Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#281

Post by bena » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:26 PM 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…

Let's break it down to something simple:

I have $3, you have $1. Is it fair that I give you $1 so we both have $2? Is that rational?

Now let's say that you work 3 hours a day and I work 1 hour. Now what's fair? You're working three times longer than me, but I had three times as much money to start with. Would fair actually be if I gave you $2 instead? That way our cash is on par with our hourly work. Does that seem rational?

Ok, but what if we had the same job. Build a widget. And due to being good at widget building, I only needed an hour to build my widget while you needed three. Now, the output of our work is the same. Should you be rewarded for simply taking longer? I could build three widgets in the time it took you to build one. Well, if we're paying by output, then shouldn't we go back to a 50/50 split of the money?

But what if widgets make a profit of $1 for each sold? And we each worked three hours building and selling widgets. And you made one and I made three and the all sold. I was more productive. Is it rational for me to split the money with you 50/50 because you don't have the same?

Now. What if I sell widget polish. And you make widgets. You buy polish from me. So now, if we split the money, I sell you a bottle of polish for $1. Now the money is unequal again, so we equal the money. Effectively, I'm just giving you free polish. That's rational? Fair?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#282

Post by selimthegrim » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:28 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #71

...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a bullshit society: our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect of having the productivity of the peop…

Finally, someone who understands New Orleans.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#283

Post by groestl » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:36 PM UTC

zekrioca wrote: post #278

groestl wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

It's not that penguins have cold blood in their feet because otherwise they could get stuck on ice. It's that all penguins that had warm blood in their feet have died.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#284

Post by draw_down » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:36 PM UTC

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 never understood what all those new administrators... do.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#285

Post by CalRobert » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #192

feverfew wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what was there to do with this free time?

The idea that free time should be filled with entertainment rather than intellectual activities and social engagement is surprisingly modern. Even only 50 years ago, in many cultures, people were spending more time reading, writing songs and playing instruments, engaging in politics, doing home DiY, gardening, improvisational theater.

I think the key difference is time spent making vs consuming. I don't know what the ideal ratio is between the two but think we've veered to too much consumption. The replacement of pc's with phones worries me for this reason.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#286

Post by Symmetry » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #130

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sort of happens by default in private industry, in that companies usually only exist for 50 years or so and are continuously being replaced with other organizations that haven't yet become sclerotic. This process is probably less efficient than just having rules expire would be.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#287

Post by tyleo » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:38 PM UTC

jakidud wrote: post #279

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 tha…

Have you considered staying at the current job, not showing up, AND getting another job? I realize this is unethical but is it actually illegal?

One of my friend’s coworkers did this but I didn’t know the coworker well enough to see how it turned out. I have always been curious.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#288

Post by bena » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:39 PM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #151

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…

"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…

I think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#289

Post by freddie_mercury » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:39 PM UTC

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…

> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair.

This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN.

I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, crappy chairs, and old laptops.

Three months later we had all the things.

Productivity did not improve. It absolutely did not double. (It is a bit insane to even claim that it could.)

Those things do not improve productivity in any meaningful way. At worst they are just status symbols. At best they are just signalling. "My company values me and I know that because I have two monitors". Their actual impact on productivity is minimal, despite the thousands of HN posts claiming otherwise.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#290

Post by davidivadavid » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:41 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #265

overlords wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I'm sure Marlboro, who spent decades building a brand, wouldn't really care about newcomers not being able to advertise. That makes sense.