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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#221

Post by overlords »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154
dantheman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A. Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and fu…

If the advertising competition you mention didn't exist, for example competitors closing shop and not playing the zero sum game, then you'd have a monopoly company, which would also be bad.

So in that case, it's good to play the zero sum game since it's a redistribution of income.

Of course, it's wasted labour, and so what you really want is for the government to step in and extract more in taxes and simply hand over the money as welfare or invest in more fruitful pursuits such as scientific research, rather than redistribution of income coming from zero sum games.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#222

Post by dantheman »

drunkpotato wrote: post #152
dantheman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they…

It's that businesses go out of business -- see Nokia, Blackberry, etc.

Public organizations can't be easily replaced by a competitor -- I think being replaced by a competitor is more of an occurrence than fixing it from the inside.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#223

Post by Scarblac »

jbrun wrote: post #174
normalhuman wrote: post #65

I 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…

There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are smal…

> If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.

Nobody believes that perfect markets exist.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#224

Post by leetcrew »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #188
adamjc wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a side-effect rather than intentional.

History proves otherwise. In many cultures, including ancient Greece, China and the roman empire, scholars described that artificially creating employment to prevent social unrest was not uncommon.

sure, but is the revolt prevented by keeping them busy or by giving them an (albeit bullshit) means of keeping food on their tables? i'm not a historian, but most of the revolts i've learned about were immediately preceded by severe scarcities of essential items.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#225

Post by lmm »

dandare wrote: post #163

This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here. Some of the arguments I keep hearing: 1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but…

> if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored

Sounds like a bullshit task then.

> 2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.

What's the mechanism that would cause this to happen? A manager could notice that they don't need as many people on their team - but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#226

Post by eitland »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #210
eitland wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy... Not called unit tests but we have something similar here in Norway: - 5 or more weeks of mandatory holidays. (both you and your boss get trouble if you don't use it.) - maternity/paternity leave (more than a year combined IIRC, and while it won't land an individual in hot water legally, -everyone including your boss expects you to take advantage of it. Oh a…

> 5 or more weeks of mandatory holidays. Impossible. Our handsomest politicians assure us that even 2 weeks vacation is pushing the bounds of outright societal collapse!

That's another similarity, I guess.

"We struggle to deliver the features we promised and you say we should create test code as well?"

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#227

Post by kahoon »

kamaal wrote: post #86
normalhuman wrote: post #65

I 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…

>>There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; One of the real reasons why languages like Lisp and Perl had a short life in MegaCorps is they were anti-dote to large people hierarchies. You can disproportionate work with small teams. Execs and VPs openly boast in company all hands about their 'team sizes' and numbers almost as the biggest accomplishment of their lives. No one is going to b…

If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? E.g. developing a website in assembly would keep more people occupied than HTML/JS/CSS.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#228

Post by Scarblac »

kamaal wrote: post #81
wastedhours wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however , quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the univers…

Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption. 12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.

There is a joke along these lines. The punch line is that in the end the company is operating at a loss, so the worker is fired.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#229

Post by branchless »

jbrun wrote: post #174
normalhuman wrote: post #65

I 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…

There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are smal…

I doubt from your comment that you have read his book. The market is broken. We have entire professions that add zero value, such as much of banking and law. Graeber then goes further in saying that at these companies there are real jobs, which are really bullshit. Such as a cleaner working doing a real job at a bank.

The rentier economy, which itself is bourne of a surplus (the surplus creates slack for mass rentier exploitation which is tolerated as nobody starves), is massively inefficient. Bullshit abounds.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#230

Post by mikehollinger »

Jaruzel wrote: post #116
normalhuman wrote: post #65

I 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 re…

> 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.

That’s actually an intermediate step. The interesting side effect of “the book” is that any sufficiently advanced organization will and does recognize the codification or procedure as a chance for automation and increased efficiency. The dangerous thing that might occur here is that “the book” became “the system” in the late 90’s when IT invaded every organization. “The system” got an upgrade here or there - but more or less cargo-cult’d the manual process. More dangerously - “the system” works, and got extended to integrate with another “system.” Changing either one would require substantial work, and the individual that wrote the original “book” has long since left the organization, leaving behind a process frozen in time.

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