Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
theguardian.com
Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#2Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser
> As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense”. Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides, replaced by praise for “hardworking families”. The rightwing injunction to “get a job!” is mirrored by the leftwing demand for “more jobs!”
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#3Off topic
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#4I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation.
Edit: you can read more about the idea here.
https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT...
My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff.
My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for disruption by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer.
Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#5I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=…
That sounds like a useful job to me - so long as said duct taping is conducted within a framework of strict architectural control...
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#6I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=…
Is a devops engineer who builds some microservice as a FaaS deployment in AWS just a 'duct taper'? Amazing to see someone say "taking existing things and creating something new is a bullshit job". That's a pretty insane position.
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#7I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=…
> An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new.
Taking existing components and building something new by combining them? What on earth is wrong with that? That's great software engineering if it's possible to do for what you need.
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#8I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=…
In today's software profession we're all duct tapers to varying degrees. Everyone is using someone else's abstractions.
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#9I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=…
Like using software libraries together?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
Re: Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
#10I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation. Edit: you can read more about the idea here. https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=…
So in other words, 99.99% of all modern day programmers.