The Rise of the Bullshittery

Most people create a profile and update it when they're job searching, but they don't visit LinkedIn or interact with the feed at all.

These days I'm wondering whether even that matters anymore. Fastest way to get rich these days seems to be insider trading, scams, onlyfans, leveraging addictions etc.

The first two are actual real effects of the complex world that we live in. Go back 150 years or so ago and most jobs were not bullshit jobs. That is, humanity spent most of its time trying to feed and clothe ourselves and if you weren't one of the few people with money then "not starving next winter" was pretty high on your list of priorities in working.

With the rise of industrialization, mechination, and transportation most of our needs can be met pretty easily (if society optimizes itself for that is a totally different story). It is highly that your job at this point has anything to do with continued human survival and instead you're working on some kind of revenue generation for some company.

This couples well with enshittification. It took a good part of said industrial revolution to learn how to make things of all kinds and make them reliably. But it turns out too much reliability isn't profitable over the long term. Getting your customer on an upgrade treadmill where they constantly give you more money makes you huge. You'll be able to get huge loans and buy up your reliable competition.

The way I think about it is that building something truly successful comes with a tremendous amount of momentum. So much momentum that growth for these companies still occurs.

The people hired into a mature organization are literally there just to keep the lights on and let the momentum do its work. They also create and grow their little fiefdoms.

You can try and build something and innovate there, but it takes a deeply concerted effort to try and sustain it. Even if something is made wildly successful and is growing 50-100% year over year, it still likely pales in comparison to the 0.005% growth of the large core business.

Even if the new innovation is given space to breath, it can be killed at any point by the core business as the fiefdoms look over and say: that should be part of my org, or those resources can be better spent on the core business. So instead of waiting the years it takes for the new, small thing to grow large enough to be important it is easily killed by the parts of the organization just keeping the lights on.