Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work

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 advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.<p>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?<p>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.

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.<p>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 deleted all of my other social media accounts long ago. I have the email or phone number of everyone I need to be in contact with. I had a chat about this with a friend who himself is a founder of a company and uses LinkedIn to keep track of developments inside his work network. It made me wonder whether I’d done the right thing.<p>Can anyone here who isn’t a recruiter or employer say that it’s worth having a LinkedIn profile?

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. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation &#x2F; 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.

The key to BS jobs is that even though the person doing it is being paid by someone who values it in some sense, it feels utterly senseless that someone values it.<p>I know a lot of people who work in the consulting industry (As in Big4, MBB, etc). None of them are starving, and someone seems to want to pay them to work. But zero of them can see why there&#x27;s any point in their work. Whatever the purported reason for a project, it always seems at least wasteful, and at worst deceptive.<p>The other part of it is that a BS job can only be hard due to unreasonable constraints. If you just plod away on your powerpoint slides, they will eventually be finished. It only gets stressful because someone is telling you it needs to be done before the sun comes up. Chances are your client also isn&#x27;t listening when you do the presentation, so that&#x27;s fine as well.<p>Interesting jobs like coding can fail for the same reasons, but they aren&#x27;t the only reasons. You can design a cloud solution badly, even if you had a lot of time to think about it. Your ML model can... be no better than chance. Even if you have a phd in it.<p>That possibility of real failure I haven&#x27;t seen in the discussion yet.

see also Gervais Principle: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;10&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;10&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-gervais-principle-...</a><p>edit: elaborating a little on why I referenced the Gervais Principle:<p>It&#x27;s an interesting guide to understand the relationship between executives, middle-management, and the worker&#x2F;producers and the relationship each has with &quot;The organization&quot;.<p>Per the gervais principle, a lot of the bullshit job phenomenon is explained through the relationship an employee has with reality and the organization in which they work.<p>In gervais, the sociopaths at the top (executives) and the losers at the bottom (actual producers of some value) both have some grasp on reality - whereas the clueless middle are full of cognitive dissonance about the reality of their position and loyalty to the idea of the organization. So, IMHO, the clueless category, in moments of honesty are the ones most likely to call out their position as a &quot;bullshit&quot; job.

I have noticed that spending time on LinkedIn makes me very unhappy. It’s on the same level as Insta or Facebook. It’s either ads, or people posting trivial insights, or, non-substance reading recommendations. It’s depressing. The only reasons I’m not deleting are: it’s a nice address book for business contacts and a good source for finding people&#x2F;to be found.

The LinkedIn angle doesn&#x27;t contribute to the other points, and even as framing it doesn&#x27;t help. While the stuff put on there may be fictitious and the interactions with it are just signalling, it doesn&#x27;t relate to the observation that many people seem to place a higher significance on their work than just a paycheck, or that they expect some degree of fulfillment, a chance to make an impact, or an opportunity to leverage their experience and relationships for later gain.<p>This mainstream self-actualization of work is probably an artifact of knowledge work moving from the domain of the intellectual elites towards the masses, which broadened the prospects of people beyond working on the fields or factories for a lifetime. Two generations of this during an economic boom created a recipe that was immortalized in culture, but didn&#x27;t work as well this time, and the ones who were spoonfed the dogma are still reeling from the bust, while the ones who were rich enough or lucky enough have made it through fine. The angst about the lack of job-related fulfillment transcends generations, but it mixes with the realization that they likely can&#x27;t leverage their job experience and relationships to advance forward. And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum, people aren&#x27;t blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.<p>Nonetheless, we shouldn&#x27;t conflate intellectual fulfillment with financial security, and their respective lack thereof. People earning well who feel professionally unfulfilled have options to find something they like more, without the crushing pressure of needing uninterrupted income. And those engaged in fulfilling work with tangible impacts can get paid peanuts; in these cases it&#x27;s often their emotional attachment to their work that keeps them going. It&#x27;s most unfortunate when the two conditions coincide. But it should also not come as a surprise, as there&#x27;s no morality in the economic system itself; rather, all money being paid out is coming from somewhere else, because somewhere someone thinks it&#x27;s where it should go. The people in bullshit jobs wish they were in control, but control is harder to come by than money. Others on a different tier of Maslow&#x27;s just wish for money, and so on.

Self-actualized, high-value, &quot;expert&quot; labor (surgeon, physicist, business owner), requires a person willing to work hard, relatively abstract motivations (prestige, memory of a loved one, etc), with a potentially unlimited ability to delay gratification.<p>Self-actualized, high-value, &quot;skilled&quot; labor (nurse, programmer), requires a person willing to work, motivations are varied, some requirement to delay gratification, but not limitless.<p>Weakly-actualized, minimal-value, minimally-skilled labor (bar tender, data entry &quot;content&quot; producer), requires minimal willingness to work (&quot;just keep a roof over my head, please&quot;), motivations are varied in direction and caliber, minimal requirement to delay gratification (but may paradoxically suffer severe lack of gratification relative to the surgeon by age 50)<p>Weakly-actualized, low-value, minimally skilled labor (Guatamalan mountain family growing what they eat, contributing minimally if at all to external society): requires minimal motivation (external motivation to survive is entirely sufficient), gratification isn&#x27;t even an issue. Ref (1)<p>De-humanizing, moderate-value, unskilled labor (Guatamalan working in a concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa). Requires tremendous motivation to get to Mount Pleasant, gratification is highly delayed (scrap by, send all money home, hope it gets there). You can imagine how these immigrants&#x27; children become doctors and business owners. Ref (1)<p>My apologies for those who suffer in the &quot;bullshit job&quot; economy. Maybe at some point you&#x27;ll be the director of a PR firm or something. I would point out though that if you want a &quot;strong storyline&quot; to your life, there are options. Moving to Guatamala being one of them.<p>(1) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18800808" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18800808</a>

This 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 &quot;metabolism&quot; do create economic value in an attributable sense.<p>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&#x27;s making a lot of room for bullshit jobs, however they might be defined. Businesses are certainly not optimized, and there&#x27;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).

&gt; I was updating my [LinkedIn] profile because not doing it would raise more questions.<p>Is this true in anyone&#x27;s experience? I&#x27;ve worked at banks for a long time and I&#x27;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&#x27;m still at the bank or what location I am. I don&#x27;t feel any pressure to update it. People just don&#x27;t care in my experience, or maybe they don&#x27;t care at my non-management level.

Working longer hours has many drawbacks <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;24&#x2F;americans-need-to-take-a-break" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;24&#x2F;americans-need...</a>

Interesting, I was thinking that there are whole &#x27;bullshit industry&#x27; such as the fashion industry,but in fact it&#x27;s not really the same thing: the fashion industry is useful for clothes makers to convince clients to buy new clothes that they don&#x27;t need..

This article, while well written, doesn&#x27;t bring anything to the table, other than poking the obvious holes in someone else&#x27;s mediocre work.<p>The reason people feel like what they&#x27;re involved in is bullshit, is because it is. There is no grand conspiracy.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>This is not news and there is no cure that doesn&#x27;t involve re-structuring, which always involves many at the very least getting their life ruined. Re-structuring doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s necessary, nothing is going to really change. It&#x27;ll merely re-structure.<p>Capitalism today, communism tomorrow, we&#x27;re still dumb, selfish apes that are largely uninterested in the welfare of others unless it directly affects us. Most people I know didn&#x27;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.

&quot;Arendt’s notion is that labor—the realm of metabolism, maintenance, and consumption—has colonized and supplanted work—the realm of craft, fabrication, and use. &quot;<p>Could somebody explain what this sentence means?