Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

I recently deleted my LinkedIn account after growing sick of the irrelevant messages from recruiters and the mind-numbing, inane posts from the cult of self-proclaimed thinkers, influencers, TED luminaries and Elon Musk sympathisers. One of Oleg Vishnepolsky’s golden posts was the final straw.

I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of the bullshit and self aggrandisation any more. And why not, since I’d already deleted all of my other social media accounts long ago. I have the email or phone number of everyone I need to be in contact with. I had a chat about this with a friend who himself is a founder of a company and uses LinkedIn to keep track of developments inside his work network. It made me wonder whether I’d done the right thing.

Can anyone here who isn’t a recruiter or employer say that it’s worth having a LinkedIn profile?

The key to BS jobs is that even though the person doing it is being paid by someone who values it in some sense, it feels utterly senseless that someone values it.

I know a lot of people who work in the consulting industry (As in Big4, MBB, etc). None of them are starving, and someone seems to want to pay them to work. But zero of them can see why there's any point in their work. Whatever the purported reason for a project, it always seems at least wasteful, and at worst deceptive.

The other part of it is that a BS job can only be hard due to unreasonable constraints. If you just plod away on your powerpoint slides, they will eventually be finished. It only gets stressful because someone is telling you it needs to be done before the sun comes up. Chances are your client also isn't listening when you do the presentation, so that's fine as well.

Interesting jobs like coding can fail for the same reasons, but they aren't the only reasons. You can design a cloud solution badly, even if you had a lot of time to think about it. Your ML model can... be no better than chance. Even if you have a phd in it.

That possibility of real failure I haven't seen in the discussion yet.

There is definitely value to LinkedIn, for all the obvious reasons. It let's you keep up to date with new jobs, and old colleagues.

But you probably already decided that it's not valuable enough to keep you on the platform. Only thing I can add if you ever start your own company it's becomes over an order or magnitude more valuable.

Actually, one of the reasons I still use LinkedIn is that their algo isn't that great.

It keeps throwing up the occasional article that I actually want to read, often because some random person I'm mysteriously connected to liked it.

If the algo gets "too good" I find it gets too samey.

Also there's some humour to be found when every other person is a "thought leader" but graduated less than 10 years ago. The self-puffery is kinda fun to watch. You can imagine how deflated the person would feel if you met them IRL and started asking proper questions.

> This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be pretty terrible in the past too.

I think this is the nub of it: we think things have changed, but they really haven't. Whilst the content/descriptions may have changed, grim jobs have always existed and have always been the majority.

I spent the summer of 1998 working in a wines and spirits bottling plant. I'd either be loading bottles on to the beginning of the line, or stacking boxes at the end - as a university student, and a temp, I wasn't trusted with the machines in the middle. Doesn't really matter: the work was beyond mind-numbing.

The first couple of hours I was checking my watch incessantly. Then I realised I was driving myself slowly (or, quite quickly) insane and limited myself to checking every N palettes of bottles, where N was a suitably large number. After a week or two got to the point where I'd check my watch once during the morning and it would be nearly lunchtime. Oh yeah: winning at life!

And this was a job that had some tangible output: thousands of gallons of some beverage started out in a massive tank and ended up in neatly labelled and packaged bottles ready for sale. Didn't change the fact that the job was boring as #### and that I hated every minute. But the money was essential to me at the time, and I was and am grateful to the childhood friend who offered me that job.

I have no end of respect for people who do these kinds of jobs their entire working lives for the simple reason that they have to in order to survive. I know exactly how fortunate I am to have other options open to me.

Perhaps a wider point: over the span of an entire career almost everyone has at least one, and often several, terrible jobs. E.g., including contracts, since graduating I've had two great jobs, one good, one that started great and remained that way for quite a while but became terrible during my final years, a couple that were all right but nothing special, one that was bloody awful from start to finish, and one that was entirely bipolar (sometimes from day to day).

Work isn't always enjoyable, and doesn't always (perhaps not even often) use you to your full potential. Yes, you may be better than that job, but so are lots of people, and you still have to eat. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try to find something better, but sometimes - and possibly for quite a long time - we have to do things we don't enjoy in order to live.

Sorry, I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.