Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#271

Post by kamaal » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

Gys wrote: post #215

kamaal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? To some extent yes. But that covers start-to-end aspects of such jobs. For example, Courier is a highly productive work in the process of delivering iPhone to your door step. Every job demands involvement of some kind of meta-coordination. Think of it like an operating system. The OS needs to manage things, and is a very important piece of software. But if it sta…

From the definition given in another comment: 'a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence' The 'Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector' might think his job is safety related and take that very serious. So then its not a BS job at all. Others might think his daily checkups (just making this up) are over the top and BS, b…

A car inspector might think his job is safety related. Then the inspector who inspects the car inspector could start thinking the same. Then you arrive at a senior manager who is the boss of the inspector who inspects the car inspector.

    | senior manager who manages inspector who inspects car inspector
      | inspector who inspects car inspector
        | car inspector
          | pizza delivery guy

As the hierarchy expands people keep moving away from the real producer. And at some point have nothing to do with the producer.

Now you could say the senior manager might think his job is valid. Well guess what, if you get paid well, and paid well as you go up, doing as little job as nothing, you aren't exactly going to complain about it.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#272

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #181

tim333 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. I'm all in favour of us having a life of leisure or fun jobs (actor, ski explorer etc) and everyone having a basic income from the state. Sadly though the AI robots are not here and getting someone to fix your plumbing is still a pain, plus many other jobs. Maybe in the future we can go that way.

AI is not a binary event. Technological progress gradually removes the need for labor. Consider simple unsexy things such as automatic cashiers at supermarkets, McDonald's, etc. How many jobs have they made redundant? And do you know that "computer" used to be a profession? Do you know that the majority of blue collar work in 2018 will be made redundant by self-driving vehicles? And so on. You say I am overestimating…

Work hours are increasing because of the decline in unions, and along with it, worker bargaining power.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#273

Post by Radim » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

everydaypanos wrote: post #194

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…

I still have a hint that the larger and super-human scales that you refer to also lack a meaningful architecture in them. They don’t have something in them that would make a thinking sentient being like us(or me) find joy in participating. That bettering of efficiency in super-human collections of stuff seems just like any other organization-it just strives for survival aka efficiency in a boring meaningless way.

I wouldn't single out "sentient beings" as any kind of exception, just because we're aware of that "homunculus between our ears" whispering to us at all times.

Our self-awareness and knack for introspection through language, as special and precious as it seems, may be just another way to optimize more efficiently. It allows us to anticipate and avoid local minima (famine, extinction, loss of knowledge, ossification aka boredom aka overfitting) across larger spans of time, in a rather cool and unique way. It makes us see farther, walk straighter with fewer detours, tap into juicier gradients, appreciate art and novelty.

But it doesn't take us outside the entropy race, outside the laws of nature. "Boring and meaningless" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. How would you even conceptualize "boring" or "meaningless", for a structure that breathes and reacts in human generations instead of seconds? What is "bullshit" to a cell or an atom that lacks such linguistic sophistication? If you want a truly universal objective metric, a stable direction for "up" and "down", it's hard not to go with long-term maximization of entropy.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#274

Post by boomlinde » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:11 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #135

boomlinde wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the point is that it isn't enough evidence to make a diagnosis. The article expands on why it is inappropriate for a psychiatrist to make a recommendation related to back pain. He's not just "the doctor", he's a specialist with a license to practice a limited set of medicine. What should a psychiatrist write on a doctor's note if his patient claims to suffer from cancer, no other evidence given than the…

> What should a psychiatrist write on a doctor's note if his patient claims to suffer from cancer, no other evidence given than the claim itself? Probably nothing? I don't think it's appropriate for the psychiatrist to inform the employer of possible Munchausen syndrome.

So why is this different from the patient claiming to suffer from chronic back pain?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#275

Post by jeandejean » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:12 PM UTC

Bullshit jobs are the new "I closed my Facebook account" articles these days. Everybody talks about it and tries to say it's a symptom of our society going wrong.

I personally prefer bullshit than dangerous jobs. And technology allowed us to switch from the latter to the former. That's good news to me!

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#276

Post by geezerjay » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:16 PM UTC

Udik wrote: post #267

geezerjay wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sort of bureaucracy is like bicycle training wheels. They hinder those who know how to do the job and want to do it well, they are a major inconvenience, but they stop some riders from falling down. Yet, some people who want to crash the bike do eventually find a way to render them useless.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#277

Post by kamaal » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:16 PM UTC

kahoon wrote: post #227

kamaal wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; One of the real reasons why languages like Lisp and Perl had a short life in MegaCorps is they were anti-dote to large people hierarchies. You can disproportionate work with small teams. Execs and VPs openly boast in company all hands about their 'team sizes' and numbers almost as the biggest accomplishment of their lives. No one is going to b…

If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? E.g. developing a website in assembly would keep more people occupied than HTML/JS/CSS.

>>If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly?

'Assembly' is a abstraction.

To a Perl programmer. Java's verbosity would look like Assembly.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#278

Post by zekrioca » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:16 PM UTC

groestl wrote: post #159

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…

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.…

It is funny that one can seen this "inflexibility asset" in many, many organizations, from various industries and areas. People running those really do not like changes..

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#279

Post by jakidud » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:16 PM UTC

Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office.

For 4 months now.

Let that sink in.

What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means that I might have access to privelaged insider information,which means I can't sit with the public teams. But there isn't any seat in the private rooms. So I'm sitting in the cafeteria, reading books, playing on the PlayStation, etc etc.

I ask my manager every single day when I'm going to get a new spot. It's usually 'next week for sure' or 'friday for sure'. Hasn't happened yet. During the first month, I stayed for 8 hours each day, doing nothing. I've gradually stopped giving a fuck anymore and am looking for other jobs now, even though this is a pretty sweet gig.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#280

Post by smolder » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:25 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #183

jbrun wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Citation needed. What is "market economy" and how does it remove bullshit jobs?

It's a theoretical model of how markets work, but substituting the people for omniscient spherical cows because real people make the modelling too difficult to be useful.