Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#121

Post by Radim » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:36 AM UTC

IanSanders wrote: post #93

Radim wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am familiar with both; what's the connection in particular? That patterns organize along least-energy principles and propagate by extracting resources from surrounding energy gradients is almost a tautology. I'm genuinely curious what you're disagreeing with.

I disagree that people and societies organize by efficiency and how well they reduce energy across time. In fact the two almost contradict each other. People organize based on individual/egotistical "efficiency", and not the efficiency of the system/society.

Thanks. Then we're in disagreement :-) For me, people are a part of the whole system, following the same rules as everything else in the universe. No special exceptions, no "get out of jail free" card.

(by the way, it's reducing energy gradients—differences between here and there, doing work—not energy itself)

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#122

Post by PavlikPaja » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:43 AM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #84

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…

I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful.

Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#123

Post by a_bonobo » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #84

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…

Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts.

I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor!

Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#124

Post by jahaja » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

So for example, with regards to startups growing rapidly on VC funding:

What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise, and thus create a lot of bullshit jobs.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#125

Post by vorg » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

Bullshit jobs also 4) keep a country's population occupied so they don't self-organize and revolt against the country's entrenched power structures.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#126

Post by panic » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:51 AM UTC

wjnc wrote: post #22

The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've…

I think it's ultimately about risk. Once it's able to make a profit, a huge, inefficient organization will probably continue to make the same sort of profit in the same sort of way. A smaller organization is more likely to do very well or very poorly, but investors don't want that. They're being paid to get 5% a year, not 200% some years and -50% other years.

IMO this would be one of the biggest benefits of UBI -- money coming from actual people instead of risk-averse institutional investors.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#127

Post by dmurray » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:52 AM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #28

jgtrosh wrote: post #7

I felt that the note could be understood as mildly passive aggressive. Maybe adding something like “I have no reason not to believe him/her” would remove any interpretation that you're writing this note out of obligation but do not believe the patient. Good post btw; I have no input on ethics and would be stumped as well.

But he does want to help the patient, does he not? But to write something else would be to take the burden of proof into his hands. "Obligation" also makes it sound like he's forced to do it, it's more like without further tests which would inconvenience the patient, he can't be sure the patient is reporting the truth (even with the patient in front of him, he wouldn't be able to objectively observe pain, and he can…

I think the "burden of proof" part is exactly what's holding him up. As a skeptic, and an analytically minded person, and perhaps even as a blogger - he's uncomfortable writing "Mr Smith has chronic back pain" without a little more concrete evidence.

I'm arguing that as a doctor he shouldn't require more evidence in this case. It's fine to write "Mr Smith has chronic back pain and I recommend he can use his own chair" and be right only 80% of the time, and introduce a process whereby sneaky chair-seeking miscreants can reliably get a doctor's note even if they don't have back pain. It's fine because the consequences of being wrong are extremely low. In practice doctors should be, and often are, OK with making diagnoses of much more serious conditions that are only 80% or 90% or 99% likely to be correct, even when some other test could reduce the uncertainty further. If he's waiting to be 100% certain a patient has bipolar disorder or anorexia before prescribing any treatment, he's doing them a disservice.

The level of certainty required should be in line with the severity of the condition being diagnosed, and of the recommended treatment. And when writing a note to an employer, it's correct to say "Mr Smith has cancer" or just "Mr Smith has a medical condition", not "I'm 94% sure Mr Smith has cancer, perhaps the next scan will be more conclusive".

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#128

Post by dangom » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

Reminds me of an internship I did at a large organization, where the computer I was assigned to was partially unusable (even after formatting it would hang and freeze all the time), but procedures stated that I couldn't change it because it wasn't 3 years old. Procedures also stated that I wasn't allowed to bring my own computer to my workplace, so I ended up spending a lot of time sitting there drinking coffee and reading books, instead of actually doing the work I was supposed to.

Nobody cared.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#129

Post by dantheman » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

a_bonobo wrote: post #123

dantheman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…

Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts. I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces…

True it takes a long time for formerly great organizations to die. I think a lot of the problems with this type of analysis are time scales and costs of switching. IBM is probably not the best solution for anything if you're starting something new; but if you already have something it's probably good enough and it would cost too much to change right now.

So IBM can limp along until new organizations develop products that are sufficiently cheaper or better that it makes switching the logical move. Or the companies tied to IBM eventually fail and replaced by more nimble organizations.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#130

Post by perlgeek » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #15

avip wrote: post #13

I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward: 1. Wu appears in work with a chair 2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X 3. X asks Wu to remove the chair 4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code 5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it

If you are in a large company then it will accrete these rules until it is almost impossible to get anything done.

It might be an interesting experiment to automatically attach an expiry date to new rules, and if nobody (or too few) stakeholders vote for keeping them, they automatically go out of scope.