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Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

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Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#51

Post by killjoywashere »

Self-actualized, high-value, "expert" labor (surgeon, physicist, business owner), requires a person willing to work hard, relatively abstract motivations (prestige, memory of a loved one, etc), with a potentially unlimited ability to delay gratification.

Self-actualized, high-value, "skilled" labor (nurse, programmer), requires a person willing to work, motivations are varied, some requirement to delay gratification, but not limitless.

Weakly-actualized, minimal-value, minimally-skilled labor (bar tender, data entry "content" producer), requires minimal willingness to work ("just keep a roof over my head, please"), motivations are varied in direction and caliber, minimal requirement to delay gratification (but may paradoxically suffer severe lack of gratification relative to the surgeon by age 50)

Weakly-actualized, low-value, minimally skilled labor (Guatamalan mountain family growing what they eat, contributing minimally if at all to external society): requires minimal motivation (external motivation to survive is entirely sufficient), gratification isn't even an issue. Ref (1)

De-humanizing, moderate-value, unskilled labor (Guatamalan working in a concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa). Requires tremendous motivation to get to Mount Pleasant, gratification is highly delayed (scrap by, send all money home, hope it gets there). You can imagine how these immigrants' children become doctors and business owners. Ref (1)

My apologies for those who suffer in the "bullshit job" economy. Maybe at some point you'll be the director of a PR firm or something. I would point out though that if you want a "strong storyline" to your life, there are options. Moving to Guatamala being one of them.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800808

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#52

Post by rleigh »

bartread wrote: post #20
danielvf wrote: post #3

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. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to b…

> 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…

One perspective is that while the job you were doing wasn't particularly fulfilling or exciting, it was just a summer job, not a career. The interesting and demanding part is the bit in the middle you weren't trusted with; that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience.

If you put yourself in the position of this not being a summer job, but a real job, then it would likely not be a career either. It would be a stepping stone to working on areas with more responsibility, allowing you to pick up expertise with the full operation of the production line. You would have to have zero ambition to do it for your entire life, and I've not seen many people who did; there's always progression and more responsibility even for those who don't have a good education, but do have a desire to improve themselves and show they are capable.

I used to work in a brewery, as an analytical chemist, but this also involved some time on the bottling and canning lines taking samples and calibrating the equipment, so I did see a lot of what went on, from the depalletisers loading the empty cans and bottles onto the conveyors, to the fillers, pasteurisers, labellers and the packaging and warehousing. They did employ a number of temporary workers to do some of the simpler stuff, like what you were doing. But since each line was several million pounds worth of state of the art German engineering, the people operating and maintaining it were well compensated for their expertise. If you'd stayed, then you could have worked your way up the ladder to do that, perhaps including part time study for an engineering degree or industry-specific qualifications.

A lot of industries like this do have good prospects for career progression. But they do require time to be served at the bottom before working up the ladder. And even the bosses have to do the menial stuff when required from time to time; I've seen the production site manager doing your job when they were caught short-handed. One of the great things about this environment is that you have everyone working across a whole site in synchrony to make the whole process work; and on the site I worked at, it was a great place to work.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#53

Post by baxtr »

I have noticed that spending time on LinkedIn makes me very unhappy. It’s on the same level as Insta or Facebook. It’s either ads, or people posting trivial insights, or, non-substance reading recommendations. It’s depressing. The only reasons I’m not deleting are: it’s a nice address book for business contacts and a good source for finding people/to be found.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#54

Post by sowbug »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #33
sowbug wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because employers are unavailable for comment. Few would be willing to say out loud that their business is bullshit, but makes money, simply because of negative PR effect. That someone's willing to pay for it doesn't automatically imply the job is useful on the societal scale, and the latter is IMO a more important concept. There are plenty of businesses that can earn money even though everyone would be better off if…

My earlier comment assumes that value is measured in dollars. Denominating value in subjective units like "useful on the societal scale" would lead to different conclusions for anyone but the most die-hard capitalist.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#55

Post by notahacker »

coldtea wrote: post #21
drdeadringer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I am curious: was there ever "meaningful work"? Have people "always" searched for such a thing and "never" found it? Sure, Farmer Joe [or whoever] can declare that s/he finds meaning in what they find themselves doing to live, perhaps after the fact of becoming entrenched in the doing of it ... but how common is it for Newboy Johnny to boisterously look upon the world with his newly minted College University degr…

> Now I am curious: was there ever "meaningful work"? Have people "always" searched for such a thing and "never" found it? Sure, Farmer Joe [or whoever] can declare that s/he finds meaning in what they find themselves doing to live, perhaps after the fact of becoming entrenched in the doing of it ... Meaningful work is not about fulfilling someone's dreams or them "becoming entrenched in the doing of it". It's about…

> Meaningful work is not about fulfilling someone's dreams or them "becoming entrenched in the doing of it".

In the Graeber "hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at" sense, it literally is exactly this. It all kicked off with an article whose most concrete example was a former musician who had failed to sell enough albums to not end up as a corporate lawyer instead, but remained convinced his music provided more value to a society that hadn't shown much interest in paying for it.

I suspect pretty much everyone who failed to have a successful music career and subsequently ended up on a production line at a farm, as Graeber puts it in his original litmus test for bullshit jobs "rant about how pointless and stupid their job is" if asked about it at parties. And for that matter I'm also sure there are a whole bunch of people flogging zero-insight reports to the network they made at business school that genuinely believe what they do is extremely valuable to society, even if they never get repeat customers. So the claim that the meaningfulness of work is better defined by the employee than the employer is far from convincing.

I doubt many bright graduates disillusioned with their inability to make much difference to how their corporate employer operates and convinced some of the decisions they're required to implement are counterproductive (yep, I know that feeling well) would start considering the work they performed meaningful if they were redeployed to pressing buttons on a food production line, even if their link in the food production chain directly stopped hundreds of meals from premature decomposition every day. It might even make some of them nostalgic for micromanaging task allocations, whiteboarding brand values, taking this week's compliance course and politely telling the customer to try turning it off and on again. After all, Marx's theory of alienation which Graeber updated for the service industry was entirely focused on people who actually directly contributed to making stuff whilst still feeling useless, powerless and disassociated from what they actually made.

The irony is that there actually is a vast literature out there on principal-agent and adverse selection problems in the workplace, positional goods, regulatory capture etc means that employers might actually pay for services which don't increase their output, but this gets far less currency than Graeber really all about "the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"; a theory which doesn't survive contact with reality.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#56

Post by thatoneuser »

drdeadringer wrote: post #5
danielvf wrote: post #3

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. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to b…

Now I am curious: was there ever "meaningful work"? Have people "always" searched for such a thing and "never" found it? Sure, Farmer Joe [or whoever] can declare that s/he finds meaning in what they find themselves doing to live, perhaps after the fact of becoming entrenched in the doing of it ... but how common is it for Newboy Johnny to boisterously look upon the world with his newly minted College University degr…

I’ve been reading through Sapiens lately and it lends some insight into the whole “was work ever meaningful”. My take is that basically once we got to the agricultural revolution, the answer has basically always been no.

We evolved to be hunter gatherers. Millions of years of evolution brought us there. Then in the recent thousands of years we found ourselves being repurposed for efficiency. But at the end of it, were spear throwing carnivores still. We just don’t have the physiology and mental wiring to be happy going into the same place for decades doing bs abstracted work.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#57

Post by thatoneuser »

baxtr wrote: post #53

I have noticed that spending time on LinkedIn makes me very unhappy. It’s on the same level as Insta or Facebook. It’s either ads, or people posting trivial insights, or, non-substance reading recommendations. It’s depressing. The only reasons I’m not deleting are: it’s a nice address book for business contacts and a good source for finding people/to be found.

Adding onto all that is the existential anguish one feels realizing that it’s all bs and that people still buy into it. It’s really hard not to think less of humanity when we know we’re being so stupid/dishonest, yet everyone keeps along with it.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#58

Post by bartread »

rleigh wrote: post #52
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…

One perspective is that while the job you were doing wasn't particularly fulfilling or exciting, it was just a summer job, not a career. The interesting and demanding part is the bit in the middle you weren't trusted with; that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience. If you put yourself in the position of this not being a summer job, but a real job, th…

> that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience.

Not in this place it didn't: nobody had a degree, and even the permanent staff weren't on particularly good money. For sure, better money than I was on, but not by a wide margin in most cases, and I'm talking here about people who in some cases had worked their for decades. As for the chemists, my degree was half biochem and half chemistry and I'd just finished my third year so I was probably "better qualified" than they were. They absolutely knew their jobs but, again, no degrees.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#59

Post by bartread »

skookumchuck wrote: post #43
yowlingcat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I must admit that I find the whole idea of micro-aggressions somewhat suspect, at least as currently posited, since it becomes an apparent necessity for me to second guess everything that anyone says to me for ulterior or questionable motives. As an introvert this degree of "extrospection" sounds utterly exhausting.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#60

Post by jjtheblunt »

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…

The most inane are from the emotional intelligence author, like blatantly obvious nonsense.
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