On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#231

Post by rollo_tommasi » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #216

Competition. This article is wrong. I'd go even as far as say he is a failure as an anthropology professor. The answer is as simple as this - competition. Survival is not enough for living organisms - they must also reproduce. Every organism tries to maximize it's own rate reproduction and minimize others. Any other behavior will drive it to extinction. To talk in human terms, those who control technology and machine…

So in your estimation, 'bullshit jobs' exist because the majority of people need to battle it out amongst each other in order to be rewarded by the elite controllers of 'technology and machines'?

I think you have unwittingly restated the author's thesis.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#232

Post by mesozoic » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:16 PM UTC

Stopped reading when I realized the author was making broad sweeping generalizations about things he didn't understand like capitalism. He claims that firms won't employ unnecessary workers, when the truth is firms will employ as many workers as they deem profitable to employ. A misunderstanding that would go on to explain every one of his other "mysterious" claims.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#233

Post by protonfish » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:21 PM UTC

Well, if Parkinson's law is correct http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 and bureaucracies expand by 6% every year regardless of the amount of work, more and more of us will end up with useless jobs.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#234

Post by retube » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:22 PM UTC

On the phenomenon of bullshit articles....

His thesis is the ideology of someone young and niave. I can assure you that no company employs anyone unless they have to, and/or they see a return on their investment (ie payroll) in that person.

He may think a corporate law job is "bullshit" but I imagine that the law firm's clients value and rely on the collective work that this person and his colleagues are doing.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#235

Post by rwallace » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:26 PM UTC

Filligree wrote: post #3

Some of what people want is positive-sum: Books, aquariums, theater showings, even cars. As we get more productive, the amount of time you need to work for these decreases. A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance. This is, I believe…

Which is why I, a moderate libertarian, have reluctantly acknowledged the need for a legal maximum 30 hour working week; the evidence for market failure in this area is sufficiently overwhelming that I can no longer ignore it.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#236

Post by pawn » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:32 PM UTC

jasonwocky wrote: post #209

burgreblast wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before we go too far, raising children is definitely not Biblically categorized as idle hands, but in fact praised and respected. The old-school Puritan would prefer you spend time teaching and raising children than helping an ad company sell more clicks. Or generally make a Skinner box. Don't know much about Soviet Russia but 19-teens Russian avant-garde art was pretty boss. To say nothing of Kandinsky. My perspecti…

My perspective is that idle hands are actually idle: not building, not thinking, not active, not contemplative, not searching, not trying, not even resting. But idle. Un(der) used. And rather hard to defend. This is difficult for me to understand. How can you tell the difference between resting hands (easy to defend, imo), and idle hands?

I'd say the difference is how long they're "resting". Taking a weekend or vacation? Wonderful. Haven't had a job in a year and not really trying to get one? Idle.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#237

Post by kenster07 » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:32 PM UTC

Why do we continue to work 40+ hour weeks when 15 would suffice? The answer is quite simple -- over the past tens of thousands of years, the primary survival pressure on our gene pool has been scarcity, and thus we are genetically -- not socially -- programmed to want to work.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#238

Post by king_jester » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:34 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #124

JulianMorrison wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the case before automation. Right now, though, humans are 1. under-bidding automation (this will be decreasingly successful) 2. politically suppressing automation (AKA "creating jobs") …because nobody wants to abandon the "work = eat" rule.

I can buy 2[1], but what's your evidence for 1? I mean, look at the decline in U.S. agriculture jobs over the past century in inverse proportion to agricultural output. Sure, China employs a lot of manpower to perform the kind of manufacturing that in more developed economies was automated long ago, and that's profitable for them (for the moment). But that's not in the guise of any "make work" scheme, it's because it…

> I can buy 2[1], but what's your evidence for 1? I mean, look at the decline in U.S. agriculture jobs over the past century in inverse proportion to agricultural output.

Machinery, automation, and corporate food production has a lot to do with why people work less on farms. However, overwhelmingly agriculture in the US uses migrant labor that is often paid very little wage when workers are needed.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#239

Post by jdpage » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:36 PM UTC

bennyg wrote: post #87

impendia wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason . Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork: http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs and are trying to change the library system: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Now the intrinsic value of resea…

Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e). That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipl…

"Math professor" probably means at the college or university level -- high school math is widely regarded as complete and utter BS.

I've taken... a rather significant pile of maths classes at this point (I'm majoring in it), and I've never felt like any of the college-level maths classes assigned busywork. I may not have liked the size of the workload (oh god, real analysis), but I've never felt it was unreasonable.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#240

Post by gdulli » Mon, Aug 19, 2013, 4:36 PM UTC

> There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

It doesn't say much more than that a lawyer can only serve a small number of people, but a musician can entertain millions at once. A less talented musician, tens of millions.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/justinbieber