On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

For example, drive to a parking garage at a shopping mall and there will be a guy who's entire 8 hour work day is spent wearing an over elaborate bell hop uniform and bowing to cars as they drive in. That's it...his entire job is bowing to cars. If he disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, it wouldn't affect a single thing. People would still come to the mall, cars would still manage to park, not one thing would change.

Or how about the nice costumed sales ladies standing in every aisle in the grocery store, not giving out promotional samples (a la Costco), but simply holding up gift packages of cheap processed food items. My favorite is the gift package for your salaryman husband, a beautifully wrapped container of instant coffee. That's actually two BS jobs, the lady holding the package (which you were going to buy anyway), and the person who packaged up the $20 container of instant coffee in an overly elaborate gift package that will go directly into the trash 10 seconds after it's received.

I remember travelling in Russia, and going into one of those amazing Stalanist subway stations, and there was a booth with a person in it. They didn't do anything, they weren't really an attendant, didn't help anybody or have any particular function, they just sat there for a 8 hours.

Of course for the really unbelievably useless jobs you have to look inside the U.S. government.

I have felt the pain described, and was with the author right up until the point where they started talking about the tube workers, which struck a nerve. Tube drivers can bring the system to its knees because they are highly unionised and can (and do) choose to strike en masse whenever they're not happy with working conditions, salary, proposed changes etc. What is one of their strongest oppositions? Automated tube driving systems. Systems that would make the tube network cheaper to run, increase capacity, improve speed and safety, and yes, make tube drivers redundant.

So here we are, and the TGWU (transport union) et al are basically ruining my day-to-day commute to keep tube drivers in their cushy positions, maintaining an inefficient situation that makes the tube drivers "indispensable". I'm gonna call bullshit on that.

Now let's say that some miracle happens and somehow the TGWU racket is broken and progress is allowed to happen. TfL (Transport for London) decide to replace all of their train drivers (why the hell are humans driving trains in the 21st century anyway???) with computerised systems. Who's gonna do that? Who's gonna plan, design, build, test, implement and maintain such a massively complex system? The tube drivers? Don't think so. I'll give you good odds that you're going to be calling in the Management Consultants to do this. All of a sudden my bullshit job isn't seeming like quite such bullshit when it is saving the taxpayer millions of pounds each year and reducing your morning commute by 20 minutes.

So here we come to the crux of the problem of this article. The yardstick by which you've chosen to determine if a job is "worthwhile" is whether anyone would notice if those workers disappeared. Given this definition, it is unsurprising that those jobs that have a very direct reward will seem the most worthwhile (i.e. nurse treats patient, patient feels better, patient happy, sees value in nurse). This feels right because it fits in nicely with the short-term worlds that most of us humans live in.

Unfortunately, the problem is not necessarily (or just) the bullshit jobs, but our bullshit caveman short-term brains that haven't yet caught up to the 21st century highly-optimised economy in which we live. As Dan Pink notes in Drive, to be motivated, we humans need 3 things - autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Our bullshit jobs are (for the most part) giving us autonomy and mastery more than any grunt jobs since the Industrial Revolution began, but what is lacking is purpose. We feel our jobs are bullshit precisely because they seem to lack purpose. They seem to lack purpose because we are so many levels removed from the output and effect of the things that we do.

I'll give you an example. I worked on a project that improved information security standards at all of the petrol (gas) stations for an oil giant worldwide. This project changed how things worked at 45,000 petrol (gas) stations worldwide, and statistically speaking, likely saved quite a few customers from card or identity fraud while refuelling their cars. Except I have no idea if it did or not - I'll never meet these guys or hear their stories, hell I barely left the office, and most of the things I did were in Excel or PowerPoint.

So there's the problem. Did I make a difference? Yeah probably. Do I emotionally feel like I made a difference? Nope. Not a bit. I was far too detached from the outcome to feel that. Looks great on my CV (resume) though for when I apply for my next bullshit job.

So to me, the answer isn't rushing out to quit our bullshit jobs and becoming tube drivers, or building houses in developing countries, although we'd probably be happier doing so. The answer is re-attaching the purpose element to the highly-productive "bullshit" jobs that we do, and reprogramming our caveman brains to realise that Excel really is mightier than the sword, and that we can be of far more use to the world by adapting our highly-optimised productivity systems to be more meaningful, rather than dismantling them and returning to an enjoyable but unproductive primary-secondary economy.

Basically, in a tax-less scheme, there's a strong financial advantage to just showing up first.

There is an absolutely limited supply of land, and society has an incentive to make sure this limited supply is being used effectively to produce wealth. Society also has an incentive to make sure that everyone is housed, financially stable, and healthy. These are competing concerns.

Say there were no property taxes, so the only incentive for selling land would be a high enough price. Your hypothetical family would be sitting on prime Napa farmland, not producing wine, and society would have that much less wine to drink.

An aspiring young wine-grower might like to purchase this land, and could even trade a bit of land of his own. If the original family doesn't want to move, though, the aspiring wine-grower is out of luck.

A property taxation scheme encourages people to use their land to produce wealth, either by producing it directly, a la farmland, or by housing people and keeping them healthy, such as houses or apartment buildings.

In a tax-less scheme, there's a strong advantage to just showing up first. The lucky few to first colonize Napa can maintain control of the land indefinitely, and younger generations and immigrants are at a financial disadvantage, as they won't have the option of owning their own land, but they'll be in a marketplace competing with persons who don't have to worry about housing at all.