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On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

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Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#291
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked agricultural jobs. We worked 8 hours a day, with a 15 minute "smoko" break after 2 hours, 1/2 hour lunch break after 4 hours, and another 15 minute break after 6. (This is in Australia, and was these were the award conditions) Except when we were on breaks we were continually working.

It's a lot easier to stay focused on physical jobs, if only because they keep your blood flowing. In contrast, office employees chug a lot of stimulants every day (coffee) and still manage to spend the afternoon fighting off drowsiness.

I disagree somewhat. Repetitious physical work can make you lose focus quite easily and that is when most accidents occur. On the contrary, office employees that drink lots of coffee and being drowsy doesn't have to do with work necessarily, but with the their bodies being immune to the caffeine.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#294
post #21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it interesting that the one example Graeber comes up with is possibly the profession writ large whose demand is largely influenced by a social structure outside of the free-market? Likewise, a over promulgation of workers in finance is suggestive that maybe there is some non-free-market force is incentivising individuals to go into that field...

"A social structure outside of the free-market" describes, by some estimates, over 75% of all human interactions. Non-market interactions are invisible to conventional economics because they're not priced, but they're by no means insignificant. They range from developing-world peasants farming land to which they simply have no title deeds, through to the form of communist praxis which is the dominant social structure…

Yes, he makes that point in "Debt" - but most free-market people would consider volunteerism, as a 'free-market' activity, because internally an individual makes a choice (based on personal utility) to do activity X versus 'something else' which is a micro-market.

I thought it was a stretch for Graeber to basically call everything socialism in the (roughly speaking) second section of Debt - especially since there is a categorical distinction between Marx's tagline ("to each... from each...") to what actually happens (in families etc), which is, "to you according to what I perceive to be your need, from me, according to what I can afford to give".

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is preferable to Basic Income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee For the following reasons: * It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression. * We actually do have a lot of infrastructure which needs rebuilding and projects which would make all of our lives better (high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.) * People actuall…

> People actually like to work - to feel useful Your argument seems to hinge on this, but I see no reason to believe it. There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc. There weren't any problems with people "needing to work" but not being able to. > It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depressi…

>There have been fairly long-term experiments on BI, and people who choose not to work do things they enjoy - learning to paint, going to school, etc.

How are those things not work? They require focused effort, just the same as any job does.

Does something not qualify as "work" just because it is enjoyable?

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#297
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is capitalism, not tax funded corporations. I feel your pain, but we've got to let go of this word. "Capitalism" has meant exactly "tax-funded corporations", and all the other bullshit that you and I don't like, for such a long time, that this is the accepted meaning now. I don't think the phrase "free market" has been spoiled yet, but if we have to have an -ism then we need to come up with a new one. Avoid the…

No, don't, please. Do Not let go of a word and its definition. It has a definition, and you must stick with it and not give them an inch of ground. It's a losing battle, where constant re-definition means that eventually anything applies under the term. Giving them ground is precisely why you, and others think that we've lost the term "capitalism". For so long, we let individuals use it in bastardized terms to refer…

Language is an extension of war without violence

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I disagree. I think that if you are in one of those jobs and continue to justify your existence and the existence of the job, you are just reinforcing it. For example, I know I am in one of those jobs so I tendered my resignation a few months ago and will be gone in December. Hopefully no one else fills it.

Easy to do if you don't have kids who need food, insurance that might lapse, rent that might go unpaid, etc etc.

Except I am married with three kids (all under 5) and a mortgage, so it can be done. I think it's an easy cop-out to say you can't do things because of your family. Yes it's hard, and there is a lot of pressure, but if you are worth something you will make it work.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay home and do nothing useful. Rather than answering supposedly common misconceptions that nobody on this thread actually had - answer me this instead: What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? They need money, but they also want to work. During the last depression the PWA built tons of useful stuff, much of whi…

> What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? If you give them basic income, then the jobs can pay what the jobs are worth, and no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs that take time that could be used for focussed training, risky (but potentially valuable) self-initiated ventures, etc. Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the…

> Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the actual value of the work (which is why the same job isn't available in the market already)

Wouldn't the government be providing these "make-work" jobs? The government regularly creates jobs, like research and infrastructure development, that would not be profitable for any private entity. Value can be calculated either from the perspective of the employer, or from the perspective of society at large, but the market only creates jobs which are valuable according to criterion #1.

In my view, this is the essential function of government. It is fascinating that, if you look back 2-3 years, when unemployment was still quite high, the private sector had recovered completely in terms of employment -- all the unemployment was actually being caused by reduced government spending (mostly on the state or local level).

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#300
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If being a marketer is a bullshit job, then being a web developer is a bullshit job too. Most people could spend a week with a marketing book and do some basic marketing. Likewise, most people could spend a week learning WordPress and create a passable website. So let's reduce the number of web developers by 90% too! Think of the billions it could save in inflated invoices from web agencies (commissioned by clueless…

If it costs you $1M per marketer rather than $100K, you're only going to hire the absolute best.

Where are you pulling those numbers from? According to Payscale the median rate for a marketing manager in Germany is €48,785 per year. A senior web developer actually makes €48,896 on average, which is about 100€ more than that.

Now if you want to hire top tier marketing talent (which are most likely consulting or teaching anyways ex. Seth Goding, Dan Kennedy) you might end up spending around that or higher. Hell, their small group seminars cost 27k$ and last 3 days, so I'm just going to go on a hunch here that getting that tier of marketers to write copy for you is going to be very expensive.

And I'm going to disagree further. Marketing is not a "bullshit" job at its base. Say we outlawed it. You're not allowed to tell people about your products. They have to walk into your store and ask about them, and you're only allwed to hand out a datasheet if they ask. What does that do to new products? I'm going to say that if your average joe tries to buy a mobile phone and first has to dig through 20-30 pages of chipset info to find out the features of it, you're not selling any mobile phones anymore. You're asking why you don't just write out the features that matter? Sorry, that's allready in the realm of sales copy. Sharing your enthusiasm about it? Nope, go straight to jail, do not collect 200$. Because that's what good marketers do. They try to understand what they're selling, who they're selling it to, and how to convey their enthusiasm about it to who they're selling it to in order to make a sale.

Now there is the argument that a lot of marketing is annoying, wasteful, ineffective and so are a lot of CRUD apps that have been churned out by fresh behind the ears Java programmers. There's a fair share of programmers that don't know about proper variable naming, splitting things into objects cleanly, designing usable user interfaces, and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of software engineers. And there is a fair share of marketers that don't know about targeting, hooks, blind bullets, cost per customer, tracking, split testing and a thousand other things that seperate them from the crême de la crême of marketing. Should we discount the field as useless because there's a lot of rhinestones to the diamond? Then it'd only be fair to throw programming out of the window with it.

By the way, i'd recommend giving something like the Robert Collier Letterbook a read, he goes through things like how highlighting a single trait in the coal he was advertising saved a mine or how he repeatedly sold the Harvard Classics through using half a dozen of different approaches, or pick up something like Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. I personally think that the only Ninja in Tech should be a Marketing Ninja, because when great advertisers sell you, you don't notice it. Well, maybe server admins too, but i digress.

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