Bullshit Jobs

The term for this, in case anyone is curious, is Chesterton's Fence.

> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

- G.K. Chesterton.

Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go?

Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there.

The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away.

I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".

Also, many institutions have a vast portfolio of real estate. This takes more man power to manage that a similarly valued portfolio of financial instruments traded on wall street.

In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?

and

It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? bosses? investors?

People aren't exactly that stupid. Its really more on the lines of malice.

I remember in my first job, it was a big IT services company in Bangalore, India. Our manager created some project initiatives to align corporate initiatives on the lines of 'Promoting Green Technologies'. Two or three people in the evening/night would stay behind and check if people's desktops were on. Mostly people just locked the computers and went home. This was necessary because many people kept IDE's and many other work related stuff running, coming back morning and redoing all that for an hour or two was a waste of time.

But these bunch of three would go around and see if someone's desktop was still powered on. They could then turn off the switch(hard turn off) on the wall socket. Next day people would come and then be mightily surprised finding all their unsaved work, or work state itself wiped out.

After a lot of fights and arguments. They decided they would just send reports instead of turning it off. The reports would then act as way of shaming people for 'wasting energy'. They eventually even got around to automating it.

Months later we saw, It was nothing about promoting green technologies or saving the earth or anything. The three people who were doing it were the manager's pet, and he wanted to promote them. He thought having a line item on 'corporate goal achievement' on their promotion packets would further their cause well. Then we saw those three get promoted over the real people were actually building stuff and delivering things.

Generally when these things happen in a company you need to think on the opposite lines of Heinlein's Razor. Some one somewhere has hiring quotas and budgets, some one is getting promoted, or getting a bonus or getting paid well for bringing up these stupid policies and jobs.

Things exist because there is an incentive for them to exist.