Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#401

Post by machiaweliczny » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #54

nikanj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In 2017–18, Stanford is a $6.3 billion enterprise." http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances Takes a lot of people to manage that much money.

I think they put it there to realize Stanford mission is not to educate future businessman and women, scholars etc. Their main business is making hard core cash. Which obviously should not be a mission of educational platform. And thats why you need so many helpers running around. Frankly its truly disgusting that they will make their students invent stuff that they patent and sale, and also kae them pay tuition for…

Yet somehow Stanford is quite reputable and desired university, so they know how to use the money they have to be one of best in educating/research. So you can't assume they are wasteful, otherwise other units should outcompete them, right? Unless system is very rigid... I don't know - I'm not from US

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#402

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:01 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #393

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.

A while back I took flying lessons. They have a procedure and checklists for most things. This is decidedly a good thing. Checklists are great for reducing errors and should be used in more situations. Of course there is also a question of whether these procedures can be updated. And whether you can improvise in an emergency. You need more training for that. But this doesn't mean checklists are bad. Another example:…

Totally not against checklists, especially in aviation. It's just something is rubbing me with the recipe for business involving such degree of micromanagement.

> Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity.

Fair, but a recipe is about as far from a checklist as you can get while still retaining bullet points. The degrees of freedom in typical recipes are so large you could drive a train through (it's probably unintended - people writing down recipes having zero experience with precise communication). I'm not a very experienced cook, so ambiguous recipes are a pet peeve of mine.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#403

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #339

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.

I'm not sure the E-myth is really targeted at the kinds of tech businesses HN readers are after. If you view it in the context of small-scale food/retail/manufacturing it fits really well. It doesn't fit well for creative efforts, but I'm not sure that invalidates the book either.

Maybe that's the reason. I found it indirectly through HN though, and for that reason I assumed it's a very general small business book.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#404

Post by softawre » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #377

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…

Yes, building Facebook is actual work.

But there are lots of people who work at Facebook who don't actually build the site, or test it, or do something that is important to delivering the website to customers.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#405

Post by village-idiot » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

jakidud wrote: post #357

village-idiot wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finance?

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuup.

Oh the joys of Garden Leave and "changing" companies while remaining in the same building.

Man, I don't miss finance.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#406

Post by rhacker » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:07 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…

Similar feelings, but slightly different list:

1) TLDR: We don't have a mission beyond population management. Long version: The population is too large to have any consensus about what humanity should be doing. We can never be on the same page at this point. We're constantly just struggling to manage growing populations. 2% of the population is capable of actually thinking through and carrying out any possible reason of existing beyond putting new technology in front of people. While new technology does in fact help humanity, our application of it is totally misplaced - it goes into military or just entertaining people.. Until a massive number of people are dedicated to extra-planetary research, we're wasting time on a doomed planet.

2) We have had a general movement from - people helping others to everyone is out for themselves. This changes the social contract from grand parents moving in with their children to everyone better get their 15 kinds of insurance in order early. If someone lost a house and the neighborhood pooled together to re-build them a house, and there was no need to "buy in" to that, then we would be both richer, and more comfortable with each other.

3) People have become mean. Streets are filled with angry drivers. People only seem to care about their friends for what they can be provided with. If shit hit the fan, most of those people would kill you to steal your food.

4) All of this leads to the house of cards. All these bullshit jobs are supported through various special conditions humanity has set up (insurance companies, banking industry, food industry, military industry) - which means that the bullshit jobs are paid for in the slight tweaks we keep making to our collective society to be more and more a dog-eat-dog world.

It's sad that most people probably don't understand any of this. The only fix would be for humanity to have a mission beyond our individual mission to keep supporting the current structure.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#407

Post by antisthenes » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

hoophoop wrote: post #349

TeMPOraL wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary > we're too dumb to do it directly citation needed. Humanity is planning the colonization of Mars, nuclear fusion and so on and yet, somehow, managing our own resources is always an unsolvable problem? > I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games. They are inevitable with competition.

> Humanity is planning the colonization of Mars, nuclear fusion and so on

You mean those 50-year old fantasies that are better described in science fiction novels than being anywhere close to reality?

You're the one that needs to provide a citation.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#408

Post by machiaweliczny » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #388

theptip wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Alexander has also written lucidly about this phenomenon ("cost disease"), e.g. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-... This increase in cost without a commensurate increase in quality is incredibly scary.

Cost disease isn't really a disease, it's a side effect of increased productivity. As productivity increases (and comsumption increases), costs increase because labor costs can't decrease as fast as technology costs. Medical care quality has vastly improved. The problem is that there is infinite demand for medical care. People think disease and dying are massive failures of medicine now. In the recent to ancient past…

Didn't you just say that education cost now 1/2 of what it used to. Education is mostly human effort(can't be easily automated - although visualisation, CAD tools and internet helps), so it means there is less incentive now for people to educate younger generations because they can make better money doing something else if I understand correctly. What I'm trying to say is that without mesurable education metrics you can't judge if reduction of costs is good or bad.

IMO it's bad - I would prefer teaching but I can make 10x doing CRUD apps :/

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#409

Post by cwperkins » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

Since this is an entrepreneurial crowd here on HN, if this is such an issue than why not create meaningful jobs! Use your creativity and help spread entrepreneurship and create products and services that people love, enjoy or makes someone else's life easier! Or better yet do some research and find cheap energy or new treatments for diseases!

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#410

Post by Chathamization » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #309

TeMPOraL wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I don't think it would be. I think if everyone stopped advertising unit sales would crash. Coke vs Pepsi is much less of a thing than the constant reinforcement that you would really, really enjoy one or the other right now. The constant reinforcement drives absolute sales, not just relative market share. I think the problem is more that a lot of heavily advertised products are incredibly harmful to personal and envi…

> It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive. There might not be a perfect solution for this problem, but we don't seem interested in having a discussion about any solution to it.

Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well). Because most people will calculate someone's worth by having a job, not by judging its impact on society (at least, most of the time).