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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#501

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #457
groestl wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, but I have a somewhat less dire view on this. I think that large companies optimize for a fundamentally different outcome than smaller companies, like startups. Large companies became large by applying a successful business model, something that startups are still lacking. If you have a working business model and stable cashflow, any change is potentially dangerous and can take down the company.…

Relevant: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/

[deleted]

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#502

Post by acomar »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #480
_jal wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition' The broken windows fallacy doesn't suddenly become net-positive when renamed. Perhaps humans are not capable of improving interaction outcomes any further than we've gotten and humanity has reached peak efficiency re: transaction costs and firm-size, but I have a hard time believing that. > Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actual…

If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages. "That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop." No, it's not. It's not always clear what is illegal, what is not, what is infringement, what is not. Rather than having a totalitarian authority create, divide and control IP etc. we have adversarial law and companies…

> If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.

The internet was developed by Darpa so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. Competition did not produce the internet, and the telecommunications industry, which came about after as a commercialization project, has serious issues which make this an even harder argument to make.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#503

Post by acomar »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #396
lovich wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but I wanted to point out that lower profits can be better for society if due to competition. Every dollar a company earns in profit is a little more of efficiency that could be eked out of the business

I think we need to be cautious here, though. A perfect market would bring perfect efficiency, but perfect efficiency is a disaster for humans who depend on the market to live. Happiness and quality of life today happen in places where market is not efficient yet.

To live in a world where markets can be perfectly efficient and everyone happy because we stop staking the lives of people to their worth as determined by the market.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#504

Post by s73v3r_ »

drdeadringer wrote: post #448
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like even this is being optimistic about the prospects of the book. The idea of The Book is appealing, until someone tries to actually write the stupid thing. Anyone who has ever tried to write any sort of unskilled user facing documentation realizes the cost and training it takes to produce a high quality manual, which naturally the company won't want to pay for, so now you have a half-assed barely legible "B…

I'm reminded of procedures in the [US] defense industry. A "good step" in a given procedure would be absolutely clear in mind-numbing detail. "Pretend you're writing for a sailor" may be half a joke but it is also very real; sometimes word does get back to you about how something was unclear and a piece of equipment got buggered [or whatever], you look at the section in question, and all you can think is "How can you…

Not necessarily it being insulting, with Navy sailors, there is a very real chance that when they are needing to read that manual, they are under attack, and thus don't have the time or ability to think through what the step is actually trying to say. Making it extremely clear means that even when being fired on, the correct thing can be done.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#505

Post by seppin »

pastor_elm wrote: post #375
jillesvangurp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse, basically students are taking loans to pay for this. This requires even more admin work so they hire even more administrators.

This is not true, at least for schools like Stanford. They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0] [0} https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financi...

> They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0]

How many of them have their parents paying anyways?

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#506

Post by cultus »

wastedhours wrote: post #90
kamaal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff. EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent t…

Hmm. In my experience as a former PhD student at a major research university, university bureaucracy only hindered my job at every opportunity. You even needed multiple levels of approval for a research proposal. You had to send it in weeks before the proposal was due for the actual funding agency. These are for highly technical proposals that the admin drones won't understand at all anyway. I hear at other universities they have people that actually help you get funding, but not at mine.

That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments.

And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#507

Post by Kalium »

Spakman wrote: post #436
chrisBob wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a research support programmer at the University of Michigan. My job is to help research labs solve programming problems that they can't handle internally. I write interactive Psych experiments, create data processing scripts based on a professors notes, assist with computer controls for new research hardware, ... If I were at Stanford I would fall into that "Admin Staff" bucket. Am I an example of wasteful growt…

That sounds like an interesting and varied role. Are you enjoying it and getting much from it? Anything you don't like about it?

Working in the maze that is East Hall is usually a big minus.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#508

Post by WiltedSpinach »

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…

'Rational' can only come about once one has chosen a goal to achieve or a social group to adhere to, because ANY set of logically developed statements must derive from axioms, logic itself included. You just happen to believe that (If I read your point "1)" correctly) that there is a limited amount of work to be done in any society.

One could just as easily state that a 'rational' society should celebrate: a stable number of jobs (if one is anti-technologically inclined, or if one happens to believe that society is harmed by rapid change); or a growing number of jobs (the rapid change view + population growth, or a belief that more jobs mean people have found more problems to be solved).

But one could also move away from the direct 'jobs' concern and argue that a 'rational' society would be better at finding ways to address the need humans have for being valuable to their society (often expressed here in the US in terms of having a job) and ensuring that people have enough capital to live on a year-to-year basis, whether by changing the expression of those needs and giving a universal basic income or by finding better jobs or perhaps even by going with a strongly progressive income tax and actually supporting small businesses.

Many of the examples I have provided have been argued in the past at some point or another (and my short list is by NO means complete), and one could certainly talk about whether empirical evidence seems to support or contradict each of these points (though note that there are likely multiple interpretations of the data!), but ultimately our society is made of people and articles such as this suggest that we have built a society that systematically fails to support the values of its members. So maybe we should start talking about those values and quit going on rants about 'oh, everyone else is irrational'.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/610/

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#509

Post by NathanCH »

jakidud wrote: post #279

Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office. For 4 months now. Let that sink in. What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means tha…

Same thing happened with me at my old software development job. Company went through a merger but I left before it completed. I stayed for nine months, working from home, but with no work to do.

I did freelancing but eventually got very depressed. Quit my job, left my apartment and moved back with my parents.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#510

Post by sonnyblarney »

acomar wrote: post #502
sonnyblarney wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages. "That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop." No, it's not. It's not always clear what is illegal, what is not, what is infringement, what is not. Rather than having a totalitarian authority create, divide and control IP etc. we have adversarial law and companies…

> If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages. The internet was developed by Darpa so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. Competition did not produce the internet, and the telecommunications industry, which came about after as a commercialization project, has serious issues which make this an even harder argument to make…

Competition definitely created the telecommunications industry and by the way most of the electric grid as well.

'The internet' as we know it was not created by DARPA.

DARPA created some protocols - of which there were many, private and public.

It just so happens that a certain version of it got a critical mass - it didn't have to be that way. And a lot of private interests were involved, particularly private universities.

The network over which the internet was overlaid is entirely commercial - and of course most of the variation of it has been commercial, or non-governmental type NGOs, i.e consortiums.

Nobody is going to argue that some projects, particularly long-term/pure R&D, or projects that literally require a scale that's out of reach of even the largest private entities, are not going to require some kind of collective participation.

But the argument that competition is kafkaesque or inherently problematic because of entities competing for the same turf is short sighted.

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