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On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

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Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#71
post #63

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 th…

I don't think those rationalisations hold ups. The facts of workforce expansion and productivity & efficiency gains can't simply be shrugged off by "overpopulation". This is intentional political policy, nothing else.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#72
post #66

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…

awesome!!!

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#73

Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop building bullshit and focus on real problems. An engineer at Kittygram is likely to be working on a bullshit, ultimately irrelevant job, but few people would question the value of an engineer's work if he's doing groundbreaking medical software. Of course, people don'…

It's not quite that simple. Engineers at Kittygram might build a new, open source system for efficient object recognition which then revolutionizes medical imaging. ImportantMedicalCo, with its government contract to modernize medical records, might go over budget and out of business, having a chilling effect on investment in medical record modernization. People do think about these things, but they're hard to reason about.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#74
As hammerzeit mentioned, a lot of bullshit jobs are there because of an arms race. Your competitors have marketers, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, so you need them too. If everybody fired 90% of their marketers, marketing dollars would go 10x as far, and things wouldn't change much.

Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.

This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of marketing 10x more expensive?

Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which also increases the number of jobs.

Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment.

Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced.

Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this arms race.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#75
post #41
post #2

"Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty" Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank. A lot of laws also require people to be at their desks for 40 ho…

> Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank. Yeah, part of this is because few have inherited or other wealth, so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets.

>so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets

That pretty much doesn't happen in any western country now, due to welfare. If the desire is to prevent starvation and homelessness, transfer payments do a fine job; there's no need for intervention in the labour market or monetary system.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#76
post #66

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…

The snarky response is cool and all, but honestly I would be VERY interested in seeing any kind of actual measured statistics on the overhead created by Sarbanes-Oxley, while the snark just kinda leaves me cold.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#77
For me, it boils down to two questions: 1) Given, that let's say only 20% of the population does real work (doctors, teachers etc..), why should they do their work, if everybody else is enjoying spare-time all the time? And if you propose that they also could work less, therefore we would have more doctor positions to be filled, guess what, people that have valuable jobs are also the ones who really like their job, and are happy with working 40 hours, or even more. It's somehow ironic that people won't do work, just because they like what they do, they also want to be acknowledged monetary, no matter how much they like their job, which I can understand. Somehow we have a situation, i.e. from a doctor's perspective, like: "Yea, I'll treat you, but only if you are also getting up at seven every morning and commute to some office and do stuff."

2) I think for biological reasons, people need status more than spare-time. We need some kind of hierarchy to determine who is more entitled to spread their genes. If everybody is unemployed, how do you know who has more status? Money and consequently buying power does simplify this problem very neatly, reducing it to a one-dimensional metric scale, easy to compare and communicate.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not everyone can be a software developer, and frankly we can't have a society of people who only have specialist skills. There will always be a need for people with minimal skills to do low-skill jobs. They're doing work that has to get done too.

> frankly we can't have a society of people who only have specialist skills. Out of curiosity, why not? And frankly, isn't it already the case? Most people are unable to produce enough for their own survival today. They can't grow crops, build a home, even make their own bread. Instead they are specialists at project management, javascript or flipping burgers. I'm not arguing that this is bad or wrong, I am only sayi…

For my first 10 yrs out of school there was no job market for network operators specializing in BGP. Then I did that for a bit less than a decade. Then due to consolidation and mergers there's no work in that field anymore (other than the stereotypical "move to SV/NYC").

Another direction to go is my grandma did meaningless low skill BS work in an office shuffling papers as a clerk because she specialized in knitting and had amazing knitting skills, but didn't feel like being sentenced to life in a textile sweatshop in Vietnam, or where-ever clothes were being made at that time (Vietnam now, but in the 70s? Surely not the USA by then?). For my own example there's no way I'd tolerate 140 hour work weeks as a medical doctor although I'd probably have made a heck of a doctor, and I'm not living in poverty so forget academics/sciences, and I'm not living urban and working in an open plan office so forget SV. As a hobby I enjoy woodworking but as a profession the pay is bad and the working conditions are awful, also its not very deep so I'd get bored with it long before I retire, so ... no.

So you have chronological problems or retraining problems, and also people that are a skills match but hate the working environment. Maybe in a communist society the central committee could force my grandma to be a textile worker or force me to be a medical doctor or work at a startup, but there would be a lot of force involved.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state. Government services like these do not equal socialism. I live in The Netherlands, a pretty liberal kingdom with excellent social security and unemployment benefits. But don't be mistaken, it's not a socialist country. Not by a long shot. The biggest political parties are liberal-conservative and social-democrats. The latter lean towards the le…

> By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state. Much of the US believes that to be the case.

It's endlessly bizarre to see Americans throw around the word "socialist" as if it was a curse. Western Europe is made of social democracies. Northern Europe in particular has made the choice to live with high taxes and better social services. It does not mean that they are governed by unelected oligarchs, they get the same kind of elected oligarchs as the rest.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#80

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…

Helping raise grandkids is a pretty common thing, isn't it?
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