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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#91

Post by wastedhours »

bambataa wrote: post #85
wastedhours wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs! 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 univers…

The link between doing useful work and being paid for it is broken in these cases, just noone openly admits it. So why not make it explicit and stop requiring people to pretend to work to get paid?

That we should! Let's hear some concrete implementation ideas as to how we can make it work without just making swathes of people redundant without something else in place (and that can't be swept away by party politics 4 years down the line).

There's lots of smart people on HN, but the default reaction to everything is "automate! efficiency! the market!" and then "something, something, UBI!".

A secure bullshit job that puts food on the table and scratch in your bank account is better than all of the alternatives proposed to now. Not saying it can't be solved, and would love to work getting there too, but it's a hard problem where the solution needs to be sustainable outside of flaky social security.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#92

Post by guptarohit »

guptarohit wrote: post #89
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…

100% agree!!

I believe all this is part of evolution.. thing to come after the current(human).

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#93

Post by IanSanders »

Radim wrote: post #78
IanSanders wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons >term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resour…

I am familiar with both; what's the connection in particular? That patterns organize along least-energy principles and propagate by extracting resources from surrounding energy gradients is almost a tautology. I'm genuinely curious what you're disagreeing with.

I disagree that people and societies organize by efficiency and how well they reduce energy across time. In fact the two almost contradict each other. People organize based on individual/egotistical "efficiency", and not the efficiency of the system/society.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#94

Post by shoo »

Animats wrote: post #18

University administrators.[1] Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators . No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff. Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land,…

"the purpose of a system is what it does"

"the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#95

Post by d--b »

> people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals

There's something about the idea of ritual indeed. Well found

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#96

Post by ramblerman »

Radim wrote: post #16

People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"? Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement? I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you ), but whether something is sustainable and make…

> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency,

This is meaningless if you leave out the goal though. Efficiency for what, food distribution? What's the function around which we are optimizing.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#97

Post by asmithmd1 »

Gys wrote: post #80

I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.…

Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#98

Post by majewsky »

groestl wrote: post #53
citation_please wrote: post #37

Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?". In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you…

It seems, for lack of unit tests, real-life almost never removes code from bureaucracies, and achieves efficiency only by replacing the whole organization.

By the way, I think this is why communism failed. I don't think their error was for companies to be state-owned. The problem was that, in the pursuit of efficiency, they merged all companies in a sector into one combine, thus making it impossible to replace (today we would say "too big to fail").

Maybe the communist/socialist bloc would've been more successful if they had retained multiple state-owned corporations in each sector and allowed for competition between them.

Disclaimer: I was born in 1989, so everything I know about communist/socialist economy, I know from books or from talking to my parents.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#100

Post by feverfew »

mumin-abu-jamal wrote: post #88
ekianjo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a bleak perspective on things. As human beings we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food, and we ha e never had as much disposable income as now to be able to enjoy more things out of work. And your view can be easily reverted. We have never had as many interesting jobs as now. And centuries before us you had to do what your parents did and you had a miserable life any…

"we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food" We actually have less free time compared to hunter-gatherers. http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html

But what was there to do with this free time?
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