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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#261

Post by make3 »

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…

this reasoning doesn't work. most jobs aren't created by politicians anything like directly, and companies have direct incentive to not be wasteful in their spending. I'm of the opinion that it's just a failing of management, which is hard.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#262

Post by TeMPOraL »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #243
TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition' and it's healthy considering the alternative dynamic of monopoly. All corporate systems could be described as various intertwining loops (that intertwine with other corporate loops), it's really a matter of efficiency of those individuals and loops as a system. Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue et…

I'm not criticizing competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary because this is how we solve resource allocation problems - we're too dumb to do it directly, so we use market dynamics to implicitly compute it for us.

I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games. Like where companies are competing for a fixed-size market - any marginal effort to win more of the market will be cancelled out by equivalent effort of the other party. The end result is the same, only both companies just wasted money fighting.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#263

Post by wildmusings »

wastedhours wrote: post #66
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

How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however , quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the univers…

How nice, to leave students massively in debt so that the university can run a private welfare state for its paper pushers. All while the taxpayer is picking up a good portion of the tab.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#264

Post by lmm »

talltimtom wrote: post #245
lmm wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored Sounds like a bullshit task then. > 2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs. What's the mechanism that would cause this to happen? A manager could notice that they don't need as many people on the…

> but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team? What incentive does a manager have to increase the size? What incentive does he have to improve performance in general? Managers don’t exist in a vacuum, and just because you as an employee don’t see them talking to other managers, executives or owners, it doesn’t mean they are just kings of their own domain.

> What incentive does a manager have to increase the size?

Personal satisfaction, looking more important, all the usual human motivations.

> What incentive does he have to improve performance in general?

The manager's own manager will likely notice increased output and reward it. Under normal circumstances an empire-building manager is kept in check by the need to justify their headcount in terms of their output (both of which are visible to their managers). It's only technological productivity increases (which are invisible to higher management, because they take effect in the technical details of the work) that gives managers cover to continue to employ people who have become redundant, or even add further redundant people (because the team is more productive): the overall team productivity (in terms of output/headcount) is going up, and so from the outside it looks like the team is simply performing well, when in fact the manager has siphoned off the fruits of technological advances.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#265

Post by TeMPOraL »

overlords wrote: post #251
RealityVoid wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see why not having advertisement would lead to monopolies.

Burger King stops advertising on Tv and loses even more market share to McDonalds. McDonalds then spends less on advertising because it realizes it doesn't need to because Burger Kind gave up. You're left with a "monopoly", McDonalds whose shareholders/top management make even more money, rather than it being redistributed to employees of Burger King.

That's why such change needs to be enforced simultaneously and externally.

As an example, I recall reading that tobacco companies were actually very happy about regulations limiting the marketing of tobacco products - by themselves, those regulations didn't change anything about their market share (the market was already saturated), but everyone got to stop spending so much on advertising.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#266

Post by kamaal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #233
dandare wrote: post #163

This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here. Some of the arguments I keep hearing: 1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but…

> As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day. And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The latter seems common, and I've personally been in co…

Part of the big problem with IT isn't just limited to BS jobs, its also BS titles.

Most managers could simply be called supervisors. And it would work just fine. The problem is once you start calling them supervisors, you have to pad a senior title every time you have to promote them, so you go like senior supervisor, senior senior supervisor ... etc. So they invent titles like manager, senior manager, general manager, director, senior director, AVP, VP, SVP, Exec ....

There is also an overall dressing of 'leadership'. If you attend most of these company wide meetings, they are full of these words. 'We are trusting our leadership to do X', 'We congratulate our leadership for doing Y'. Making it look like highly laborious mental work involving a test of human spirit.

They also have to establish the master-slave relationship inconveniencing you every step along the way to show you who the real boss is.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#267

Post by Udik »

geezerjay wrote: post #164
TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The main reason why organizations evolve to a bureaucratic mess is human agency, in particular the fact that each individual has personal interests and is motivated to achieve their personal goals. Bureaucracy is designed to restrict personal initiatives that favour the individual worker at the expense of the organization. For example, in Greece public sector workers abuse their position by expecting grafts to do the…

Interesting. The same happens in Italy; however this hyper-regulation doesn't actually ensure that jobs are performed well and ethically; rather it has the effect of removing personal agency and accountability, while those who seek personal profit still find a way to circumvent the rules.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#268

Post by hrktb »

dandare wrote: post #163

This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here. Some of the arguments I keep hearing: 1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but…

> 2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.

I think this could be the main point of contention from where a lot of things flow. It all depends on how we define 'actual work', but I think we can all agree that to do the same things as we did a century ago we need less effort and time.

We need less time to build a bridge, less time and human energy to wash our clothes etc. From there, where did that time go ? Some of it wen to help our survival, but the rest of it could arguably fall into 'BS' jobs.

We didn't get massively unemployed when we got better machines, we just found out other uses of our time that were seen as low priority before, but become good enough to be seen as 'work' afterwards. What was once considered a BS job becomes a standard job, the bar just gets lowered.

To get back to the point, I believe less works doesn't lead to unemployment, just new 'jobs'.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#269

Post by paulie_a »

rwmj wrote: post #114
paulie_a wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If stealing office furniture is an actual concern and ongoing problem that company has some incredibly fundamental problems. Personally i would just bring the damn chair in and play dumb.

I know if you have worked only in software companies where everyone is paid six figure salaries then you will think that stealing stores and company property must be incredibly rare and deviant behaviour, but at most companies this is a very real concern of management and something that happens regularly.

I understand people steal stuff at pretty much every company, but a chair? That's kinda hard to just walk out with.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#270

Post by annabellish »

jbrun wrote: post #174
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…

There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are smal…

>If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.

That's the theory, but we all know that theoretical capitalism and what we have today are very different beasts. Bullshit jobs are not literally companies paying people to do nothing, but more systemic problems.

My local shop wants to sell a banana to me. The intrinsic complexity of this task is: A small group of people who grow bananas. A large group of people who manage global shipping. A small group of people to sell the banana to me.

However, let's inject some bullshit: My local shop and a shop slightly further away both want to sell bananas. Therefore they advertise. Let's add two large groups of people making graphics for the side of busses, posters for walls, animation for web advertising, filming television adverts, maintaining 'woke' social media accounts, et cetera. We now involve more groups of people for the busses to sell this advertising space, television networks to manage ad time, et cetera. We now have more people advertising the banana than selling it, but no more human beings are buying bananas, because there's a fixed size market for it. _Those_ are bullshit jobs, because they achieve nothing but keeping the market in the same steady state it would otherwise have been in, except with vast resource expenditure. No one company can stop advertising, though, because then their competitor's resource expenditure would actually become meaningful.

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