Regarding the doctor's note thing, isn't it just to present a hurdle that the majority of people wouldn't jump over unless they actually needed to? So as to prevent people arbitrarily demanding an unlimited variety of conveniences that they don't really need?
Bullshit Jobs
111–120 of 576 posts
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#112I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…
An angle that appears to be underexplored, is what happens if you let males compete for sustainability. We might be underestimating the effect of classical (or perhaps even biological) provider roles of males, i.e. the amassment of resources to attract a mate. If we could transform this in competition in sustainability, then it might make a huge difference. Current approaches to sustainability might exactly fail because they do not take such possibly hardwired mechanisms account. E.g. a male who foregoes meat and excessive life style appears to have it harder [0], not easier in his romantic life.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#113University administrators.[1] Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators . No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff. Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land,…
I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia... "Academic staff: 2,219 Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC Students: 16,430" Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
Not sure this means what you think it means.
My unit in the university has:
Academic staff: 10
Administrative staff: 70
Students: 0
Because we do research, which requires a lot of staff who aren't academics.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#114A test of a bullshit job (or procedure) is whether we could get rid of it. Could we get rid of the doctor's note requirement, or of the compliance officers in the company insisting on one? In a start-up or small company, yes. Bring your own chair to work day! In a larger company where people don't know each other or there are many employees on low pay or short contracts, not so much. They'd be worried about people st…
If stealing office furniture is an actual concern and ongoing problem that company has some incredibly fundamental problems. Personally i would just bring the damn chair in and play dumb.
I know if you have worked only in software companies where everyone is paid six figure salaries then you will think that stealing stores and company property must be incredibly rare and deviant behaviour, but at most companies this is a very real concern of management and something that happens regularly.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#115I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…
I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…
> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.
Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer.
IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations.
The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over.
Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#116I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…
It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures.
These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training required, no hiring of expensive people who already know the skill. As the Book of Procedures enables you to rinse and repeat the process with every new hire, you are no longer invested in keeping 'talent' within the organisation; good people leave once they realise that the job is 70% procedure vs. 30% actual work... No matter, there's always The Book, let's hire another grunt from the employment queue.
However, because you are filling up your organisation with unskilled workers, errors become more common place. To reduce the error rate, you introduce some extra checks and balances to ensure that the job is being done correctly. These extra procedures go in to The Book. The ratio is now 90% procedure vs. 10% actual work.
People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work' following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of trouble.
Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up, and incidents are down. Creating The Book of Procedures is now considered a valuable skill in it's own right, so the people who care about climbing the managerial pole devote large chunks of their time adding yet more processes to the The Book, and thus the cycle continues, until several roles in the company are nothing but endless procedure creating/tracking without any actual product output.
There's still the problem of a high attrition rate amongst the middle tier staff, but hey, there's always more fish in the sea right?
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#117I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…
> As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous.
It's actually the opposite that is the case. As technology progresses you will see more and more and more speculative waste because the entire market becomes more efficient at producing speculative waste.
Another name for "speculative waste" by the way is "Capitalism." Before you worry about "bullshit job" you might want to consider the thousands of businesses that fail everyday, the books and movies and cartoons and the mountains of media that is produced that will never be read or consumed, the endless containers of products -- everything from Squirrel Girl teeshirts to satellite networks to cryptocurrencies -- that get made and then quickly discarded.
All of it is speculative waste and all of it is absolutely necessary for a free market to function.
The concept of "bullshit jobs" is stupid but it's the "common sense" stupidity that is really just a lack of imagination. In a global economy filled with billions of independent actors the vast majority of economic activity will be variously inefficient, useless and often down right harmful. This speculative waste will expand to consume all of the speculative capital available. The vast majority of this economic activity will only be minimally profitable and much of it will generate no returns whatsoever. But every once in a while you get a "10 bagger", an investment that yields order of magnitude returns, and this changes everything.
The author should be concerned not that most people are engaged in ultimately pointless economic activity but that, perhaps like himself, so many in the West are profoundly underemployed.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#118People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"? Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement? I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you ), but whether something is sustainable and make…
> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, This is meaningless if you leave out the goal though. Efficiency for what, food distribution? What's the function around which we are optimizing.
The answer is literally the part after the comma you left out. Entropy maximization.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#119I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.…
Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.
A more nuanced approach might work there. Some people are up at night because their projects keep them engaged, and delivering pizza to those people is not a bullshit job. What Graeber alludes to is when people have pizza delivered because they need to work their own bullshit job and thus do not have time to cook.
In other words: If there were less bullshit jobs, there would be less pizza delivery. Hence, to a certain extent, pizza delivery is also a bullshit job.
I'm not sure I subscribe to this reasoning, but I think this is a more honest representation of Graeber's argument.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#120I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.…
Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.
> His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.
That is a very subjective definition.