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Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

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Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#61

Post by Carpetsmoker »

Joeri wrote: post #46
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.

Many countries are suffering from a shortage of teachers. Yet in spite of this, salaries aren't rising. This isn't really explained by simple "supply and demand".

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#62

Post by skookumchuck »

bartread wrote: post #59
skookumchuck wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's much like that "cultural appropriation" absurdity.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#63

Post by scarejunba »

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.…

About the one difference between people who live in NYC and people who live elsewhere is that the former always prefix their questions with "As someone who lives in NYC,". They're sort of like college mothers, members of the armed forces attending university, or vegans.

I'm somewhat of the opinion that the people you're talking about will have considered answers to the so-called proper questions you have. It may be that they need to think to answer some.

Constructing some fictional individual who's bullshitting on LinkedIn and then tearing them down is top-shelf insecure behaviour.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#65

Post by DATACOMMANDER »

thatoneuser wrote: post #56
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…

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, wer…

I have a strong hunch that human evolution has been accelerating for quite some time. I can’t back this up with citations, but intuitively, as fitness becomes more complex, adaptations should spread faster (and maladaptations should disappear faster). This is of course partly counteracted by the presumably much higher percentage of individuals that reproduce in a civilized environment compared to a pre-civilized environment, but the dawn of civilization by no means brought about full reproductive parity. It seems to be taken for granted that cultural evolution largely replaced genetic evolution circa 10,000 years ago, but I highly doubt it. It seems much more likely to me that cultural evolution has been taking place alongside accelerated genetic evolution.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#66

Post by danmaz74 »

blfr wrote: post #44
danmaz74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that, of those orders of magnitude, some came out of innumerable penny savings accumulated over 200 years.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#67

Post by coldtea »

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.

>An employer profitably exchanges wages for labor. That profit is the economic value. If this weren't true, then all businesses would be bankrupt.

The fact that you can have a net profit doesn't mean you operate anywhere near 100% efficiently, or that you don't have tons of BS jobs. After a point of profit, wages are only a tiny part of the cost of a company.

Besides industries and companies get bailed out, VC money pay for tons of useless jobs (and/or indulgences) and then companies crash, etc.

Not to mention: we're not looking for economic value, but to value to society. You can make a good profit in all kinds of leechey businesses too.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#68

Post by coldtea »

sowbug wrote: post #54
TeMPOraL wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that TFA is about "meaningless jobs" not "profitless" ones.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#69

Post by halfastack »

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…

Well, I personally like it to just satisfy my curiosity about what are some of my friends and coworkers up to. Generally, I am quite curious about what is my friend/coworker/ex-coworker/... doing, and I am genuinely happy when someone I know gets promoted, or gets a new job.

Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

#70

Post by scawf »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #61
Joeri wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many countries are suffering from a shortage of teachers. Yet in spite of this, salaries aren't rising. This isn't really explained by simple "supply and demand".

It is. If the salaries were raising, the supply would follow.
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