The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?" A great example of this is tax departments at large companies that look for tax avoidance strate…
> "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?" But isn’t this basically every job that doesn’t directly support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just arbitrarily working to meet some other human’s desires?
In order to process request X, we need pieces of information A, B, C, D. Users frequently send in incomplete information. So we have to hire someone to check that all the required information is provided and accurate.
Yeah, it's kind of bullshit because it wouldn't be needed if people just did the right thing, but people are people, and they don't. In some cases it can be replaced with a web form with proper validation, but sometimes the information is something you can't verify with Javascript (like checking for a valid driver's license or something), so you need a human. So it goes.