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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#311

Post by maxxxxx »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #289
TeMPOraL wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, cra…

You won't see an improvement in productivity but I would take a look at employee health, satisfaction and retention.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#312

Post by bena »

maxxxxx wrote: post #304
bena wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.

I think it's turned me into a bit of a nihilist.

I worked initially as in-house for a doctor's office trying to break into medical software while running his solo practice. So I figured a little "spit and glue" is par for course. It's essentially a mom and pop.

Then I became a contractor and the first time I ran across a multi-million dollar company doing serious business off of a shoddy Access database that sometimes corrupted the data and needed to be reverted to a previous backup, I was legitimately horrified.

I thought it was a fluke. Then another. And another. Even hospitals and national chains. And I realized that none of us know what we're doing, so don't worry about it. The worst that could happen isn't actually so bad.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#313

Post by c22 »

bena wrote: post #281
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 r…

> 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?

By the same rationale you can just pick up a free widget, so it seems both rational and fair.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#314

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

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 feel like even this is being optimistic about the prospects of the book. The idea of The Book is appealing, until someone tries to actually write the stupid thing. Anyone who has ever tried to write any sort of unskilled user facing documentation realizes the cost and training it takes to produce a high quality manual, which naturally the company won't want to pay for, so now you have a half-assed barely legible "Book" that's full of confusion and madness which spirals closer to pure noise with every new "clarification" - pretty soon people aren't doing activities because it's procedure from the book, they are doing activities that are the equivalent of signal noise because no one knows what the book is even trying to say. "No, no, to get a raise first you have to fill out form 2123b, and THEN you sacrifice the goat."

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#315

Post by dentemple »

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…

Use this time to train a new skill.

People are willing to pay big money to set aside time to learn a new, marketable skill. You currently have the opportunity to be paid while doing the same.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#316

Post by ransom1538 »

You need a note to bring in a chair? At all the startups I have worked for - as long as it isn’t illegal you can bring it in. At zynga they moved my desk to install a keg. (Edit 2008 zynga)

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#317

Post by _jal »

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…

> What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition'

The broken windows fallacy doesn't suddenly become net-positive when renamed. Perhaps humans are not capable of improving interaction outcomes any further than we've gotten and humanity has reached peak efficiency re: transaction costs and firm-size, but I have a hard time believing that.

> Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..

That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop. It doesn't justify the bullshit, it is an object lesson in how it works.

Kafka is still required reading.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#318

Post by wastedhours »

wildmusings wrote: post #263
wastedhours wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The crux of my argument isn't that it's ideal or even acceptable, but these staff provide services for the university and in the majority of cases, directly to the students - the university would struggle to fulfil the demands placed on it without 1) radical transformation of hundreds of services (and being a part of wider community, ensuring that community is still sustainable), 2) employing more people.

Which cohort foots the bill for the cost of the radical transformation projects? The severance packages, the business process mapping, the specification creation, the tender process, the development of hundreds of interlinking system integrations, training, maintenance, licensing costs etc...

Splitting wasteful salaries across thousands of students over a number of years and trying to improve piece by piece and not cause a local issue (whilst increasing people power temporarily in other areas where needed which aren't be focused on) is the only viable solution we have at the moment.

Believe me, I'd 100% love to hear solutions to this problem that take all the moving pieces into account to solve it, and it'd have been great not being saddled with £00,000s of student debt too!

But, us techies can sit on HN and bemoan the inefficiency of little pieces of people-powered work and how it should all be automated! efficient! etc... till we're blue in the face. But without building a university, healthcare system, multi-national conglomerate... from scratch, we can't just retrofit our napkin systems and processes without causing a shittonne of unthought impacts.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#319

Post by groby_b »

Bullshit jobs are created just like the comments on this article demonstrate.

The proper response is "This is bullshit, let's fight it". Yet, it's not of personal importance, and really, how many fights can you fight, so somebody somewhere comes up with a way to circumvent the system. Others help refine the step for that - because you know it's bullshit, and circumventing bullshit feels satisfying.

From there, this will no doubt spread, and be further refined. The ultimate outcome is a content free form that allows everybody to take no personal risk, and simply trades the actual decision making for signing a form that you know will never harm you.

And voila, there will, at some point, be a specialization where you just see large volumes of people, and sign their slip. The insurance will press to make it lower skill and less expensive. Since no actual skill is needed, it won't stop at being delegated to nurses. Sooner or later, it's a minimum wage job. At this point, companies will start bringing it in-house - why would you want people taking half a day off for signing a bogus form? And after a while, there's huge demand for this - each company needs it - but really, they're not needed fulltime. And so there will be an agency that has these people travel to your office.

At this point, backpain form signer certainly is a new job. And the decisions at every step of the way were entirely rational.

I want to end this with a rousing call to fight bullshit where you see it, but realistically, it would be an all day job. So we'd get bullshit fighters. Who probably at some point just sign forms.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#320

Post by village-idiot »

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…

Finance?
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