Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#2> I was updating my [LinkedIn] profile because not doing it would raise more questions.
Is this true in anyone's experience? I've worked at banks for a long time and I've never had anyone ever bring up my Linked In profile, despite being connected to many of my colleagues. I doubt anyone is carefully watching my profile apart from the occasional check to see if I'm still at the bank or what location I am. I don't feel any pressure to update it. People just don't care in my experience, or maybe they don't care at my non-management level.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#3It’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. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be pretty terrible in the past too.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#4> I was updating my [LinkedIn] profile because not doing it would raise more questions. Is this true in anyone's experience? I've worked at banks for a long time and I've never had anyone ever bring up my Linked In profile, despite being connected to many of my colleagues. I doubt anyone is carefully watching my profile apart from the occasional check to see if I'm still at the bank or what location I am. I don't fee…
I think the whole LinkedIn angle was a vehicle to get the author's points across, and they are a realistic experience on the platform. The entire model seems to be built on company loyalists pushing their employer's latest "innovations." I don't think anyone in the real world assigns any importance to LinkedIn profiles.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#5It’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. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to b…
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 degree in hand and say "Yes, this one lifetime career path is just for me and I'll take it!"? It's not 1952 any more. I don't know why anybody younger than I am still believes that any of this is real.
You don't have a career, you have a job. You shall change jobs throughout your life. The moment the word "loyalty" is uttered you should laugh as you run as far away as reasonable if not possible. I am open to thinking otherwise.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#6This is a well written piece and I agree that self-diagnosing your own job as bullshit in a complex environment is not a great path forward. I also agree that a good portion of jobs that serve the "metabolism" do create economic value in an attributable sense.
The truth, though, it probably somewhere in between. Operations management tools exist to cut down on bullshit (inefficiency) and goal posts are moving so fast that it's making a lot of room for bullshit jobs, however they might be defined. Businesses are certainly not optimized, and there's a clear difference between, for example, needlessly delegating tasks as your sole responsibility, and actually serving to complete those tasks (at likely a fraction of the pay).
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#7It’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. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to b…
> actually do create economic value
This is just another opinion though; an opinion based on generalizing value on as broad a dataset as individuals across an economy. The author may be right in some cases, but so might be many employees. What's still missing from this conversation are methodologies for identifying and articulating individual value from leadership, down to the individual whose job it is.
One possible solution (from my own career perspective) is solving a rampant issue with "management" being a step in a career path rather than a career in its own right, promoting functional employees based on tenure rather than their ability to manage (and manage _people_, not projects and tasks). In practice, this results in micro-managing at the expense of vision, creative freedom, and general flow, replacing it with anxiety across the board and employees slipping into a "peace and pay" mindset (or worse yet, hopping jobs every couple years as is the trend, only to experience similar conditions).
At the end of the day, no one wants bullshit jobs. So whether that's remedied via better management, or molding it into a better job, some kind of action needs to address this considering how much Graeber’s original article resonated with, well, far too many people.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#8> I was updating my [LinkedIn] profile because not doing it would raise more questions. Is this true in anyone's experience? I've worked at banks for a long time and I've never had anyone ever bring up my Linked In profile, despite being connected to many of my colleagues. I doubt anyone is carefully watching my profile apart from the occasional check to see if I'm still at the bank or what location I am. I don't fee…
I think the whole LinkedIn angle was a vehicle to get the author's points across, and they are a realistic experience on the platform. The entire model seems to be built on company loyalists pushing their employer's latest "innovations." I don't think anyone in the real world assigns any importance to LinkedIn profiles.
It’s going to vary by manager/position/industry/etc. A social media marketer is going to have their social accounts looked at by hiring managers. For programmers, LinkedIn might be yet another datum to break an offer, and another place to look.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#9Picking 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 advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.
Is squeezing most sales per advertising campaign or saving a few pennies per unit delivered of a mass market product really worth what the economy is willing to pay for that? Does it really make sense to make that kind of optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have meaningful value?
It is really hard to measure bullshit jobs specifically, but it might be more easy and meaningful to try to characterize this strange gradient where abstracted work that is distant from people has value far beyond the simple and necessary basics of human social function. Worry less about the bullshit label and try coming up with a measure more like dollars lost per human life improved.
Re: Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
#10This article, while well written, doesn't bring anything to the table, other than poking the obvious holes in someone else's mediocre work.
The reason people feel like what they're involved in is bullshit, is because it is. There is no grand conspiracy.
It's bullshit so much of the time is because people are more interested in succeeding personally, than in not screwing things up for tens, hundreds, millions, billions, of others.
Is your job bullshit? Then quit and get a potentially lower paying job that is less bullshit. Have you done that? No? End of debate. If you actually can't afford to get paid any less, you are not busy moaning about your job being bullshit. People in survival mode are hustling, not moaning.
This is not news and there is no cure that doesn't involve re-structuring, which always involves many at the very least getting their life ruined. Re-structuring doesn't guarantee that things get better, only that they change. Until by some miracle, intelligent people with integrity end up at the top, have enough power to cut heads, get away with it and understand that it's necessary, nothing is going to really change. It'll merely re-structure.
Capitalism today, communism tomorrow, we're still dumb, selfish apes that are largely uninterested in the welfare of others unless it directly affects us. Most people I know didn't start to care about anyone other than themselves until they had children. Now they care about themselves and their children - so we have private schools instead of improving the school system. Selfish to the bone, this will not change.