On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the &quot;ruling class&quot; sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them.<p>To give credit where it&#x27;s due, I first saw this credible argument on michaelochurch&#x27;s (now sadly inactive) blog [1], and he may well have originated it. Here it is, in a better explanation than I could provide:<p>&quot;The Marketing and Sales Treadmill<p>In the modern world [...] there are no unexploited resources and no surplus jobs to be had processing those resources. [The worker] needs a job, but their labor is surplus and unnecessary.<p>[...T]he most common path is that our prospective worker enters the sales and marketing business. [...] Even engineering focused companies like Facebook have more sales people than engineers. [...] So everyone’s energy is focused on imagining some gimmick – a six bladed razor, a beer can that turns blue when [it&#x27;s] cold, a funny talking gecko – that gives someone a reason to give you money when there is no real differentiation based on product value.<p>The sales and marketing economy is zero sum. Each business must work harder and harder at new tag lines, gizmos, tricks, and jingles. And when sales guys at the other company work harder, you must work harder too.<p>Past writers who imagined the future thought that as machines saved our time, we would have more time for leisure. That has not happened. Instead [...] we must work in sales and marketing to convince someone with money to trade cash for our trinket, so that we can have purchasing power to access the natural bounty of the land. [...] The future is here, and it is the sales desk at Dunder Mifflin.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-economy/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;intellectual-detox.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;14&#x2F;rent-seeking-econom...</a>

Some of what people want is positive-sum: Books, aquariums, theater showings, even cars. As we get more productive, the amount of time you need to work for these decreases.<p>A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance.<p>This is, I believe, a large part of why working hours aren&#x27;t going down. You could work less, but then you&#x27;d lose out to someone who doesn&#x27;t.

We need to distinguish between two separate, tangentially related issues: bullshit <i>jobs</i> and bullshit <i>hours</i>.<p>Most of the classes of jobs mentioned in this piece are not, in and of themselves, entirely bullshit. Rather, the idea that each of these people actually needs to be in the office, pretending to be continually and evenly busy, for 50+ hours a week -- that&#x27;s bullshit. Work ebbs and flows in a very different way for each type of job; it is not evenly distributed across the day or week. The belief that it is leads us to create busywork, the dread and bane of all office workers.<p>We are struggling to unshackle ourselves from the remnants of the old, industrial workweek, which was developed around assembly lines at automobile factories. Most of us aren&#x27;t building Model T&#x27;s anymore. And yet, we have laws and&#x2F;or employment contracts charting mandatory minimum workweeks, mandatory minimum hours per day, etc.<p>Some jobs really do require 40, 50, or even more hours per week. Many, and I&#x27;d dare say most, do not. Especially the white-collar administrative and &quot;paper pushing&quot; positions mentioned in this article. The jobs themselves aren&#x27;t unnecessary (at least not in reasonable quantity), but the idea that <i>all jobs are normalized around the same schedule</i> is absolute lunacy.

(wanted to post this on the website, but the comments system is off)<p>I&#x27;ve found this article both entertaining and insightful; there&#x27;s one big hypothesis in it which I find unnecessary, though: the conspiracy theory, making it a fight between dominant classes and actual wealth producers.<p>If we call &quot;bureaucracies&quot; the collectives which consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth out of it, then those bureaucracies are best understood as a life form, distinct from the homo sapiens individuals which serve it. You need to see them as a whole, for the same reason as why you can&#x27;t make sense out of an animal if you mainly see it as the sum of its individual cells.<p>From a biologist&#x27;s point of view, they need to compete for resources, they show some adaptability, they reproduce themselves with some amount of mutation: they have everything needed to benefit from Darwinian selection, and they do.<p>The resulting current generation of bureaucracies has evolved a very good effectiveness at diverting resources, from other consumers including humans, towards themselves (that is, maintaining and growing the bureaucracy itself).<p>As a result, they exhibit many &quot;intelligent&quot; traits, including some selfish sense of purpose. Conspiracy theorists wrongly look for The Man, the mastermind driving bureaucracies. There&#x27;s none, no more than there&#x27;s a single neuron nor small group thereof which drives your brains: a complex enough bureaucracy has a non-human mind of its own.<p>Keynes was right about the amount of work we&#x27;d need, what he failed to predict is a phenomenon very similar to eutrophisation: we dream of full employment when we don&#x27;t need to, so we produce much more &quot;nutrients&quot; (people willing to offer their workforce) than we can use for survival and human enjoyment. So instead of being consumed by&#x2F;for homo sapiens, this energy is consumed by that competing life form that are bureaucracies.

I was with him all the way until <i>&quot;The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger</i>&quot;. The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least.<p>The &#x27;ruling class&#x27; really doesn&#x27;t care if anybody is or isn&#x27;t working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody who is unemployed as some kind of failure. When a child gets out of school they need to find work or they have failed. If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide. This has nothing to do with someone forcing people to work and everything to do with the human brain&#x27;s need for purpose forcing working - even if that work is pointless. For example, you often hear someone say with pride how they have worked so much they don&#x27;t have time to eat or sleep even when the work they are doing is something like filling out pointless bureaucratic paperwork.<p><i>&quot;How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?&quot;</i><p>Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. They&#x27;ll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value.

&gt; <i>It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)</i><p>We&#x27;d probably lead full, rich and happy lives until we were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from an unexpectedly dirty telephone.

For those that don&#x27;t know, this is the same David Graeber [1] who wrote &quot;Debt: The first 5000 years&quot; [2].<p>&quot;Debt&quot; is a pretty great book, and I recommend others read it. At least, I found it illuminating to the popular concept of debt, the historical idea, and its ramifications.<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;David_Graeber</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Debt:_The_First_5000_Years</a>

I liked the article but there is no conundrum here:<p>&gt; the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people<p>Yes, people are not paid in accordance to the direct tangible benefit their work brings. Salaries are broadly determined by the same laws of supply and demand that determine prices for other stuff.<p>Tube workers are not seen as worthy of high compensation, or high-status in general, because people believe, correctly or not, that it&#x27;s easy to do the job. On the other hand, programmers usually command high wages, despite being viewed as nerds and rather low-status, because it&#x27;s hard to replace one.<p>Some professions may have an artificially constricted supply, through regulations for example, which throws those observations off a bit.<p>&gt; It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers<p>I&#x27;d argue that if you replaced school teachers with babysitters, the only catastrophe would be all those damaged egos.

&quot;<i>The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger</i>&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t know what to call this fallacy, but it needs a name. In a way it&#x27;s similar to saying &quot;nature abhors a vacuum,&quot; &quot;this evolutionary strategy aims to&quot;, &quot;the market will..&quot; etc. Those are all personifying emergent phenomenons. They are non person things that behave amusingly as if they have a personality. The &quot;ruling class&quot; is different though because it is made of of people. I don&#x27;t think the author is trying to suggest thousands (or millions) or people conspired to make &quot;the masses&quot; waste 30 hours per week on motivational seminars, but using that language makes it sound like he is, sort of, without committing to it too much.<p>Worse, it absolves one from exploring the most interesting part of this argument. If There is a literal conspiracy, who? how? details, please. If it&#x27;s a metaphor for some sort of emergent phenomenon, explore that. What are the forces at work that make this happen. Is it the proliferation of zero (or small) sum games like litigation or advertising? Is it about opaque performance in modern snowflake jobs? This is the most interesting part of the discussion and &quot;<i>The ruling class has</i>&quot; just absolves the writer of addressing it.

Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70&#x27;s -<p>&quot;We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.&quot;

<a href="http://paste.ie/view/de115ebd" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paste.ie&#x2F;view&#x2F;de115ebd</a> Cached version (black on back text was all that was show from Googel Cache, this is a bit more readable ) as strikermag seems to be having issues at the moment

I&#x27;ve found myself thinking about this a lot lately. I don&#x27;t know about corporate law, but I can certainly see many jobs becoming obsolete in the not-so-distant future. Automation is advancing and accelerating like never before, and that is a good thing. Of course, this means fewer workers are needed. Factor in population growth, and this quickly becomes a major issue.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people bring up basic income when such concerns are raised. I myself am undecided on how effective it would be, but it seems like now is a good time for conversation on the matter to begin.

I really enjoyed this piece. Very thought provoking. I only have one issue and that is the question of what causes pointless jobs.<p>Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition. To some extent there is some support for that. One of Hilaire Belloc&#x27;s complaints about the early welfare state was that it would effectively chain people to corporate work.<p>But I don&#x27;t think it is the whole or even the primary driver. One of the most interesting books I think one can read is &quot;The Collapse of Complex Civilizations&quot; by Joseph Tainter (another anthropology professor) who suggests that the rise of these sorts of paper pushing jobs is caused not by a desire to keep the poor poor and dependent on work (something early Capitalists like Adam Smith advocated outright) but as an overall measure of complexity. These are coordination jobs. They have become at once pointless and necessary.<p>Take for example Graeber&#x27;s example of corporate lawyers. These jobs are needed because we have seen an explosion in the complexity of corporate law. Corporate lawyers thus effectively pilot a corporation through hazardous legal waters (with the officers still nominally at the helm). The job is BS. The job is necessary because we had problems and passed laws, and now everyone needs corporate lawyers.<p>Interestingly Graeber&#x27;s view is much more optimistic than Tainter&#x27;s. If Graeber is right the world will hum along with or without these complexity-related jobs. But if Tainter is right then we are nearing a danger zone where we risk societal collapse when the complexity becomes one level too high. I hope Graeber is right, but in my heart I fear and believe that Tainter is.

&quot;Silicon Valley&quot; (as a euphamism for our industry) has a chance to lead the culture here, and also to respond to an emerging criticism of itself in a way that is socially positive.<p>I&#x27;m seeing more and more articles to the effect that high-tech destroys jobs. Our response should be: &quot;good, now we should move to a four-day work week.&quot; If high-tech work destroys jobs, it should leave people more time for friendship, family, art, learning, play, ...<p>Attack the Puritan bullshit-work ethic and the associated economic broken window fallacy directly. Make it a &quot;culture war&quot; issue if necessary.<p>That would be the first step: a four-day work week, a three-day weekend. More jobs for those who don&#x27;t have them, less work for those who do. The energy savings in transportation would also be immense.<p>Tech industries would be largely unaffected. Why? Because our work is largely intellectual in nature, and intellectual work does not come in continuous streams. It comes in bursts of productivity. I bet removing one day from the work week would negligibly impact productivity in our field. It might even increase it in some cases.

I find it funny that the author states that &quot;the ruling class&quot; essentially decides to keep people busy. Let&#x27;s not forget that there are other factors at play here: unions are the first one that come to mind. Any union shop is going to have a major problem on their hands the day they decide to cut one job (not saying it&#x27;s right or wrong, just that unions defend their jobs rigorously, as they should). Unions typically aren&#x27;t what I think of when I think &quot;ruling class&quot;.<p>However, I do tend to think of politicians as that &quot;ruling class&quot;. And for better or for worse, people love to hear the phrase &quot;job creation&quot;. Politicians can&#x27;t &quot;create&quot; jobs in the same way that private companies can. They can certainly foster an environment wherein companies can flourish (and ruin it). But any politically-created job is either an oversight job (finance industry is littered with jobs that <i>should</i> be automated but in the interest of being able to point fingers at people, exist) or a bureaucratic job (in my opinion).

An enduring image for me is of the kind of bullshit jobs that you really can only find in certain parts of East Asia these days.<p>For example, drive to a parking garage at a shopping mall and there will be a guy who&#x27;s entire 8 hour work day is spent wearing an over elaborate bell hop uniform and bowing to cars as they drive in. That&#x27;s it...his entire job is bowing to cars. If he disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, it wouldn&#x27;t affect a single thing. People would still come to the mall, cars would still manage to park, not one thing would change.<p>Or how about the nice costumed sales ladies standing in every aisle in the grocery store, not giving out promotional samples (a la Costco), but simply holding up gift packages of cheap processed food items. My favorite is the gift package for your salaryman husband, a beautifully wrapped container of instant coffee. That&#x27;s actually two BS jobs, the lady holding the package (which you were going to buy anyway), and the person who packaged up the $20 container of instant coffee in an overly elaborate gift package that will go directly into the trash 10 seconds after it&#x27;s received.<p>I remember travelling in Russia, and going into one of those amazing Stalanist subway stations, and there was a booth with a person in it. They didn&#x27;t do anything, they weren&#x27;t really an attendant, didn&#x27;t help anybody or have any particular function, they just sat there for a 8 hours.<p>Of course for the really unbelievably useless jobs you have to look inside the U.S. government.

(1) As a lawyer I love how to non-lawyers the legal industry (usually BigLaw) is always the go to example for things that cost a lot but do nothing.<p>(2) All these lofty ideas and conspiracy theories are great but bullshit jobs exist for one reason - most people suck at their job and are perfectly O.K. with it.<p>It&#x27;s nice to think of labor as a machine. A system where everyone tries to be efficient and strive to do the best work possible. In reality that just doesn&#x27;t exist. Most people go to work for a paycheck. Their one goal - keep getting that paycheck. In that context it&#x27;s easy to see how what could be accomplished in 15 hours suddenly takes 40. If there is no incentive to work hard, better, faster, or stronger, why bother? Anyone here ever work a union job? You don&#x27;t exactly get to leave early if you finish early. You don&#x27;t exactly get a raise either.<p>Additionally most people don&#x27;t have a passion that they&#x27;d rather get back to. Very few people think of anything besides (a) work (b) family (c) friends (d) misc. rec. activ. (sleep, sex, vacation, whatever). So this idea that the Bullshit Job is somehow preventing people from doing something more productive is, well, bullshit. Most people would do nothing with their time if not for work.<p>It&#x27;s nice to dream the world works otherwise but at least in my experience it does not.

This fails to engage with any economic reality.<p>Realistically, the reason that bullshit jobs exist is because it is possible for a low amount of work to result in a good amount of profit. Let&#x27;s look at Microsoft Office, for example - you can charge $200 per copy for effectively zero cost. Therefore, if somebody can manage to sell 1000 copies of it, their job is justified, along with an assistant or two. This could take a very short amount of time.<p>The reason there are &quot;bullshit jobs&quot; is because profit margins can be so high. The higher the margins, the more bullshit jobs, and the lower the margins, the fewer. Restaurants have few to no bullshit jobs because there simply isn&#x27;t enough money to be made with labor that isn&#x27;t running at 100% most of the time.<p>If you want a world without bullshit jobs, you&#x27;ll want a version of the world where products are NOT sold at 4x markup from their cost of production, and instead a 1.5x to 2x markup. Then, companies will HAVE to be lean, because a marginal increase in sales&#x2F;support will not translate to an enormous increase in profits.<p>Look at companies with low margins and high costs of production, and you may see inefficiency (it happens everywhere), but there will not be many bullshit jobs.

I live and work in Washington DC. If you ever want to visit a living museum of bullshit jobs, come visit this city. One of my favorite anecdotes is when my friend worked for a defense contractor who hired a &quot;requirements manager&quot;. On her first day of work, she popped into my buddy&#x27;s office and whispered: &quot;what are requirements?&quot;.

The author has a very interesting point. Still he oversimplifies and so I didn&#x27;t find the article very insightful.<p>For example lawyers are there for good reason. Modern society needs a way to officially settle conflicts. But our law system creates arms races and draws more and more resources this way.<p>I think few jobs are as zero sum as SEO from their beginning. The problem is that when we start arms races and pour more and more resources into them, they become almost zero sum.<p>So the interesting question would be how to avoid arms races. But that is not even mentioned.

&quot;if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.&quot;<p>Are you freak&#x27;n kidding me? The 99% <i>is the market</i> not the 1%. Who do you think is buying what the 1% is selling? It&#x27;s the 99% who determine what is being made by buying what they buy!<p>I&#x27;ve had a few jobs like this, not many though, and I can tell you that none of them were at companies small enough for an owner to know who I was.<p>I&#x27;d like to propose a different reason for these jobs; middle manager decision makers who have ulterior motives than to optimize ROI. Like what you ask? Like getting a bigger budget next year. Like empire building. Like maximizing the illusion of importance. I could go on, but since I&#x27;ve never had one of these positions, I&#x27;m sure I could never do the list justice.<p>Law (since it was mentioned) and consulting are slightly different since you might end up doing something pointless where your company is maximizing ROI because the market is paying for you to do something pointless. ... and given that situation, I&#x27;d venture to guess that either a) it was one of the non-stakeholders mentioned above that brought you in, or b) an owner who bought into your industry&#x2F;company&#x27;s marketing BS and hasn&#x27;t been disillusioned yet. ... yet.<p>There may be situations I can&#x27;t think of, but I&#x27;d suggest that it&#x27;s the 99% who has created this situation in most cases.

Not surprised that the top four comments at the moment disagree with the author. I strongly recommend that anyone who was affected by the 2008 economic crisis read his best-known book: <i>Debt, the first 5000 years</i>.<p>You may still disagree with his conclusions, but you&#x27;re more likely to do so in an informed way. It is the only treatise on the subject of debt, which I have been able to find, that actually makes sense. I say that as someone who has read far more Hayek and Rothbard than Marx or Bakunin.

Other people clearly don&#x27;t think your job is worthless or they wouldn&#x27;t be paying you to do it. The reason we don&#x27;t work less is because we clearly want (and can have) more stuff than we had in the 1930&#x27;s. If you&#x27;re happy with the standard of living from 1930 you could probably achieve that with 10 hours of work per week.

“Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone.<p>The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.” —Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness<p>“Suppose the people around here decide that instead of having more consumer goods they’d like to have more leisure. The market system doesn’t allow you that choice. It drives you to having more consumer goods because it’s all driven to maximizing production. But is the only human value to have more and more goods you don’t need? In fact the business world knows that it’s not. That’s why they spend billions of dollars in advertising, to try to create artificial wants.” —Noam Chomsky<p>I strongly agree with the author, Russell, and Chomsky. I think Jacque Fresco also has interesting thoughts regarding this matter.

The core cause of bullshit jobs is not conspiracy, it&#x27;s political economy. We currently choose (IMO a terrible choice) to have a money based society where &quot;don&#x27;t work&quot; == &quot;don&#x27;t eat&quot;. And so work must be found.<p>This is what it means when politicians talk of &quot;creating jobs&quot;.

I have been lucky enough to have a few jobs that paid the bills (though barely) that gave me some perspective on this. Before college, I worked at a gambling parlor where I was effectively paid to take other people&#x27;s money from them and to give it to my boss. The potential for a financial gain was there as the establishment was...quasilegal at best...but it never happened that one stranger would walk in and take the house, never to return. Instead, older men and women would come in night after night and spend the majority of their disposable income hoping to break even though they usually never did. This was a bullshit job, and worse it was a job that directly contributed to the detriment both of the local economy and to that of the greater economy. They could have cut my job entirely by simply direct depositing money into the bank account of my employer and it would have cost them less in the long run (counting for gas and &quot;concessions&quot; consumed while gambling). However, the majority of the customers were older, uneducated, and lonely. Thus, they paid more for the social interaction than for the hope of winning big money. At the time, I worked maybe 70 hours a week and though I always had a little pocket money I was by no means &quot;financially stable.&quot; What&#x27;s more, the job in no way contributed to my long-term financial well being. Luckily, this was my last job before college, and since then I&#x27;ve been fortunate enough not only to find a decent job, but a job that works to optimize customer-commercial interactions - we try to help businesses actually figure out what their customers want to buy and to help the customers buy it more easily - and at the same time I have a roughly 20 hour work week that allows me to support my family and to give us a fair amount of recreational time. Still, I know that I am in the minority with my good fortune, and that makes me sad for others who are less fortunate than I.

It bears saying that working hours have gone down, at least here in Europe. But it took unions and laws to make it happen, and at every stage employers have screamed blue murder - &quot;oh noes, we couldn&#x27;t possibly maintain productivity with only a 60&#x2F;50&#x2F;40&#x2F;35 hour work week&quot;. Of course, once the law is introduced it turns out the company can remain just as productive.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the figures are for the US, with its hatred of organized labour and social legislation.

It&#x27;s hard for me to believe in grand conspiracies of a ruling class that is in competition with itself. I&#x27;m more inclined to believe that bullshit jobs exist because there is bullshit work to be done, and more of it piles on when there isn&#x27;t a market incentive pushing the bullshit out.

Where do I start with this half-baked article?<p>1) I&#x27;ve been through layoffs that disproportionately hit &quot;paper-pushers&quot;<p>2) Many of the &quot;paper-pusher&quot; jobs are extremely useful to society (e.g., actuaries), while the &quot;manual&quot; jobs may not be (e.g., why do we really need dock workers? Can&#x27;t technology eventually replace them all in the future?)<p>Now economic usefulness is definitely not linked with personal satisfaction &#x2F; some altruistic notion of &quot;societal value&quot;.<p>At the end of the day, economic usefulness seems to always win out, because it takes money to do most anything, and generally money goes to the places with the highest potential economic ROI.<p>Insurance companies hire actuaries to help them manage their risk, while record labels aren&#x27;t signing a bunch of unknown bands to ensure we have enough jazz musicians around.

In addition to the factors described in the article, in the United States there is an additional and very real incentive to work &quot;bullshit jobs&quot; and that is that health insurance is tied to employment (far less expensive when purchase through or by your employer). Unexpected healthcare costs are one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy, so this creates an unnecessary incentive to have a job.

Reading economic discussions on this board is like reading Congressional debates of SOPA.

Serious shades of Douglas Adams&#x27;s Telphone Cleaners in this... That&#x27;s the result when the BS job class fully decides that anyone who does &quot;menial tasks&quot; should just be discarded.

Well, if Parkinson&#x27;s law is correct <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/14116121" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;node&#x2F;14116121</a> and bureaucracies expand by 6% every year regardless of the amount of work, more and more of us will end up with useless jobs.

Part of the problem is that it&#x27;s really hard to quantify the social value of failure. So, a lot of people opt to take the easy path and do more busy work. At least, then they may show that their busy work had some productivity and output.<p>I see this all too often in software development. Instead of people chasing wildly challenging ideas, they choose to re-write things over and over. How many programming languages do we really need? How many ORMs and MVC frameworks? How many template engines? Do we really need to port all of those libraries to yet another platform?<p>It seems its socially more acceptable to chase the incremental improvements (or illusory improvements) than to chase those things that have high risk of failure.<p>Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re a musician. Would you rather spend your life working on a entirely new genre of music that ends up never catching on? Or, would you rather pursue the path of getting signed to a major label by churning out rehashes of previous hits? At least the second path gives some opportunity to pay the bills while still doing something that resembles what you love.<p>As a society we need a better way of &#x27;paying&#x27; people to explore, experiment and invent. We need better ways to capture the multitudes of failures and re-incorporate them. I think this used to be the realm of the academic, but it seems that the academic institution has now become just a hand of the corporate machine.

I wrote this song as a response to a bullshit job I was doing for a period of time, thankfully I got my ass out because it drove me to write such thoughts....<p>Title: The Ballad of a 30 something Office Worker<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/swampscott/the-ballad-of-a-30-something-office-worker?in=swampscott/sets/streams-of-consciousness-ep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;swampscott&#x2F;the-ballad-of-a-30-somethi...</a><p>Yeah, I was in an environment (as a result of consulting) that sucked the very life from my creative nature...

On the phenomenon of bullshit articles....<p>His thesis is the ideology of someone young and niave. I can assure you that no company employs anyone unless they have to, and&#x2F;or they see a return on their investment (ie payroll) in that person.<p>He may think a corporate law job is &quot;bullshit&quot; but I imagine that the law firm&#x27;s clients value and rely on the collective work that this person and his colleagues are doing.

How many of those pointless, time wasting bullshit jobs are directly linked to the gross expansion of government in the 20th century? Finance, law, health care, education... almost all of the jobs he complains about are built around the requirements of bureaucracies and laws, and the exploitation thereof.

&quot;It&#x27;s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen&quot;<p>Which is fitting, as America hasn&#x27;t been a Capitalist nation in nearly a century.

What I find bizarre about this is that where I live, India, this seems more prevalent than anywhere else I have traveled in the world. Its as if the vestiges of British bureaucracy have left behind a middle class with such a sense of entitlement that they seem to have no problem with the obvious fact that their job is meaningless.<p>Apparently the official policy is that government employees cannot be fired so are simply given something, anything, to do until they retire - don&#x27;t quote me on this.<p>The strange thing is that you have a non-english speaking, poorer, class beneath this (of around 600 million people) that simply MUST make an economic contribution in order to survive because no one will pay them anything unless their economic contribution is undeniable.....

The site seems to be experiencing problems. Here is an archive:<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20130818200653/http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130818200653&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strikem...</a>

I haven&#x27;t seen the terms come up in this discussion yet, but the concepts of post-scarcity economy or abundance economy are relevant. This article is more focused on the gap of why we aren&#x27;t in a post-scarcity economy now, and I think there is weight to the thought that we all work so much now because the ingrained philosophy &amp; assumptions of a old system that makes increasingly less sense in the modern world.<p>On a pure technology basis, does the world have sufficient resources to feed and house every living person? Or are the problems that prevent that economic, political factors?

I find it cute that he thinks teaching is mostly not a bullshit job. apart from the first 4 years it is as bullshit as any of his other examples. He just fails to recognize that due to personal bias.

I think there is an inherent assumption at the heart of this logic that, when questioned and revealed as false, causes the entire argument to fall apart. The assumption is that because somebody believes that their job is &quot;bullshit&quot; or pointless, that their own assessment is actually correct.<p>Usually when people I know moan about how useless they are and how boring and pointless their jobs are, they are reflecting on inter-office politics, easier methods that could and should be employed, and a host of solutions that could render them useless. The only problem is that for whatever reason, those solutions have not been pursued and somebody is willing to pay them for their services.<p>It doesn&#x27;t really matter whether you as the employee see the point in your job if the person paying you sees the need. It&#x27;s important to remember that when you assume that your job could even be eliminated, you are making an assumption without necessary data. After all, you were hired because a need existed. In other words, I think people in many jobs underestimate their actual economic value to society. Like it or not, most artists don&#x27;t actually contribute a whole lot of economic value. That is, they don&#x27;t create wealth for other people. Those who do are usually compensated accordingly.

As a struggling musician this hits close to home. I&#x27;ve worked over a dozen jobs in four states since leaving home at 18. I went into debt for college but dropped out as my older friends reported back from the &quot;real world&quot; that the promises of higher education were mostly empty. I camped out at Occupy Portland to try to wrap my head around this propaganda-fueled global enterprise. Thank you, David, for tirelessly speaking the truth.

In a modern society, you will have complex systems where the individual worker is so abstracted away from the concrete value that they will not be able to see the immediate effect of their actions, but this does not make them pointless. To an investment banker, all they see are numbers growing larger, but that does take away from the fact that they&#x27;re moving millions of dollars, which invariably comes from somewhere.<p>This is not an issue of capitalism. If you work for someone else, then <i>by definition</i>, the motives for your work are not your own, thus you will often fail to see the immediate point in your work past the description of your company on Wikipedia.<p>Do truly pointless jobs exist? Sure, but the author sure seems to across as simply listing jobs he doesn&#x27;t understand as pointless. Perhaps his musician friend could have fared better if he had a better &#x27;PR researcher&#x27; to publicize his work. Until we think of a system where we do not work for capital, our lives <i>will</i> revolve around creating capital to sustain ourselves, making it hard for all 7 billion people on Earth to derive meaning from it.

Quote from steve jobs:<p>&gt; So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”<p>&gt; .... companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM.

To make it simple, the jobs exist because people need money to trade for things they need (including the vital food&#x2F;shelter&#x2F;health care). Since it&#x27;s a capitalistic world, nobody gets paid&#x2F;given stuff for doing nothing, that&#x27;s considered parasitism. So the jobs exist, even though pointless, because the people need and want them.

For anybody who wants a lighter view of the subject, I recommend Stanley Bing&#x27;s book:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/100-Bullshit-Jobs-How-Them/dp/0060734809/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1376923281&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=100+bullshit+jobs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;100-Bullshit-Jobs-How-Them&#x2F;dp&#x2F;00607348...</a>

&gt; Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.<p>Those toys just create a high tech low life paradox. The problem is the iron law of wages: &quot;real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker.&quot;<p>This minimum is based on housing costs, health insurance, tax, and saving for pensions. The main toy, a car, fuel, and car insurance, is often a requirement for working, because of stupid zoning laws. The cost of food is nearly negligible, compared to the above costs.<p>If you look at places that have high wages and low tax, then you can expect high housing costs. So there will be always some days left end of the month, when a typical family runs in danger of running out of money for food and the like.<p>So regardless how much you work, the land lord or the bank in case of house ownership, will eat the big part, forcing the average family to work 8 at least hours.

Can&#x27;t believe no one mentioned the best work on &#x27;bullshit jobs&#x27; out there - &quot;Player Piano&quot; by Kurt Vonnegut. Back in 1952 he already guessed it all: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Player_Piano_(novel)</a>

I don&#x27;t understand the alternative world that is being proposed. If all these bullshit jobs could be magically eliminated, then most people would sit around doing...what, exactly?<p>Eating pizza and playing videogames, maybe? But who&#x27;s going to make the pizza and video games?

This is like a proper academic-language version of Bob Black&#x27;s largely superior text, <i>The Abolition of Work</i>, which was posted here a few days ago and promptly disappeared.<p>Google it. Read Bob Black&#x27;s essay, which is shorter and more blunt than this one.

&quot;If 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else&quot;<p>From the entire article, this stuck out the most for me. It is such a simple explanation.

We <i>ARE</i> working essentially 15 hour weeks (or trending towards that). But instead of each person working 15hour weeks, most people will just be unemployed. The average will end up around 15 hours.

&gt; There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?<p>It doesn&#x27;t say much more than that a lawyer can only serve a small number of people, but a musician can entertain millions at once. A less talented musician, tens of millions.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/justinbieber" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;justinbieber</a>

First let me start by saying I am someone who has worked almost exclusively doing a &quot;bullshit job&quot;, in fact if there were a scale of bullshit jobs, I think that Management Consulting would probably be placed at the apex of bullshit.<p>I have felt the pain described, and was with the author right up until the point where they started talking about the tube workers, which struck a nerve. Tube drivers can bring the system to its knees because they are highly unionised and can (and do) choose to strike en masse whenever they&#x27;re not happy with working conditions, salary, proposed changes etc. What is one of their strongest oppositions? Automated tube driving systems. Systems that would make the tube network cheaper to run, increase capacity, improve speed and safety, and yes, make tube drivers redundant.<p>So here we are, and the TGWU (transport union) et al are basically ruining my day-to-day commute to keep tube drivers in their cushy positions, maintaining an inefficient situation that makes the tube drivers &quot;indispensable&quot;. I&#x27;m gonna call bullshit on that.<p>Now let&#x27;s say that some miracle happens and somehow the TGWU racket is broken and progress is allowed to happen. TfL (Transport for London) decide to replace all of their train drivers (why the hell are humans driving trains in the 21st century anyway???) with computerised systems. Who&#x27;s gonna do that? Who&#x27;s gonna plan, design, build, test, implement and maintain such a massively complex system? The tube drivers? Don&#x27;t think so. I&#x27;ll give you good odds that you&#x27;re going to be calling in the Management Consultants to do this. All of a sudden my bullshit job isn&#x27;t seeming like quite such bullshit when it is saving the taxpayer millions of pounds each year and reducing your morning commute by 20 minutes.<p>So here we come to the crux of the problem of this article. The yardstick by which you&#x27;ve chosen to determine if a job is &quot;worthwhile&quot; is whether anyone would notice if those workers disappeared. Given this definition, it is unsurprising that those jobs that have a very direct reward will seem the most worthwhile (i.e. nurse treats patient, patient feels better, patient happy, sees value in nurse). This feels right because it fits in nicely with the short-term worlds that most of us humans live in.<p>Unfortunately, the problem is not necessarily (or just) the bullshit jobs, but our bullshit caveman short-term brains that haven&#x27;t yet caught up to the 21st century highly-optimised economy in which we live. As Dan Pink notes in Drive, to be motivated, we humans need 3 things - autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Our bullshit jobs are (for the most part) giving us autonomy and mastery more than any grunt jobs since the Industrial Revolution began, but what is lacking is purpose. We feel our jobs are bullshit precisely because they seem to lack purpose. They seem to lack purpose because we are so many levels removed from the output and effect of the things that we do.<p>I&#x27;ll give you an example. I worked on a project that improved information security standards at all of the petrol (gas) stations for an oil giant worldwide. This project changed how things worked at 45,000 petrol (gas) stations worldwide, and statistically speaking, likely saved quite a few customers from card or identity fraud while refuelling their cars. Except I have no idea if it did or not - I&#x27;ll never meet these guys or hear their stories, hell I barely left the office, and most of the things I did were in Excel or PowerPoint.<p>So there&#x27;s the problem. Did I make a difference? Yeah probably. Do I emotionally feel like I made a difference? Nope. Not a bit. I was far too detached from the outcome to feel that. Looks great on my CV (resume) though for when I apply for my next bullshit job.<p>So to me, the answer isn&#x27;t rushing out to quit our bullshit jobs and becoming tube drivers, or building houses in developing countries, although we&#x27;d probably be happier doing so. The answer is re-attaching the purpose element to the highly-productive &quot;bullshit&quot; jobs that we do, and reprogramming our caveman brains to realise that Excel really is mightier than the sword, and that we can be of far more use to the world by adapting our highly-optimised productivity systems to be more meaningful, rather than dismantling them and returning to an enjoyable but unproductive primary-secondary economy.

I think the author makes a good point, to which I would add a couple of thoughts -<p>1) The danger of too much free time isn&#x27;t because all of that brainpower would somehow figure out how to topple the system or at least replace its&#x27; current occupants -- but would be spent licentiously. Exhibit A - Jerry Springer show guests.<p>2) The choice of more trinkets over less work has a very strong sponsor -- business itself.

Stopped reading when I realized the author was making broad sweeping generalizations about things he didn&#x27;t understand like capitalism. He claims that firms won&#x27;t employ unnecessary workers, when the truth is firms will employ as many workers as they deem profitable to employ. A misunderstanding that would go on to explain every one of his other &quot;mysterious&quot; claims.

Reading... reading.. oh... it&#x27;s the Republican&#x27;s fault; they caused this...<p>Eventual point invalidated.<p>I think I&#x27;ve commented on HN before -- I come for tech news, which is where I could see this going. Suddenly it turned into a political discussion, and all hope for some useful resolution immediately gets lost. I really wish it would have turned out differently.

This resonates particularly wrt what has happened in the UK to the health, electricity and rail sectors, where privatisation, or movement thereto, has created a vast class of white collar jobs whose only function is to administer the labyrinth of utterly pointless complexity that imposing a market model onto these sectors has introduced.

This article reads like conspiracy-laden bullshit. Not surprisingly, it came from a professor -- ego-driven, vanity jobs for rich white men. Maybe he&#x27;s projecting based on his probable lifetime experience in the fake-world rat race that is the university syste, just maybe.

Why do we continue to work 40+ hour weeks when 15 would suffice? The answer is quite simple -- over the past tens of thousands of years, the primary survival pressure on our gene pool has been scarcity, and thus we are genetically -- not socially -- programmed to want to work.

Thought provoking article, we all want a better world. Seems arrogant to think that most people believe their jobs are meaningless, I get no sense of that here in Indianapolis. The last sentence really turned me off, &quot;We’re an anti-profit, radical publisher.&quot;

&gt; <i>Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at</i><p>So, as a young person who might end up in a bullshit job, what are the best ways to enjoy it? It&#x27;s not <i>all bad</i>, after all

Although Einstein worked in the patent office, didn&#x27;t he?<p>Some jobs don&#x27;t matter and on top of that freedom is hard to manage, but the idea that we&#x27;re all doomed sounds like something an anthropologist would imply in 400-1000 words.

Today&#x27;s economy produces goods far more efficiently than ever before. Although it might seem like there are lots of unproductive workers, the average worker today vs. the average worker in 1930 is far more productive.

Did anyone else have a strong feeling of Douglas Adams while reading the OA?

Along these lines: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/rulezerorules/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;rulezerorules&#x2F;</a>

The LSE should be deeply embarassed that this person is one of their professors. His assumptions are incredibly juvenile.

For a quick second i thought this was a review of the new movie

Gotta keep the people busy so they don&#x27;t focus on the real issues.

Competition.<p>This article is wrong. I&#x27;d go even as far as say he is a failure as an anthropology professor. The answer is as simple as this - competition.<p>Survival is not enough for living organisms - they must also reproduce. Every organism tries to maximize it&#x27;s own rate reproduction and minimize others. Any other behavior will drive it to extinction.<p>To talk in human terms, those who control technology and machines that could provide 15 h work week, have no interest in doing so. It&#x27;s the opposite. They don&#x27;t need others neither to survive, nor to breed. You need them. You must prove them that you are worthy of him giving money to you.<p>Besides, the bigger the population, the bigger the competition. It is seen very clearly in big cities like New York. There&#x27;s even saying &quot;If you can make it in NY, you can make it anywhere&quot;, because the competition makes it harder and harder as the human count increases.

Part of the explanation lies in the hiring process. At the company I work we have a ton of useless people - &#x27;office manager&#x27;, &#x27;coordinator&#x27; and other titles that don&#x27;t mean anything - which make you wonder how they got the job in the first place. Usually answer is they are hired because they know someone at the company, and it&#x27;s so easy to get somebody who has no skills to fit into paper pushing jobs. Of course there isn&#x27;t anybody to oversee all this. The chief executives aren&#x27;t checking if some guy in the building is really needed there. At every step down from CEO somebody is getting hired by someone because they need a job.

I wonder how much people we really need to replicate, sustain and exceed present levels of technology and culture (on another planet perhaps)?<p>Given that we allow every person to develop their talents of contributing to the productivity of the society. Not just being a wage drone or an unemployed drone.<p>My guess is: as few as a few million people today, hundred thousands when we figure out robotics.

This is basically cooperation vs. competition, not much more to be said.