Businesses are in it for the money, employees tend to be one of the larger expenses, so maintaining some bullshit positions that would cost them money doesn’t make fiscal sense, so what’s up?
deleted by creator
Despite how people act, we are fundamentally flawed and generally imperfect.
Whether we’re talking about daily life or global industry, mistakes are often made, plans go awry, and processes are almost never perfectly efficient or optimized. Even the most highly engineered, well oiled machine has inefficiencies.
Businesses are just the same and they actually waste a fuck ton of money every day, but all of that (plus a healthy profit margin) is ultimately factored in to the prices that we pay for goods and services. In other words, many people have bullshit jobs that don’t actually improve services optimization or production, and that wasted effort is actually paid for by all of us, the consumers.
On top of that there’s another variant of bullshit job that’s actually useful to the economy or society in some way, but might be inherently unfulfilling or unsatisfying on a personal human level. (For example, something like corporate data entry jobs come to mind. Potentially useful to someone, and better than being homeless, but maybe not a very meaningful way to live in the long term.)
if you go by david graeber’s bullshit jobs, some of these are some sort of status symbol, some are made up to diffuse responsibility, there were more that i don’t remember. at any rate bullshit job is labeled as such by a worker
Yeah and hopefully we can get rid of them. I mean the way how we work and what we do change quite fast. 20 years ago there were secretaries taking notes (last time I saw someone listening to a tape recorder and typing down the notes was around 2017, for soon to retire doctor) and calling up people because the boss needed info (etc. etc.) Now even emails start to look has-been. Guess people get stuck sometimes in no-need land.
Maybe those jobs are just the sand in the engine and will be flushed out some day.
Problem comes when those jobs get flushed away, and more and more people end up without decent job prospects while wealth keeps trickling up.
Well yeah cue basic income or something along those lines…
P.l.e.a.s.e.
The same reason the military gets soldiers to fill sandbags and other soldiers to empty the same sandbags. Because the system only has to be good enough not to fail.
Because people work at this companies. These people have friends and families.
no one cares if they’re collecting a fat paycheck. source: i am embedded in such bullshit.
There may be a financial reason, but it feels like bullshit.
The Lumberghs in charge haven’t gotten around to bringing in the Bobs, and Lumbergh’s too chickenshit to do the job himself, so…
Managers dont want to be fired so they claim that they are important. At least that is what i got, dont know if it is really true
Other commenters have covered the organizational inefficiencies that allow bullshit jobs to exist pretty well. I’d like to also point out that larger organizations have more of these inefficiencies (part of what is known as “diseconomies of scale”, the counterpart to the more well-known term “economies of scale”). Our capitalist society actively subsidizes larger organizations, both literally and figuratively, resulting in more bullshit jobs and more economically wasteful behavior in general.
A non-capitalist free market society (such as a mutualist one) would have significantly smaller and more efficient organizations across the board. One can’t eliminate organizational efficiency entirely, but we currently have a lot of room for improvement.
A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).
Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).
Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.
A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.
Do not assume that most people in a corporate management structure work towards company profit. Having people under you makes you powerful and helps your career.
As a career-hunter, I convince corporate leadership that I can re-architect their dying and mismanaged software if I get a team of 20 cheap outsourced devs and four years. It will be everything the old system was plus several new and innovative ways to capture the market. This is not remotely possible, but I manage to convince corpo that it is.
Everyone under me are doing bullshit work that will accomplish nothing, but we have SCRUM and promotions and time tracking and all the toys in the box to distract everyone.
After four years, I have lead a department of 20 people successfully for four years, which gives me momentum to move up the ladder.
Or maybe the thing is killed in mere two years, and I can fail upwards. I dared to dream and I managed a deparment for two years and am the right person to do New Thing X.
100% this. My company is going through a reorg and I now have to work for 10 new managers who know absolutely nothing about the company or the business. Their track record of failing at some other similar competitor and being ousted got them in the door here.
deleted by creator
(I am not actually doing this. I was using a hypothetical writing style.)
deleted by creator
I’ll also add that managers don’t think like normal people…
IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.
But Sales. Well that’s all profit. So we should give them all the money.
Even if we closed sales most people who want our stuff will still buy it from us, but nothing will get done without IT…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And your competitors would love you for closing your Sales department.
IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.
This was the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss repeatedly when I was in a pure IT position. As in, he would bitch about, “Every time I come into your office you’re just sitting here playing Doom.” (It was not, for the record. At the time, it was Half Life 2 or, more occasionally, Unreal Tournament 2K4. But to your common-or-garden PHB, all first person shooters look alike.)
I had to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that your IT guy sitting around playing “Doom” is the ideal scenario during business hours. Why? Because if I am sitting here doing this, that means none of the millions of dollars of mission critical IT infrastructure that your building full of engineers relies upon every second to perform work for billable hours is on fire. If any of said infrastructure catches fire, I am here, on site, to put it out. Not on call. Not four hours away. Right here, right now. Then I go back to playing “Doom.”
