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On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

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Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#61

Post by decode »

hammerzeit wrote: post #54

This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics. Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better…

> There are more musicians employed in this country than there are people in biglaw.

Is "number of lawyers employed at the 100 largest law firms" a good proxy for the number of corporate law specialists? I don't know that much about corporate lawyers, but it seems like a lot of them might be employed by corporations or smaller law firms.

Since there are somewhere around 1 million lawyers in the US [3], it seems reasonable to me that at least %17 of them would be corporate law specialists, making the original assertion true.

[3] http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php...

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#62

Post by michas »

insickness wrote: post #46

What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on. The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what pe…

I understand your point about managing nurse's jobs, but think about this: in the last century we went from doing manager's work by means of pen and paper to computers with software that can do planning, managing, accounting etc. Given the technological advances it should take less and less managers to organize jobs of the same number of workers. Mystery lies in the fact that we have more managerial jobs than we used to.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#63

Post by xpto123 »

Workers in the beginning of the 20th century worked 70 hour 6-7 days weeks, now in many countries we are down to 35h / 5 days. In the next 10 years we will get to 30 or less, we are at a threshold of the 4 day work week that's why its taking longer to cut down on the work hours.

The 4 day work week will imply social changes, and therefore the resistance but it will come in the next 20 years.

The author understands that its a slow process and it takes time, but congratulations on talking about a taboo.

Concerning the value of jobs, in the Philippines, go to a restaurant: one guy comes and set the dishes, the other the glasses, the other takes the order, etc.

The root cause for this is I believe overpopulation unprecedented in the history of mankind.

Not to defend lawyers, but who would solve disputes? Everybody bashes lawyers, but the day an employer tries to make you sign an indemnity paper that is less than you have right, you are glad that there is a lawyer there to defend you.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#64

Post by jcfrei »

coldtea wrote: post #43
jcfrei wrote: post #35

The author himself notices half way through the text that he might have gone out on a limb. If his description of "bullshit jobs" was at least followed by some statistics on marginal valued added (to a product, service) by that particular job (and how this margin has become lower and lower) then we could start a serious discussion about it. But now his extraordinary claims just stand there as a shallow rant, more lik…

So, essentially he has to add some bullshit statistics to his description of bullshit jokes... I find those kind of statistics pointless. Most of the time they are based on incomplete data and as much guesswork as any rant. An intelligent opinion on the other hand, based on observation and with a coherent point of view, is worth more than all those statistics (to paraphrase Alan Kay, who said "A point of view is wort…

Statistics help in testing and validating an author's claims. Eloquent deductive reasoning can easily lead to wrong conclusions, which is why we need to test them with empirical results. This author in particular appears to put a prohibitively large value on physical goods over any kind of service. He dismisses the fundamental transition from an industrial economy to a service economy, simply labeling most of the new jobs as pointless. while his arguments might be convincing for a few jobs such as telemarketing, he appears to forget about the highly increased complexity of a modern economy, which requires people working in corporate law, financial services and the administrative sector. in my opinion those regulations weren't just invented because

The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger [...]

but rather because: 1) modern technologies require a more extensive management (with an entire workforce dedicated to maintaining them). 2) because globalization creates a much more complex framework for corporations (different local laws). 3) there are much more financial options available today to both individuals and corporations. a small company from Utah can today raise money from investors in Abu Dhabi and an individual from Europe can invest in Australian mining companies - just to name a few examples. this range of services is unprecedented and requires an accordant workforce.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#65

Post by VLM »

insickness wrote: post #46

What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on. The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what pe…

"After a while though, it killed me inside."

Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week.

1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him.

2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some.

3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#66

Post by edw519 »

Let's not forget about how much bullshit government adds to non-bullshit jobs...

My Typical 8 hour day

1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley):

  7 hours: code
  1 hour:  overhead
2002 to 2014 (after Sarbanes-Oxley):

      1 hour: insure rigorous Requirements documentation
      1 hour: insure rigorous Test Plans (whether used or not)
      1 hour: peer review (of devs I would have never hired)
      1 hour: code review (for what peer review missed)
      1 hour: answer auditors' questions
      1 hour: status reports
      1 hour: status meetings
  55 minutes: bitch to boss
   5 minutes: code

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#67

Post by jug6ernaut »

furyg3 wrote: post #48

While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking about a taboo. White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours. There are exceptions, and HNers may deny this fact (because the demographic is different or because the taboo is more powerful in this circle), but Graeber's inebriated cocktail party confessions match my own discussions with friends. Howe…

I am not going to deny anything you said, its almost 100% true. But I believe your missing an important "fact"(maybe).

That is its not really physically/physiologically/mentally possible to put in 40 hours of true "work". Not consistently anyways. So as much as it is we not truly putting in 40 hours, its the entire effort to be available for 40 hours IMO that you are getting paid for.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#68

Post by rondon2 »

jcfrei wrote: post #35

The author himself notices half way through the text that he might have gone out on a limb. If his description of "bullshit jobs" was at least followed by some statistics on marginal valued added (to a product, service) by that particular job (and how this margin has become lower and lower) then we could start a serious discussion about it. But now his extraordinary claims just stand there as a shallow rant, more lik…

His point is that there is no way to provide statistics on the number of bullshit jobs.

For example, I worked at a company where we made networking software for some military radios. We had a "Hardware Engineer" that fixed or returned radios that had stopped working. From all economist metrics this was not a bullshit job. He was using his engineering degree to do engineering work.

But in reality he added nothing to the productivity of the company. He actually reduced the productivity of the company by taking 3 days to do 5 minutes of work. I stopped using him and did it myself when he was at lunch. It is impossible to get metrics on bullshit level because it includes lots of nuances. For example, i'm sure this guy and his manager would say that only he was capable of doing the hardware work because he took a 1 hour course on electrostatic discharge.

It would take a lot of evidence gathering for me to prove that this was a bullshit job and once I did prove it his manager would have immediately assigned him some new responsibilities making my previous data worthless. This is a big problem with macro-economics. Economic Job data is limited to Salary,Title,Hour worked. It doesn't tell you much more than that.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#70

Post by marveller »

tomp wrote: post #37
binarymax wrote: post #28

I just had a great trip to a cousins wedding and saw a lot of family. My Parents' generation are now just past the 'age of retirement' and are in their late 60s and early 70s. The majority of them are still working in their bullshit jobs. I asked several if they were going to retire soon and they all replied the same. If they retire what would they do? Even though their work is mostly pointless from a job function pe…

I can't help but pity people who say "there is nothing better to do" (but then again, maybe that's because I'm employed, working 10 hours a day). We live at a time when "I have nothing to do" is a really bullshit excuse. You have the whole internet available! - learn languages (e.g. Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish - to cover most of the world's population) - learn new stuff (statistics/machine…

I agree with you. But only if you are a motivated person. It saddened me when I had to give up on them by founding out that they (most people, even the close ones) are not motivated due to fear, laziness, and disbelief in own powers and possibilities of improvement.
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