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The rise of the pointless job

theguardian.com

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Re: The rise of the pointless job

#391

Post by nabla9 »

lainga wrote: post #15

I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest. As a…

Tokugawa era had lasting peace partly because of these bullshit jobs. It was a way to build institutions that kept 300 regional daimyos and people who trained weapons in check.

Japanese developed clever formal court system (Sankin-kotai "alternate attendance") where half of the daimyos were kept hostage in the capital city at all times. Spend year in your own lands surrounded by your own men, one year as hostage in the capital that was under the control of the shogun. If daimio left the capital, his wife and heir were kept as hostages. All these daimios and their close families needed something to do to make their life meaningful. Same applied to their underlings.

King Louis XIV had similar system for the same reasons. Nobles had to keep hostage in his palace at Versailles and they needed things to do. The court system developed bullshit jobs for nobles, like helping him into the bed or taking part of the party. Everyone was given a role to play.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#392

Post by amelius »

matwood wrote: post #379
billfruit wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethically slightly problematic to work on some side project, than in doing creative time wasting.

Yeah. If I'm on work time, working on a potential side project feels ethically wrong. This is different than wasting time on HN, or reading about some new programming language because that knowledge gain could be used at work at some point.

I would just think of it as keeping the machine oiled.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#393

Post by rangibaby »

sverige wrote: post #304
epc wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was that guy as a kid, at least for road work. The role rotated through my crew while everyone else worked in the manhole or on the street. Part of the reason for it to be a human is to serve as a witness for the police when a distracted driver plows into the road crew. This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today.

> This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today. Missing the /s. Drivers today are far worse than they were in the 80s.

I would say they are almost certainly less drunk now

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#394

Post by xbgood »

ImaCake wrote: post #340

Universities are filled with this kind of pointlessness. The result is a massive amount of friction between those on the "edge" of the university doing useful work in research, teaching, building things, and the people in the "core" who routinely fire and re-hire whole departments and replace perfectly functional buildings in order to justify their paycheck. It's not that the beaucracy running a University isn't need…

This is the same in industry: At a company that was supposed to be financially struggling, the CEO did:

1) Lay off software engineers are (the best ones, he had no clue).

2) Increase the head count in the HR department.

3) The increased head count in the HR department proceeded to move from one billing or HR platform to the next because they needed activity.

4) Hire "diverse" new (cheap) software engineers with no clue.

I think professional unions with all their flaws are needed not primarily to bargain for higher incomes, but to stop this social welfare program for the bureaucracy.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#395

Post by sverige »

rangibaby wrote: post #393
sverige wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today. Missing the /s. Drivers today are far worse than they were in the 80s.

I would say they are almost certainly less drunk now

But a lot more have been smoking weed.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#396

Post by pg_bot »

expensivedrone wrote: post #80

I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package. However, the team that I go put into, i…

You are living my nightmare

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#397

Post by rayiner »

gtvwill wrote: post #384
rayiner wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Packing your own groceries is work and boring though.

If packing your own groceries fills your definition of work and doesn't just come under "shit you just do to get something from one place to another because you need it in your life". You REALLY need to get out and perform a variety of jobs. Like damn you gotta be about as useless as tits on a bull if you think pulling the food your going to eat that is NECESSARY FOR YOUR SURVIVAL off a bench and into a bag is work.

Growing food is necessary for my survival but I don’t do that myself. Grocery bagging is also not trivial. You can’t just throw things into a bag in random order, you need to think about it. A well packed set of shopping bags is a big convenience, and I don’t want to spend the bandwidth to do it.

There is a big difference between a job that creates convenience for other people and one that’s redundant or pointless.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#398

Post by randomdata »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #358
edraferi wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an economic theory that job satisfaction is a kind of compensation. That is, you have to pay people more to do unsatisfying jobs.

I doubt that top-paying jobs like CEO are undesirable to those people who have them as well as those who would like to have them. On the other hand all really shitty jobs pay nothing - that's true for hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of people worldwide. A >100k$ programmer office job in the US does not belong in the "shitty job" category, no matter how much someone complains online because they are bored wh…

It's just basic supply and demand.

Top paying jobs like CEO are top paying because the supply of trusted people, who boards are willing to hand control over billions of assets to, is vanishingly small. Programming jobs are reasonably well paying because businesses are careful about who they hand their code over to, although not the extreme degree of CEO. And something like fry cook is low paying because those businesses are willing to hire just about anyone.

But we cannot completely discount the effects of desirability. If your employment options are fry cook or oil rig worker, most people would prefer fry cook and thus oil rig worker has considerably higher wages due to the aversion to the job, and therefore reduction in supply at the price point of fry cook. Of course, increased compensation can prompt people to look in alternative directions.

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