Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#301

Post by grasshopperpurp » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

feverfew wrote: post #100

mumin-abu-jamal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food" We actually have less free time compared to hunter-gatherers. http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html

But what was there to do with this free time?

What do people do when they go camping or hiking? What do people do when they go to the beach? What do people do when they go to a park? What do people do when they have dinner with their family and friends?

If you can't sit still and enjoy yourself just being, you will be in constant pain, and any break in that pain is only momentary relief. Most people pile distractions on top of distractions to shield themselves from their misery.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#302

Post by logifail » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:01 PM UTC

overlords wrote: post #251

RealityVoid wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see why not having advertisement would lead to monopolies.

Burger King stops advertising on Tv and loses even more market share to McDonalds. McDonalds then spends less on advertising because it realizes it doesn't need to because Burger Kind gave up. You're left with a "monopoly", McDonalds whose shareholders/top management make even more money, rather than it being redistributed to employees of Burger King.

How much evidence* is there that "stopping advertising [on TV]" necessarily causes a loss of market share?

* specifically evidence not funded by the ad industry

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#303

Post by dmurray » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:01 PM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #274

dmurray wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What should a psychiatrist write on a doctor's note if his patient claims to suffer from cancer, no other evidence given than the claim itself? Probably nothing? I don't think it's appropriate for the psychiatrist to inform the employer of possible Munchausen syndrome.

So why is this different from the patient claiming to suffer from chronic back pain?

Because the main symptom of back pain is the patient reporting "My back hurts". If the patient instead reported "I have this lump in my testicles that wasn't there last week", I'd certainly think it's likely he might have cancer, and some good medical advice would be "go and ask a GP about that".

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#304

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #288

sonnyblarney wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would." No, not in a lot of industries. Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient. For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified. Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money…

I think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.

I had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#305

Post by maxxxxx » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #18

University 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,…

That's usually the start of a decline. When Mercedes bought Chrysler and wanted to become the next GE in the 80s they built a new huge administrative facility far away from production and moved management there. That was the start of a long decline of the company until they got rid of Chrysler and closed the administrative facility.

It's a very bad design if management gets physically separated from the actual purpose of an institution. They get detached from the actual work and live in their own reality.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#306

Post by majewsky » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #207

majewsky wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. There is no purely rational way to redistribute wealth (or, really, no rational way to actually do anything ). Rationality is a tool that allows you to choose the path of action that best fits your goals/values. It does not prescribe any values. What we (as a society) do right now to redistribute wealth may very well be "the rational way" relative to s…

The efficient frontier is large, but a lot of the things we do are just dead-weight losses. There are cases of incompatible values where we have to make trade-offs, sure, but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system.

> but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system

I think the set of possible value systems is much larger than you appreciate. For example, nuclear war is perfectly rational when your value system is "KILL ALL HUMANS".

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#307

Post by snaky » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #260

snaky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get anything done large companies hire contractors.

They also hire contractors for external validation. Their internal team knows they should do X, but they won't get buy-in from management until an external contractor comes in and tells the company needs to do X.

In big companies it's often easier to get decision to pay six-figure to external consultants than to not even pay four-figure to employees for the same job but sometimes to even accept the job which is already done by employees just for salary.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#308

Post by crunchlibrarian » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #281

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…

Let's break it down to something simple: I have $3, you have $1. Is it fair that I give you $1 so we both have $2? Is that rational? Now let's say that you work 3 hours a day and I work 1 hour. Now what's fair? You're working three times longer than me, but I had three times as much money to start with. Would fair actually be if I gave you $2 instead? That way our cash is on par with our hourly work. Does that seem r…

Literally zero percent of the economy works like this in reality.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#309

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #262

sonnyblarney wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition' and it's healthy considering the alternative dynamic of monopoly. All corporate systems could be described as various intertwining loops (that intertwine with other corporate loops), it's really a matter of efficiency of those individuals and loops as a system. Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue et…

I'm not criticizing competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary because this is how we solve resource allocation problems - we're too dumb to do it directly, so we use market dynamics to implicitly compute it for us. I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games. Like where companies are competing for a fixed-size market - any marginal effort to win more of the market will be cancelled out by equivalent e…

I don't think it would be. I think if everyone stopped advertising unit sales would crash.

Coke vs Pepsi is much less of a thing than the constant reinforcement that you would really, really enjoy one or the other right now. The constant reinforcement drives absolute sales, not just relative market share.

I think the problem is more that a lot of heavily advertised products are incredibly harmful to personal and environmental health. Sugar is unbelievably toxic over the longer term (weight gain, diabetes, etc) but the canonisation of the profit motive means that market morality rewards the creation and promotion of these toxic effects.

You could argue that if people want to poison themselves they should be allowed to. But even ignoring the direct social costs of the medical care required to clean up the effects of Type II diabetes and heart disease, the argument is patchily applied.

Some poisons (sugar, alcohol, tobacco) get a pass, while others (psychedelic drugs) don't. A few like cocaine remain in limbo, with nominal disapproval but tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - covert political support.

It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#310

Post by eximius » Thu, Aug 30, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

In addition to all of the other valid observations, I think some of the impetus to create these bullshit jobs is to maintain a certain level of employment we wouldn't have otherwise only because thr alternative jobs wouldn't be excepted.

I.e., take all your excess administrators and TSA employees and offer them jobs that are in demand but unwanted like construction or something. I doubt they'd take them.

People want office jobs, so we find ways to make office jobs.