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?
no one cares if they’re collecting a fat paycheck. source: i am embedded in such bullshit.
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
There are no bullshit jobs. There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. These are propaganda pieces to suppress wages of the most vulnerable of society.
I think you misunderstand the original author’s point.
TFW you’re so anti-capitalist that your integer overflows and you become pro-capitalist again.
Those two things are not at all similar. The idea of bullshit jobs is not a propaganda thing like unskilled labor. The guy that wrote this book Bullshit Jobs would probably find that what most people think of as unskilled labor are some of the most not bullshit and most important jobs there are.
Although the guy has a lot of debatable ideas that I don’t fully agree with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Facebook paid an HR professional six figures for over a year to not do any actual work. Good for her and all but it does sound like her job wasn’t much of a job.
So, she did do something, just not her specific job duty because she got fired after 6 months for a TikTok video. She was doing a bunch of training and was told to learn how things are done at Meta. At a large company, I would not expect a new hire to do much of anything for the first few months as they learned the ropes of how things worked. The more forward facing, theonger I’d expect. Hiring people? That’s forward facing. You’re choosing who to spend money on. Developers? Customers see the application. I wouldn’t let them touch anything significant for a bit. I’m sure it applies to other areas as well.
Bullshit jobs are another issue, it’s well paid jobs, sometimes very well paid but whithout an objective way to quantify what they do. Think about the manager who organizes workshop on improving communication between team in a company or the person who does long post on Yammer to praise the company for their green transition as from today there is charging stations on the parking and directors will be given a Tesla rather than a Mercedes and other executive will be given an e-bike rather than a train card.
The don’t really feel like they do something complex (or linked to there training) but just use common sense to do basic tasks. Unfortunately, these are still necessary in a large structure
I always took the term ‘bullshit jobs’ to refer to jobs that produce something that society doesn’t really require, and typically only exists because they need someone to deal with the output of someone else’s bullshit job.
Society isn’t really good at knowing what it requires. And sometimes it’s better to be cautious. Also capitalism breaks down in certain markets, one of which is the “job market”.
Any market that involves a lot of players and little oversight will get manipulated like crazy, including the job market. Employers try to counter that, but in the end the people that are best at getting hired for a job get that job, not the people that are best at doing that job. How could it not be?
And that includes the jobs of the people that do the hiring. So it’s a market that’s rife with inefficiencies.
It breaks down a lot because most things arent markets.
Can you clarify what, specifically, you mean by bullshit jobs?
For instance, I’ve seen some recent discussions about (mostly IT) jobs where you can do nothing almost all the time. These exist because every once in a while, they are REALLY important. There’s also a lot of mystery about what’s involved, usually from automation changing the workload.
I do one of those “IT jobs that you do nothing until you do everything” it’s kinda wild and I have to remember not to completely fuck off and at least pretend to do something work related.
I say as I’m responding to this on company time.
Also non-technical people need to understand that automation makes life easier, but you still need someone who knows how to do it manually to fix the automation in case it breaks or needs updating. That person will do mostly nothing most of the time, but if you didn’t had him full time he would be extremely expensive to hire on demand on a rush, since he could ask whatever price he wanted and you would have to pay it.
It’s not just that the person would be expensive. Systems like that require system specific knowledge. So it’s possible that it would take an outsider 3 months of study to get to the point where they can fix an issue properly in 5 minutes.
You can’t make a baby in 1 month with 9 mothers. Some tasks just have an upfront cost and SOME IT automation jobs are like that.
And yes, you can try and do bodge job after bodge job “just to keep it going”. And that works for some time. But eventually the small mistakes end up causing large outages. And then you need someone that can piece together how the small issues cause big outages.
Superiors not understanding what the job entails helps. Superior says do task A. Old guy not too computer savvy takes a long time to do task A. Of guy retires and a new young girl gets the role. Superior says do task A. New young girl does it in a few minutes and has extra time. I’ve run into that a lot.
Or the exact opposite, not trying to contradict you here, but I have seen lots of jobs that had to be just stopped (the job itself, not the person doing it) just because the knowledge went away with parting people.
That could go either way. Had a job where a guy retired and they suddenly found out no one knew what he did but it needed to be done. There were legit conversations about offering the retired guy contract work just to teach someone what he did. In that case the manager had the bullshit job that could have been eliminated.
So, what comes to mind when I write bullshit jobs are jobs simply for the sake of jobs, like to say that a business is in fact hiring for some unclear reason, or because of some cultural inertia that insists people must be working so they just make up jobs.
A more realistic form would be the weird busywork kind of jobs that seemingly could be automated but just…Aren’t…For some reason, but these may be more like what you describe where it’s not exactly bullshit yet it can feel very close to it at times.
You mean like manual work that can be automated?
Jobs that exist exclusively for the sake of jobs really only exist in places of government (or caused by government). Otherwise, as you mentioned, the profit motive would kick in.
But what you’re mainly describing here is something different - it’s jobs that exist because someone (possibly many people) are bad at their job. Those unclear job openings? Often, it’s because Bob is leaving, and we need someone to replace him. But no one really knows what Bob does, or how to find another Bob, or even what would happen if they didn’t have a Bob. Or a PHB gets lofty ideas about what Bob’s replacement should do better, with no connection to reality. Or HR interferes with what the engineers say they actually need, and how to screen for that.
The people that can literally be replaced by an Excel macro? Their work is valuable, and often something the business needs. It was probably done on paper a long time ago. At some point it got moved onto a computer, and a process was developed. This person has probably been doing it reliably for 20 years. No one wants to mess with it. Or a really big one, the corporate bureaucracy has stopped everyone that’s tried to make it better.
I can attest that I’ve repeatedly been put on bullshit busywork projects because of managers that were completely detached from reality. Sure, they may sound cool, but it’s immediately obvious to anyone else that it will never actually be used. Or they themselves want to check a box on their own review with higher managers to say they accomplished something, even if they really didn’t.
Sometimes those jobs that can be automated are already. At a previous job a coworker had been asked to prep a weekly report. When he took it on, this would take him half a day. I wanted to work on some excel macro skills so I worked with him to figure out what was needed. Wrote an ugly ass macro that worked for what was needed. I told him in no uncertain terms he should not tell anyone about the time savings. He should use it as he sees fit.
Same job different person. HR business partner called me into her office. Had an excel file open. Ultimately what they were asking was for a simple formatting issue. I’m talking like merge and center or using the format painter. A couple times. It took her longer to explain what she needed than it took to “fix” it. She exclaimed that it probably would have taken her hours to figure that out… there were also salaries on the spreadsheet…
I’ll say this, as an engineer who’s worked closely with the brass tacks, a lot of the time when new directors or c level people are brought in, they want to own a space. There was a solution existing prior to them, because the company already existed before they joined. But no one wants to be the guy who supports the previous ideas (maintenance on an engine isn’t as sexy as designing it) because the idea doesn’t have their branding. They want to be seen as bold/innovative, etc. So they make some calls and they find a solution that promises everything they have and more. If the new solution is a success, their position is cemented, they are now a stakeholder in the company. Sales guy is going to sell his ass off, maybe the workforce has to be repurposed (need more expertise in new fields), etc. All this creates unnecessary work for people with real jobs just because a boss wants it. In the end, the new director/c level can say, “wow, this was great, look at how our metrics have improved, all thanks to me!” Despite the fact that they weren’t given all the features they were promised, or they didn’t hire/train specialized engineers to truly own the new solution. Or maybe the solution isn’t very effective. A lot of the time it’s mostly politics. People are trying to get headlines just like politicians so they can keep climbing the ladder.
The way you’re describing “bullshit” jobs doesn’t exist, there are no jobs that are inherently, always bullshit. There’s just bullshit work, and a lot of people who’s job it is to do bullshit work
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…
Think of a rushing river. Huge volumes of water roll through, but you still have swirling eddies and stagnant pools at the edges.
It’s the same thing. Positions get overlooked. A business practice gets outmoded but not phased out right away. Miscommunication or misalignment between departments leaves goals unclear. Perverse incentives encourage inefficient behavior.
When I worked in an office, we were running behind on inputting paper forms to the database. Because we were behind, we were ordered to hire more clerks, and did. But the bottleneck was the database; we were only allowed two connections at a time. To ensure maximum efficiency, only the two or three most experienced clerks were allowed to input to the database, and the rest of us did triage on the paper forms. I carved out a role for myself (as the roughly sixth most senior clerk) as the guy who trained new hires how to pre-process the forms. And I was always busy, because we were always hiring, because we were ordered to, because we were further and further behind, because of the database bottleneck that adding more staff did nothing to address. I came away with six extra weeks of pay and two letters of recommendation, and I haven’t worked an office job since.
What do you do now, if you don’t mind my asking?
I wait tables
Respect, my wife waits as well
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Read the book by Graeber. It’s pretty easy to find a pdf copy online.
There’s a lot of different reasons and it varies depending on the type of bullshit job, the industry, the country, etc.
Here’s a good example. It might make sense to re-train or fire members of a low performing team. But instead you hire more people to basically just redo the poorly done work. It would make economic sense, initially to fire them and replace them with less people and less rework, but morale, pensions or other factors may make firing them unpalatable.
Risk aversion. If you have a team of twenty people who only put in half days of work, well now you can easily absorb double workload when the business needs to.
Maybe a VP has a big ego and demands to hire a big new team. Most people think it’s a waste, but no one wants to tell the VP “no”. Afraid the industry veteran will quit or worse. So they get their team of questionable value and it makes everyone feel good that this powerful person now leads more people/teams.
The short answer is the market is never fully efficient. I mean, it can’t be. Not even serious capitalists would expect it to be.
Seriously, read the book. It’s not super long.
Read the book by Graeber. It’s pretty easy to find a pdf copy online.
Which book?
Edit: nevermind. Other commenters have mentioned it.
Bullshit Jobs. Graeber’s the one who coined the term.
RIP David Graeber
Thanks for the suggestion & info, I didn’t remember there being a book titled as such as I wrote the question, lol
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.
There may be a financial reason, but it feels like bullshit.
I think a lot of bullshit jobs exist because as a society we have decided that everyone absolutely has to work at a job in order to live. There isn’t enough work to be done for every single person to contribute so we have to invent work so we can pay people so they can make money to live in society.
If some day we manage to implement a universal basic income then I think this will eliminate a lot of the problem.
I’d have to disagree with this. Why would all companies just unilaterally agree to waste money so people can make a living. If that were the drive, they’d also pay thriving wages, etc.
I don’t think it is intentional. I think it is more like a phenomenon. I think entire companies can potentially be bullshit. It’s not like the people working there aren’t making the company money so nobody is deciding to hire people for no reason. It’s just that these people and businesses are mostly working bullshit jobs. So much of the economy is based on doing nearly pointless work so it enables further pointless work.
Really it depends on your exact definition of pointless. If our only goal is to survive then we can probably succeed at that with 5-10% of the work that is being done now. Everyone else isn’t doing something that is directly contributing to humanities survival. That seems a little extreme as I personally believe that things like entertainment, art and making life more comfortable are all meaningful to society. There could be some definition of pointless that a majority agrees on that implies that 25-50% of jobs are not doing much of anything.
Oracle was almost entirely bullshit when my friend worked there in the mid-90s.
You can coast off a high-margin business into pure BS for a while before it catches up. Particularly with an egomaniac CEO who is checked out at the moment.
Why would all companies just unilaterally agree to waste money so people can make a living
The motivations of the company are often very different to the motivations of senior staff within the company.
Mid-level manager is obsessed with building his empire within the company. The bigger their division, the happier they are.
Mid-level manager creates bullshit jobs and justifies them up the chain. “Our team is vital to the company and my staff is swamped. I need to increase my headcount”.
That’s fine. That’s my point though. The intentions are entirely different. I don’t think any company is actively worried about ensuring people are employed. The end result of a bunch of other motivations may be the same, but my statement is about the why.
Because the alternative is a bunch of hungry people with pitchforks and a large amount of free time.
That’s not the alternative. An alternative would be hiring people because it offers some benefit to the company.
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)_/¯
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.”
And your competitors would love you for closing your Sales department.
There’s probably bullshit jobs.
But there’s probably a lot that you think are “Bullshit jobs” and really you mean “I don’t see what they do” I thought “Scrum master” was a joke of a title for someone to do fuck all. Then I had to take over for my scrum master for 2 weeks. Holy shit, that was the most eye opening experience. He’s in 6 hours of meetings a day, talking to management, designing future work, working on requirements, dealing with the minutia, assisting everyone on and off the team, and basically keeping the 6 of us on the team from dealing with what we would call “Annoying pointless shit” which is actually really important for other people.
My scrum master talks about “Seeing the bigger picture” and I get it now. But the thing is it’d also be really easy for someone to think he has a “Bullshit job”
The Lumberghs in charge haven’t gotten around to bringing in the Bobs, and Lumbergh’s too chickenshit to do the job himself, so…
