I used to think corporations strive to reduce costs and therefore keep their workforce to the minimum necessary. Now my theory is that managers in a company try to maximize their influence and standing and this is mostly done by making sure they have as many people below them as possible. Therefore they hire consitantly for their teams and create new sub-hierarchies below them.<p>If this is the case, the obvious side effect is the emergence of bullshit jobs as the purpose of hiring is not primarely to finish work but to increase power of managers in corporations.
My favorite Bullshit Job was my very own. There was an employee that was hired only because, well I couldn't say No during the interview.<p>He had nothing to do so they turned him into a human website health checker. He had a page with dozens of iframes of all our websites. He would spend the day refreshing the page, reloading the iframes in intervals. If any failed to load he would report them.<p>Not knowing what the page was for, i was asked to automate refreshing each iframe after an interval. This meant, he wouldn't have to click the reload button anymore. Just sit and wait until a website failed. I thought his job was bullshit. Until, I realized that I had just automated a bullshit job.<p>Longer version: <a href="https://idiallo.com/blog/the-40-million-dollar-job" rel="nofollow">https://idiallo.com/blog/the-40-million-dollar-job</a>
"Accordingly, over time, the prosperity extracted from technological advances has been reinvested into industry and consumer growth for its own sake rather than the purchase of additional leisure time from work."<p>This is what annoy me most, and why I don't want to go back to working in an office.
I can't name a single job I've taken that was not a bullshit job. Ironically the better it pays, the more bullshit it is.<p>I made some good money on these jobs, but I always hated them. I can't think of a single product I worked on (as an employee) that is objectively net positive value to society.<p>Sure, it has some customers, but these customers are other corporations that are doing bullshit business. The end users themselves probably hate the product.<p>The only things I worked on that I felt had some positive value to society where things I ended up put out there for free.<p>This might be cynical but now I think a large segment of the economy is just bullshit excuses to circulate money around.
The definition of “bullshit jobs” is fuzzy. Middle managers are extremely important. Corporate compliance officers exist to represent the interests of external stakeholders in a company.<p>I’m sure many people resent having to go to compliance training every week (in some highly regulated jobs).<p>But it’s not bullshit work.
UBI is probably not the antidote. UBI would not cover rent in many places and the existence of UBI would likely be yet another bullshit excuse for not addressing our housing issues.<p>Address basics like our housing issues and universal healthcare and the need for bullshit jobs would go way down.
I worked for the government, no one was doing anything. But everyone was stressed and super busy.<p>I automated two teams of peoples work load, and they said we can't use your code because that's not how it works, the goal is to spend budget and hire more people, so we get more budget next year.
Graeber said that maintaining and repairing software is a bullshit job because you can just write it correctly the first time.<p>Yeah thanks genius, we're all out here intentionally writing bugs just to keep ourselves employed.<p>This from a man who developed his theory over a decade from a short essay to widespread social research to talks and interviews then finally to a book. Why didn't he just write the final book the first time?<p>Graeber's theory is the only thing that is bullshit here. May his theory rest in peace with him.
We've discussed this before.<p>In [1], dang has a list of over a dozen past discussions for it [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23749722" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23749722</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23750755" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23750755</a>
I have a high voted comment from 2018 on this subject, which I wont repost here, as I don't need the karma, but if you are interested:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875314" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875314</a>
It's very sad to see how many people admitting they have bullshit jobs in this thread. They almost seem proud of it as well. You would think that, given the choice, (yes, many of us technical people DO have a choice) people would strive to do something meaningful in their jobs rather than just scoop up a paycheck every month while doing bullshit. It feels like some people have simply "given up" even though they are probably capable of finding something better.
When I first read this book I was working at a company building a product that no one used. The company was propped up by investors and eventually folded. It's not a great feeling developing something that no one will miss when it disappears.
Can we talk about bs computing jobs? Some people have the great job of constantly rewriting their sites in the lastest "design language" or even framework. Can we call it bs job?
Bullshit jobs is bullshit. Sure when tasked with some interminablely dull task it can sure feel like bullshit, but the reality is no firm pays for headcount unless it absolutely has to. Large organisations by the nature need a fair amount of box ticking and other admin to allow management visibility and control over an organisations' activities.