Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#371

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

davidivadavid wrote: post #290

TeMPOraL wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think Marlboro cared about newcomers, a big company can usually buy out the small one if it gets dangerous. Consumers usually don't even notice.

Unrestricted advertising is basically Red Queen's race; capping it levels the playing field, so it's better for newcomers as well.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#372

Post by CalRobert » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

ksdale wrote: post #365

CalRobert wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to say this without sounding smug, but I'm reminded of talking with new roommates in San Jose about 10 years ago * them: "we all split the tv bill, it's $45 a person" * me: (gasping at a $220 per month tv bill) I actually don't watch tv * them: (in disbelief) but what do you do after work??? Nowadays this would probably be less weird since we have more streaming options but this whole idea that time i…

Sort of tangential, but I have a similar thought whenever someone says they don't want to have kids because they don't want to "give up their freedom." No one bats an eye at the idea of spending 60 hours a week between work and commuting. A lot of young people don't even particularly care that much where they work, as long as the pay is ok, as opposed to say, starting their own business and making less money but havi…

Though I do agree with the general point of your premise - spending 60 hours a week working+commuting sounds horrible (I've worked to keep commutes under 15 minutes by bike, walk, or transit). Unfortunately it's non-optional for most people.

This actually brings to mind one of the issues of such a full world - there's not many places you can go to check out of the 9-5 and live off the land. I'm sure sustenance farming is really hard, but I'm not sure it's worse for the soul than spending 2000+ hours a year at a bullshit job.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#373

Post by lovich » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #240

overlords wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the advertising competition you mention didn't exist, for example competitors closing shop and not playing the zero sum game, then you'd have a monopoly company, which would also be bad. So in that case, it's good to play the zero sum game since it's a redistribution of income. Of course, it's wasted labour, and so what you really want is for the government to step in and extract more in taxes and simply hand over…

I'm not saying the competition shouldn't exist - just that we should put brakes on some of the negative-sum games it causes, once the market is saturated and things turn into a fight for a fixed pie. As you say, at this point it's all wasted labour, and it can eat pretty much all your profits. I tried to refrain from mentioning government regulation here, but the brakes need to be put on everyone simultaneously - dec…

I get what you're saying, but I wanted to point out that lower profits can be better for society if due to competition. Every dollar a company earns in profit is a little more of efficiency that could be eked out of the business

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#374

Post by throwawayjava » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

grimjack00 wrote: post #359

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.

This is why I am highly skeptical every time there's a bill/referendum/whatever to increase the education budget. It's not that I don't care about children and their education; it's that I doubt much of that money will get anywhere near where it needs to go.

FOIA headcount and budget info.

Also, pay attention to what the bill/referendum is for. Any competent district will have a website explaining to the public what the funds are going to be used for.

In particular, be careful about voting against bond issues that are placed on the ballot within one or two years of the maturation date for a similarly sized bond. Because those are basically a continuation of the status quo, and voting them down can mean costly deferred maintenance and/or dumb financial trade-offs.

Real example: firing a whole bunch of people this year to pay for asbestos removal in cash money (because the bond issue wasn't passed and this NEEDS to be done in order to use the building), and then re-hiring a bunch of people the next year. Because the bond issue failed and the bond issue is literally the only legal way to amortize the cost of the asbestos removal. So, I guess no amortization, we pay upfront and fire a bunch folks for a year in order to afford it. (BTW, we all know from the software industry what happens when you lay off a bunch of people -- you lose your best folks and it becomes difficult to recruit good people).

Think of it like this: school districts in many states literally can't amortize their capital costs without coming to you with a ballot initiative. By voting "no" carte blanc, you're basically saying "I carte blanc disapprove of my local school district using amortization". Which is pretty unreasonable.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#375

Post by pastor_elm » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #67

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

It's worse, basically students are taking loans to pay for this. This requires even more admin work so they hire even more administrators.

This is not true, at least for schools like Stanford.

They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0]

[0}https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financi...

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#376

Post by ksdale » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #368

ksdale wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of tangential, but I have a similar thought whenever someone says they don't want to have kids because they don't want to "give up their freedom." No one bats an eye at the idea of spending 60 hours a week between work and commuting. A lot of young people don't even particularly care that much where they work, as long as the pay is ok, as opposed to say, starting their own business and making less money but havi…

I just had a kid, and I understand this idea completely. I like being a parent but among other things, it means that major life decisions are MUCH more constrained. Want to live somewhere else? Hope the schools are decent. Want to live in the city? Hope you can afford a bigger flat. Want to go on a holiday? Hope you're ok with a pissed off kid (and neighbours) on a flight, or lots of time spent entertaining them on a…

Yeah definitely, I didn't mean to be flippant about the amount of time it takes to raise a child, I have 3 myself, just that people don't hesitate to give up a similar amount of time to a job they don't care about, so I don't think it's really about freedom, it's really about priorities.

My wife and I own our own business so we're both home with the kids. For my own "freedom", working from home has been far more positive than having kids has been negative, but boy, I really hated working in an office so I may just be weird.

We're also considering homeschooling, so we don't have as many of the concerns about location, which would definitely be stressful.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#377

Post by ken » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:21 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…

> 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress

I would disagree, but this depends entirely on how you define "actual work". Is building and maintaining Facebook actual work? Is composing and playing new music actual work? If we had automated every mechanical task so 100% of human effort every day was spent creating art, would you consider that 100% employment, or 100% unemployment?

I don't think there's one correct answer here. We've never in the past had to use terms like "work" and "employment" in the context of a world where nobody had to work, so it's ambiguous.

There's some kinds of jobs (like creating art) which seem literally bottomless. There's other kinds of jobs (like inventing technology) that create new kinds of work. We may well run out of manual labor, but I don't see us ever running out of work.

> 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.

Agreed -- or rather, "wealth" is another one of those words which starts to lose its clear definition in a post-scarcity, post-labor world. It was a good abstraction for a couple thousand years, but no abstraction can survive indefinite growth of both technology and scale.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#378

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

foobarchu wrote: post #370

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.

Feels like a chicken and egg problem. McDonalds would only have that dominance thanks to years of advertising. If the mass advertising game never existed, those companies would have to have grown through their own merits instead of advertising dollars, and BK might have a chance (opinions of their food nonwithstanding). I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we'…

> I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.

That's not what I meant. What I meant is that neither BK nor McD can risk cutting advertising efforts, because if either one does, the other automatically starts winning market share. They can't agree to it together, because the first party to defect from the agreement will win (not to mention a third party could swoop in and (excuse the pun) eat their lunch).

This is a prisoner's dilemma situation, and as we all know, the optimal solution for prisoner's dilemma is to have a mob boss proclaim that he'll kill any prisoner that rats others out to authorities. Similarly, either there's a way to punish defectors, or McD and BK will forever be stuck in the loop of ever growing advertising expenses.

Removing advertising would definitely benefit both BK and McD, as both could be able to stop spending money on advertising just to protect their market share.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#379

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:23 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…

I've been getting paid for free for the past four months.

I had a similar thing happen to me once.

I was hired to perform a certain mission-critical task that had to be performed at a particular time two days a week. It's was a significant task involving about a hundred people that had to be done every day of the year, including holidays.

When I was hired, I was supposed to do that task on weekends and then three days during the work week help out the people who had to do the task on those days.

Everything went fine for about three months. Then one of the full-time helpers complained to their union that I was doing a helper job three days a week. In the union's view, I was taking away a helper job, which wasn't really true. I was a bonus helper. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a new three-day-a-week helper position.

The union got all huffy and the result was that I had to come to work, suit and all, and I sat at a computer and got paid six figures to look at LOLcats three days a week.

This went on for five years until I left for another company.

Amazingly, that was the least problematic staffing situation at that company.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#380

Post by gowld » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

leetcrew wrote: post #234

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does a university do outside of giving classes to students? Don't they also operate a huge research endeavour, patent administration, and operate numerous businesses all at once?

universities duplicate many services offered by businesses (and even the government, to an extent) in the surrounding area. i certainly found this convenient as a student, but i always found it a bit silly. wouldn't it be more efficient to just offer an expansive shuttle service to take the students to important places? you could even give stipends to the poorest students. institutions tend to be pretty wasteful when…

What kind of services are extraneous? The problem is that once a campus gets big enough (a few thousand people or more at a residential university), it is the neighborhood, so you have to either provide the community services, or outsource to vendors to provide services on campus. And handing out monopolies to vendors is a bad idea.