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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#151

Post by sonnyblarney »

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…

"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would."

No, not in a lot of industries.

Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient.

For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified.

Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later.

Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves.

Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat.

Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams.

Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit.

The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue.

I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch.

I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#152

Post by drunkpotato »

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…

It has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they’re the problem (though middle or senior management might accidentally lay off a bad manager or two on rare occasions, but again never lay off themselves). Also I’ve seen in larger companies, no division head wants to get a smaller headcount unless they’re a new person specifically brought in to be a wrecking ball.

Similarly, “the market” is a convenient fiction, a shorthand that occasionally exhibits describable collective behavior but ultimately is also composed of people. There is creative destruction but it takes place over decades, far too long for any individual activity to be pointed to and say that ruined the company except in the most extreme cases.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#153

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A.

Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and further to formation of more companies supporting those games. Consider the advertising industry, the poster child of wasteful negative-sum games: in saturated markets, it supports competition for fixed customer pool. To that end, it employs countless of creatives designing new texts, posters, videos, etc. It then employs printing shops and distribution centers to place all that material in the real world. All that effort, man-hours and fuel is wasted - in an attempt for one side to get more market to themselves, only for the other to cancel it out. If all parties agreed not to do this, everyone would be better off. But they can't, and so instead a whole industry of bullshit jobs is created.

Those are, I believe, the two main sources of bullshit jobs - internal closed loops, and negative-sum games.

(EDIT: in a sense, those two are actually facets of the same phenomenon.)

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#155

Post by Hoasi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140
Jaruzel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…

This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works , but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

Indeed, that book starts really well, in that it states an existing problem: the sole owner overwhelmed by their business, and losing their sense of purpose and happiness. But as it goes on the solution it suggests is disappointing. It may make sense for company owners to delegates and run their operation like a machine. But it is a recipe for frustration for the actual workers—who then may find themselves in the same situation the author's entrepreneur example starts with...

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#156

Post by ramblerman »

Radim wrote: post #118
ramblerman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, This is meaningless if you leave out the goal though. Efficiency for what, food distribution? What's the function around which we are optimizing.

The answer is literally the part after the comma you left out. Entropy maximization.

> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time.

Reducing energy across time is just a rewording of efficiency. It's still not a goal in and of itself, at least not in the context of a society.

Going to the moon was not reducing energy gradients across time, nor 'entropy maximization' as you have reworded it.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#157

Post by valesco »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #140
Jaruzel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…

This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works , but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

That is because companies are now considered as money-making black boxes. Human agency at execution level isn't relevant.

However if you consider a company as a means to a shared endeavour, then human agency becomes extremely important.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#158

Post by imgabe »

stirlo wrote: post #31
Animats wrote: post #18

University administrators.[1] Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators . No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff. Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land,…

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

I wonder how many of the administrative staff are in fundraising. That should at least be net-profitable to the university.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#159

Post by groestl »

Jaruzel wrote: post #116
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…

It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…

I think you're right, but I have a somewhat less dire view on this.

I think that large companies optimize for a fundamentally different outcome than smaller companies, like startups. Large companies became large by applying a successful business model, something that startups are still lacking. If you have a working business model and stable cashflow, any change is potentially dangerous and can take down the company. So in contrast to whatever the marketing material says, rigidity and inability to change is actually an asset for large companies. This means the more inflexibility is added to the organization (e.g. by imposing a Book of Procedures that can never be abolished, employing people with no real power to change anything, or self-selecting a staff which is, put blatantly, incompetent to change), the longer the organization keeps existing. Until the market changes fundamentally, that is.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#160

Post by bgie »

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…

A company doing X has as its main goal not being good at doing X, but making profit.

This is the essence, and reason why companies need a hierarchy of managers: the owners are at the top, their instructions (make us profit) are delegated down, then profit goes back up. The people in charge are not there because they are experts at doing X. They are there because they are experts at making sure profits go to the top.

All bullsh*t jobs and most inefficiencies can be traced back to people not caring enough about doing X. Because that is not what the company is about, its about making profit.

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