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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#141

Post by BlackFly »

Radim wrote: post #16

People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"? Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement? I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you ), but whether something is sustainable and make…

Except that we know from history that people invent superstitions and act upon those superstitions. Look at all the effort that was wasted telling people to turn off cell phones in flights. Once electronic devices became ubiquitous and there was push-back from passengers, they finally had to admit that if the electronic interference of a handheld device was enough to interfere with onboard instrumentation, natural atmospheric electricity would have rendered flight impossible. The security theater at airports is still ongoing and equally superstitious.

In the case of the OP, the author is pointing out that there is no authoritative test that actual medical doctors can do, so the doctor is not adding any authority to the check. The business is incorrectly ascribing authority to a doctor to form the basis for a prohibition. There is enough information there to pass judgment.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#142

Post by roel_v »

akvadrako wrote: post #134
Dayshine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure this means what you think it means. My unit in the university has: Academic staff: 10 Administrative staff: 70 Students: 0 Because we do research, which requires a lot of staff who aren't academics.

You call researchers administrators?

Programmers are not researchers; lab techs are not researchers; many other people who do work for the academics are not 'academic staff' (and can't be paid as such). It's not hard to imagine what that sort of structure leads to.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#143

Post by JanisL »

citation_please wrote: post #37

Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?". In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you…

Honestly I think one of the best ways to find this out is to have people regularly take annual leave, you get a chance to see what they were doing from a different angle when they are not there. Making people take this leave is a really good way to fight presenteeism as well.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#144

Post by [deleted] »

dangom wrote: post #128

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 r…

[deleted]

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#145

Post by PavlikPaja »

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…

People paid to pretend being busy doing something useful get good at their job, too.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#146

Post by NoobPwner »

dangom wrote: post #128

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 r…

You first-worlders are damn lucky. In my country, it is considered a good day when you get paid half the money you were promised for doing some hardcore high-skill job. Which is still like 10 times lower than what you would get in the first-world, living-costs adjusted.

Real elephant in the room is the resource flow from the colonies to the first-world and the Western financial institutions that enable it. That's probably the thing allowing you to bore yourself to death with bullshit jobs.

No one likes talking about it though.

"Why do we have every resource and service available but half the population has to do bullshit jobs? Probably because of technology - yes, that must be it."

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#147

Post by rusk »

I was listening to Feynman's lectures on Quantum Mechanics this morning, and he was talking about the lattice structure of materials and how different lattice structures permeate EM waves and stuff. You've got this repeating atomic structure. Each of them is carbon, or hydrogen or iron or whatever. I suppose in essence you could say on their own each of these is "bullshit" but it's the repeating lattice structure that gives a material it's properties. This reductionist view of "bullshit" jobs is kind of silly - some jobs are unfulfilling, or seemingly pointless but you can only really evaluate them in the overall structure and productivity of the organisation. It's the emergent lattice that counts, not the individual elements.

In the case of this article, author is looking at a single aspect of a larger organisation, and like the blind men and the elephant [0] can only guess at the reasons.

There could well be good reasons for these processes and procedures. Could be to do with management accountability, or insurance (more likely). The fact that in isolation it seems "silly" is notwithstanding that there might a reason in a larger organisational context. Kind of like a traffic light hardwired to red because at scale, operationally it just makes more sense to do it that way [1] (this article is a bad example because it doesn't go into the explanation as to "why" - operationally, which when I actually heard it seemed quite reasonable - can't find it now).

The way I look at management is like this - a LED produces light by way of spontaneous emission, which is all well and good, but to produce a LASER you need all these photons to be emitted in phase which requires a whole heap of extra bullshit circuitry to create to produce stimulated emission. There is a curve of cost/efficiency where you can go "oh well why am I spending all this money when all I want is light" - but if you don't do all this extra "inefficient" stuff, well then you can't have optical communication, CDs or a fancy lightshow.

Don't get me wrong, there are inefficient organisations that produce little, or even do damage, but IMHO by looking at individual jobs we're looking in the wrong place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20150615/there-is-a-light-that-never...

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#148

Post by branchless »

vorg wrote: post #125
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.

Spot on. Spare time would allow us to conclude we can expunge rentiers.

Here is a video on land value tax, which would fix our messed up feudal economies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0

Posting here as shadow banned after two posts because Hacker News hates any kind of free speech.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#149

Post by Sujan »

majewsky wrote: post #82
stirlo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia... "Academic staff: 2,219 Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC Students: 16,430" Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

WTF. My alma mater (Dresden University of Technology) has 6000 academic staff and 2500 administrative staff for 35000 students, which sort of matches the expectation that I had before checking.

I like mine as well:

> Administrative staff: 452

> Students: 8000(approx)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applie...

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#150

Post by SEMW »

sophistication wrote: post #73

It looks like psychiatry, especially psychotherapy, is bullshit to a far greater extent than what was discussed in this blog post: --- For real patients, there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain... (Prioleau 1983) Meta-analysis shows antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy. No signi…

AFAICT none of the links you give offer any support for the claim that "psychiatry is bullshit".

Several, if anything, support the exact opposite (e.g "antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy" -- 'psychiatrist' is not a synonym of 'psychotherapist', a psychiatrist is a medical doctor specialising in mental illness, so is licensed to prescribe antidepressants). Most of the others are just not relevant to the claim ("Young children emerge from single potentially traumatic events psychologically unharmed" -- how exactly is that supposed to be evidence that psychiatry is bullshit? By some kind of hidden implication that just because thing X does not cause mental illness, therefore mental illnesses don't exist?)

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