent unrest" is consciously held by some 'oligarchs'. However, the systems which accomplish that goal have emerged via trial and error and were not consciously designed by the 'oligarchs'. The 'oligarchs' watch the broad trends and have supported changes to the system that supported their goal and have hindered changes to the system that do no support their goal on a case by case basis. I suspect the 'oligarchs' striving for the above goal is not a 'conspiracy' among the elite so much as a shared cultural belief in stability.
• edw519 12y ago
  Let's not forget about how much bullshit government adds to non-bullshit jobs... My Typical 8 hour day 1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley): 7 hours: code 1 hour: overhead 2002 to 2014 (after Sarbanes-Oxley): 1 hour: insure rigorous Requirements documentation 1 hour: insure rigorous Test Plans (whether used or not) 1 hour: peer review (of devs I would have never hired) 1 hour: code review (for what peer review missed) 1 hour: answer auditors' questions 1 hour: status reports 1 hour: status meetings 55 minutes: bitch to boss 5 minutes: code
  • meapix 12y ago
    awesome!!!
  • mcherm 12y ago
    The snarky response is cool and all, but honestly I would be VERY interested in seeing any kind of actual measured statistics on the overhead created by Sarbanes-Oxley, while the snark just kinda leaves me cold.
  • crdoconnor 12y ago
    Sarbanes Oxley was created to prevent executives from looting their own companies (a la Enron) and then feigning ignorance and blaming their underlings when everything blew up. The reason why it seems to be ridiculously onerous is because it gives the government the power to slam execs in jail if they do not have sufficient control over the company. It's executive bullshit that ruined your day, which is caused by executive paranoia about going to jail which was caused by executives who stole from their own companies.
    • personZ 12y ago
      Has it worked? I'm not supporting any opposition to SOX, however we all know of many processes that offer no real checks or value, but we have to do it...just because why not, you're getting paid for it. In the case of SOX and the like, the argument can be "well everyone else has to do the same illusion of control work, so the drag is similar". Most businesses are filled with processes that everyone knows are done for absolutely no value to anyone, but we do them anyways and they absolutely sap our soul.
• jbogp 12y ago
  From one of the comments at the bottom of the article: http://www.bullshitjob.com/ http://www.bullshitjob.com/ Some of these are pretty amazing.
• bryanlarsen 12y ago
  As hammerzeit mentioned, a lot of bullshit jobs are there because of an arms race. Your competitors have marketers, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, so you need them too. If everybody fired 90% of their marketers, marketing dollars would go 10x as far, and things wouldn't change much. Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera. This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of marketing 10x more expensive? Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which also increases the number of jobs. Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment. Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced. Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this arms race.
  • pidg 12y ago
    If being a marketer is a bullshit job, then being a web developer is a bullshit job too. Most people could spend a week with a marketing book and do some basic marketing. Likewise, most people could spend a week learning WordPress and create a passable website. So let's reduce the number of web developers by 90% too! Think of the billions it could save in inflated invoices from web agencies (commissioned by clueless marketers). Let's just reduce all jobs by 90% and make everyone teachers, doctors and street cleaners. I have a really good feeling about this.
    • bryanlarsen 12y ago
      If it costs you $1M per marketer rather than $100K, you're only going to hire the absolute best.
• tawan 12y ago
  For me, it boils down to two questions: 1) Given, that let's say only 20% of the population does real work (doctors, teachers etc..), why should they do their work, if everybody else is enjoying spare-time all the time? And if you propose that they also could work less, therefore we would have more doctor positions to be filled, guess what, people that have valuable jobs are also the ones who really like their job, and are happy with working 40 hours, or even more. It's somehow ironic that people won't do work, just because they like what they do, they also want to be acknowledged monetary, no matter how much they like their job, which I can understand. Somehow we have a situation, i.e. from a doctor's perspective, like: "Yea, I'll treat you, but only if you are also getting up at seven every morning and commute to some office and do stuff." 2) I think for biological reasons, people need status more than spare-time. We need some kind of hierarchy to determine who is more entitled to spread their genes. If everybody is unemployed, how do you know who has more status? Money and consequently buying power does simplify this problem very neatly, reducing it to a one-dimensional metric scale, easy to compare and communicate.
  • shkkmo 12y ago
    I think that we should offer basic income to everyone, in return for reversible sterilization. Then the only people working be those who want to (either for extra money or status). The only people having kids would be those who are motivated enough to find a way of getting off public income for long enough to have them.
• tim333 12y ago
  Interesting article but Graeber seems to mix up some different issues: a) We're not working 15 hour weeks. I'd say that's mostly because people like to do things. Give people enough money to not need to work and they'll still want to go build stuff b) His musician mate made loads as a lawyer, not much as a musician in spite of contributing more to society as a musician. That does seem to be a market failing. Gandhi types preaching peace and making a big positive impact can make nothing, patent trolls can make a fortune while screwing society. Not sure how to fix that. c) "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger" - not convinced by that one. I think it's a failing of the human mind to attribute what are probably emergent market phenomena to plotting human bad guys.
  • lsseckman 12y ago
    Comment C) is right on! The amount of coordination and planning it would take to secretly pull it off greatly surpasses even the most talented and motivated groups. It's interesting you use Gandhi as an example, there is some substantial evidence he had access to a great deal of the world's bounty due to his positive impact. This would seem like a market efficiency. It seems this artist had significant exposure to the potential customer, along with a recording contract which would suggest promotional funding. With my cold-hearted economist hat on it's tempting to assign this less to a market inefficiency than not contributing much to society.
• DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  I am reminded of a quote from an economics professor. "Why do big nations have a lot of jobs, no matter how much they are producing? As it turns out, this is a very interesting question" This is the robots-are-coming-for-us fallacy rearing its head again. Once again, the premise is that we only need certain things -- food, shelter, electricity, internet, health care. Once robots make these things, well dang, there won't be anything else for the rest of us to do, will there? No, no, a thousand times no. Humans value not only things to keep them alive, but scarcity and novelty. As the basic needs become automated, huge industries will continue to explode devoted to creating scarce and novel things for other humans to collect and consume. Most of these "bullshit jobs" are in this sector. I find these essays always have some kind of value statement, either implied or outright -- "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialist in corporate law?" It says that if you had a magic wand, we'd have more poets. If I had one, we probably would, too. But it tells us absolutely nothing about why there are jobs that folks don't like, or jobs that you or I might find useless.
  • normloman 12y ago
    I see what you mean about the robots: productivity goes up, but we always find new things to consume. But 1. Is there a limit to how much we can consume? Look at the super rich. They have more money then they know what to do with, so they stash it in hedge funds. The middle class drives consumption more than the rich. Leads me to think there's a point where consumption doesn't grow with your income. 2. The bullshit jobs discussed in the article are not about creating novel and scares things to consume. Advertising, corporate law, etc, has an arms-race element. Companies spend more on advertising to keep up with their competitors.
• atmosx 12y ago
  I like that fact that the decrease of working hours per day, is becoming a mainstream discussion. I've seen other articles popping up elsewhere the last couple of years. That's good.
• sauere 12y ago
  As long as the President's success is measured by the unemployment rate, these jobs will exist.
• martingordon 12y ago
  I wonder if the problem is exacerbated in the US by the lack of guaranteed time off. That is, European workers (for example) can better fill a 35-40 hour work week because they only have to work ~47 weeks of the year, whereas in the US, many feel lucky to have even two weeks off.
• byEngineer 12y ago
  I work at a large bank in the US. We build websites. Internal websites. The company employs maybe 300k people in the US alone. None of the websites gets more than 10 hits a day! There are 5 websites. And we have 40-50 people to support just that! If all these websites disappeared overnight there would be no difference to the bank. And to the society. The best part: the bank has been rescued by tax payer money. If it went bankrupt -- as it should have -- I would be working productively somewhere else. Unless "somewhere" else is also supported by the tax payer money and artificially cheap credit, FED rates at 0% full economic cycle now. The solution is more capitalism, not socialism. I.e. let them go bankrupt! This is what capitalism is all about. You take risks. You win, big payout! You loose, you go bankrupt! This is capitalism, not tax funded corporations. That's socialism for the rich. But don't call that capitalism, please! Interest rates at 0% for 7 years?! Set by whom? Capitalist free markets? Or socialist bureaucrats who know it all better?! Who sets the rates? Mr. Market or Ms. Yellen? Get rid of the FED too. You will see jobs like mine disappearing. And forcing me to do something more productive than slacking off for $120k / year curtesy of the tax payer. Capitalism in crisis is all about reallocating work force from unproductive work at looser companies to do something great at productive companies! That's what bankruptcies are all about. Yes, my bank should be history long time ago. Its assets should be taken over by a bank that didn't make the stupid mistakes. And smart people who avoided those mistakes. This is what the bankruptcy process is about. Then this new CEO that weathered 2008 crisis making his small bank winning party here and taking over assets of bankrupted banks -- would see that nonsense and fire half of the staff. So they can go do something productive! This is how it works in true capitalism. We don't have it though because we believe in socialism. So yep, pay for your zombie bank (and my salary!) because the people who you voted into the office, didn't let the markets work!
  • dognotdog 12y ago
    Don't take it out on socialism! Under those principles, the banks either would not have existed in this form in the first place, or been allowed to go bankrupt just as you suggest. What happened with the bank bailout was pure capitalism, the banks simply bought the government!
    • 12y ago
• RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago
  It's a ridiculously widely recognised phenomenon. I immediately thought of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6J7TUHDzC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6J7TUHDzC8
• rwmj 12y ago
  So why doesn't competition push out the "bullshit" jobs? This article mentions that competition is supposed to fix it, isn't fixing it, but doesn't explain why.
  • dropit_sphere 12y ago
    Answer: the jobs are caused by the competition. Competition is what makes them necessary. If a company doesn't spend on marketing, other companies will outmarket it. If a company doesn't have a legal department it will crumble under a barrage of high-digit lawsuit damages. If a country doesn't spend on defense, it will be annexed by one that does (that some countries manage to escape this is an illusion stemming from the fact that the U.S. or similar large bloc effectively owns them already and is spending on defense in their behalf). There is one job of value to society that teachers, etc., are failing (or succeeding; take your pick) to do: managing their own sustainability. The unlisted list item on all job descriptions is "protect this job from backstabbing, layoffs, budget cuts, or impoverishing or killing the person who takes it." Snarky aside on engineers: we are usually bad at this, because, just like I said, it's not in the requirements.
• rglover 12y ago
  The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them. This has always bothered me, even before I was old enough to join the "work force." I had a hunch back in the day and have subsequently confirmed it early in my career: working less promotes better, clearer thinking, and ultimately a higher volume of results (i.e. when I work less, I end up getting more done). This is incredibly telling of our times: Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does. I encounter this more often than I'd like to admit. Brilliant, talented, positive people finding their core competencies squashed under meaningless political bullshit. I constantly shudder at the idea of what these people might accomplish if they were given the resources and freedom to do what they were actually good at. I've been reading Freedom From the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti and this one excerpt really speaks to this problem: For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, `Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.
  • vinceguidry 12y ago
• mrottenkolber 12y ago
  I achieved the 15 hour week. I like to do 20 hours some weeks (I get paid the hour, so its attractive, but I really don't have to). Note that I am not rich. Also I am young and healthy and don't have kids.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• aaron695 12y ago
  Lol Take something everyone thinks and talks about (Like all childish thought games) put a crappy explanation on it and people buy in. > The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger Seriously... and man didn't land on the moon. Conspiracy's happen, but it's about broken processes and complicated feedback. This is a interesting topic, it's a real shame people are fooled so easily by essays like this.
  • backlava 12y ago
    I agree. When he started talking about how capitalism shouldn't create these BS jobs, I assumed a reasoned economic argument was coming. Then this passage. It's a cabal of elites who have decided to spend their own money occupying the masses. What a joke. He could have just as convincingly claimed it was space aliens creating the jobs.
• evoloution 12y ago
  Choose your friends carefully, you never know when your life is going to land on HN: * Corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm * A poet in the past * Front man in an indie rock band in the past that his songs made it to the radio There shouldn't be more than 10 people fitting the description... Admits that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist. Btw great article!
• mathattack 12y ago
  The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them. I just don't buy this. If you view capitalists as evil, they are doing it to pocket money, not as some grand conspiracy to keep people busy. If it were economically possible to keep people busy in a capitalist society, inflation would be zero.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• jordanpg 12y ago
  Link to original: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ In this particular case, I think linking to libcom.org instead of strikemag.org is doing a significant disservice to the author.
• Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  From my POV, working 40 hours a week instead of 15 is a conscious choice. I could probably start my own company or source of income and get away with working 15 hours or even less a week, but I'm not going to. One, working for a boss is secure - I know what I'm gonna earn by the end of the month, no stress there. Two... I honestly wouldn't know what to do with the remaining time. I'm not an artsy hipster that spends all that free time being creative, I'd probably spend the extra time playing video games and growing fat. I for one need the structure in my life.
  • 72deluxe 12y ago
    This is quite true. Some of my friends and family work for themselves and I could not possibly cope with the stress of having to win jobs or worry if I was going to get paid at the end of the month. Despite the romantic ideas of working for yourself, it appears to offer LESS flexibility instead of more - they're always working! Instead of "I can work when and where I want!" it turns into "I am always working, anywhere" I could happily find things to do in my spare time though. Like playing an instrument, or reading.
    • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      I coped by adding a column to my spreadsheet: satisfaction. I charged more per hour for instance for family time, than for engineering time. So trading one for the other was obviously wrong. Still, the spreadsheet total has to meet a bar. I ended up working about 30 hours per week.
• api 12y ago
  Bullshit jobs are central to how our economy works, and their history goes way back. Most "work projects," unless they are to build infrastructure, are bullshit jobs. I'm convinced that a significant proportion of the military activity in the world is one big exercise in very pompous and important-seeming bullshit jobs in the defense sector. Whole sectors of the economy are bullshit. The more I see, especially since 2008, the more I think Keynes was really onto something re: monetary velocity. Our biggest problem is excessive pessimism and a zero-sum mentality, manifesting as various paradoxes of thrift. Without monumental efforts at hand-waving to keep the money flowing, our tendency is to deflate all the way back to the dark ages. Bullshit jobs are a semi-conscious hack to keep this from happening-- to keep people "working" so they get paid so the money flows. The other crazy hack around this problem is inflation, and fiat currency in general. The Austrian types who preach how all this nonsense is a result of these things are precisely wrong. Don't blame the hack for the thing it's fixing. If we can find a more permanent solution to the problems that we're hacking around, maybe we can dispense with the bullshit. Maybe that's a guaranteed minimum income.
• cylcon 12y ago
  what a bunch ob crap, only large super corporations can keep "bullshit" jobs. Otherwise the market corrects this. Funny to see all the hn readers advocating for more welfare and central planning. Typical neckbeard communism.
• talos 12y ago
  I find it incredible that we're at almost 200 comments, and no one has brought up the phenomenon of people doing real (often clerical office work they don't care too much about, except that it's in a field they're interested in) for free -- unpaid internships. Despite the fact that this is quite illegal, there is no enforcement (http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-labor-department-let-companies-off-hook-for-unpaid-internships http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-labor-department-l...).
  • gambiting 12y ago
    Maybe because not everyone on HN is from US and it's not illegal everywhere? In fact, it is de facto standard in some countries(as sad as that is).
• jdmichal 12y ago
  I'm surprised to see no mention of the wage stagnation that has been occurring, at least in the US. Quite simply, people can't stop working if they need the money that 40 hours of work brings. Meanwhile, inflation keeps ticking up and housing bubbles at rates far above inflation. It could, in fact, be argued that we have made negative progress since 1910. In that same time period, most households have gone from one worker to two as women join the labor force. So now, on a household basis, we are looking at 60+ hours per week instead of 40.
• klunger 12y ago
  The "elephant in the room" of this article was wealth redistribution. Technological advancements should make it possible for people to work 15-20 hours a week. In theory. The problem is that those same technological advancements go hand in hand with increased concentrations of wealth. It is the regrettable observed tendency of people with considerably more wealth than the masses to be stingy with that wealth, feel they inherently deserve it and lack empathy. So, if people in general are to benefit from technological advancements, there needs to be legislated wealth redistribution to overcome the inherent miserly-ness of the 1% whose wealth is largely a function of that technology.
  • solistice 12y ago
    What about the Giving Pledge[1] or the 2,000,000 people the Antony Robbins Foundation is trying to feed this year[2]? Whilst I agree with the assessment that charitable giving among the billionaires of the world might not be what it could be, there are shining examples of charitable giving amongst them, and I think that the generalization of stinginess, entitlement and heartlessness is overly broad and extremely harsh. [1] http://givingpledge.org/index.html http://givingpledge.org/index.html [2] https://www.anthonyrobbinsfoundation.org/ https://www.anthonyrobbinsfoundation.org/
• notdang 12y ago
  Don't want to defend Soviet Union, but this is very different to what I experienced while living in USSR: "Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). " It was quite the opposite. Just one person serving a huge queue.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    Three huge queues? You queue to say what you want and get a ticket. You take that ticket to a different queue and pay for the item and get a different ticket. You take that ticket to a third quue to collect the item.
• nevergetenglish 12y ago
  If I had to cope with a bullshit jobs that required only physical capabilities, I should try to advance in my start-up or whatever high thinking I am doing. Newton created his gravitation law when the university was shut-down because the pest. Doing something really nasty make you enjoy a lot your mental work in your real passion. Also, having your mind free but your arms working is a good way of thinking deeply. Edit1: I should add I don't like bullshit jobs! Edit2: Addendum For example you should try to learn and read a lot at night but just some core points, and the next day while working physically you should echo mentally all those material, discussing, analysing all in your head. When I was younger I could reason without writing, now I should need to write thing down, anyway the desire to get out of a bullshit job is a great force, the most boring the job stronger the desire to escape from that job and greater the concentration you find to center into your real passion, your real job, the one you adore.
• Animats 12y ago
  This is the price of competition. It takes a lot of extra labor, over doing the stuff, to keep a competitive market going. There are a large number of items where the advertising and marketing cost exceeds the cost of production, from soft drinks to movies to pharmaceuticals. This is an overhead of capitalism, and it's a big one. The financial system has especially bloated overhead. The US used to have a financial system with three big, independent sectors - commercial banks, savings and loan companies, and stock brokers and markets. The Glass-Stegall Act kept them separate. Trouble in one sector didn't crash another sector, because the sectors couldn't invest in each other. That ended in the 1990s. Trouble soon followed. The whole hedge fund / "private equity" industry is a net lose. "Private equity" is really leveraged buyouts using equity-to-debt conversions to reduce taxes. It's an artifact of tax policy, not a real industry. In many cases, the money ultimately comes from low-cost borrowing by banks from the Federal Reserve. With different tax and regulatory policies, the finance industry would be about as big as it was in the Eisenhower era, far smaller than it is now. This isn't a secret, but it's not something discussed in public much. On the medical care side, the US spends about as much in public funds on medical care as the European nations with state-paid medical care do. But that's less than half of US medical spending. Find out what a "prescription-benefit management company" does, and how big they are.
• squozzer 12y ago
  I liked the illustration better when this story appeared in Strike! magazine.
• squozzer 12y ago
  At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, I would say my job is to make money. With the additional condition of enjoying the liberty to spend the money, which is why I avoid lucrative but illegal activities, at least to the extent I can consciously avoid doing illegal things.
• gills 12y ago
  Also, in the US, people are willing to work full time at whatever job will provide health insurance.
• gohrt 12y ago
  Previously on HN, when this article was originally published: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) 528 points by gu 351 comments
• strangename 12y ago
  Keyne's "15 hour workweek" projection cited within is an interesting thought experiment, but it ignores effects of necessary overhead. For example, let's look at the cognitive overhead I face as a programmer. There's a certain amount of time I spend just spooling content into my brain's working store. I'm not contributing anything new; I'm just keeping the old in my brain and coordinating with the changes my coworkers are making. Let's pretend that forms a nice, round 10 hours of time a week. If I work another 5 hours, that time has a 2:1 overhead:production ratio. Since the productive time is what's being sold, it operates at a steep 300% cost inefficiency. The next 5 hours brings it down to 200%, the next 10 to 150%. There's a lot that would change in our economies if we could eliminate transaction and overhead costs. But physical and temporal limitation utterly forbid that in practice. One should always take those highly abstracted economic projections and starting points of analysis: see what assumptions lead them to be skewed from reality. That post-analysis is, in my experience, often the truly enlightening part.
• ownedthx 12y ago
  I work 40 hours a week at a minimum, every week, and have always done so. I'm a programmer primarily, but also do other related things (build, devops, customer support). But if I have a week with nothing but programming, I will still work a minimum of 40 hours a week. The idea that you can't do more than 15-20 hours a week is not true. I do love my job. Perhaps that's why I work this much. I admit that I have a hard time relating to this general idea I see over and over about the need to fill up time with non-work. Also, over the years, I've met my fair share of those who also work just as hard.
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    And yet, here you are, posting on HN. Is this part of work? Or are you off work now? Curious.
    • ownedthx 12y ago
      I don't work at an office. I guess you can say I'm on a break.
• gregorious_c 12y ago
  ^^
• GoldenHomer 12y ago
  While we are on the subject of bullshit: https://github.com/bullgit/bullshit-job-titles https://github.com/bullgit/bullshit-job-titles
• jongraehl 12y ago
  Conclusion is not supported by what came before: > If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.