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Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

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Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#41

Post by notahacker »

bloudermilk wrote: post #27
bartread wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think we have to look pre-industrialization to see fundamentally different ways of organizing production and work. The digital age has certainly sped things up, but the 20th century was full of bullshit too.

And before industrialisation the tendency was for everyone to inefficiently cultivate their own food whilst most semi-skilled tasks were carried out by small numbers of artisans typically organised around protectionist guilds, whilst the largest employers (preferring unpaid labour where possible) were religious orders and landowners conspicuously consuming and fighting their neighbours. I'm not convinced this arrangement involved less bullshit, but it certainly entailed less production.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#42

Post by yowlingcat »

whatshisface wrote: post #31
lordnacho wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pu…

> You can imagine how deflated the person would feel if you met them IRL and started asking proper questions. You could make anyone unhappy by "asking the proper questions," irrespective of what they have in their LinkedIn profile. Doing that is called "being mean."

Who pissed in your coffee today? Perhaps it's my bias living in NYC, but the average denizen here (myself included) finds someone asking proper, honest questions to be the absolute bare minimum to taking that person seriously, not to mention the absolute bare minimum to a whole host of basic human interactions and endeavors: working together, dating, making and sustaining friendships, making art, building a company.

Frankly, I find the almost passive aggressive lack of asking proper questions to be a little condescending and mean in and of itself. One of my favorite movies has several themes, but that's one of them. It's name, very interestingly enough, is Mean Girls.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#43

Post by skookumchuck »

yowlingcat wrote: post #42
whatshisface wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can imagine how deflated the person would feel if you met them IRL and started asking proper questions. You could make anyone unhappy by "asking the proper questions," irrespective of what they have in their LinkedIn profile. Doing that is called "being mean."

Who pissed in your coffee today? Perhaps it's my bias living in NYC, but the average denizen here (myself included) finds someone asking proper, honest questions to be the absolute bare minimum to taking that person seriously, not to mention the absolute bare minimum to a whole host of basic human interactions and endeavors: working together, dating, making and sustaining friendships, making art, building a company.…

Ironically, asking someone "where are you from?" is now considered a micro-aggression!

https://othersociologist.com/2017/07/15/where-are-you-from-r...

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#44

Post by blfr »

danmaz74 wrote: post #30
m0llusk wrote: post #9

Picking apart the jobs as bullshit metric directly might not be the only or best path. There is a known and confounding spectrum currently exhibited in most developed economies where some of the most valued labor such as teaching the young and caring for the sick and elderly turn out to be among the lowest paid while some of the highest paid labor is so detailed an specialized that it ends up in being sufficiently ad…

Saving a few pennies per unit, times millions of units, makes a very big impact - and is integral to how industrialised civilisations became so rich compared to previous ones. Ignoring this kind of math isn't going to help teachers or carers for the elderly.

Yes but saving a few pennies is not how industrial civilization got rich. Mass manufactured goods are orders of magnitude cheaper than their hand-crafted equivalents.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#45

Post by AndrewKemendo »

m0llusk wrote: post #9

Picking apart the jobs as bullshit metric directly might not be the only or best path. There is a known and confounding spectrum currently exhibited in most developed economies where some of the most valued labor such as teaching the young and caring for the sick and elderly turn out to be among the lowest paid while some of the highest paid labor is so detailed an specialized that it ends up in being sufficiently ad…

Does it really make sense to make that kind of optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have meaningful value?

I think the reason this is a problem is that there is no foundational vector for progress which we can universally agree upon a measurement metric for. So capital allocation becomes the default measure, and money becomes a proxy for value.

So in that sense, what is most easily measurable is more valuable, and something which is easily measured and increases the unit of measurement by the largest factor becomes the most valuable.

Eg. If one unit of money is input and some multiple of that unit is the result, the system with the least amount of work or fastest iteration time (high margin) becomes the place where resources pool.

I'm skeptical whether humans could even define in a meaningful or measurable way how to better allocate resources than individual resource allocation on a common unit of measurement aka "markets."

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#46

Post by Joeri »

m0llusk wrote: post #9

Picking apart the jobs as bullshit metric directly might not be the only or best path. There is a known and confounding spectrum currently exhibited in most developed economies where some of the most valued labor such as teaching the young and caring for the sick and elderly turn out to be among the lowest paid while some of the highest paid labor is so detailed an specialized that it ends up in being sufficiently ad…

Wages obey supply vs demand. Teachers may do a valuable job but are not themselves valuable because they’re considered easily interchanged (leaving aside the notion that great teachers are rare).

Cleaning staff are often paid orders of magnitude less than the people they clean for but work harder and longer, because the perception is that anyone can do their job.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#47

Post by Nasrudith »

lordnacho wrote: post #14

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 p…

Personally I think that is a separate aspect - alienation from the bullshitness of the job at least in the functional sense. If someone is paid enough just having someone work one and a half hour a day for $15/hour paid 40 hours per hour could still save the company money if their boss is paid $100 hour - the $600 a week they pay would be less than the $750 a week that their boss would be getting paid to do it themselves.

A factory worker could make tons of widgets and not see any point because they are nine levels of abstraction deep from anything they can relate to. Similarly in WW2 many in Bletchly park worked completely devoid of context in what seemed to them literally pointless like repeatably rolling dice and writing the numbers down. It was important but they may feel alienated.

Meanwhile someone could be utterly convinced that their job as a paid entourage is vitally important when really they have no purpose but to signal a person's wealth and status. Their job is bullshit but they're not alienated.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#48

Post by renox »

Interesting, I was thinking that there are whole 'bullshit industry' such as the fashion industry,but in fact it's not really the same thing: the fashion industry is useful for clothes makers to convince clients to buy new clothes that they don't need..

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#49

Post by Nasrudith »

sowbug wrote: post #28
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s the second half of the article that contain the real insights - that what are termed “bullshit” jobs, and despised by the people working them, actually do create economic value. Only there's no proof, just some handwaving. I'd rather trust those actually doing the jobs for their assessment of them.

An employer profitably exchanges wages for labor. That profit is the economic value. If this weren't true, then all businesses would be bankrupt. By definition, non-owner employees are insulated from that economic value. It's unclear, then, why you'd prefer their assessment over that of someone looking at the business as a whole.

Technically that only states that employers /think/ they provide value not that they actually do it. It may fit inside their expense margins but that doesn't mean it is valueable only that it is viable from /something/ in it. This is an important distinction - the higher level up means not seeing all of the details and they have their own biases.

To give a deliberately absurd example a rich madman made $5 million per year from his vinyard and winery for personal and spend $1 million on running the place to the highest quality, $0.5 million buying piles of bananas and $2 million on mercenaries paid to beat the piles of bananas with baseball bats so they don't plan a rebellion he would still make $1.5 million a year profit could make $4 million a year profit if he didn't spend so much money on repressing fruit.

Silly example aside it is possible for both employee and employer to be both right or both wrong. An employee might notice low level waste that could be avoided by not repairing defects, and the employer knows that the cost of labor to fix it is more expensive than materials for a new one. Even if the one strategy is right both have a point.

Or in the reverse both employee and employer could think that the new fangled automobile won't be able to compete with horses because of vast fields of grass for free on the plains and even hay being cheaper than gasoline.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#50

Post by UnpossibleJim »

0db532a0 wrote: post #12

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 de…

I mean this in the most genuine way. What is a "Elon Musk sympathiser"?
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