[HN Gopher] Bullshit Jobs (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Bullshit Jobs (2018)
Author : TotalCrackpot
Score : 258 points
Date : 2023-06-17 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theanarchistlibrary.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (theanarchistlibrary.org)
| maxbond wrote:
| Graeber had an HN account:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgraeber
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24367226
| aj7 wrote:
| Any job where 80% of the output can come from an LLM.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| I was quite shocked to hear that Graeber died quite suddenly back
| in 2020.
| mempko wrote:
| Covid got him. Like so many others.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Further context:
|
| > Graeber died suddenly from necrotic pancreatitis on
| September 2, 2020 while on vacation with his wife and friends
| in Venice. ... His wife, Dubrovsky, attributed the
| pancreatitis to COVID-19, saying they both had strange
| symptoms for months beforehand, and she said there was a
| connection between COVID-19 and pancreatitis.
|
| (From Wikipedia)
| BenFeldman1930 wrote:
| "David died of necrotic pancreatitis and internal bleeding,
| but why suddenly the healthy, totally never-drinking-alcohol
| David would develop this disease. Why would it be so sudden
| and quick? Why did such strange symptoms accompany it? Why
| did it start right after we thought we had Covid?"
| (https://www.patreon.com/posts/42824424)
|
| Lol
| louwrentius wrote:
| Really sad! His book "Debt, the first 5000 years" is a hefty
| listen, but provides a very interesting perspective on debt and
| money.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Keynes proposed to let people dig holes and let these be filled
| by again by people.
|
| Basically, the ultimate description of a bullshit job. Keynes
| proposed this as a counter measure against a depression. I'm
| absolutely certain that he understood that it does not make
| society any richer.
|
| So for an economist, bullshit jobs are especially bad because
| they think about what people could be doing instead.
|
| Basically, bullshit jobs come at an opportunity cost. Governments
| should be fighting this phenomenon. Just thinking about creating
| jobs is a bit shortsighted.
| pydry wrote:
| Keynes never actually suggested doing that. He merely said it
| would be sufficient to escape from a liquidity trap. He
| advocated for productive work to escape them - like the US did
| by for example building the Lincoln tunnel.
|
| If he were around today to see e-digging holes and filling them
| up - bitcoin - he'd be horrified.
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| I would argue Keynesian economists are bullshit but not the
| entire astrological field of economics.
| mo_42 wrote:
| And what would be your exact argument for that?
| jmyeet wrote:
| This was a concern among some economists in the 20th century:
| what would happen to society when 20% of the people produced all
| the goods and services? With increasing automation, it seemed
| like that would happen eventually.
|
| Now it didn't happen in the 20th century. Most jobs we did in
| 2000 simply didn't exist in 1900. That same principle is extended
| ad infinitum to argue there's no problem with the current
| economic order.
|
| Bullshit jobs are really a response to that problem (IMHO).
|
| Automation could be a paradise. A future where people don't have
| to worry about time off task in an Amazon warehouse or work extra
| jobs delivering food could be fantastic. Or this could be a
| dystopian hell as automation allows the capital-owning class to
| capture even more of the labor value so we can further
| concentrate into a class of hyper-wealthy.
|
| In our current political climate, the dystopian hellscape of
| subsistence living at one end and trillionaires at the other
| seems more likely.
|
| The problem is capitalism.
| IsaacL wrote:
| In memory of the olden days when Hacker News focused on
| discussions for entrepreneurs, here's a question:
|
| I have no doubt that hundreds of millions of BS jobs exist, but
| isn't that what management consultants are supposed to fix?
|
| Whether or not management consultants actually do fix wasteful
| jobs is another issue. But my understanding of the sector was
| that it was aimed to fix these issues. Organisational
| refactoring, if you will.
|
| Likewise, everyone complains about bad management, but _good_
| management is supposed to be able to fix the kind of issues
| Graeber describes. Steve Jobs ' return to Apple in the late 90s
| is a famous example.
|
| Years ago on this site someone who worked in senior management in
| a tech company told a story. It went something like this: there
| were two teams in the company, who were always complaining, not
| very productive, and seemed to waste enormous amounts of time and
| energy on pointless busywork or trying to coordinate tasks.
| Everyone on team A blamed team B, everyone on team B blamed team
| A, etc, etc. The manager realised this needed to be fixed, talked
| to the relevant people on both teams, figured out what the
| problem was, and ... fixed it. (I have no recollection of what
| the actual problem was -- let's suppose it was some kind of
| communication or process issue.) After that, things ran smoothly.
|
| Is this story realistic? No doubt -- after all anyone who has
| worked in engineering is familiar with chronic technical problems
| that can be fixed with very small amounts of work -- if one has
| the requisite knowledge. And no doubt there are chronic human
| problems that are similarly solvable.
|
| Anyway - after many rounds of such management fixes you would
| have an organisation that ran like a swiss watch. In such places,
| good managers, like good sysadmins, fade into the background and
| become invisible. Google in the 2000s may have been a good
| example. But eventually either the organisation grows, or the
| good managers leave, or -- most likely -- people decide they no
| longer need to worry about good management, the organisation
| begins to rot, and eventually they're forced to bring in bad
| management. Corporate entropy proceeds in the usual way, and you
| end up with waste, bad practices, poor communication, doomed
| projects, crappy output, politics, and -- BS jobs.
|
| This is why I'm skeptical of political intellectuals like Graeber
| who note a problem but misidentify the solution. Some of the
| things he categorises as "BS jobs" are themselves intended to
| _fix_ BS jobs.
|
| But I do not have much experience working in large organisations,
| so perhaps someone else can chime in.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I feel cheated that I have to work more then 15 hours per week
| just to afford a home for my family and put food on the table.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| I was talking about this book with a friend and they worked for
| the state qualifying people for government benefits. Think food
| stamps, welfare, etc etc. They said their job was a bullshit job.
| Why? Their reasoning was if you eliminated all the people who
| have to qualify people for benefits and just gave benefits to
| anyone who applied, you would end up spending less time and
| money.
| myshpa wrote:
| So ... UBI
| TheFreim wrote:
| This would just cause more people to apply.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The point is the increase in spending due to both more
| applicants and all applicants succeeding in getting the
| support would be less than the reduction in spending on the
| being of them. This is very likely true marginally in most
| benefits systems: there's a bias towards avoiding any case of
| someone getting an "undeserved" benefit, because this is
| politically unpopular, even though the system will spend more
| money than the benefit costs to make sure that rejection
| happens (not to mention the additional cost to society of the
| incorrect rejections: ironically the more admin overhead you
| add to getting benefits the less accurate it becomes, as
| people who do not have the time or capability to navigate the
| bureaucracy drop out despite meeting the requirements, but
| those exploiting the system jave all the time in the world to
| find the cracks).
|
| (The UK has a particularly extreme version of this: the
| benefits department is hellbent on rejecting as many
| applicants as possible, and they lose a huge amount of court
| cases because of it, at great cost to the taxpayer and the
| lives of those affected)
| medvezhenok wrote:
| They're neglecting the fact that if you eliminated the checks,
| a lot more people would apply for benefits (and you would have
| to deal with much more fraud - look at the COVID relief fraud
| which had fairly little supervision). Induced demand, if you
| will.
|
| It's the same as the TSA - they're not very good at catching
| people bringing things through at airports, but their mere
| presence there acts as a pretty good deterrent for people
| trying funky things.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| You can't compare this to COVID loan fraud. Those are apples
| and oranges. COVID relief loans had requirements but the
| watchdog that was meant to oversee it was rendered toothless.
| In this situation the only chance of you fraud is someone
| applying as someone else and you handle that the same way you
| handle all identity fraud.
| jl6 wrote:
| I honestly think the author doesn't understand the jobs that are
| presented as bullshit jobs, and here's an example:
|
| > In some countries, such as Brazil, such buildings still have
| uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the
| button for you. There is a continuum from explicit feudal
| leftovers of this type to receptionists and front-desk personnel
| at places that obviously don't need them.
|
| This example speaks to me because I recall many years ago using
| an elevator in Rio de Janeiro which had an operator, and although
| his job was ostensibly to push the buttons, he was in fact part
| of the security apparatus - the friendly outer layer of a
| defence-in-depth strategy.
|
| Not bullshit at all.
|
| Now that's not to say that organizational dysfunction doesn't
| exist. I've seen people get hired and then the project that
| motivated the hiring has lost funding and the person has been
| idle. I've seen managers go on long-term sick leave and their +1
| being too busy to find a replacement or provide supervision
| themselves, leaving teams directionless. I've seen people work
| really hard on bad ideas that didn't fail fast enough.
|
| Those people absolutely described their jobs as bullshit, but it
| was _circumstantial bullshit_ , not an intrinsic property of the
| job.
|
| The other angle here is grand purpose. The author denigrates some
| jobs because they achieve some allegedly amoral outcome. You
| might think that cosmetics shouldn't exist, or that if they exist
| they shouldn't be advertized. But that's a value judgment to say
| the least, and a wholly different argument to declaring the whole
| supply chain to be made of bullshit jobs.
| asah wrote:
| +1 same in NYC.
| waboremo wrote:
| Ask yourself: what problem is that job solving and how
| effective is the solution?
|
| A security guard who has to manually press elevator buttons is
| not solving the problem effectively. Are you more secure that
| the guard manually presses the elevator button? Hell there
| could be an assault in the elevator and he wouldn't know a damn
| thing because he spent time away from watching cameras to press
| the elevator button. Therefore, it is a bullshit job.
| gretch wrote:
| Well maybe his job is to guard what exists at the top of the
| elevator. So yeah, controlling the single point of entry and
| the only keys to the kingdom could be super effective
| compared to watching it on a TV screen.
|
| You don't know anything about the threat, the environment, or
| the asset being protected. Maybe just don't comment with
| baseless speculation?
| waboremo wrote:
| So using your example, maybe there is something at the top
| floor that needs guarding. Someone manually pressing the
| elevator doesn't fix this, he becomes another weak point
| that can be easily socially engineered. One alternative
| solution that doesn't require that bullshit job is a
| separate elevator with its own lock/access, which is a very
| common solution used in many buildings.
|
| I don't understand your defensiveness here. The entire
| point is to question the role as a solution to the problem.
| Literally what bullshit jobs is all about. This isn't
| specifically about the elevator man, so you don't need to
| get all weird about it.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| Your solution to an elevator operator is to retrofit a
| building with an entirely separate elevator to access to
| the floor?
| waboremo wrote:
| The problem you are trying to solve is not the elevator
| operator. The elevator operator is a byproduct of a
| rushed cheap solution to the problem of crime/access to
| top floor/whatever the actual problem is. Therefore yes,
| a retrofit could be a potential solution among many
| others, what actually is the problem, and how effectively
| does the role solve it?
|
| I should step away from the elevator example because
| people are clinging to it a bit too firmly when the
| entire point is to question [job role], not the specific
| elevator operator.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Watching cameras constantly is boring. It's more interesting
| to maintain attention by being a face in public, ears and
| eyes present on a single space.
| waboremo wrote:
| Bullshit isn't a quantifier about how entertaining a job
| is. Unless the job is specifically about entertaining I
| suppose.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Security jobs rely on attention. One's effectiveness at
| it is impacted by how attentive they can and will sustain
| for their defined shift.
| waboremo wrote:
| All jobs rely on attention. In this example, a security
| guard having to divert attention to interact with guests
| at the elevator is going to be distracted far more.
|
| But again, this isn't about the security man!!
| golemiprague wrote:
| [dead]
| marcod wrote:
| If the elevator man doesn't think his job is bullshit, it
| doesn't not fall under the definition of the author.
| Quinzel wrote:
| I haven't read the entire book yet, but this is a great read.
| Thanks for sharing.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I got the book on audible because I liked the article. I
| wouldn't recommend the book. It is the article stretched out to
| the length of a book resulting in everything being spread thin
| without much substance.
| sylware wrote:
| Post-pandemic, it is now even worse:
|
| There are tons of bullshit jobs... in the "essential and key
| sectors".
| michaelt wrote:
| I have no doubt there are a great many people employed doing
| things like maintaining and policing the boundaries between
| organisations.
|
| For example, the process of making retail purchases and
| delivering the right item is highly automated - think of what
| happens when you place an order on amazon or ebay or any other
| major retailer.
|
| But when a big corporation wants to make a purchase it's manual,
| manual, manual, manual. Manual e-mail to ask the supplier for a
| quote. Manually send that to the purchasing department, who'll
| manually copy it into a purchase order, then manually e-mail it
| to the person who wants the items, who'll manually forward it to
| the supplier, who'll dispatch the goods to the customer, who'll
| manually e-mail someone to say they've been received, then the
| supplier will create an invoice and send it by e-mail, to someone
| who'll manually enter it into the finance system where it'll
| _eventually_ get paid (After 30 days? 90 days? Who knows) then
| the supplier will get e-mailed a PDF and they 'll manually match
| the payment up with the invoice.
|
| A great deal of manual labour, in other words, to accomplish what
| Amazon can do for a cent or two. And a lot more opportunities for
| human error too, when for some unfathomable reason the item
| descriptions are reworded for the purchase order, or the product
| is dispatched without the recipient's name or to the wrong
| building.
|
| Why? It's certainly not to save money, the suppliers who'll deal
| with this stuff understandably mark up the products for their
| trouble. To spot fraud perhaps - but if you've been doing the job
| for years without spotting any fraud, I can well believe the job
| would seem pointless.
| dools wrote:
| The only truly bullshit job that Graeber identifies in this whole
| book is anthropologist.
| justin66 wrote:
| David Graeber was such an interestingly polarizing personality,
| since the people who like him and the people who dislike him seem
| at times to fall under politically unconventional lines - or
| maybe the polarization isn't about politics at all. Some people
| react to public figures based on those figures' strong
| personalities, but it's surprising that that might be the case
| with Graeber, since he was pretty damn mild mannered and affable
| when one actually observed him in interviews.
|
| The guy who rants maniacally about Graeber in every. single.
| thread. about Greaber's work hasn't commented yet. I hope he's
| okay.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Anarchism is polarizing, even within the left. It's also widely
| misunderstood. I hope you're talking about me btw
| paulpauper wrote:
| I see parallels between the Unabomber manifesto and his 'bullshit
| jobs' thesis. Although over a decade a part, they both sorta came
| to the same conclusion about how humans are being alienated. Both
| works are fundamentally critiques of modernity.
| msla wrote:
| The Unabomber manifesto is the work of a Fascist White
| Supremacist.
| abhiminator wrote:
| Unabomber manifesto reads more like an unhinged rant written by
| some resentful, middle-aged Anon on 4chan than a piece of
| academic literature -- Ted Kaczynski somehow managed to fill 32
| pages of it with racist, misogynistic and incomprehensible
| rambling with zero citations.
|
| Also, the fact that he literally had to threaten people to
| force the publication of his "manifesto" says it all to me. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/06/11/ted-
| kaczyn...
| Eliezer wrote:
| Directly productive jobs are often easier to automate than jobs
| produced by coordination difficulties. Just as we saw sectoral
| shift from manufacturing to service as manufacturing became
| easier to automate, we have been seeing a shift from service to
| bullshit - or so I would wildly guess.
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| Security is a bullshit job? Would be a shame if anyone was to
| ever commit a crime and completely invalidate that argument. Why
| would you say "pizza delivery is bullshit" when some non
| ambulatory people rely on it as a life line. Then I hear "oh it's
| these people who SAY their job is bullshit" to that I say ipse
| dixit. This whole line of thought is bullshit. There's a profit
| shark at every company looking to eliminate bullshit jobs. I'm
| sure this author would call that job bullshit too.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| So you didn't read it / are talking to a point you made up in
| your head
| devnull255 wrote:
| Maybe one reason a job becomes a bullshit job is because the
| objectives such a job is defined to achieve are themselves
| bullshit. And whoever has stated the objectives are critical to
| the mission of the enterprise is either bullshitting themselves
| or believes the bullshit premises of the objectives.
|
| But then again, it's probably important to truly know what
| bullshit is. Is it, as expressed in the book "On Bullshit"
| intentional deception or even lying to advance the bullshitter's
| own interest? Or is it an unfounded or unsubstantiated belief in
| a value or goal that has not been subjected to enough careful
| scrutiny or deliberation?
| 0xr0kk3r wrote:
| [flagged]
| ryuhhnn wrote:
| Consumed by anger? Graeber was an anthropologist, it was
| literally his professional job to make anthropological
| observations about society and form them into a coherent
| theory, which, as someone who read this book in its entirety,
| he did an excellent job. To say something like "well that's
| just the way things are" is tautological nonsense and adds
| nothing to the conversation he jumpstarted, you're basically
| just saying "suck it up, these things won't change". One of the
| most compelling argument of this book was how we got to where
| we are by socially engineering such a system. If we can come to
| the conclusion that we got to where we are by deliberate
| choice, we can unwind all of what we've built and do something
| better for ourselves.
| apsurd wrote:
| Graeber is an anthropologist. If anything, I would say he
| _loves_ humans, and humanity.
| drno123 wrote:
| Elon Musk's Twitter experiment with firing over jakf od the
| workforce is very interesting in regards of this book
| napierzaza wrote:
| [dead]
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I read this book and then started asking devs about BS projects.
| Turns out there are a lot. I even wrote it up.
|
| I remember someone talking about the nth attepted rewrite of the
| company's main project. Where all the devs were certain it would
| fail like the last one but the new CTO had a new plan. Just like
| the last CTO.
|
| So there are definitely lots of people working at jobs they
| beleive are pointless though somewhere up the hierarchy it's
| beleived to be important. Which fits grabers definition.
|
| The crazy thing is these jobs can be hard. Deadlines to hit and
| the like, but also they are pointless. It's a path to burnout.
|
| https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/
| reso wrote:
| I wholeheartedly and aggressively recommend Graeber's book Debt:
| the first 5000 years. It changed my whole view of the social role
| of money and property. I have bought copies of it for multiple
| people.
|
| I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, because from the press tour around
| it it seemed to me Graeber's position was one I'd already
| considered and rejected. It seems to me that a lot of desk jobs
| that feel like bullshit to the employee are really part of the
| nervous tissue of the organization, and the value they provide to
| the organization is still larger than the employee's salary. I
| could be wrong, however, either about Graeber's thesis or about
| his conclusion.
|
| Either way, brilliant author and great man. Lost too soon in
| Summer 2020, likely due to rare covid complications. Debt will
| always have a place on my bookshelf.
| myshpa wrote:
| Read it, you're probably wrong, and it will change your views
| once again.
|
| All his books are superb.
|
| The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)
| analyzes our civilization from another angle - how we have
| apparently "got stuck" on a single trajectory of development,
| and how violence and domination became normalised within this
| dominant system. Not finished yet, but it's also a candidate
| for aggressive recommendations :)
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| That's one of those books that I read and enjoyed but don't
| remember a damn thing about. Do you remember enough to mention
| a few things you learned?
| blueline wrote:
| there's an interview with graeber about the book that covers
| a good deal of the book's content pretty succinctly:
|
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-
| ja...
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Another category of bullshit jobs are the pyramid scheme academic
| degrees. It's one thing to work a useless job in private industry
| where nobody is forced to fund you, but it's a significantly
| bigger problem when your publicly funded philosophy degree only
| qualifies you to teach philosophy on a taxpayer tenure.
| rndmwlk wrote:
| I really dislike this take. It's an oversimplified view of the
| world and a sad evaluation of what is important in the world.
| I'd much rather my taxes go to funding someone learning &
| teaching philosophy than subsidizing Lockheeds latest and
| greatest kill-bot. And to preempt the inevitable assumption, no
| I'm not a philosophy grad I work in finance. I did, however,
| take philosophy courses when I was a student and I believe I
| benefited greatly from them.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| I didn't say you couldn't take philosophy courses, the
| fundamental issue that that you're trying to force others to
| fund it for you. The same way I don't support subsidies for
| Lockheed. This is a big thing I experienced in my
| undergraduate, it was always arts students trying to force
| things onto others. They simultaneously force their courses
| onto everyone else through breadth requirements while not
| having any breadth requirements themselves.
| rndmwlk wrote:
| We just fundamentally disagree about what is important in
| life. If education does not become a public funded "burden"
| then it becomes a luxury of the rich. And yes, education
| can *and should* be more than just preparation for your
| role as a cog in society. I cannot take courses in
| philosophy if there is no one to teach those courses.
|
| I never experienced anything like what you're talking
| about. I was happy to have elective courses because that
| meant I was able to study things that interested me outside
| of my planned career path. It sounds like you view
| education as some purely transactional profit driven, ROI,
| productivity is the only measure of success nonsense and to
| my previous comment - that is sad to me.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| If philosophers wouldn't exist without forcing others to
| give them money, then that reinforces their
| worthlessness. After all, someone's usefulness is by
| definition how much others are _willing_ to give for
| something they do, and for philosophers that quantity
| seems to be $0. Sciences seem to have no such problem
| with voluntary funding, bell labs is a great example.
|
| If you went to a school where STEM students were forced
| to take a humanities course but humanities students did
| not have to take a calculus sequence, then you
| experienced the thing I described.
| rndmwlk wrote:
| >After all, someone's usefulness is by definition how
| much others are willing to give for something they do,
| and for philosophers that quantity seems to be $0.
|
| I can only repeat my point so many times, this is exactly
| the outlook on life I find to be sad and ignorant.
| Philosophy doesn't poof into non-existence when it isn't
| supported by taxes, it becomes a playground for the rich
| and the rich get to decide what schools of thought are
| worth pursuing.
|
| >If you went to a school where STEM students were forced
| to take a humanities course but humanities students did
| not have to take a calculus sequence, then you
| experienced the thing I described.
|
| I did not view it as forced to take humanities courses,
| but as an opportunity to take humanities courses. I will
| also say that, if my memory serves, those humanities
| students _were_ forced to take certain math courses
| (Algebra & Statistics). I agree that those same students
| would benefit greatly from being "forced" to take
| calculus courses - there are number of interesting
| philosophical concepts covered in calculus.
| sfblah wrote:
| Let's assume for sake of argument that the author's thesis is
| more or less accurate. What types of BS jobs will the GAI
| revolution produce? I'm assuming the thesis can be extended to
| suggest the same thing will happen as with technology-related
| productivity gains across the 20th century.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| I love that this guy is a leftist Occupy Wall Street guy who
| wrote a whole book whose fundamental premise is "what if
| capitalism was not actually ruthlessly profit-seeking, but
| actually kept millions upon millions of people employed doing
| nothing basically out of charity".
|
| It sort makes sense in the context of tightly state-controlled
| capitalist economies like Japan, but in a US context it's just
| comical. The same evil corporate managers who get lambasted for
| laying people off to satisfy Wall Street's demand for quarterly
| profit growth are supposedly keeping loads of other people
| employed just for funsies.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| The hierarchy of empire builders fatten up on subordinates at
| every occasion, at certain times 'right sizings" become en
| vogue and blanket decrees for firings come down from above.
| They are complied with so you might see a short term net
| reduction, but the bulking process never even blinks
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Lots of companies see no net employment growth, and plenty
| more see net employment decrease. So, empirically you are
| wrong.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I literary said you might see net reductions.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Every US auto company (and many/most manufacturing
| companies) has had net reductions for decades now. That's
| not short term net reductions.
|
| Plenty of white collar employers have had net reductions
| too. Most of the dotcom era companies net reduced all the
| way to zero.
| asmor wrote:
| I mean, both can be true at the same time? I think the point is
| more that working a bullshit job is like an evolved form of
| Marx's alienated labor. Instead of not seeing yourself in
| whatever you create, you create nothing, but are told to keep a
| charade of productivity up anyway.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| It's not a charade of productivity if it is producing value
| for some stakeholder.
|
| "some people get fulfillment from their jobs" is a very very
| banal take. The pitch for Graeber's book is that he's going
| beyond this banality and actually claiming the jobs are
| generating no value at all.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Depends on your perception of value. Plenty of things are
| valuable for a company but clearly useless for the world.
| Some things aren't even valuable for the company but is to
| a manager, etc.
| badpun wrote:
| Some things are clearly valueless. For example, if you
| slave away for 6 months creating a report on something,
| and then the document is never even opened by anyone,
| your work was clearly valueless. There are a lot of jobs
| which have components like that in public administration,
| in military, as well as in private sector, in areas like
| compliance, due dilligence etc.
|
| For example, I once worked on a team tasked with auditing
| a large EU-funded project. We were hired only because the
| EU fund required a post-mortem audit. The actual public
| administration officials who hired us to do the audit
| never seemed interested in the contents of our audit
| report, as long as it didn't contain anything that would
| put them in a bad light. The whole audit was mostly
| bullshit work. For extra irony, the project we audited
| was also largely bullshit work - tens of millions of
| euros spent on a system which ultimately didn't work, and
| its users had to send each other excel spreadsheets
| instead (with the data that the system was supposed to be
| managing). Ocassionally, they had to come in to work on a
| Saturday to enter the data into the BS system that
| provided no value to them.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > For example, if you slave away for 6 months creating a
| report on something, and then the document is never even
| opened by anyone, your work was clearly valueless.
|
| It seems plausible at least that you could evaluate a
| potential path forward, decide it is a dead end, let
| everyone know it is a dead end, have the report there
| just for backup in case anyone asks, and then not
| actually have anyone ask (maybe you have a really good
| reputation). I'd say the report there was still useful,
| even if only as an insurance policy.
| m000 wrote:
| The problem is that the "stakeholder" is (more often than
| not) Bob, the manager from the neighbouring department. So,
| "producing value for the stakeholders" is essentially
| "doing what Bob perceives as useful", so Bob can in turn
| appear as useful to upper management. So yes, it's a
| charade.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| If you're doing something useful for Bob, and he's doing
| something useful for upper management, and upper
| management is doing something useful for shareholders...
| then transitively you're probably doing something useful
| for shareholders. Or at least to reject that hypothesis
| you'd need a lot of visibility into what Bob is doing,
| and what the upper management is doing, and what their
| respective goals/priorities/strategies are.
| mordae wrote:
| You could still be doing a bullshit job, though.
| Shareholders are institutional nowadays and what they ask
| for can very easily not be aligned to their needs. Not to
| speak of needs of the wider society.
|
| Pension fund manager wants bonus, not to ensure livable
| conditions for the next couple of generations whose funds
| he's managing.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| There are lots of jobs that make the world less livable
| but are clearly _not_ bullshit jobs. Like if you work in
| marketing at a cigarette company you are probably a bad
| person, and you are advancing bad goals, but you are
| doing real, non-bullshit work every day.
|
| The bullshit job concept is not "this is making the world
| worse off", it's "no one would notice if this job ceased
| to exist".
|
| There is a real theory out there that index funds are
| making companies less cutthroat and competitive, but
| there's pretty limited evidence to support the theory.
| And if you can identify any companies with a notably high
| amount of fat to cut, there's a lot of money to be made
| working for an activist investor trying to get those
| companies to fire all their bullshit workers.
|
| If you can't identify such companies, you may just be a
| bullshitter yourself though.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| when people (like you) use "productivity" and "value" and
| "stakeholder" i generally write them off because they are
| uselessly vague abstractions. its so irritating to simplify
| things in this way, there's basically nothing to talk about
| at that level.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Trying to assess productivity _without_ a clear
| stakeholder and value metric is what 's pointlessly
| abstract. "Did this generate additional profits for
| shareholders" is a concrete way to measure productivity.
| "Did this make Mother Earth's vibes better" is not.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Not out of charity, it's more about incompetence and nepotism.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| If you're able to identify these situations at all reliably,
| you can make a lot of money as a consultant. Like, way more
| than whatever you're earning right now.
| kristianc wrote:
| Tyler Cowen's review at the time nails it I think:
|
| > He doubts whether Oxford University needs "a dozen-plus" PR
| specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few.
| Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise
| admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating
| services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they
| face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political
| unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just
| for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber's managerial
| intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely
| convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding,
| compared to people who deal with these problems every day.
|
| > A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make for
| a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year managing a
| mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which does
| not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not
| have an HR department at all. Then let him report back to us.
|
| > At that point we'll see who really has the bullshit job.
|
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| in3d wrote:
| UC Berkeley has 400 full and part-time staff to run DEI
| programs, might be a better example.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Everyone thinks inclusion is bullshit until they're the ones
| being excluded. Talk to some older devs and you might learn
| they've latterly come see the value in "bullshit" HR policies
| against discrimination.
| screye wrote:
| DEI usually translates to "D>E>I" in such organizations.
| DEI personnel are far too often the bullies, not the
| bullied.
| in3d wrote:
| FYI DEI rarely includes ageism.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Most students in the UC system are youngish. Ageism is
| just a relevant example because it's one that many
| straight, white male developers will eventually face
| first-hand.
|
| I've observed peers who were historically dismissive of
| "special treatment" (aka antidiscrimination measures) for
| women and members of underrepresented racial groups
| develop an case of late-onset empathy once they find
| themselves on the other side of that "not a good culture-
| fit" line.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| That's an interesting observation.
|
| Here's a thought... after growing up in a culture that
| tells them that no one is special and that everyone's
| just out on their own to fend for themselves, they're
| bombarded with this firm an unrelenting message that some
| do deserve special treatment and that it's only fair. But
| they're not included.
|
| And then, when something unfair happens to them, and they
| hint that maybe they deserve this special treatment too,
| they're told to "fuck off, go eat shit and die
| patriarchy!".
|
| I wonder why they're so keen to watch Fox News in
| retirement. Some mysteries we'll never figure out, I
| suppose.
| [deleted]
| zosima wrote:
| But many of us are.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| [dead]
| mempko wrote:
| Cowen is an economist while Graeber was a scientist. Graeber's
| book based off his article was well researched and has a lot of
| empirical data. While Cowen just makes stuff up in his
| criticism.
|
| So who do we listen to? Economists (a very dubious and arguably
| the most bullshit profession?) or an anthropologist who creates
| well researched and thoughtful works?
|
| Cowen completely missed Graeber's point in his criticism.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Anthropology is not science and economics is far more
| quantitative than any humanities ever will be. And more
| importantly, economists usually have the honesty to call
| their opinion an opinion and separate it from the statistics,
| whereas any metric used by a humanities person usually comes
| in the form of a number they attached to their opinion to
| present as a fact.
| waboremo wrote:
| You do realize that economics relies entirely on
| humanities, right? Psychology, sociology, philosophy, etc
| without such fields economics cannot reach any of the
| conclusions they have suggested since the field's creation.
|
| But it is hysterical to see people try to separate
| economics from humanities.
| butlerm wrote:
| Economics is rather dodgy as a science as well, at least
| compared to the physical sciences. e.g. (as has been said
| of philosophers) is there anything more predictable than
| two economists who will give the opposite recommendations
| on nearly any question of consequence? That is not science,
| that is politics. Or at least the science is still in its
| infancy on questions like that.
| kristianc wrote:
| This is a pretty common misconception. Nearly all
| economics agree that free markets are good, immigration
| is a net benefit, rent controls are bad, congestion
| pricing is good, lowering corporate tax rates are good,
| the gold standard is a bad idea. Politicians disagree on
| all or most of these things, but nearly all economists
| are in consensus about this stuff.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Well yeah. If you're trying to make a career as an
| economist, you have to uphold the status quo. Pepsi or
| the Wall Street Journal aren't interested in what a
| Marxist economist thinks of the economy.
|
| There are other forms of economic thought, but, IMO, they
| all start from different fundamentals. If the goal is
| profit and productivity, there's various ways to organize
| an economy to pursue that goal. If the goal is human
| flourishing, then alternative economic models are needed.
| kazen44 wrote:
| this is a point that massively gets overlooked in
| economic academic circles. especially since the fall of
| the berlin wall and dismantling of the USSR/eastern
| block.
|
| neoliberal economics tends to disregards any other basics
| of economics as an afterthought, and the philosophical
| debate about how a country's goals (and thus economy)
| should be build hasn't been held since.
| narcraft wrote:
| Economics: arguably the most bullshit profession
|
| Anthropology: True Science
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Cowen is an economist while Graeber was a scientist
|
| Graeber:
|
| "Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by
| (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in
| Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic
| circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each
| other's garages"
|
| That's a scientist?
|
| If that's a scientist then I am done trusting scientists.
| constantcrying wrote:
| "Tyler Cowen (/'kaU@n/; born January 21, 1962) is an American
| economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George
| Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in
| the economics department.[2] He hosts the economics blog
| Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok.
| Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal
| Revolution University, a venture in online education."
|
| I think it is pretty safe to assume that at the very least in
| this case Graeber was correct.
| strokirk wrote:
| I can't tell from your comment which of these accolades you
| think is problematic. Can you expand?
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Cowan is wrong purely based on his bio? What a facile
| argument. I can't even tell if you think so for political
| reasons or something else.
|
| For what it's worth, Cowan is quite prolific, so not a
| bullshit job holder if that's what you're implying.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _A simple experiment would vastly improve this book and make
| for a marvelous case study chapter: let him spend a year
| managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one
| which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or
| perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him
| report back to us._
|
| I've been in a couple organizations of around 100 people with
| no HR at all. They did just fine. One of them got one HR person
| when it got to 120 employees, mainly because it wanted to sell
| and potential buyers would see them as "more serious" that way
| - not because it was needed for daily functioning (and growing
| just fine).
|
| HR mostly became necessary in the litigious happy countries as
| a means of ass covering. Even in the US such sized companies
| used to work just fine without HR or with just a person or so
| back in the day.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Hmm I've worked in a startup that had around 80 people when I
| joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what? They
| totally had HR. It was just one person whose job wasn't
| officially HR and they soon got a whole HR department as they
| expanded to 400 people.
|
| HR is definitely not a "bullshit job". Who do you think deals
| with payroll and pensions and hiring and firing and contracts
| and complaints and m/paternity leave and ....
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Hmm I 've worked in a startup that had around 80 people
| when I joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what?
| They totally had HR. It was just one person whose job
| wasn't officially HR_
|
| Still refutes kristianc's/Cowen's case, about a company
| absolutely needing HR so much that "one which does not have
| an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not
| have an HR department at all" is in serious trouble.
|
| Apparently the company can servive not just with an
| understaffed HR deparment, but even with no HR department
| at all. Even with just a person (as in your example)
| unofficially doing some related tasks part time, alongside
| their real main role (which is not the same case as "having
| HR but just calling it something else - for starters it's
| just an ocassional task, and second it's not formal nor
| seen in some aggrandizing view).
|
| And not only survive, but, if I get you story right expand
| to 80 people, and from there to 400 people, before even
| setting up an actual HR department.
|
| The parent quotes Tyler writing: "let him [the person
| considering much of HR redundant] spend a year managing a
| mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees, but one which
| does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or
| perhaps does not have an HR department at all. Then let him
| report back to us."
|
| Well, I've discussed various stages of the companies growth
| with the people managing such companies, and the lack of HR
| was never considered a problem. And if they lied to me,
| considered the objective proof of that: if it was they'd
| have prioritized creating one, like they had estalibshed
| other departments, but they never cared of it. One only did
| it in the end, after getting close to 120 people, to
| appease potential buyers.
|
| So this "let him manage one (...) and report back to us",
| as if this will make him see the error of his idea, is
| already shot down by that. People have managed more than
| one, and never saw the issue even with not having a HR at
| all, much less with having an adequately stuffed one.
| 7952 wrote:
| Depends how broadly you define HR. The company I work for
| has hr but their role is pretty limited. Payroll is handled
| by accounts. Recruitment is mostly done by hiring managers.
| Day-to-day issues are handled by line managers and office
| managers. Most onboarding comes from a health and safety
| manager and QA leads. The vast majority of people doing
| these kind of duties report to someone other than HR.
|
| The core duty of the actual HR team is looking after
| executives. Providing advice and managing the relationship
| between directors and employees. And acting as a lever for
| instilling "behaviours" in the workforce. It creates
| distance.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You forgot wage suppression
| wazoox wrote:
| There are tables in the book that make it very clear that the
| phenomenon is real : the number of administrative jobs has
| literally exploded in Universities, particularly private
| Universities, while the number of diplomas delivered augmented
| much less. Where is our "productivity improvement"?
|
| Here are the numbers (1982 - 2005) :
| Administrative personnel : +240% Management
| : +85% Students : +56% Teachers
| : +50% Diplomas delivered : +47%
|
| Also a banker notice than his job can be 100% automatized, and
| according to his own evaluation, at least half the jobs in his
| bank (60,000) can be 100% automatized.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Administrative requirements at universities have
| _skyrocketed_ over the past decades [1]:
|
| > Perhaps most controversial is an increasing raft of federal
| and state regulations that universities must abide by: the
| Clery Act, which requires campuses to report their crime
| activity; new Title IX regulations that govern the handling
| of sexual assault; and Family Educational Rights and Privacy
| Act (FERPA) requirements for providing educational records.
|
| > In 2013 and 2014 alone, the Department of Education
| released rules and directives on 10 new sets of issues,
| ranging from proposed rules on teacher preparation programs
| to Net Price Calculator requirements to specific regulations
| for FAFSA verification. Complying with all these rules
| requires additional staff and additional money. The resources
| required are not insignificant: a Vanderbilt study of 13
| colleges and universities found that regulatory compliance
| comprises 3 to 11% of schools' nonhospital operating
| expenses, taking up 4 to 15% of faculty and staff's time.
|
| > "It is pages and pages and pages of regulations that
| require more sophisticated professionals," says Penny Rue,
| vice president for Campus Life at Wake Forest University and
| board chair-elect of the National Association of Student
| Affairs Professionals. Rue adds that incidents on college
| campuses, such as the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech,
| contributed to a need for administrative spending that often
| goes unnoticed, from case management services to threat
| assessment teams.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bur
| eau...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Perhaps an organization that requires such tremendous overhead
| just to exist should've failed long ago. It's not the
| anarchist's job to design improvements, but to make the
| evolution of improved systems possible by dismantling what's in
| the way.
|
| If Graeber had wanted to make contributions to management
| theory, he presumably would've written a different sort of
| book.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >It's not the anarchist's job to design improvements, but to
| make the evolution of improved systems possible by
| dismantling what's in the way
|
| Hard disagree.
|
| As an Anarchist, it's my job to support the dissolution of
| any hierarchy that is not democratically operated _in a way
| that supports people attempting to live_ while also creating
| communities founded on democratic incentives.
|
| You can't be a passive anarchist and yes improvements need to
| be made. Who else would be doing the evolving here?
|
| You prefer to just leave organization to the loudest
| capitalist leaders?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm not proposing that an anarchist ought to dismantle the
| problem and then sit idly by until someone else to fills
| the niche. Of course we should strive to make things
| better, even if it means allowing little hierarchy here or
| there.
|
| I'm just saying that when switch to this mode, we've put
| our anarchist hat away and are playing a different role.
| Whatever we are, at those times, we're no longer the
| audience that Graeber is writing for.
|
| Of course reality doesn't work like that. You don't have
| the "burn it down" phase, followed by the "build it better"
| phase. It's all jumbled up together. But I still think it's
| helpful to view these two perspectives as different
| personae.
| baremetal wrote:
| >As an Anarchist, it's my job to support the dissolution of
| any hierarchy that is not democratically operated in a way
| that supports people attempting to live while also creating
| communities founded on democratic incentives.
|
| Can you elaborate on this point?
|
| >You prefer to just leave organization to the loudest
| capitalist leaders?
|
| I'm inclined to agree with you that that is a bad idea.
| kristianc wrote:
| In Britain we've had over a decade of political leaders
| questioning "Hmm is this political institution / job role /
| arm of government / publicly funded service really necessary"
| and most here are of the consensus that it's essentially
| gutted the place.
|
| Easy to be the one in the ivory tower declaring other
| people's jobs to be worthless...
| bombolo wrote:
| That was completely intentional, just presented to the
| citizens in that way.
| pydry wrote:
| It's the institutions like the NHS which _everybody_ agrees
| are the most necessary which have been gutted the most -
| usually as stage 2 in the privatization playbook.
| Retric wrote:
| Unpleasant as it is for those who lost their jobs, the
| country seems better off now. The sheer overwhelming
| bureaucracy that built up over hundreds of years really did
| need to be trimmed.
| louistsi wrote:
| I can tell you haven't worked for the British Government!
|
| The bullshitters tend to be better at keeping their jobs
| than the people actually doing the work. They've had the
| practice - years of justifying their existence to the
| people controlling headcount numbers.
| foldr wrote:
| This is a curious comment in multiple respects. First,
| Britain has never been a particularly bureaucratic
| country in comparison to its European neighbors or even
| the USA. For example, it is very easy to start a small
| business, file taxes, etc. etc. Second, as the sibling
| points out, the country is in a pretty bad situation
| economically at the moment. Many people would happily
| wind the clock back 10-15 years in that respect.
| Retric wrote:
| It's not always about business.
|
| Read up on the history of Greater London Council/Greater
| London Authority, its one attempt deal with the 32
| boroughs and City of London Corporation. Compare it with
| say NYC, or similarly large city's around the world and
| it's clear London/UK could benefit from streamlining
| things.
| foldr wrote:
| What does that have to do with the actions of the current
| government over the past decade? You were talking about
| things that have allegedly already improved, not possible
| future improvements.
|
| By the way, I live in London and am reasonably familiar
| with its history. Asking people to 'read up' on things
| that haven't previously been a topic of the discussion is
| a bit presumptuous. I might know more about it than you!
| kristianc wrote:
| I'm curious what metric you're assessing 'better off'
| there - by many conventional economic measures such as
| real wage growth, productivity, GDP, the British economy
| has either flatlined or gone backwards over the last
| decade.
|
| Under the previous 'bloated' administration there were 40
| consecutive quarters of economic growth at one point.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Complexity, it's not always about economic growth. Though
| it's also clear the UK has been in relative decline
| compared to the rest of the world long before these
| reforms started.
| kristianc wrote:
| Sure, not everything's economic growth. But without some
| concrete examples of where things have actually improved
| in tangible terms over the last decade you leave yourself
| open to the claim that what this is _actually_ about is
| seeing people and institutions you dislike taking a
| decline in status regardless of the objective
| consequences.
| bandrami wrote:
| Isn't the UK now poorer than Croatia?
| ryuhhnn wrote:
| You must not have read the book because Graeber was pretty
| clear that he wasn't making suggestions of what ought to be,
| he was simply diagnosing the issue and providing a framework
| to think of something better.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| You're right. It's on my list. My familiarity with Graeber
| comes from Debt.
|
| But is a diagnosis not a declaration of: "there should be
| less of _this_ in the world "?
| ryuhhnn wrote:
| > make the evolution of improved systems possible by
| dismantling what's in the way.
|
| I think you already answered that question for me. I'll
| also add that I don't think this book was meant to be a
| contribution to management theory at all, I think the
| broader point is that we as a society have valued jobs
| more than we value humanity, so we now have hundreds of
| thousands of people performing meaningless work just for
| the sake of having a job. This isn't an issue of
| management, it's an issue of values.
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| I literally own and operate a business in that headcount and it
| operated exceptionally well for the last decade with zero hr
| staff. We are considering hiring an hr person now and that
| isn't driven by business need, it's driven by increasing risk
| from bad government liability policy basically forcing us to
| develop policy documents we can point at if two or more
| employees get into a beef unrelated to work on premise or if
| one or more employees do something stupid that leads to their
| or others injury, among other government mandated risk vectors.
| In a sense government bullshit jobs are creating private sector
| bullshit jobs.
| nicbou wrote:
| Who is handling on and offboarding of employees? Contracts?
| To be honest I don't recall working without HR above a dozen
| employees.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Anecdotal but I worked for a smallish company of about 40
| people in total for several years , and we had a single
| person handling HR.
| kazen44 wrote:
| also, in some countries having HR above a very small size
| (25 people or so) is a requirement because of the addition
| of work councils. workers have legal representation with
| the company above a certain size, and HR is required as a
| counter party for a lot of the stuff worker councils co-
| decide on.
| crtified wrote:
| In a small business with low staff turnover - which amply
| describes any number of small city outlets - most of that
| stuff is ad-hocable. It's not efficient, but it's such a
| small part of the work involved that few cares are given.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I wouldn't hire someone for that now. The cost of lightly
| customized documents is taking a hard turn towards zero.
| robocat wrote:
| Repeatable work: why are you not outsourcing or finding a
| startup in the space?
| Aperocky wrote:
| He's very confident in his assessment but never even took any
| possibility that things maybe automated away or done
| differently.
|
| We're heading in that direction - just because everybody rode a
| horse doesn't mean a car won't find market.
| justin66 wrote:
| If someone were to ask me to guess which academic is more
| likely to have a good grasp on organizational structures and
| efficiency, a philosopher/economist or an anthropologist, I
| think rather than pondering the question and their
| qualifications, I'd make a rude noise.
|
| (Cowen's review, characterizing the book as "entertaining,"
| isn't bad)
| spencerflem wrote:
| What you miss is that the people working the jobs _themselves_
| describe their own job as bullshit. The introduction to the
| book makes it very clear. Graeber is not decreeing which jobs
| are pointless, he 's describing what it feels like to work such
| a job based on interviews.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| >What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves
| describe their own job as bullshit.
|
| Tbf this isn't that great of a metric and the book itself
| relies on it a lot. I've personally seen a few of doctors and
| surgeons describe their job as mostly bullshit because
| they're not satisfied with it.
| pyb wrote:
| Yes. Tyler conveninently ignores one of the central points of
| the book.
| version_five wrote:
| I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions,
| but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a
| methodological error in the research. Line employees often do
| not have a big picture understanding of the work they are
| doing. For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of
| people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the
| work could be done differently or more efficiently,
| questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive
| view that is looking across the organization.
|
| Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for
| exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their
| (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false
| positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people
| thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe
| looking back was actually valuable?
| why5s wrote:
| > but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a
| methodological error in the research. Line employees often
| do not have a big picture understanding of the work they
| are doing.
|
| Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their
| jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or
| society at large?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people
| complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work
| could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning
| priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is
| looking across the organization.
|
| Because of course, the executive are always driving things
| in the optimal way, but only them can see it...
|
| In fact, in most orgs the higher in the management position
| you climb, the more acutely you see the organisational
| warts of the company, which more often than not, is
| governed not according to some clever plan from the
| executives, but instead is the results of political
| struggles between entities whose leader often _hate_ each
| other.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I 've seen lots of instances of people complaining about
| leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done
| differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities,
| etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking
| across the organization._
|
| There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions
| are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the
| ground.
| bboygravity wrote:
| There's also instances of leadership being installed with
| the goal to drive a company into the ground.
|
| Using BCG consultants for example.
| coldtea wrote:
| _cough_ Nokia _cough_
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Having leadership that can't help you see the big picture
| and leaves you feeling like a duct taper or a goon is a
| problem in and of itself, for multiple reasons.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think you're right that line employees often lack the
| "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not
| required.
|
| An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the
| finance department of a university: her _entire_ job is to
| copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into
| another piece of software. She 's told which rows to copy
| by another person in the department (via email), who in
| turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of
| this could be automated without any "big picture" changes,
| and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact;
| hence "bullshit."
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and
| still lacking local-language skills, settled for an
| entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data
| entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I
| said, "That could be automated with just a few lines of
| AWK."
| cylinder714 wrote:
| Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a
| lapel button made: I WAS REPLACED
| BY A CRON JOB
| 13of40 wrote:
| Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they
| decided that we would add every airport in the US to it.
| Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway
| orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the
| info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had
| half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few
| days.
|
| Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss
| didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant
| building full of computer programmers being able to crack
| the government's database format.
| sebastialonso wrote:
| bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a
| poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty
| common scenarios: department and role duplicity,
| unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you
| mentioned.
|
| Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises
| _precisely because_ no one has the visibility that there
| 's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be
| automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who
| do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2)
| the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to
| push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will
| "run the automation"?
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and
| clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced,
| presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get
| copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not -
| maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's
| vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to
| realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more
| likely that not, there is an actual reason that task
| needs to be done.
|
| I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job
| is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative
| characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when
| really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more
| to the company than they're paying in salary to the
| person doing it.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The point is that _they_ think it 's bullshit. The
| operation of copying rows itself exists for an
| intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts),
| but the dedicated _role_ of "row copier" is a bullshit
| job from the vantage point of the people working it.
|
| No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the
| two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.).
| Assuming that we need to agree on what actually
| constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error
| that the GP points out.
| Klinky wrote:
| Then shouldn't the title be something like "Self-
| proclaimed Bullshit Jobs".
|
| Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could
| have variables that make the job of having an IT guy
| drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make
| sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in
| many computers becoming broken costing more in money and
| downtime than having a trained professional drive in and
| move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more
| expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few
| visits a year.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's an anthropological book; you, as a reader, are
| _expected_ to understand that the framing is subjective.
|
| Compare _The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down_ [1]:
| tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve
| any understanding of the contents, and would only make
| the author come across as smarmy.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You
| _and_You...
| Klinky wrote:
| In the Preface, the earlier inspiration for what's a
| "Bullshit Job".
|
| > Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don't
| seem, to the _outsider_ , to really do much of
| anything...
|
| > This possibility that _our society is riddled with
| useless jobs_ that no one wants to talk about did not
| seem inherently implausible.
|
| > Clearly, then, we have _an important social phenomenon_
| that has received almost no systematic attention.
|
| There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society
| Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?"
|
| It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary,
| including society's perspective, which goes beyond the
| personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| The term "bullshit job" is confusing and probably
| intended just to be entertaining instead of informative.
|
| A more informative title would really be "boring jobs
| whose purpose isn't understood by the people doing them"
| rvba wrote:
| The operation of copying rows might as well exist because
| some manager wants to have a big headcount and be
| important / promoted.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This doesn't contradict what I've said!
| conjectures wrote:
| Yes, this is thread is developing some weird capitalist
| inverse of marxist 'false consciousness' theory.
|
| Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and
| should not exist."
|
| The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and
| their self-report is deluded."
| drewcoo wrote:
| I think people mistake middle-brow contrarianism spoken
| with confidence with actual intelligence.
|
| I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we
| recognize the possibility that self-perception of the
| value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good
| measure of the value of that job.
| waboremo wrote:
| We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know
| best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-
| perception because it doesn't align with our perception
| of their role.
|
| Further, how can we trust our perception is the better
| measure of the value of that job? If the person
| performing the role can't even assess the value properly,
| how are they providing that value?
| Klinky wrote:
| Can't you simply test by asking what happens if the
| person stops doing their job? If nothing detrimental
| happens, then the job was probably bullshit.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| >The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital
| and their self-report is deluded."
|
| The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks
| they output enough value to continue paying them for
| their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE
| firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff
| to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves
| doing the work probably doesn't have the full
| perspective.
| waboremo wrote:
| What a brilliant summary of this thread.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Perfect example of how RPA with a sprinkling of LLMs will
| change the world of work.
| bumby wrote:
| A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates
| "bullshit" jobs. Consider when someone is doing something
| simply because "That's the way we've always done it" with
| no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of
| things. When business goals or processes change, these
| jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have
| lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and
| more recent obsolescence)
| version_five wrote:
| Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though
| is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some
| things are the way that they are, but people with limited
| perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and
| it's hard to tell which is which.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| > I consider relying on people's own answers to be a
| methodological error in the research.
|
| If the conclusion of the research is "these jobs are
| bullshit", then I agree, but if it is about how people are
| doing in these jobs, it is completely valid. Graeber was
| mixing these in his book to have more popular appeal, which
| is bad.
|
| > Line employees often do not have a big picture
| understanding of the work they are doing.
|
| That's what Marx called alienation of labor. While it may
| increase efficiency, it takes all the pleasure out of work.
| But that's not really the topic of the book: There's
| entropy in any larger organization, and I'm sure we all
| have an example or two of people who are a pure waste of
| energy in their position.
| a1o wrote:
| > That's what Marx called alienation of labor.
|
| I am almost positive Adam Smith pointed to this problem
| before with the pin factory example
| jaggederest wrote:
| You might not be surprised to learn that Marx, as an
| economist among other things, was almost certainly
| familiar with Adam Smith's work. Capital, for example,
| was at least partly a direct critique of On The Wealth of
| Nations.
| bumby wrote:
| If you ever start feeling bad about your job being
| pointless, remember that someone somewhere is installing a
| blinker light on a BMW.
|
| -advice (and an old joke) from a former colleague
| civilized wrote:
| I don't think it's an error to ask people what they think.
| It's one imperfect source of information, and better than
| just blindly assuming that any money spent on wages or
| salary is spent on something truly "productive" regardless
| of the perceptions of those doing the work.
|
| Graeber was an anthropologist. Anthropologists want to
| understand how people feel about their lives and why. They
| don't take feelings of meaninglessness to imply that,
| objectively, a job could be cut without consequence. Just
| that many jobs don't satisfy a human thirst to be doing
| something subjectively worthwhile.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| If people complain about leadership decision en masse, then
| maybe the leadership failed to explain the decisions at the
| first place.
|
| Give people a meaning and they will do much better work.
| It's not rocket science.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > Give people a meaning and they will do much better
| work. It's not rocket science.
|
| This sounds good, but it's honestly just not realistic in
| a lot of jobs. How are you going to make working at an
| Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart?
| Making fries at McDonalds?
|
| You can give the usual platitudes of how you're helping
| to make sure that people in your community can get the
| goods/food/whatever they need, but I think most people
| know that they're not really contributing to the
| betterment of society in a lot of jobs.
|
| And to be clear, that's not just menial labor - I've been
| a PM on some products that could disappear off the face
| of the earth without making anybody especially worse off
| (except the guy managing the part of the operation that
| used our software, but ultimately he'd go to a competitor
| and all would be fine).
|
| I think that it's often better to forget the idea that
| work needs to be deeply meaningful and treat people with
| the respect of recognizing that they're there for a
| paycheck and nothing else, and then try to do what you
| can to make the day-to-day work easier and more pleasant.
|
| Meanwhile I'll be hoping against hope that when these
| meaningless jobs get replaced by robots and AI that we
| get UBI and people can actually work to find meaning.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think people have this idea that meaning must not be
| fair compensation (or put another way, adequate
| compensation relative to the size of the company and
| demands required).
|
| I think excluding compensation from those jobs, meaning
| higher compensation, from the idea of meaning is losing
| sight of it all. There at a lot of jobs that if people
| were compensated better they would find it to be more
| meaningful to engage with. It can be a primary motivation
| to simply do well because they feel fairly valued.
|
| It's not all heart and soul stuff
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Your point about warehouses and fast foods is a fallacy.
|
| If you talk to these workers, you can tell those who have
| a careful manager from those who don't.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean. You can have a great
| manager but still not a meaningful job. That's what I
| meant when I talked about making the job easier and more
| pleasant - you can have a manager who optimizes for your
| happiness by making the job as non-tedious as possible.
| It may still be tedious in the grand scheme, but maybe
| they're rotating everyone through different tasks to make
| it less tedious, and you feel that and appreciate it.
| That's good and will definitely increase your
| satisfaction, but it doesn't mean the job is meaningful.
| jaggederest wrote:
| "Tedious" is different than "bullshit". A bullshit job is
| a combination of two things: pointlessness and
| tediousness. Painting pictures nobody buys is pointless,
| but it is not tedious if you're being creative. Likewise,
| working hard on an assembly line doing the exact same
| operation is incredibly tedious, but it is not pointless:
| the line has an output which is presumably useful.
|
| Mere tediousness would consign all warehouse jobs and
| janitorial positions to "bullshit" - which they are not,
| as specifically called out in the book. They might be
| unpleasant, but are definitely necessary.
|
| Parent commenter is stating that, with a good manager,
| they will remind you of the meaning inherent in the work.
| At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry
| people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"
| myshpa wrote:
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-brooks-
| david-g...
|
| "You make a distinction between bullshit jobs and shit
| jobs in your book. Can you talk a little bit about the
| distinction between the two?
|
| Well it's fairly straightforward: shit jobs are just bad
| jobs. Ones you'd never want to have. Back-breaking,
| underpaid, unappreciated, people who are treated without
| dignity and respect... The thing is for the most part,
| shit jobs aren't bullshit, in the sense of pointless,
| nonsensical, because actually they usually involve doing
| something that genuinely needs to be done: driving people
| around, building things, taking care of people, cleaning
| up after them...
|
| Bullshit jobs are most often paid quite well, involve
| nice benefit packages, you're treated like you're
| important and actually are doing something that needs to
| be done -- but in fact, you know you're not. So in that
| way they're typically opposites."
|
| > At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting
| hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot
| meal"
|
| McD is a prime example of a bullshit sector.
|
| "Bullshit jobs are ones ... that if the job (or even
| sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it
| would make ... the world ... a better place. "
|
| > Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in
| climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? ...
| https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-
| climate-...
|
| > Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the
| potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years
| and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century .. ht
| tps://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journa
| l...
|
| > Avoiding meat and dairy is 'single biggest way' to
| reduce your impact on Earth ... https://www.theguardian.c
| om/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
|
| > In terms of carbon sequestration and dealing w/
| climate, it is clear that agricultural land
| use(especially land used for animal feed) is the largest
| barrier to ecosystem restoration. Potential for carbon
| sequestration is enormous (literally enough for the
| entire 1.5C carbon budget) ...
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| I'll make you a deal, comrade: I'll eat bugs when Klaus
| Schwab, John Kerry and Bill Gates eat bugs.
| myshpa wrote:
| No need to eat bugs, eat vegetables, fruits, legumes,
| grains, nuts and seeds, comrade, and you'll help save the
| environment for your children.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Amazon warehouses & retail are actually called out in the
| book as _not_ being bullshit, as in - the workers know
| exactly why people would want packages and find it
| useful.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I can't stress this point enough, having read the book.
|
| I feel that "our industry" is also rife with bullshit jobs, I
| think we aren't exempt, but I wonder how others feel about
| this.
|
| I had a bullshit job once: a project of 30M euro was clearly
| failing hard. 60 people were working every day and we didn't
| deliver anything suitable for production. I kept my corner
| neat, but the writing was on the wall.
|
| It felt so surreal, trying to care and do work, but on the
| other hand knowing the project was doomed.
|
| After a year or so I couldn't stand it anymore, I felt
| physically ill and I quit.
|
| My manager was fired a month after I left. The project got
| canceled 6-8 months later.
| cptaj wrote:
| There definitely are bullshit jobs. But its super dangerous
| when charlatans, which in my opinion are far more common,
| take the "bullshit job" meme and start firing people that
| actually do important work and creating extremely toxic
| work environments.
|
| I feel you about the bullshit project you were on. I've
| been on similar projects and its such a grind. Helps to
| have a healthy work-life balance.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Well, charlatans can take over any term by
| misinterpreting. We do not need to get along with their
| misinterpretation, though.
| asmor wrote:
| For DevOps/Platform Engineering, I found that companies are
| either ridiculously overstaffed and are developing their
| own database orchestration from scratch (fun, but not
| effective in most organizations) or 3 people do
| _everything_ related to running software somewhere as soon
| as someone shouts at them. And probably all kinds of
| permission clicking. Worst when someone in one of those
| small teams goes off the rails and uses something cause
| they want to have fun with it (ask me about the bare metal
| ceph cluster we barely use and nobody knows how to fix when
| it inevitably breaks)
| ravenstine wrote:
| That reminds me of a buklshit project I was involved with
| at a previous company. The short of it was they wanted
| some way to exchange articles between affiliated
| journalism outlets, and so they spent $6+ million to
| build what was effectively a clone of CouchDB from
| scratch. No, I am not making that up. I knew how silly
| that project was from the get-go, but thought nothing of
| it because, as far as I knew, it was an organizational
| pet project that didn't cost that much. Needless to say,
| I was flabbergasted when I was told how much had been
| spent on it over a period of a few years. I know at least
| a significant portion of that budget went to some staff
| engineers, and it wouldn't surprise me that some blood
| sucking consultants fed from the trough as well. This was
| clearly one of those things that may have started out as
| some developers identifying a problem, having fun with
| it, and then management decided it to throw a bunch of
| money its way thinking it was going to give them a big
| name.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I was ordered once (because I had previously ordered my
| staff to not do this) to have my staff make a certain
| internal website comply with accessibility requirements.
| Except the only authorized users were soldiers and airmen
| who would be discharged if they had any of the
| disabilities this was for.
|
| They didn't believe that bird colonel JAG who told them
| there was no way the law applied. By the time it all got
| sorted out, we had it done.
|
| Apparently, a memo went around that this was required
| everywhere all the time and the distinction wasn't made
| between public-facing websites (where this is true) and
| this one.
| ohhdotgov wrote:
| Imagine working for a 100M generic AI unicorn startup, with
| nothing but a hunch? That's my worst nightmare. Somebody
| elses dream
|
| But: Big corps need to learn and experiment. Sometimes it's
| ridiculously expensive. But it needs to be done.
|
| I quit a project (stayed in the company) that is currently
| running something like 10M euro. I quit when it was 1M.
| Because I felt my small role was tedious and stupid and not
| a big learning opportunity. But the job needs to be done.
| So now less capable people are doing it. And we (they
| organisation) will kind of maybe succeed. But the fact is:
| the project is mission critical for the company. So no
| choice but to do the job. But i can assure you most people
| working that project hates it. Think their job is bullshit
| etc. But really. It's just a really really important
| threadmill.
|
| What i am trying to say: sometimes it's not the job.
| Sometimes it's you.
| rcxdude wrote:
| The problem is that the phenomenon of feeling your own job is
| bullshit is not as common as he says, and on wider ranging
| surveys this feeling is negatively correlated with the kind
| of jobs he posits are more likely to be bullshit: it's much
| rarer for someone working in an admin role in an office to
| feel like their work contributes nothing useful to the world
| than for someone doing manual labour for some essential
| service, like refuse collection.
| refurb wrote:
| Are people the best judge of whether or not their job is
| bullshit? Doubtful.
|
| Some people might complain about all the data they need to
| analyze and forms to fill out and say "my job is bullshit",
| but it's all needed for compliance with some industry
| regulations (that HN seems to love so much).
|
| Is that a bullshit job? I'd say no, even if the person doing
| the work thinks so.
| pydry wrote:
| The thing is if you look at the results and assume at least
| 20% of people do this then theyre still bad.
|
| Moreover, I think most people have a better idea of how
| bullshit their job is than an outside observer. Theyre
| doing it.
| zosima wrote:
| But the industry regulation may be what is bullshit.
|
| The job can be still bullshit, even though it serves a
| purpose for a specific company in a specific environment.
|
| Corporate lawyer is the archetypal graeberian bullshit job.
| myshpa wrote:
| If the system is set up to employ an army of people solely
| for the purpose of complying with some meaningless
| regulation, then that army of people (and those who support
| them) are all examples of bullshit jobs.
| abandonliberty wrote:
| >What you miss is that the people working the jobs themselves
| describe their own job as bullshit.
|
| The author uses a very broad definition of bullshit, then
| pivots to their own personal view. You'll see this tactic in
| a lot of manipulative/dishonest content.
|
| "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless,
| unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot
| justify its existence."
|
| Are the Internet, phones, cars, planes, processed food,
| restaurants, sporting areas, payroll, loans necessary? Many
| would argue that some of these are downright pernicious. It
| comes down to the evaluation and perspective of the employee,
| and thus is very much a feeling of bullshit, rather than a
| fact of bullshit - contrary to what the author argues. This
| is mostly a misinterpreted job satisfaction survey.
|
| This person has no actual domain expertise, but instead they
| set out to confirm their mostly naive belief.
| incone123 wrote:
| In the book he interviews several people who do almost
| nothing all day. That was my takeaway when I read it. It's
| not about jobs where the employee does not see their work
| as valuable to the organization.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Cowen's review is very poor. Graeber famously interviewed a lot
| of people and they described their own jobs as bullshit and
| explained why.
|
| Graeber's work might be opinionated but his evidence is
| stronger than Cowen's flippant comeback.
|
| >> At that point we'll see who really has the bullshit job.
|
| This almost reads as Cowen is claiming that Graeber's job is
| bullshit.
|
| Graeber is a prize winning and successful writer and academic.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Cowen's review misses the point, which is that Graeber is
| probably right about academia (not coincidentally, that's where
| he worked). Academia has no profit motive so all the money gets
| sunk into an ever-expanding bureaucracy rather than lowering
| prices or paying dividends to shareholders.
|
| The thing is, Graeber is wrong about the entire rest of the
| economy, where 99% of people live and work.
| spencerflem wrote:
| The book is based of interviews, so certainly some people
| feel that way. Anecdotally, plenty of people I talk to (in
| industry) question the usefulness of whatever widget they're
| building.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| I don't think he got a book deal to write this doorstop
| about the utterly banal claim that some people find their
| jobs unfulfilling. Like, duh, that's why they pay you. He
| got the book deal because his pitch is that the jobs are
| actually bullshit, i.e. the kind of jobs some salarymen
| have in Japan where the company is expected to keep you
| employed and you are expected to show up for 12 hours a day
| but whether actual work gets done productively is sort of
| beside the point.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I'm glad you don't feel your job is that way. This book,
| however, is an anthropology of people who Themselves,
| feel that their job is pointless. You can argue that they
| are incorrect, but Graeber's point is -
|
| Who is more likely to know whether a job is valuable:
| you, or the person actually working it?
| jdm2212 wrote:
| I'd trust their manager or skip-level manager more than
| I'd trust them. Lots of rank-and-file workers really have
| no idea how they generate value for the organization.
| Until you've spent a lot of time managing people or at
| least sitting in on management decisions, it's hard to
| understand the kinds of concerns that drive corporate
| decision-making. The fact that a corporate minion thinks
| their job is pointless means the job actually is
| pointless like 10% of the time, or that the minion just
| has no idea how the org works like 90% of the time.
| m-ee wrote:
| I think this misses the point. At the beginning he states
| very clearly that the people providing the labor are best
| positioned to determine if the labor is bullshit, which
| seems like a reasonable starting point. The purpose of
| the book is probing how a system that's supposed to be
| ruthlessly efficient and profit seeking could waste so
| much money on bullshit.
|
| For those who haven't read the book the answer is largely
| what he terms "managerial feudalism". The economic
| motives of any individual manager, up to and including
| the CEO, often don't align with the abstract ideal of a
| brutally efficient capitalist firm. They get money and
| status by having a large "court" of underlings. If you've
| worked at a growth stage company it seems impossible to
| deny that this doesn't happen in the tech industry.
| notahacker wrote:
| > At the beginning he states very clearly that the people
| providing the labor are best positioned to determine if
| the labor is bullshit, which seems like a reasonable
| starting point
|
| seems like a pretty questionable starting point tbh,
| especially when he starts conflating the idea of actual
| bullshit with _would prefer to be doing something else_ ,
| like his example of his corporate lawyer friend who
| thinks his job is bullshit mainly because he'd rather
| concentrate on being a 'poet-musician'. It's not
| 'managerial feudalism' causing people to get paid more to
| solve large organizations' legal problems than scratch
| their own musical itches. And at the other end of the
| scale, some of the most parasitical workers really love
| what they do, whether that's because they love the thrill
| of browbeating people into giving them money or because
| they have a genuinely bullshit "strategy" job for
| internal politics reasons which has been designed to make
| them feel much more important than they actually are.
|
| (and there's lots of pre-existing material on the
| efficiencies and inefficiencies of fields like law and
| adverse selection problems within firms, most of which
| works from _better_ assumptions. Plus of course Marx 's
| theory of alienation - one of his better theories -
| offering a theory for why people become more dissatisfied
| with the work they do as industrial processes become
| _more_ efficient)
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Sure, managerial feudalism is totally a thing but also
| CEOs are aware of that and shareholders are aware of that
| which is why layoffs and reorgs and such happen
| periodically at any company in a competitive business.
|
| But the rank-and-file employee who's trying to assess
| whether their job generates value will have a very hard
| time doing this at all accurately. You need a lot of
| business strategy context to understand why the company
| is actually employing you (as opposed to what they tell
| you, which is always going to be "because you're amazing
| and talented and a valued team member")
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Having worked long time in both academia and industry, I can
| assure you the differences when it comes to bullshit jobs are
| minor. You might argue about the color of the turd, but it
| still tastes like shit.
| censor_me wrote:
| [dead]
| jdm2212 wrote:
| In the US this is completely untrue. Research universities
| basically never have layoffs. In contrast, Google alone has
| in the last year laid off more people than the combined
| faculties Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford.
|
| Private sector layoffs are harder in Europe and academia is
| less well funded, so it might be true-ish in Europe.
| goodpoint wrote:
| That proves nothing.
| Mouthfeel wrote:
| [dead]
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Working in a large company, 50-80% of the work seems like
| bullshit but often plausibly necessary because the projects are
| large and complex and there are a lot of coordination headwinds
| across so many teams with large adverse effects of building the
| wrong thing or getting things wrong at scale. So you have a lot
| of meetings, a lot of planning, and a lot of middle management.
| It's pretty easy to go too far in the wrong direction though
| where you can see a 1:1 ratio or even worse of
| administrative/managerial overhead where a project might have
| only 1-2 actual engineers doing work but a heavy dose of
| project/program/product managers, 'leadership', or other
| overhead. Basically this is the ratio you have to watch, ideally
| you have <=10% overhead, 20-30% is maybe workable but as soon as
| you have 50%+ overhead it's pretty obvious something is wrong.
| kurthr wrote:
| If you have a highly profitable company you can go a really
| long way. Stability breeds instability... and any sufficiently
| complex system is operating at the limit of some instability.
|
| To take Google as an example (cuz I think it's actually not a
| bad company and certainly quite profitable, where I used to
| know a lot of people in different areas) over 80% of income is
| ads and 60% of the total is search ads. There's YouTube(ads),
| Gmail(ads), Android (ads and Play Fees), and Cloud (fees that
| might cover costs?). But I'd bet that 80% of the people are
| working on 20% of the profits. Certainly, I'm familiar with the
| hardware side and that is flat out a loss leader. Don't even
| get started with the Bets. The last 20-30% (of engineers!)
| probably produce absolutely nothing that any customer will
| every see, or are producing net losses of the company over the
| lifetime of the product.
|
| It's hard to get real motivated about even a product you make
| when the company considers it a loss maker... that makes it the
| plaything of executives. Because, whatever the folks at Meta
| may be capable of or want to do with VR, there's really just
| one customer who's last name starts with Z. It's just politics
| at that point and pleasing the managers since the easiest way
| to higher profits is to kill the whole division.
|
| Of course VCs face some of the same issues, but at least there
| you have a target customer (maybe the wrong) and a product
| (maybe the wrong one), and you know your work isn't BS when
| you're profitable post IPO.
| asmor wrote:
| This is my goto book to recommend when people are scared about
| being replaced by GPT.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This article relates the two:
| https://compactmag.com/article/a-i-might-not-steal-your-bull...
| PeterStuer wrote:
| The article was great. The book was insufferable and didn't add
| substance.
| esquire_900 wrote:
| Exactly. Like so many popular non-fiction books these days,
| there's about 15 pages of content fluffed up with 200 pages
| of anecdotes to be able to sell it as a book.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I thought the same of Graeber's book about Debt. It's not a
| bad book and I feel like I learned something from it but
| Christ it was like 5x longer than it needed to be and felt
| very unstructured.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ironically, a bullshit job.
| esafak wrote:
| What consolation is that? At least a BS job pays the bills.
| asmor wrote:
| You misunderstand my point. A BS job wasn't necessary in the
| first place, so it's unlikely to be replaced by GPT. The
| market is pretty bad at optimizing the amount of labor large
| corporations need, and this isn't going to change this.
| clnq wrote:
| Hmm... a lot of jobs being displaced by ML are technical, and
| not very bullshit.
| marcod wrote:
| >1st Bob: What you do at Initech is you take the specifications
| from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?
|
| >Tom: Yes, yes that's right.
|
| >2nd Bob: Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers
| take them directly to the software people?
|
| >Tom: Well, I'll tell you why... because... engineers are not
| good at dealing with customers...
|
| >1st Bob: So you physically take the specs from the customer?
|
| >Tom: Well... No. My secretary does that... or they're faxed.
|
| >2nd Bob: So then you must physically bring them to the software
| people?
|
| >Tom: Well... No. ah sometimes.
|
| >1st Bob: What would you say you do here?
|
| >Tom: Look I already told you, I deal with the @#$% customers so
| the engineers don't have to. I have people skills! I am good at
| dealing with people, can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS
| WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!
| mynegation wrote:
| I thought about this a lot. I believe to a large extent the
| feeing of a job being "bullshit" is driven by ultra-
| specialization while at the same time wider context is
| increasingly complex and hard to grasp. Another factor is
| increased regulatory burden and jobs associated with it. Having
| said that I do believe that there are some areas where influx of
| money causes the empire building (some teams at large tech
| companies and ballooning admin staff in universities are probably
| two examples I immediately think of).
| snitzr wrote:
| I read half of Graeber's book Debt before realizing he was always
| taking the most pessimistic opinion every chance he got for no
| real reason. I had to stop reading it.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Great article but to be fair, there's a huge seasonality in the
| way people feel about their job.
|
| Asking people how they feel about their job on Jan 5th right
| after they come back from vacation in the darkest days of the
| winter is guaranteed to yield the worse possible response.
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