>This has come to be known as principal-agent theory (or incentives theory), and is the foundational structure that most corporations are built upon today. Pay people more, and motivation should follow naturally.<p>This is where the article breaks down for me. This is definitely not what corporations do outside of the executive class.<p>The norm is attempting to drive pay and wages <i>down</i> as much as possible, sans a few exceptions. I think this is actually how it <i>used</i> to be until sometime in the mid 1980s when financialization took off in earnest and union power started to significantly decline.<p>EDIT: Here's an anecdote I experienced. When I was younger in college I got a job working nights at a FedEx Office. I did really well there, working full time and it accommodated my hours, and leadership took notice. One day, they pull me aside, and ask how they can help incentivize things. Before I could answer they said "The only rule is it can't be about money. Money is off the table". I told them that if money is off the table, then what are we talking about exactly? They didn't give me a straight answer, only they couldn't increase my wage. This to me is further evidence of how untrue this statement is.<p>FWIW, to complete the story, I left a short while later, and started working at Apple which lead to one of the most amazing lucky breaks I've ever had in my career
The overwhelming majority of people work because they realistically have no choice but to work.<p>There is no amount of neoliberal salad dressing that you can douse that with to make it more palatable to anyone.<p>Doing shit because you have no choice but to do it sucks, period.
I didn’t see any actual examples of a high paying bullshit job cited. I don’t think they are common.<p>I have known one fellow who was given a job as a sort of fake project manager. He was perplexed over why he would be given work and then told not to do much of it, while the real decisions and administration remained with others.<p>Then he realized it was because this was a consulting company that made its profit from every billable hour he worked.<p>So, yeah, it happens, but it’s not some grand phenomenon.
The ending of this is great. If you've got a job that pays decently but offers no satisfaction, the solution is a SIDE HUSTLE. Not a fulfilling hobby, not volunteering to improve your community, not even raising a family - all things that have provided satisfaction to <i>countless</i> people with well-paying-but-meh jobs over the history of office work. None of these things exist in the world of Usagi Sararīman, only MORE WORK.
I used to think that the older I got, the easier it would be to knuckle down and get an hour or two of meaningless work done so I could move on to something more important or interesting. But actually the opposite has been the case, possibly due to overall declining energy levels.
If you work at a for-profit corporation, your job will be pointless, because the only reason it exists is to generate profits. It's as simple as that.<p>We all need to make a living, so pick something you're reasonably good at, absolutely do not invest yourself emotionally into it, and use the proceeds to do what you really want to do. Exploit your employer every chance you get, because that is their default approach towards you.
reminds me of this charles bukowski quote<p>> “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
I know this is not what this article is chiefly about, but I have always found the bullsh!t jobs argument lame. Sure, I have met plenty of people who just spin their wheels for money, but to me that is always just bad management. In my experience even at a mature company, there is always a mountain of real work to do even if some people are avoiding it.
The answer is obvious: do the absolute minimum you need to do to not get fired while you find meaning outside of work, look for something else, or both.
This article a bad job of gluing together various ideas (Principal/agent problem, the motivational effects of money, so called Bullshit jobs etc) and does it via unfounded assertions (that people are paid more as they're promoted in order to motivate them for instance or that society actually considers teachers important).<p>It's like the musing of a drunken co-worker after too many post-work drinks.<p>More thinking and editing please, less keyboard-diarrhea!
pay me lots of money to do nothing? sign me up!<p>sadly, in a long career, this <i>never</i> happened to me. most well-run companies are always looking at ways of getting rid of dead wood.<p>i thought this article was BS, and went on too long.
0 - In real life, that "pointless" service job is a critical need for people and that's why it exists.<p>1 - When any job becomes truly pointless it ceases to exist.<p>2 - I look forward to what jobs we'll have when these service jobs have been mostly automated away