Review of _Bullshit Jobs_

I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation.<p>Edit: you can read more about the idea here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ie&#x2F;books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT75&amp;lpg=PT75&amp;dq=bull+shit+jobs+“duct+tape”&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=xL4O7mlGMW&amp;sig=5d3WPf8btLridL9RopkQiqGCmno&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjHiczZiaTbAhWksKQKHacYCz8Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=bull%20shit%20jobs%20“duct%20tape”&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ie&#x2F;books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT75&amp;lpg=PT...</a><p>My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff.<p>My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for <i>disruption</i> by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer.<p>Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.

Here are the first 3 paragraphs of the section on Duct-tapers from Chapter 2.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monosnap.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monosnap.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;L41lTePrEn3wAJxD4sMZxeIYacxDqK</a><p>This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I&#x27;ve authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that work. I always did.<p>It&#x27;s necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro-services, whatever) but it&#x27;s still complex and I resent that.

Link to the original essay: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strikemag.org&#x2F;bullshit-jobs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;strikemag.org&#x2F;bullshit-jobs&#x2F;</a>

Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser<p>&gt; As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense”. Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides, replaced by praise for “hardworking families”. The rightwing injunction to “get a job!” is mirrored by the leftwing demand for “more jobs!”

Off topic

&gt; people are not inherently lazy: we work not just to pay the bills but because we want to contribute something meaningful to society.<p>That is a pretty extraordinary claim!