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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#511

Post by Noumenon72 »

skybrian wrote: post #393
TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works , but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

A while back I took flying lessons. They have a procedure and checklists for most things. This is decidedly a good thing. Checklists are great for reducing errors and should be used in more situations. Of course there is also a question of whether these procedures can be updated. And whether you can improvise in an emergency. You need more training for that. But this doesn't mean checklists are bad. Another example:…

I have never deviated from a recipe in twenty years except for being out of ingredients. And I only have one recipe that I can remember without referring to the printout. Checklists have entirely replaced the need for knowing how to cook and I'm glad.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#512

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #205
emptyfile wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How in the hell??? Is this considered extreme even in america?

I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.

Me too. A public school district I worked at had an entire building to administration. Every person had their own office except HR people. The running joke among a few of us was that we don't have a clue why most of their jobs existed. On that note - it was also the time I read about wasted time at work. The article stated that most people work only 1-2 hours per day and the rest is just filler time with very little productivity. I started tracking my working time to see if it were true and sure enough, most of the day I did nothing other than sit around pretending to be busy. I then made it my mission to observe administrative staff (I worked in IT so I was able to do this) and confirmed that most of them did nothing as well. It was many years later when I started freelancing and billing by the hour that I realized just how few hours people work. I'd work 6 hours a day as a freelancer and I'd be totally exhausted and often thought about the easy days in IT. I think most people greatly overestimate their jobs importance.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#513

Post by nradov »

ansible wrote: post #496
rout39574 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries. Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down.…

> The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries. Our company once was in the same office building as another company that specialized in billing for health care. They would look at the services provided by a doctor's office, and figure out ways to code the procedures performed so that it would maximize the payout from the insurance. Doctors liked it bec…

That's one of the reasons why insurers are moving away from the fee-for-service model toward value-based care. So those bullshit jobs at least will eventually disappear.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#514

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

grimjack00 wrote: post #359
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.

This is why I am highly skeptical every time there's a bill/referendum/whatever to increase the education budget. It's not that I don't care about children and their education; it's that I doubt much of that money will get anywhere near where it needs to go.

Rightfully so. The school district I worked at was incredibly wasteful both staff and resource wise. Seniority, lack of being able to dismiss bad teachers and a slew of other nuecenses makes education a prime target for huge waste of tax dollars. When I confirmed just how little most administrators did for the benefit of the kids, it was difficult not to feel guilty for wasting public tax money. Knowing what I do know, I will never look the same way at the education system.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#515

Post by dvasdekis »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #493
jpttsn wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good being, a smaller number of happier lives? Huh. Anyway, Optimizing for the whole is different than optimizing for the parts. What seems redundant on a high level can be critical on a lower level. To each antilope eating grass is purposeful. As may be the work of each Department in your original example.

Why is the supposition that fewer lives is good controversial? What do we owe the unborn and non existent? Surely in any moral framework, if one could prove that additional organisms in an environment degrade the quality of life for all organisms, then it would be a moral decision (in principle) to reduce by attrition the number of new organisms? I am not arguing for population control as the mechanisms to achieve it…

A moral framework is inherently subjective, so it should be no surprise that the rights of the unborn are considered more important in some than others.

Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan. Buddhists likewise consider all life as sacred, in that an animal may previously/subsequently be a human soul. Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#516

Post by gniv »

wott wrote: post #485
ekianjo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not glossing over things. Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago or even way before in time. We are just acting as spoiled brats.

> Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago I for one would definitely want it. That's my favourite period of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_%C3%89poque and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann%C3%A9es_folles Very active, very interesting times: lots of scientific breakthrough, development of recent theories, lots of experimentations, while a great part of science is still, and for the last ti…

Medicine was definitely not developed enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#517

Post by thsowers »

bena wrote: post #297
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…

Reminds of something I read here not too long ago. From what I understand, it makes the rounds every now and then. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

I hadn't read this before. Thank you so much for sharing, I will cherish this for many decades to come.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#518

Post by jakidud »

browsercoin wrote: post #438
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…

I just would like to add a bit of a warning to anybody reading parent's comment and thinking it's the life-it really isn't what it's cracked up to be. After like a year of doing nothing, like around the 9th month mark, it starts to take a toll. Since my manager was constantly telling me there's not much I need to do other than explain lines of code and what they do in business terms. Often I would prepare something b…

Yes, definitely. If I made it sound like I was having the time of my life, I'm sorry. If you're just starting out in your career, four months of experience is too valuable to pass by. Besides, you'll get bored of all the shit pretty quickly. You'll have nobody to talk to because everyone will have work, and all the websites you can visit will start getting boring and repetitive after a while. And when the time comes that you have to get to work, you'll be out of touch.

I honestly think that free time in office isn't free at all, it's fucking suffocating. You can't work, but you can't have fun either, i.e, have a beer and watch a movie, play videogames (the games on the company playstation are at least a decade old) , hang out with your girlfriend, go for an actual vacation. It's like you're stuck in limbo. You can't do anything productive or fun.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#519

Post by jakidud »

foobarchu wrote: post #381
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…

Bear in mind that this makes you an pretty expendable employee, if management decides they need to get rid of people, you are a prime candidate. One of my past employers was a consulting firm that would have people "on the bench" for weeks to months at a time between clients. When the time comes to get leaner, those who have been "on the bench" the longest are the ideal ones to get rid of, because they're the ones wh…

Yes, this is true. The wierdest part is that my new team lead fucking fought tooth and nail to get me pulled from my previous team. The old lead told him I was needed till at least the newest batch of dev work had been done but the new lead went to the department manager and got me reassigned. And I have no place to sit, even. Makes me wonder if I've been caught in the middle of some kind of management power play.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#520

Post by retox »

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…

You could at least work on that site/app/comic/book you've always wanted to put together.
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