
Bullshit Jobs - wyclif
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/29/bullst-jobs-part-1-of-%E2%88%9E/
======
normalhuman
I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries)
exist as a consequence of the following things:

1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological
progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger
organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth
yet.

This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of
boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is
caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work
to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to
employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the
politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main
topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of
development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.

As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only
become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of
this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and
environmental collapse.

It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate
itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.

~~~
Jaruzel
It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are
wrapped up in _bullshit procedures_.

These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs.
The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job
is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything
you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training
required, no hiring of expensive people who already know the skill. As the
Book of Procedures enables you to rinse and repeat the process with every new
hire, you are no longer invested in keeping 'talent' within the organisation;
good people leave once they realise that the job is 70% procedure vs. 30%
actual work... No matter, there's always The Book, let's hire another grunt
from the employment queue.

However, because you are filling up your organisation with unskilled workers,
errors become more common place. To reduce the error rate, you introduce some
extra checks and balances to ensure that the job is being done correctly.
These extra procedures go in to The Book. The ratio is now 90% procedure vs.
10% actual work.

People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had
previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work'
following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just
follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of
trouble.

Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are
patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up,
and incidents are down. Creating The Book of Procedures is now considered a
valuable skill in it's own right, so the people who care about climbing the
managerial pole devote large chunks of their time adding yet more processes to
the The Book, and thus the cycle continues, until several roles in the company
are nothing but endless procedure creating/tracking without any actual product
output.

There's still the problem of a high attrition rate amongst the middle tier
staff, but hey, there's always more fish in the sea right?

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the
recipe for successful business is to enshrine _everything_ in superdetailed
Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were
programmable automatons. Now maybe this _works_ , but eliminating human agency
like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.

~~~
geezerjay
The main reason why organizations evolve to a bureaucratic mess is human
agency, in particular the fact that each individual has personal interests and
is motivated to achieve their personal goals. Bureaucracy is designed to
restrict personal initiatives that favour the individual worker at the expense
of the organization. For example, in Greece public sector workers abuse their
position by expecting grafts to do their job, and they deny service to those
who don't pay by giving a higher priority to everyone else. Thus, rules are
put in place to restrict how prioritization is handled by public sector
workers to mitigate this problem. Yet, now public sector workers are bounded
to a rigid set of rules which dictates how and when a process should be
processed.

~~~
Thriptic
Exactly this. The procedures are put in place to prevent abuse of the system
by the individual. The problem is that they rarely have the intended effect.
First, frequently the policies are put in place to prevent an abuse which
performed by an individual at some point. As time goes on, not only do
conditions in the world / org change but the people who were part of the org
when the abuse happened leave. This creates a situation where people can't
remember why a rule exists, but follow it blindly just because it exists, even
if in current circumstances it hampers the organization.

Second, inevitably there will be a series of edge cases which any rule is
poorly suited to address. These edge cases require a thoughtful application of
regulatory authority, which itself requires a thorough understanding of the
current context and the purpose of the rule. This thoughtfulness requires
intelligence or deep domain expertise, which is often not found in the
regulators because if they had these things then they wouldn't be in boring
regulatory jobs like HR to begin with. Evaluation of edge cases also requires
work, and it's far easier for someone to simply say no than it is to actually
investigate the request.

Third, everyone knows that some employees are more valuable to the
organization than others and should be allowed to bend or break simple rules
as long as permission is sought. However, this will inevitably invite a
bullshit lawsuit and so companies have a huge incentive to codify policies and
be rigid about them.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> As time goes on, not only do conditions in the world / org change but the
> people who were part of the org when the abuse happened leave. This creates
> a situation where people can't remember why a rule exists, but follow it
> blindly just because it exists, even if in current circumstances it hampers
> the organization.

Not only that, organizations measure different things differently even from
the start. If someone is socializing at work and this wastes 15% of their
time, but a procedure to prevent them from socializing at work wastes 40% of
their time, everyone is actually better off to just allow employees to
socialize (or what have you). But "employees slacking off" is an unsanctioned
thing to be reduced whereas "employees following procedure" is an officially
sanctioned thing to be increased, so the fact that the procedure is more
costly than the "abuse" never enters the decision process.

------
Animats
University administrators.[1]

Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's _all
administrators_. No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings.
2700 staff.

 _Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such
critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries
and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs;
Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential &
Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development. ... Three of the
university's eight vice presidents will have their offices at Stanford Redwood
City._[2]

[1] [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-
administ...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-
administrators-growth_n_4738584.html) [2]
[https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/frequently-asked-
questions](https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/frequently-asked-questions)

~~~
stirlo
I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia...

"Academic staff: 2,219

Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC

Students: 16,430"

Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University)

~~~
wastedhours
How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in
middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs!

Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are
horrendously inefficient - _however_ , quite often in the cities where a big
university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at
house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the
university or the hospital), where should these employees go?

Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and
streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on
with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there.

The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that
those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way.
People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the
janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians
etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll
see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the
requirement to have someone do it go away.

I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more
efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone
tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people
can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE
THINGS".

~~~
kamaal
Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while
the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual
decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption.

12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is
not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.

~~~
wastedhours
I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the _vast_ majority of the
admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing
other/different services, as well as _supporting_ the academic staff.

EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not _advocating_ for this level
of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of
a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments
on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could
lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it
(as bored as they might be).

~~~
kamaal
That depends on how you define 'admin staff'. Do you classify Janitors, Chefs,
Shuttle Drivers etc as 'admin staff'?

If so then based on how large the campus is, it could still make sense. But I
doubt if those sort of jobs are covered in that term.

~~~
gowld
Those people aren't students or faculty, so unless there's another category,
they are Administration.

Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't
have Administration, we have _General and Administrative_. There's a lot of
stuff in _General_. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.

------
jakidud
Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely
relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been
turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company
cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office.

For 4 months now.

Let that sink in.

What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team,
which means that I might have access to privelaged insider information,which
means I can't sit with the public teams. But there isn't any seat in the
private rooms. So I'm sitting in the cafeteria, reading books, playing on the
PlayStation, etc etc.

I ask my manager every single day when I'm going to get a new spot. It's
usually 'next week for sure' or 'friday for sure'. Hasn't happened yet. During
the first month, I stayed for 8 hours each day, doing nothing. I've gradually
stopped giving a fuck anymore and am looking for other jobs now, even though
this is a pretty sweet gig.

~~~
bena
Reminds of something I read here not too long ago. From what I understand, it
makes the rounds every now and then.

[https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

~~~
zrkrlc
That was a hilarious read! Know more stories like it? I only got reliable
Internet access in 2008 (kid in a third world country) and I've always been
interested in the dot-com bubble days.

------
dandare
This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in
the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new
thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here.

Some of the arguments I keep hearing:

1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the
parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but the
author jumps into conclusion without really understanding why are employees
not allowed to bring whatever chair they wish to the office. Then he jumps to
another conclusion, that nobody really cares because his psychiatrist note is
usually accepted. As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I
will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored,
and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day.

2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological
progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.

3/ "There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations."
True and totally unrelated. What is the argument?

4/ "Managers like to have large teams." True, and economic forces push against
that. This does not explain the apparent pandemic of BS jobs (that I don't see
anywhere).

etc.

If you won't mind, I will try some anecdotal evidence and jumping to
conclusions myself:

5/ I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would be
great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible for
compliance is not doing a BS job.

6/ Automation and technology saved us from slaving in the fields and
sweatshops. Driving a truck full of confectionery across the US is pretty much
a BS job if you ask me. Same as "Shirley, make me 5 copies of this contract
before the lunch" \- on a typewriter.

7/ BS jobs pandemics is nothing else but a variation of the "Grass was greener
when I was young". Developed countries (maybe with the exception of the US)
have safer environments than ever, more disposable income than ever and people
live longer than ever.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to
> get a doctor 's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent
> all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day._

And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or
are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The
latter seems common, and I've personally been in companies that could easily
double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost
of _one_ developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair
of headphones and a good chair.

Also note that in this article, the employee needed a note to _bring their own
chair_ to work, so it's essentially free for the employer anyway.

> _5 / I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would
> be great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible
> for compliance is not doing a BS job._

I guess we have strongly different perspectives, because to me, _most of the
jobs_ I've seen in this industry are bullshit, in the sense that the world
would be a better place if those jobs (often: companies) didn't exist in the
first place.

~~~
freddie_mercury
> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity
> of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer
> salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and
> a good chair.

This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN.

I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for
real office space, so there were no monitors, crappy chairs, and old laptops.

Three months later we had all the things.

Productivity did not improve. It absolutely did not double. (It is a bit
insane to even claim that it could.)

Those things do not improve productivity in any meaningful way. At worst they
are just status symbols. At best they are just signalling. "My company values
me and I know that because I have two monitors". Their actual impact on
productivity is minimal, despite the thousands of HN posts claiming otherwise.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And I counter that with my personal experience because I've been at this job
long enough that I notice things that are really, really distracting me from
doing my job. Like:

\- sitting in a hot, airless room will drop my productivity to much less than
half; I'll be spending most of the day angry and trying to fight sleepiness

\- a computer that can barely run a browser and an IDE at the same time will
operate slower than I think, and will introduce distractions and annoyance
every time I have to wait 15 seconds for the page to reload

\- having just one display is bearable (I'm used to it), but having two
significantly cuts down on switching between programs, removing those small
delays add up over the day (incidentally, adding a third display is marginal
for me; I find myself not using it very much - I usually dock IMs and project
logs there)

Few years ago I actually had all three issues simultaneously at the same
company. I complained until they were resolved, and only then I started to
feel that it's me who's the limiting factor in my productivity. As it should
be.

------
Radim
People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily
obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and
isn't "bullshit"?

Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can
pass such definitive judgement?

I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like
bullshit to _you_ ), but whether something is sustainable and makes sense on a
larger, super-human scale (organization, society, species) is tough to
determine by any single actor. It's typically left to be played out and then
(hopefully) analyzed and learned from.

Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by
efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what
the individual actors wishes or feels. If a drone-like society turns out to be
the most efficient in this sense, full of silly rituals which nevertheless
make it more cohesive / stable / whatever, then that's where we're headed.
Even though it currently doesn't seem that way, with individualism, science
and articulation scoring some spectacular victories.

~~~
IanSanders
>Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by
efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what
the individual actors wishes or feels.

I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

>term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource
system where individual users acting independently according to their own
self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or
spoiling that resource through their collective action.

>Although common resource systems have been known to collapse due to overuse
(such as in over-fishing)...

Especially check the "examples" section

~~~
Radim
I am familiar with both; what's the connection in particular?

That patterns organize along least-energy principles and propagate by
extracting resources from surrounding energy gradients is almost a tautology.
I'm genuinely curious what you're disagreeing with.

~~~
IanSanders
I disagree that people and societies organize by efficiency and how well they
reduce energy across time. In fact the two almost contradict each other.
People organize based on individual/egotistical "efficiency", and not the
efficiency of the system/society.

~~~
Radim
Thanks. Then we're in disagreement :-) For me, people are a part of the whole
system, following the same rules as everything else in the universe. No
special exceptions, no "get out of jail free" card.

(by the way, it's reducing energy _gradients_ —differences between here and
there, doing work—not energy itself)

------
wjnc
The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that
bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do
they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept
bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters
themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management
does not care Enough. They've got real problems on their hands. But every now
and again a No bullshitters should pop up and say stop this local incident of
BS. It just does not happen. I'm one of those that tries to make senior
management aware of total time and energy sinks in the corporation. Often it
just doesn't click and I move on. Why don't cultures change (fast) enough?

~~~
vfc1
I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team,
because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.

The problem is that teams in large organizations are not run by the company
owners themselves anymore, instead they are run by a middle manager whose job
is to run the team.

The middle manager has no incentive to cut down too much on the team size, as
that would risk his career, perceived social status, and even directly its
job.

If a team of 10 all of the sudden becomes a team of 3, maybe there is no need
for the middle manager anymore.

Also it does not look well on the CV to be a manager of a team of 3 instead of
10 people, so its not good for the manager career to cut down the team too
much.

If the team size gets reduced a lot, the manager will be asked to do non-
managerial tasks again, which would effectively mean a demotion.

~~~
alxlaz
> I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the
> team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.

Better yet: there are companies where a team needs to have at least N people
in order for it to be assigned a manager. Otherwise it gets a "team leader"
and several of those get assigned to a single manager.

N varies with the job, too. It can be as low as 5-6 in software development or
engineering, and as high as 30-40 in administrative departments or poorly-
automated production floors.

So if you cut the bullshit jobs, you also cut yours. No one does that.

How good it looks on the CV is also a factor, indeed, and often it's a barrier
of entry, too. When hiring managers, many companies, including the ones that
you'd think would know better, routinely demand a minimum team size,
regardless of team performance. You can manage a team of 200 and run all
projects into the ground and still get hired -- and yet get disappointed looks
if you managed a team of 20, no matter how well it performed.

------
jancsika
I don't understand how this is a bullshit job.

A manager foresaw a problem. Right or wrong, that manager didn't have the time
or inclination to do a grad-level research project on back pain diagnosis and
foolproof verification systems. Instead, they delegate to people who are
trained in medicine and make a process by which someone else receives and
stores the doctor's note.

This solves the perceived "cowboy" chair problem where everyone brings a
custom chair and ends up tearing up the carpet or whatever. Pretty much nobody
wants to risk their job by outright forging a note. So few people risk the
higher levels of cheating-- like the psychiatrist example-- that the manager
can just assume those people have back pain. And, in the event that one of
these assumptions are broken by a bad faith actor, someone _can_ go back and
read some or all of the doctors' notes.

I would think the bar for "bullshit job" is the 2nd and 3rd boss Peter has in
Office Space who parrot the criticism that the first boss gave him. Unless you
invoke magic those jobs have no value whatsoever.

In other words, bullshit jobs should be the ones that add no value but cannot
be removed because the structure of the organization suppresses the tools
necessary to officially measure the employee as ineffective. It's like the
king's idiot son-- everyone just has to pretend he isn't an idiot.

Edit: clarification

------
citation_please
Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person
disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is
interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was
eliminated, would systems be more efficient?".

In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in
legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove
it, and then it's too late.

If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...

~~~
eitland
> If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...

Not called unit tests but we have something similar here in Norway:

\- 5 or more weeks of mandatory holidays. (both you and your boss get trouble
if you don't use it.)

\- maternity/paternity leave (more than a year combined IIRC, and while it
won't land an _individual_ in hot water legally, -everyone including your boss
expects you to take advantage of it. Oh and it might land the company in hot
water if they prevent anyone from using it which might explain why even the
company often actively encourage it.)

It works mostly the same:

\- like unit tests it verifies that the organization works, including edge
cases like "what if half the company is away for two weeks at the same time".
(The last point is encouraged by design it seems by specifying that at least
two of the weeks should be in the summer.)

\- like unit tests it might _seem_ like a giant waste but turns out to be
useful in the long run.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> 5 or more weeks of mandatory holidays.

Impossible. Our handsomest politicians assure us that even 2 weeks vacation is
pushing the bounds of outright societal collapse!

~~~
eitland
That's another similarity, I guess.

"We struggle to deliver the features we promised and you say we should create
test code as well?"

------
vfc1
The creation of bullshit jobs probably comes from a combination of 3 things:

\- the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to
prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't
in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc.

\- the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other
individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager of 10 persons
and not 4, so it will keep hiring to fill all positions regardeless of true
need - its his social status and his career, and not his money

\- the huge amount of automation introduced in the last few decades, making
many jobs unnecessary.

There have always been bullshit jobs, just not that many as today.

~~~
varjag
also close to your last point,

\- abundance of people with good social and low practical skills

~~~
majewsky
In a world with 80% service jobs, social skills _are_ practical skills.

~~~
varjag
Social skills are practical skills for "bullshit jobs" as they are presented
in the article, so it's really no contradiction.

------
mehrdadn
Regarding the doctor's note thing, isn't it just to present a hurdle that the
majority of people wouldn't jump over unless they actually needed to? So as to
prevent people arbitrarily demanding an unlimited variety of conveniences that
they don't really need?

~~~
dood
Another example: if somebody asks you to do a random task (which is essential,
very important, top priority), then a tiny amount of push back - e.g. sending
an email asking for clarification of what is needed and why - often makes the
task suddenly become unnecessary.

The broader principle is that if a request for expenditure of
time/effort/money has minimal cost or risk to the requester, they are
incentivized to request unlimited expenditure if it has any potential to
benefit to them.

------
Gys
I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article
that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as
of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new
industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented
expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration,
human resources, and public relations.'

Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real
jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night
delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does
that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even
so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to
pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order
that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ?

We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.

~~~
asmithmd1
Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job
only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then
don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book
after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the
job holder calls it a bullshit job.

~~~
Gys
> His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a
> bullshit job.

That is a very subjective definition.

~~~
nouripen
Yes, the new Bullshit Jobs book says:

 _“Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that
is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee
cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of
employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”_

 _“The attentive reader may have noticed one remaining ambiguity. The
definition is mainly subjective.”_

Then goes on to explain that many cases are obvious: like if an office
worker's spending 80% of her time making cat memes. But even in more
complicated cases, you're likeliest to know best. (Not managers. The higher up
you are, the more people have reasons to hide things from you.) After a couple
years at the same company, normally people will learn enough of the company's
secrets.

------
avip
I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward:

    
    
      1. Wu appears in work with a chair
      2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X
      3. X asks Wu to remove the chair 
      4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code
      5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it

~~~
tonyedgecombe
If you are in a large company then it will accrete these rules until it is
almost impossible to get anything done.

~~~
perlgeek
It might be an interesting experiment to automatically attach an expiry date
to new rules, and if nobody (or too few) stakeholders vote for keeping them,
they automatically go out of scope.

~~~
Symmetry
This sort of happens by default in private industry, in that companies usually
only exist for 50 years or so and are continuously being replaced with other
organizations that haven't yet become sclerotic. This process is probably less
efficient than just having rules expire would be.

------
asoplata
Why does working a Bullshit Job have to be about ritual or tribal identity or
anything else, when the most important thing in that person's life is putting
food on the table? Even if a job is bullshit, there isn't enough of a social
safety net in most/all of the world to provide for one's needs without taking
a job. For an employee with no financial cushion and trying to avoid
homelessness/starvation, what the job does or its contribution to society is
secondary to the income it provides that allows that person their basic
necessities.

Similarly, if those basic needs were met a la Universal Basic Income or a Star
Trek society, there'd probably be less bullshit jobs of people doing
something, ANYTHING, just to earn enough to live and provide for their family.

------
xivzgrev
I don't think requiring a doctor's note is necessarily bullshit. Special
chairs are more expensive so it's a shallow cut to prevent everyone wanting
one just because it's available. If they are more comfortable and the two
people sitting next to you have one, wouldn't you want one too? Now obviously
there is potential for fraud and so there is some bs as the author notes. But
let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater I can see a reason the company
would have this process.

~~~
ry4nolson
The note is to allow the employee to bring their own chair to work. How does
this cost the company anything extra?

------
a012
Reminds me of a distant previous job where I requested a 24" LCD for
monitoring and doing other tasks, the response was why I need such a large LCD
while everybody in company just have 17"? Though it's no written in paper but
generally you can't be different than all other employees unless you have a
very strong reference. And this case it's doctor's note.

~~~
nikanj
I use monitors as a surprisingly good heuristic for measuring the values of an
organization.

If you make your rockstar ninja unabomber programmers stare at a single 24"
screen all day, you're basically paying for Wayne Gretzky and then skimping on
skates.

------
nnq
...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a _bullshit
society:_ our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free
time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety
of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually
have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect
of having the productivity of the people that actually choose (and are able
to!) to be productive being lowered by being surrounded by slackers etc..

Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and
_you can 't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of
posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible!_ You might end up
with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or
with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive
behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature
it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-
massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun"
or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or
whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark
tendencies.

"Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.

~~~
selimthegrim
Finally, someone who understands New Orleans.

------
jokoon
I have been unemployed for the most of my life, and i now have a 9to5 job. I
think I hate jobs. I love working with code and projects, but it's very
difficult or impossible to find a job, even in programming, that has some kind
of meaning, good sense, or is stimulating.

Jobs feel like you're playing the role of a robot. It has no soul. It just
shows how society has become so mechanized and lifeless and dead boring.

It's not all jobs, but I really feel alien to the society of labor. I might be
unable to adapt and do work I don't like, but at least this article is
agreeing that I'm not 100% of the problem.

On the other hand, creating a project by one self and making it happen seems
hard, but it really shouldn't. My view is that society doesn't really like
struggling artists.

------
dangom
Reminds me of an internship I did at a large organization, where the computer
I was assigned to was partially unusable (even after formatting it would hang
and freeze all the time), but procedures stated that I couldn't change it
because it wasn't 3 years old. Procedures also stated that I wasn't allowed to
bring my own computer to my workplace, so I ended up spending a lot of time
sitting there drinking coffee and reading books, instead of actually doing the
work I was supposed to.

Nobody cared.

~~~
NoobPwner
You first-worlders are damn lucky. In my country, it is considered a good day
when you get paid half the money you were promised for doing some hardcore
high-skill job. Which is still like 10 times lower than what you would get in
the first-world, living-costs adjusted.

Real elephant in the room is the resource flow from the colonies to the first-
world and the Western financial institutions that enable it. That's probably
the thing allowing you to bore yourself to death with bullshit jobs.

No one likes talking about it though.

"Why do we have every resource and service available but half the population
has to do bullshit jobs? Probably because of technology - yes, that must be
it."

------
JepZ
Well, I think Dr. Alexander is doing a great job. I mean, he is protecting the
mental health of his patients by using the authority he has been given and I
think that is what his job is about.

Nevertheless, he might do even better if he would recommend to his patients
someone who is better qualified to help them with treating the origin of their
physical problems (while still providing them with the letter they require).

~~~
ChairmanLmao
As I understand it the majority of back pain cases have unknown/undiagnosable
causes (and the only "treatment" is either more or less exercise and
painkillers),so unless there is an actual physical deformity a psychiatrist is
as qualified as anyone to diagnose it.

------
ainar-g
The article[1] linked in the OP is an interesting read of its own.

[1] [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

~~~
jgtrosh
Isn't copying content from the article just a _bullshit comment_???

Joking aside, your comment made me read the article. I agree with it almost
entirely, except I don't believe there needs to be a conscious decision to
invent bullshit jobs for them to appear everywhere. I believe people are
capable of hiring other people for bullshit jobs and not questioning why they
do it without some kind of conspiracy.

------
groby_b
Bullshit jobs are created just like the comments on this article demonstrate.

The proper response is "This is bullshit, let's fight it". Yet, it's not of
personal importance, and really, how many fights can you fight, so somebody
somewhere comes up with a way to circumvent the system. Others help refine the
step for that - because you know it's bullshit, and circumventing bullshit
feels satisfying.

From there, this will no doubt spread, and be further refined. The ultimate
outcome is a content free form that allows everybody to take no personal risk,
and simply trades the actual decision making for signing a form that you know
will never harm you.

And voila, there will, at some point, be a specialization where you just see
large volumes of people, and sign their slip. The insurance will press to make
it lower skill and less expensive. Since no actual skill is needed, it won't
stop at being delegated to nurses. Sooner or later, it's a minimum wage job.
At this point, companies will start bringing it in-house - why would you want
people taking half a day off for signing a bogus form? And after a while,
there's huge demand for this - each company needs it - but really, they're not
needed fulltime. And so there will be an agency that has these people travel
to your office.

At this point, backpain form signer certainly is a new job. And the decisions
at every step of the way were entirely rational.

I want to end this with a rousing call to fight bullshit where you see it, but
realistically, it would be an all day job. So we'd get bullshit fighters. Who
probably at some point just sign forms.

------
TeMPOraL
> _It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and
> satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all
> procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? investors? I
> don’t know._

Direct supervisors? I don't think someone inventing or enforcing a procedure
like this is trying to satisfy _investors_. They're mostly concerned with
their own job security and chances of promotion. I propose that a big chunk of
the economy is made of such chains of people trying to please their direct
bosses.

~~~
coldtea
> _Direct supervisors? I don 't think someone inventing or enforcing a
> procedure like this is trying to satisfy investors._

You'd be surprised. There are a lot of procedures and changes changed when a
company tries to attract investors...

------
fapjacks
Those bullshit jobs which pull the great bulk of humanity together to pay the
mortgage and buy groceries and degrees and Beanie Babies and cocaine... They
are the substrate from which real progress grows.

------
eximius
In addition to all of the other valid observations, I think some of the
impetus to create these bullshit jobs is to maintain a certain level of
employment we wouldn't have otherwise only because thr alternative jobs
wouldn't be excepted.

I.e., take all your excess administrators and TSA employees and offer them
jobs that are in demand but unwanted like construction or something. I doubt
they'd take them.

People want office jobs, so we find ways to make office jobs.

------
dmurray
It would be ok to replace "Mr Smith tells me he has chronic back pain" with
"Mr Smith has chronic back pain", if the former is enough evidence to make
that diagnosis. If he was diagnosing Mr Smith with cancer, or depression, the
doctor's note wouldn't include a scan of the tumour or a transcript of the
interview: the doctor should abstract those away and just present the
conclusion.

~~~
darawk
True, but the presumption in the case of cancer is that:

a) The doctor in question is qualified to diagnose cancer.

b) The doctor has made that diagnosis, in the medical sense.

In this case, Scott is a psychiatrist, who is unqualified to diagnose back
pain or recommend any course of treatment on the matter. He believes his
client when they say that they are in pain, but that belief is a personal, not
professional, opinion.

~~~
dmurray
He's a medical doctor. He's qualified to diagnose back pain and recommend
(professionally, not just personally) the patient tries using his own chair.
As I understand it the AMA would be OK with this, while they wouldn't be OK
with, say, me (not a medical professional) writing the same letter and
presenting it as a professional diagnosis.

He knows the limits of his abilities and wouldn't recommend the patient take 2
weeks off work, undergo back surgery or prescribe opiates. If any of those
were in the discussion, he'd tell his patient he really does need to see a
specialist.

------
erikb
> In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of
> people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?

There are lots of reasons for bullshit tasks, I found. And let's call it
tasks, not jobs. Because a job is something regular that pays a monthly
income, and there ARE certainly complete bullshit jobs!

One reason, as mentioned here, is process. Everything needs a process, so that
it's clear (or rather that it's unclear, but more about that later) who's
responsible, what needs to be done, and that there is an objective checklist
to show that something is done when it's done. It sounds stupid but it makes
complex things work. In a relatively big company for this chair topic a number
of separate, independent units, who might not even know each others existence,
need to cooperate on a task that is split in organisational, financial and
temporal terms. That is hard. But with a process it's possible to get finished
at some point.

The second thing is that each company that is still alive had a time of growth
and a time when they where stuck. When you are stuck, you can't just fire
everybody. And you can't allow people to just browse Facebook all day. So what
do you do? You create bullshit tasks. That keeps the juice flowing. And if an
interesting, profitable opportunitiy comes up you still have people, orgs, etc
setup so you can start approaching it. It also makes sense, to some degree.

The third one I can immediately think about might come as shock to some
people. We grow up with the believe that things are equal and supposed to be
fair. Truth is, the world sucks and is an unfair place. Therefore power
hierarchies really exist, even in the seemingly most open places. Even at the
cool company you heard about and really want to work at. And what do people do
who achieved some powers in these virtual pyramids? They create obstructions
for the people below them so they can't follow them upstairs and maybe even
take their seat. Bullshit processes, bullshit tasks, and bullshit jobs help
greatly with that. This might look inefficient, but in fact might actually be
the most efficient system in existence. Because it works. It worked in the
stone age, in the medieval times, in modern dictatorships, and also (sadly) in
modern democracies. Like the invisible hand that governs the resource
allocation in free markets, power structures are always there and make things
work. Maybe not like you want it, but you are also not at the top of the
pyramid, right?

Alright, that's what I can think off. They do valuable things, just that the
value is not obvious to you nor is the value shared with you. That's why it
looks like bullshit.

------
moon4u
There is a thing that I don't understand from the original article[1]:

> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with
> free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And, on the other hand, the
> feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to
> submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their
> waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Does the author really mean that if you don't work you still deserve something
in return? That one kinda sounds like bullshit. Has that been expanded upon
somewhere?

Also, the author mentions that this was already attempted during the 60s and
that it ended in a disaster but doesn't tell what that was. I am not from
America, so I don't really know the history of the country during the 60s.
What happened?

[1] [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

------
dalbasal
If you buy in to Yuval Noah Harari's narrative than the limiting factor has
been and is flexible cooperation within group, at scale. It is what out highly
developed sences of politics and religion are for. Its what money is for,
caste systems, popes, grand admirals, corporations and premium fashion brands.

In any case... a lot of traditional "bullshit jobs" are about. Middle
management. Lawyering, reporting, coordinating, administrating, bureaucratic
procedure management....etc.

Maybe we should think of these as extremely inefficient ways of solving that
neverending "problem" of flexible cooperation in large groups. Even though the
low hanging fruit is gone and the marginal efforts are extremely
inefficient... throwing resources at bottleneck is ... to be expected.

Just a thought. Not sure that I'm convinced myself. I think it might explain
the chair rule though.

------
jgtrosh
I felt that the note could be understood as mildly passive aggressive. Maybe
adding something like “I have no reason not to believe him/her” would remove
any interpretation that you're writing this note out of obligation but do not
believe the patient.

Good post btw; I have no input on ethics and would be stumped as well.

~~~
netsharc
But he does want to help the patient, does he not? But to write something else
would be to take the burden of proof into his hands. "Obligation" also makes
it sound like he's forced to do it, it's more like without further tests which
would inconvenience the patient, he can't be sure the patient is reporting the
truth (even with the patient in front of him, he wouldn't be able to
objectively observe pain, and he can only ask and believe the answer).

But the note fixes the stupid problem of "The rules say no special chairs
without a doctor's note"...

~~~
dmurray
I think the "burden of proof" part is exactly what's holding him up. As a
skeptic, and an analytically minded person, and perhaps even as a blogger -
he's uncomfortable writing "Mr Smith has chronic back pain" without a little
more concrete evidence.

I'm arguing that as a doctor he shouldn't require more evidence in this case.
It's fine to write "Mr Smith has chronic back pain and I recommend he can use
his own chair" and be right only 80% of the time, and introduce a process
whereby sneaky chair-seeking miscreants can reliably get a doctor's note even
if they don't have back pain. It's fine because the consequences of being
wrong are extremely low. In practice doctors should be, and often are, OK with
making diagnoses of much more serious conditions that are only 80% or 90% or
99% likely to be correct, even when some other test could reduce the
uncertainty further. If he's waiting to be 100% certain a patient has bipolar
disorder or anorexia before prescribing any treatment, he's doing them a
disservice.

The level of certainty required should be in line with the severity of the
condition being diagnosed, and of the recommended treatment. And when writing
a note to an employer, it's correct to say "Mr Smith has cancer" or just "Mr
Smith has a medical condition", not "I'm 94% sure Mr Smith has cancer, perhaps
the next scan will be more conclusive".

------
voidhorse
Proceedures are like a web of safety nets. Companies want to avoid risk, so
they focus on making the nets tighter and tighter. Eventually, the nets are so
densely woven that the possibility of injury for any tightrope walker dancing
on the line becomes nil. You can see while this is only for the best interests
of the circus as a whole (they can’t afford to replace tightrope walkers all
the time) and for the tightrope walker himself (he won’t get injured) it saps
his vocation of any risk, excitement, and thrill, and effectively eradicates
everything that made the circus a circus and exciting place to be in the first
place.

Such is the field of pencil-pushing work today—except the massive corporations
have captive audiences, so in spite of the incredibly flaccid shows they put
on, the crowd can’t help but pay for a ticket anyway.

------
JamesAdir
As some mentioned before bullshit jobs exist because the corporate world still
thinks in terms of hours instead of production. People have zero incentive to
reduce or automate their work, something that every solo freelancer is
struggling to do daily if he wants to survive.

Since they need to fill their hours quota somehow they create meetings and
procedures and more job functions that are needed in order to be in line with
those new procedures.

The bigger the corporate the bigger the time and money waste. Meeting become
global team meetings that costs tons of money, jobs that can be easily
automated become complete departments and so on.

Only in a corporate culture where the only thing measured and compesnated is
output - there you will see almost zero bullshit.

------
facetube
There's a well-known reason for these requirements: they are an attrition
tactic. It erects barriers to obtaining insurance benefits. Many give up,
reducing the costs to the insurance company. It happens with WAY more than
chairs, and is fundamentally unethical.

------
baxtr
Let me take the opposing view (not just for fun’s sake): I think one reason
why BS jobs exist is to keep everybody busy. if there were no bullshit jobs,
what would we do with all the people? Maybe we end up with many more people
unemployed, maybe watching TV all day?

~~~
mergejoin
I'd rather see those people using their time hiking mountains, watching tv
shows, doing arts... than go spend their day at a useless job that will make
them feel unhappy because of the lack of accomplishment.

------
reacweb
Welcome in bureaucraty world! This patient needed a medical note so that his
employer authorizes him to bring his own chair. This medical note is
completely fancy and does not contain any assesment about health. For
bureaucratic procedure, it is perfect.

------
perfunctory
It would be interesting to see what's the distribution of BS jobs in the HN
community:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159)

------
mathattack
I’ve been at offices that require notes like this. (The company paid for
special chairs) The reason listed was “we want to introduce some friction -
enough that we are not using VC money to buy special equipment for everyone”

------
collyw
I did something a few months ago and pulled something in my back. Went to the
doctor when the pain hadn't gone after a few days and it was exactly as
described. He made me do a few movements until i triggered it, then told me i
had lumbago, take some painkillers. I got home and googled lumbago, which
basically told me I had back pain.

(As a side note I had some kratom, which worked wonderfully for this, better
than the ibuprofen I was prescribed. Fortunately my pain went away after a few
days, but I see that the DEA wants to ban kratom in the US. That would be
pretty bad for many who use it for chronic pain).

~~~
slfnflctd
My understanding of the kratom situation is that the worst danger is how it's
all too easy for it to become habitual. I absolutely do not think it ought to
be banned (nor any psychoactive plant for that matter), but interested parties
should be forewarned.

Many advocates may only use it occasionally and/or in consistently low doses,
but there are plenty of accounts out there of users ramping up dosage and then
having a really hard time getting off it. Withdrawals from heavy use read a
lot like similar accounts of kicking a Vicodin habit.

~~~
collyw
Agreed, I subscribe to some kratom subreddits and some people do seem a bit
irresponsible with their use. And after two or three weeks of daily use I
could see it getting addictive. Though it wasn't hard to cut back on at all,
but I wasn't using particularly high amounts.

------
firefoxd
_" Nothing we do in this large department of ours is really very important,
and there’s never any rush. On the other hand, it is important that we let
people know we do a great deal of it."_

General Peckem - Catch 22

------
mwsherman
What allows a firm to stay competitive if there are many apparently wasteful
tasks being done? Should that firm not be superseded by competitors offering
better efficiency (reflected in prices) or consumer benefit?

I keep coming back to theory-of-the-firm:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm)

An industry that accommodates a lot of bullshit work is an industry with high
transaction costs. The author hints at that at the end of the article, but
leaves it an open question.

------
rwmj
A test of a bullshit job (or procedure) is whether we could get rid of it.
Could we get rid of the doctor's note requirement, or of the compliance
officers in the company insisting on one?

In a start-up or small company, yes. Bring your own chair to work day! In a
larger company where people don't know each other or there are many employees
on low pay or short contracts, not so much. They'd be worried about people
stealing the furniture, or bringing in furniture that was not fire safe and
then getting sued.

~~~
paulie_a
If stealing office furniture is an actual concern and ongoing problem that
company has some incredibly fundamental problems. Personally i would just
bring the damn chair in and play dumb.

~~~
rwmj
I know if you have worked only in software companies where everyone is paid
six figure salaries then you will think that stealing stores and company
property must be incredibly rare and deviant behaviour, but at most companies
this is a very real concern of management and something that happens
regularly.

~~~
paulie_a
I understand people steal stuff at pretty much every company, but a chair?
That's kinda hard to just walk out with.

------
megaman8
The explanation for BS jobs is that the economy is not nearly as "efficient"
as we hope that it may be. Incumbents at the top, stay at the top, regardless
of how inefficient they may become. A number of forces including government
and regulation, and barriers to entry confound to reinforce the position of
mega incumbents that simply stay at the top forever.

On the plus side, I'm hopeful that the rise of BS jobs will increase work life
balance.

------
kamaal
From the article:

 _In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of
people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?_

and

 _It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and
satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all
procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? bosses?
investors?_

People aren't exactly that stupid. Its really more on the lines of malice.

I remember in my first job, it was a big IT services company in Bangalore,
India. Our manager created some project initiatives to align corporate
initiatives on the lines of 'Promoting Green Technologies'. Two or three
people in the evening/night would stay behind and check if people's desktops
were on. Mostly people just locked the computers and went home. This was
necessary because many people kept IDE's and many other work related stuff
running, coming back morning and redoing all that for an hour or two was a
waste of time.

But these bunch of three would go around and see if someone's desktop was
still powered on. They could then turn off the switch(hard turn off) on the
wall socket. Next day people would come and then be mightily surprised finding
all their unsaved work, or work state itself wiped out.

After a lot of fights and arguments. They decided they would just send reports
instead of turning it off. The reports would then act as way of shaming people
for 'wasting energy'. They eventually even got around to automating it.

Months later we saw, It was nothing about promoting green technologies or
saving the earth or anything. The three people who were doing it were the
manager's pet, and he wanted to promote them. He thought having a line item on
'corporate goal achievement' on their promotion packets would further their
cause well. Then we saw those three get promoted over the real people were
actually building stuff and delivering things.

Generally when these things happen in a company you need to think on the
opposite lines of _Heinlein 's Razor_. Some one somewhere has hiring quotas
and budgets, some one is getting promoted, or getting a bonus or getting paid
well for bringing up these stupid policies and jobs.

Things exist because there is an incentive for them to exist.

------
rusk
I was listening to Feynman's lectures on Quantum Mechanics this morning, and
he was talking about the lattice structure of materials and how different
lattice structures permeate EM waves and stuff. You've got this repeating
atomic structure. Each of them is carbon, or hydrogen or iron or whatever. I
suppose in essence you could say on their own each of these is "bullshit" but
it's the repeating lattice structure that gives a material it's properties.
This reductionist view of "bullshit" jobs is kind of silly - some jobs are
unfulfilling, or seemingly pointless but you can only really evaluate them in
the overall structure and productivity of the organisation. It's the emergent
lattice that counts, not the individual elements.

In the case of this article, author is looking at a single aspect of a larger
organisation, and like the blind men and the elephant [0] can only guess at
the reasons.

There could well be good reasons for these processes and procedures. Could be
to do with management accountability, or insurance (more likely). The fact
that in isolation it seems "silly" is notwithstanding that there might a
reason in a larger organisational context. Kind of like a traffic light
hardwired to red because at scale, operationally it just makes more sense to
do it that way [1] (this article is a bad example because it doesn't go into
the explanation as to "why" \- operationally, which when I actually heard it
seemed quite reasonable - can't find it now).

The way I look at management is like this - a LED produces light by way of
_spontaneous emission_ , which is all well and good, but to produce a LASER
you need all these photons to be emitted _in phase_ which requires a whole
heap of extra bullshit circuitry to create to produce _stimulated emission_.
There is a curve of cost/efficiency where you can go _" oh well why am I
spending all this money when all I want is light"_ \- but if you don't do all
this extra "inefficient" stuff, well then you can't have optical
communication, CDs or a fancy lightshow.

Don't get me wrong, there are inefficient organisations that produce little,
or even do damage, but IMHO by looking at individual jobs we're looking in the
wrong place.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant)

[1] [https://www.thelocal.de/20150615/there-is-a-light-that-
never...](https://www.thelocal.de/20150615/there-is-a-light-that-never-goes-
out)

------
cwperkins
Since this is an entrepreneurial crowd here on HN, if this is such an issue
than why not create meaningful jobs! Use your creativity and help spread
entrepreneurship and create products and services that people love, enjoy or
makes someone else's life easier! Or better yet do some research and find
cheap energy or new treatments for diseases!

------
cafard
Meh. Didn't John Stuart Mill describe the Indian empire as "indoor relief for
the British middle classes"?

------
anonfounder747
Two mutually-reinforcing reasons why bullshit jobs exist in companies:

* managers are of the power-seeking kind. to expand your power base, hire hire hire

* employees on average tend to underperform to their potential and tout the important of their work as there's incentive to look busy and look good

The result: an army of folks doing mediocre or meaningless work

------
ajsharp
This is wonderfully concise and spot-on. With respect to the American health
care system, it's painfully accurate. An unbelievable amount of economic
activity in the US health care system ultimately boils down to a whole lot of
ceremony in order to fit a square peg into a medical billing code sized hole.

------
jeandejean
Bullshit jobs are the new "I closed my Facebook account" articles these days.
Everybody talks about it and tries to say it's a symptom of our society going
wrong.

I personally prefer bullshit than dangerous jobs. And technology allowed us to
switch from the latter to the former. That's good news to me!

------
jahaja
So for example, with regards to startups growing rapidly on VC funding:

What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's
planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation
phase is just a check boxing exercise, and thus create a lot of bullshit jobs.

------
prepend
I worked in an organization with lots of processes. I was in an office with no
windows, a bit of a hole or maybe even oubliette. You couldn’t tell time of
day, weather, etc but it was better than a cubicle.

My door opened to a 10 foot hallway with and about 5 feet down there was a
large window. It was a weird L-shape and no one else’s office or cube or
anything was in the hallway to nowhere. So it was kind of nice that no one
walked by and it was off the beaten path.

The window in the hallway was closed with blinds. But if I opened them it was
possible to get some ambient light effects so while I couldn’t see out it from
inside my office, I could tell if it was day or night. So it was better.

A few weeks went by and the blinds were closed one day. That’s weird, no one
comes by here. I asked some nearby coworkers if they knew who closed and why
and they didn’t know. No one knew. The entire floor is probably the size of a
football field and has 100 offices around the edge with 200 cubes and
conference rooms and stuff in the middle. My team is probably 10 people and
there’s lots of other groups.

No one I knew knew and didn’t really care. I maybe spent 2-3 minutes because I
was surprised that anyone walked by here, much less cared. I opened the blinds
and when about my business.

About a week later, the blinds were closed again. Weird, but again I checked
and no one I knew cared. I opened them again.

3 days later, they were closed. Repeat a few times and now I was opening them
every day and someone else was closing them. Weird and funny.

This went on for a few days and the blinds would close in the middle of the
day. I spend about 3-6 hours out of my office doing different stuff so I come
and go. So I would now open them whenever I noticed them back down during the
day.

Finally, I’m in my office and I hear the metallic zip sound of blinds closing.
I stick my head of of my office and say hello to someone from a different
floor and group, I’ll call her Betty.

I ask Betty what’s up and she tells me that she’s closing the blinds. I ask
why and she says because they are supposed to be closed. I explain why I like
them open and that there’s no one else who sees this window and she again says
the blinds must be down.

Interesting. I love arbitrary rules as a big board game fan. I ask about why,
and she says that no building things can be changed without a business
justification as required by OSHA, fire marshalls, and emergency coordinators.

I tell her that I think this wouldn’t apply to something as minor as a window
blind, but assured me it’s for everything.

I try a different tack and propose that the natural state is open, and that
she is actually the one who needs a justification to close. But she’s too
smart for that, she produces an inventory of the building that she makes each
January that clearly shows the blinds closed for the past few years.

She is not joking or being ironic. She’s serious.

So I ask how business justifications are evaluated and she says that they are
submitted to her and she evaluates them. There’s no template or format and no
one has ever submitted one in the 10 years she was in this role.

Wow, ok. I go ahead and tell her I’ll write one and ask how to submit them.

This is funny to me, so later that evening, I spend a few minutes and write up
a justification email. It’s pretty bullshit and basically says “Window blinds
open makes me happier, and thus more productive. Closed blinds reduce
productivity and thus reduce organization impact. Yadda Yadda Yadda.”

It’s maybe two paragraphs. She replies that my justification is insufficient
and blinds will stay closed.

This is now less funny. So I look her up in the company director. She is a
random workgroup’s Secretary and is a contractor who has been in the building
forever. She has contracted for three different organization, but has always
sat there. She schedules appointments and orders staples and stuff for about
20 of the hundreds of people in the building. She’s on a different floor than
me. There’s five floors. Her group is entirely on a different floor.

This is bizarre. With this knowledge, I resubmit a revised justification. She
denies it again. I respond copying her contracting monitor or whatever you
call the person who organizes the contract, pointing out this bizarre process.
The contracting person is confused and responds that this is not in any
contract, they don’t give a shit, and question why this is done.

Then there’s silence for via email for a few days. The contracting person
responds that the blinds will stay open. I never hear from Betty again.

I moved out of that office about 5 years ago. The blinds stayed open while I
was there.

About a year or two ago, I was in that building and I walked by my old area to
talk to some former co-workers and noticed the blinds were down.

I gave a quick recap and the current occupant didn’t care and hadn’t noticed.
But they did say that Betty was still there.

I think people get really invested in a process they think is important, but
is only important to them. A co-worker called this “building imaginary castles
in the sky.”

It was really cool to them, but meaningless to any observer. Sometimes it’s
useful in the long run for something else, but hard to tell immediately.

There’s confusion that gets compounded and you have real stuff wrapped around
it. It seems like it may be bullshit.

------
fouc
Reminds me of [https://www.fastcompany.com/3036728/office-roleplay-meet-
the...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3036728/office-roleplay-meet-the-people-
who-pretend-to-work-at-an-office-together-for-fun)

------
jl6
For all the talk about bullshit jobs, I don’t recall seeing a single example
of one that made me think “yep, that job is clearly creating no value for
anyone”.

Dog washer is mentioned. Sure it’s a luxury, but bullshit? There are clearly
people willing to pay for that service.

------
nouripen
I contributed to David Graeber's new Bullshit Jobs book. And this week
published: "Dissecting two academic trolls’ review of 'Bullshit Jobs: A
Theory'": [https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-
academ...](https://medium.com/@nouri.pennywhistle/dissecting-two-academic-
trolls-review-of-bullshit-jobs-a-theory-e2782559becb)

The OP asks a key question: _" In an efficient market, why would profit-
focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t
doing anything valuable?"_

Anyone wondering this should skim the book, which squarely addresses this
concern: _" This is always represented as exactly what would never happen
under capitalism. The last thing a private firm, competing with other private
firms, would do is to hire people it doesn’t actually need. If anything, the
usual complaint about capitalism is that it’s too efficient, with private
workplaces endlessly hounding employees with constant speed-ups, quotas, and
surveillance."_

Don't know if I should spoil the explanations. :)

------
advertising
Makes me think of every 1st tier support interaction I’ve ever had where a
person can’t answer a single question and just refers you to online resources
you’ve already read and couldn’t find the answer to.

------
ransom1538
You need a note to bring in a chair? At all the startups I have worked for -
as long as it isn’t illegal you can bring it in. At zynga they moved my desk
to install a keg. (Edit 2008 zynga)

------
dumbfounder
Can't he just write a letter "So-and-so wants to bring his own chair to work,
and it is important to him. Will you let him?"

It is a note from their doctor. It isn't a medical opinion.

------
rmetzler
Regarding the back pain from sitting to much: IKEA has an electrical standing
desk called BEKANT for a little more than 500 EUR. This was life changing for
me.

------
d--b
> people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that
> degenerate into rituals

There's something about the idea of ritual indeed. Well found

------
PeterStuer
"why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own
admission aren’t doing anything valuable".

The short answer: they might not be doing anything valuable, but that doesn't
mean they aren't valuable.

I'm not a sociologist, so this is 'anecdotal', but I have consulted in and
worked with a large number of companies during my professional 'career.

First key insight I gained is that [b]the larger the company, the greater the
distance between personal action and institutional success[/b]. In a very
small business, your own actions directly influence and visibly contribute to
the success or failure of the company. As the company gets larger, your own
actions or even complete lack their-off will for the vast majority of
employees not visibly influence the needle.

In absence of this tight coupling between personal actions and company
outcomes, the majority of people will be optimizing decisions in terms of the
outcome for [i]themselves[/i], something their direct actions most certainly
influence, rather than for some nebulous and intangible 'for the benefit of
the enterprise'.

As large companies invariably have a multi-layered hierarchical structure, the
lack of objective measurement in company contribution will not counterbalance
the 'career-optimizing' forces, and so the average 'me'-focused person will
tend to 'out-compete' a more holistic 'company-minded' individual when it
comes to climbing the hierarchy.

Optimizing for personal gain does not align with company efficiency unless by
accident. It often even contradicts it as 'small but efficient' solutions are
the exception as their creation might benefit the one person that can claim
the credit for it at some point and rise to the next level, yet burn that
bridge for everyone 'coming behind' as they now are just heading a small
division instead of shepherding over a large number of warm bodies and the
size of the spending-budget they 'control', the universal career success
measure for management.

Second key insight: [b]companies are legal entities, but don't [i]realy[/i]
exist as a conscious entity.[/b]

Let me explain what I mean. As an external consultant, you never work for
company X, you work for person A, the person that hires you. Same (but
different), as an employee, you don't realy work for company Y, you work for
the benefit of persons B and C, people that got you onto their team to improve
their situation.

Combined, both of these insights lead to the realization that a vast number of
people do not work because they create by their work actions, their 'job', a
focused benefit to 'the company', the 'customers/clients' or 'society at
large', all of which are typical personal 'value' related vectors. They work
because they are foot-soldiers that provide 'value' in the managerial
hierarchy wars, which is something most people will not recognize as 'value'
but as 'bullshit'.

A third key realization(I promise, I'll keep it at that), and the one that
answers [b]'but why are these inefficient behemoths not put to rest by highly
efficient competitors[/b], is that a lot of people tend to misinterpret
Darwinian dynamics, a common popular conceptual model in thinking about
'markets' and 'efficiencies'. Popular interpretation that of the 'survival of
the fittest'. They imagine animals (enterprises and businesses in this
context), to be in an eternal struggle (red in tooth and claw), resulting in
the leanest and meanest, the most efficient providing the best 'fit', rising
to the top. The invisible hand of the market will create optimal, highly
efficient companies in each sector. Unfortunately this model and the
interpretation there-off are deceiving. Rather than selecting for the best, a
Darwinian dynamic 'just' selects for a sufficient fit to a niche, and only
works by weeding out the bottom, those that fail to find a place in any niche
at all. In 'static' systems running for a sufficiently long time, promoting
the top or weeding out the bottom can lead to the same outcome. In 'dynamic'
systems, where 'niches' change over time, both mechanisms can have very
different outcomes. Theoretically speaking, top selection tends to efficient
but 'over-fitted' solutions, bottom removal does not favor efficiency but
resilience, doing 'good-enough' to survive under very many circumstances.
Companies that truly 'solve' a problem (something that is definitely on the
'value' scale when people think about 'is my job meaningful'), either
eliminate the very basis of their existence by eradicating the 'problem' they
solve. It's hard to think of such things or companies, because both they and
their reason for 'existence' have disappeared. A more stable solution in terms
of company (and thus job) existence must have an ongoing number of cases to
'solve', ideally (in terms of stability) by having the 'solution' create it's
own demand for more 'solution', a dependency. People think we as a society
weed these out, because they are culturally immediately conditioned to think
of 'heroin' or 'illegal substances' as the example of the archetype of of the
dependency inducing concept. Thing is that our whole socio-economic market
system is based on creating and sustaining ongoing dependency.So once again,
people seeing that the company they work for doesn't solve but even plays a
role in creating the problems it pretends to solve, again find their job
'meaningless' at best.

Sorry for the long post.

~~~
arbitrary_name
This is the comment i came here for. SlateStars previous 'meditations on
moloch' considered the idea of complex capitalist systems, and a relentless
trend towards efficiency and Survival of participants within the system that
eventually snuffs out art, freedom, and results in dire consequences for both
the participants and the wider environment.

This interpretation is similar to the one put forward here by Graeber, and as
you point out, similarly overestimates the effectiveness of the feedback
mechanisms that drive 'fit' or 'fitness' and especially overestimates the
willingness or incentive of participants, including corporations as well as
workers, to adapt beyond a point where survival, at least for a time, is
achieved.

I entirely agree that bullshit jobs exist, and in significant number as a
result of a number of factors, but i often suspect that a 'hypercapitalist'
system, with greater resource allocation efficiency and price or other
signalling, would just be a miserable gig-driven dystopia.

At least with a bullshit job you can condition yourself to relax and enjoy the
ride...

~~~
PeterStuer
Thx. I bought his book and put it on my (long) Kindle reading list. (OT::
buying more books than I can read has always been my guilty pleasure.)

------
aedron
Maybe it's simply that companies aim for a certain aesthetic, and letting
people bring random chairs in would go against it.

------
varunpant
Well, not everyone needs a meaningful job, like all the time.

------
rajacombinator
Keep in mind, most of tech is bullshit jobs that have no impact on product,
business or customers. Tech for tech’s sake.

------
RobertSmith
Most bullshit jobs are well paid

------
sophistication
It looks like psychiatry, especially psychotherapy, is bullshit to a far
greater extent than what was discussed in this blog post:

\---

For real patients, there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are
greater than those of placebo treatment.

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-
brain...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-
sciences/article/an-analysis-of-psychotherapy-versus-placebo-
studies/08C6F3704103BE1DE8737138D61BE66B) (Prioleau 1983)

Meta-analysis shows antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy.
No significant difference between the studies with and those without a placebo
condition.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26169475](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26169475)
(Cuijpers 2015)

Negative results in phase III trials of complex interventions

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-
journal-...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-
psychiatry/article/negative-results-in-phase-iii-trials-of-complex-
interventions-cause-for-concern-or-just-good-
science/188FDEFC70880724315045EC8D773AA2) (Crawford 2016)

Therapy experience in naturalistic observational studies is associated with
negative changes in personality

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656616302410)
(Philip 2016)

Does psychotherapy work? An umbrella review of meta‐analyses of randomized
controlled trials finds only 7% of studies provided convincing evidence that
psychotherapy is effective. These pertained to cognitive behavioural therapy
(n = 6), meditation therapy (n = 1), cognitive remediation (n = 1),
counselling (n = 1) and mixed types of psychotherapies (n = 7).

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acps.12713?c...](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acps.12713?campaign=wolearlyview)

More experience and training do not improve outcome of psychotherapy.

[http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-46640-006](http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-46640-006)
(Erekson 2017)

Trauma and victimhood have also been way overstated, overlooking that most
people recover from traumatic experiences; that duration and and frequency of
trauma are uncorrelated with subsequent disorder.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735818300539)
(Küenzlen 2016)

Young children emerge from single potentially traumatic events psychologically
unharmed

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405629.2016.11...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405629.2016.1150174)
(Galatzer-Levy 2018)

People with moderate life adversity have the fewest stress symptoms, are the
most satisfied with life and the least affected by recent traumata.

[https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/2512-8442/a0000...](https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/2512-8442/a000011)
(Höltge 2018)

How to spot hype in the field of psychotherapy: A 19-item checklist

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXZ75sEnpTpqExb_KP0buaL6V2y...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXZ75sEnpTpqExb_KP0buaL6V2yZagvE/view)

~~~
SEMW
AFAICT none of the links you give offer any support for the claim that
"psychiatry is bullshit".

Several, if anything, support the exact opposite (e.g "antidepressants to be
more effective than psychotherapy" \-- 'psychiatrist' is not a synonym of
'psychotherapist', a psychiatrist is a medical doctor specialising in mental
illness, so is licensed to prescribe antidepressants). Most of the others are
just not relevant to the claim ("Young children emerge from single potentially
traumatic events psychologically unharmed" \-- how exactly is that supposed to
be evidence that psychiatry is bullshit? By some kind of hidden implication
that just because thing X does not cause mental illness, therefore mental
illnesses don't exist?)

~~~
sophistication
Yes, I predominately mean psychotherapy. The links I've listed mostly just
provide hints of excessive psychologizing and quackery, but it is indeed
awkward when >90% of psychotherapy methods do not perform better than placebo.
There seems to be quackery in the medical side of psychiatry as well, but to a
lesser extent.

Here it is straight from the horse's mouth:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Fi32LbXHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0Fi32LbXHA)

------
village-idiot
I actually hold the view that we no longer live in a capitalistic society per
se, but a neofeudal one. A lot of modern companies, especially the really big
ones, seem to be less interested in competing in the open market and more
interested in rent extraction.

------
allthenews
I've always wondered if my various general practitioners had primarily
bullshit jobs following the rise of the internet.

~~~
feintruled
Having gone to the Internet for advice (and I don't mean just Googling
symptoms and taking a guess, I mean those actual pay for medical advice
sites), I have a handle on what your GP is for - they provide some sort of
accountability and responsibility.

Once, at my wits end with a problem with my child I went to one such site even
though I knew it was a bad idea - it's basically a stackoverflow but staffed
by real doctors (apparently) and you pay per answer. It's not terribly
expensive, but literally any advice you have will be totally vague and contain
the instruction to "see your GP". No reputable professional would put their
nuts on the line for a remote diagnosis.

