
For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose - wyclif
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom
======
apohn
A large company I worked for was spending >$1M/year (data + data pipeline +
personnel) on "Social Media Analysis." Every month a "Social Media Report" PDF
was emailed to "key stakeholders and decision makers." When we asked them what
they were doing with it everybody said they never really looked at it. When we
asked them how it could be more useful they shrugged their shoulders.

And yet the company was constantly talking about how great they were at their
social media presence and using social media Analytics to keep their customers
happy.

I guess a sending out a monthly PDF on social media is self-explanatory to the
value of if. So many people involved in something that was zero value.

~~~
foobarbazetc
You’ve just described 95% of projects at large companies.

If you consult for any of them you quickly realize there are like 5 people
running the entire company and 49995 somehow pushing forward through inertia.

~~~
konschubert
And this, kids, is why a small startup can beat a big incumbent.

~~~
buserror
"can" but can also suffer from other idiocy. I know, i've worked many times in
big, medium, and small companies.

The problem with small companies is... the _lack_ of inertia! You get the CEO
reading an article and decide to 'rebrand', throwing away whatever plan there
was in motion to do the previous fad.

Then he goes to a show, and comes back all bouncy about the new cool stuff we
HAVE to start integrating or else we won't be relevant when coming to market.

Been there, done that, got a whole pile of t-shirts ;-)

------
zby
The root cause is complexity. People don't understand their jobs: sometimes
they are told to do stupid things, other times they do useful things but they
think they are useless. Companies always relied on their employees to adjust
their work to the overall goal - if they cannot understand the whole structure
then this crucial organizational maintenance fails. If they see that their
reports are not read - then they or their bosses should intervene - but now
people don't understand what is the purpose of those reports, who should read
them and why.

Another thing is that in a complex organization there are many internal zero-
sum mini-games - bosses that employ people only to increase their own
importance, etc - then the job of these employees must be kind of useless. But
the root cause of that is the same - it is the job of the boss of the boss (or
maybe the CEO, or the board or the owner) to reduce that, but they don't
because the complexity hides it. And then those mini-games add to the
complexity itself creating a positive feedback loop.

Jobs like lobbyists or corporate lawyers or much of PR departments are also
about zero-sum games - but in a bigger organization - the nation as a whole.
Military is a zero-sum game on yet bigger scale.

~~~
zentiggr
Former submariner:

The military is about as far from zero-sum as you can get.

Gear is manufactured, used, worn out and discarded, at surprisingly high cost
overall.

Soldiers are recruited, trained, serve, and leave. Training funds, time, and
gear are necessary but never recouped.

Every military operation of any scale uses food/fuel/every other supply
imaginable - all used and lost from other productive use.

Every 'build a civilization' game ever assigns expenses to military units
created, never any production value.

(Ok, military R&D is sometimes practical and useful outside of the military...
a small sop in an other wise large sinkhole.)

~~~
IdiocyInAction
I think he means it in a sense that you have to have one as a nation and the
more powerful yours is, the less other countries can project power. Though
nukes change this IMHO.

~~~
Abekkus
nukes only threatened to change this, drones will change this.

------
mysterypie
I didn't quite understand what he was saying about President Obama's thinking,
so here's the full quote from Obama:

 _" Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this
money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one
million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at
Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them?
Where are we employing them?"_

So it seems that Obama didn't pursue a single-payer system because keeping 2-3
million "bullshit" jobs was more important than efficiency in the health care
system, or at least it was part of his reasoning.

~~~
stevenwoo
Joe Leiberman would not have voted for single payer. He opposed moving
Medicare eligibility to 55 and over so that had to be taken out of ACA. He (or
any single Democrat) was the margin for passing the bill in the Senate with 60
votes to avoid the GOP killing the bill in the Senate.

Also, if I remember correctly, the ACA is similar to but not identical to a
GOP plan from the 90's and the state plan adopted when Mitt Romney was
governor of Massachusetts in the way you describe - continuing to use existing
insurance companies.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Just to underscore this, Lieberman represented Connecticut, which is home to
some of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. Lieberman killed
the public option in the ACA.

[https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/16/16766/elimination...](https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/16/16766/elimination-
public-option-threw-consumers-insurance-wolves)

~~~
StanislavPetrov
Lieberman was (and is) certainly bought and sold by the insurance companies,
but the lion's share of the blame for not having single payer - let alone a
public option - lies squarely on Obama's shoulders. Obama's man in the Senate,
Max Baucus, at Obama's direction, barred all single-payer and public option
advocates from the conference rooms and negotiating table from the very
beginning. Nancy Pelosi and Obama cajoled Dennis Kucinich into supporting the
ACA in exchange for a promise that they would bring his single-payer bill to
the floor for a vote, to at least put Congressman on the record. Obama brought
Kucinich on Air Force one to make this promise. They lied. Kucinich never got
his vote - Pelosi and Obama never allowed single payer to surface at all.

Lieberman is certainly worth of endless condementation, but trying to pretend
Obama didn't do everything he could to kill single-payer and a public option
in order to implement Romneycare is just wrong.

------
mysterypie
> _bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain
> as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole_

The incredible thing is that this happened without being a master plan of any
government or even a cultural meme (an ideal like recycling, minority rights,
literacy).

No one sat in a meeting room in the 1950s and said, "Well, we're going to have
massive unemployment in the decades to come, so let's start creating lots of
meaningless jobs."

It just happened. Gradually and without anyone noticing. Amazing.

~~~
api
That is how most things happen. They emerge from evolutionary pressures, game
theoretic dynamics, or just as emergent properties of the rule set in
operation. The result looks like a conspiracy but in reality it's driven by
the furious mad piping of the blind idiot gods of evolution, economics, and
complex systems.

~~~
zentiggr
Lovecraftian Economics... just saying that makes me shudder a little but I see
it, can't unsee it.

~~~
api
Steve Jobs once quipped that conspiracy theory is optimistic. It assumes that
someone somewhere has some idea what is happening and can actually steer the
ship.

------
valeg
>Still, I think Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-
sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct
categories. Overall he presents the five types of bullshit jobs as flunkies,
goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters, but he spends too much time
trying to lower the status of these jobs and not enough time investigating
what happens when those jobs go away.¹

¹
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull-
shit-jobs-theory.html)

~~~
linkregister
That was great.

My favorite excerpt:

 _> Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par,
or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior
organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems
every day._

------
ng12
This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most
important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper
pushers. I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system
to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never
felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they
were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever
being read by another human.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
After 10 years in consulting, my conclusion is that we haven‘t really figured
out how to run a large company properly. Its Kafkaesque and causes so much
suffering.

~~~
speedplane
Your assumption is that avoiding personal suffering or miserable beuracracy is
the goal, that isn’t the point. Maximizing return on investment is the point,
of course these other goals won’t be met.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
How is wasting a million dollars on unread social media reports „maximizing
return on investment“?

------
ravenstine
> Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors,
> who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose
> job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.

This is the most irritating aspect of any company I've worked for. I can deal
with the fact that certain people are "duct tapers", people who take pick up
the slack, "box tickers", etc. But people's belief that others need to be
managed, especially when those others are already motivated, is demoralizing
and destructive on so many levels.

The bias of management creates a feedback loop when the employee does the work
the way they would have done it had management not been looking over their
shoulder, and the manager thinks to themself "It's a good thing I'm here,
because nothing would get done!"

~~~
kingkongjaffa
Equally there is value in herding cats.

My role is often times just to ask people what they think they need to do.
often they know, often they just need to speak to department x and work
together. for whatever reason they don't so my department herds the cats
together and works to focus on what is the right problem to solve.

------
theshadowknows
The purpose of my job is to make me money. I make money by doing things that
my company thinks is productive. Today I helped write some internal APIs. Last
week I worked with legal on some stuff. Building “sexy” web applications or
“disrupting industries” is great. But I can’t pay my rent or go to the movies
because I shifted some paradigms. The purpose of my job is to make me money,
regardless of what the job is.

~~~
cup-of-tea
But do you think they are productive? That is the key. There are many things
my company thinks is productive but I think they are a waste of my life.

Feeling good about "making money" isn't something that lasts. Eventually it's
just that thing you have to do to maintain your completely normal lifestyle
that you now take for granted. At that point you'd better hope the thing has
more meaning than just "making money".

~~~
pqs
It is productive if it feeds and shelters your family. I once made peace with
this and now I'm happier.

~~~
phito
If your only goal is just to make money for yourself, then you're a part of
this "work bullshit" problem.

~~~
kup0
Yeah, but I don't really have the time or the freedom to care about whether or
not I am part of the problem. At the end of the day, I need to live, and
everything else takes a back seat to that.

------
ry_ry
I'm a frontender. My speciality is client-side JavaScript. I'm not horrible at
it.

I freaking love my job and would do it for funsies of there weren't companies
prepared to pay me to do it, but my job has been completed bullshit for as
long as the role has existed. When the revolution comes I'll be the first
against the wall against the wall alongside the digital marketing managers and
the agile coaches.

~~~
ironjunkie
don't you think you help people navigating websites by making them more user-
friendly ? I would believe that what you do doesn't really fulfill the
definition of bullshit job as it helps people down the line.

~~~
tomatotomato37
Yes, for maybe the first 2 years. Then a maxima is reached, but UI designers
gotta justify their paycheck, so they keep innovating right off that peak into
the next valley

~~~
linkregister
Aren't they usually designing the UI for new features of the software? Backend
developers can't just ship an API in a B2C environment.

~~~
meheleventyone
Plenty of new features are bullshit as well. Added without much reason and
used by few customers. There’s often a lot of pressure on product teams to
continuously make things better and no incentive for them to say “the best
thing we could do is to leave this alone for now”. This gets internalised to
the point everyone has their own little hobby horse and actively lobbies to
get it on the agenda. Hey presto you have a “dynamic and creative” team
constantly churning the periphery of the product core.

~~~
otakucode
For many years now I have wondered if it might be practical for software
engineers to be kept "on retainer", as lawyers often are, by companies. I once
purchased an absolutely fantastic FTP client called BulletProof FTP. But it
followed the sad trajectory of so much software. It reached very near to
absolute perfection. And then they just kept working on it. It grew like a
cancer. It destroyed everything good about the software and eventually made it
worthless. It was clear, to me at least, that there was simply some manager
somewhere who had personal problems and couldn't tolerate sitting still,
forcing developers to just keep bolting garbage to the side of the thing.

A lot of it boils down to the Protestant Work Ethic having no place in the
modern world. It made sense for situations where 'work' was physical labor.
That benefits from perseverance and endurance. Mental work does not benefit
from perseverance and endurance. It suffers tremendously from them. The brain
simply does not work that way.

------
TomMckenny
The price of labor is so cheap now apparently there is almost no incentive to
clean this up.

Consider that even small sandwich shops consider it worthwhile to hire a guy
to stand on a street corner waving a sign or dressed as a pickle.

I suppose we as a society have decided to do this rather than guaranteed
minimum income or any other livable social safety net.

------
caboteria
At my company, a small startup, I recently attended a meeting whose invitation
list included 4 managers and 2 workers. From that I can extrapolate that the
bullshit to work ratio is 2 to 1. They're working to fix it, though: they're
hiring more managers.

------
Timpy
Larger airlines create really well produced (and expensive) safety guideline
videos as a supplement to the safety speech before each flight, and they still
have attendants pantomiming the safety procedures. Smaller flights just have
the attendants. I think this is a form of branding, it "feels" like a better
product when you have a video with expensive production values.

Is it necessarily true that a bullshit job has to server no purpose? I think a
doorman is like the safety video. It makes the product feel more expensive. I
agree it's a bullshit job, but it contributes to the impression your company
is making. Maybe a well produced Analytics Report makes a sort of impression
like this too. At a glance you can prove you are a high end company that has
everything together, and produces sophisticated reports as evidence. Even if
it's a bullshit report, spending 5 figures to make the report is worth it, if
it secures a bunch of 6 figure customers.

I'm not saying we should secure bullshit jobs, I'm just trying to voice some
more perspective.

~~~
SCdF
> I think this is a form of branding, it "feels" like a better product when
> you have a video with expensive production values.

I'm only familiar with Air New Zealand's productions, but they are totally
marketing / patriotism / more marketing. In that sense they form a very
important function: they do some crazy video that gets them in the news again,
reminding people they exist and solidifying the idea that they are a fun
airline you should totally pay slightly more than the competition to fly with.

(full disclosure, I am a New Zealander who will fly AirNZ if given the
opportunity, so clearly it worked on me!)

------
ryandrake
> Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the
> workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can
> acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every
> morning compiling useless reports

This passage starts getting into why these jobs have to exist.

1\. There are fewer useful things that need doing than employable people, so
not everyone can get a useful job.

2\. Everyone needs some kind of income.

3\. Basic Income and welfare are politically difficult because of our
Protestant cultural belief that income _must_ be earned through work.

If 1, 2, and 3 are true, then bullshit jobs must be created, or people
starve/riot.

~~~
komali2
Is it rooted in Protestantism or just generalized zeitgeist for our planet?
Even in the Soviet Union you had to work to eat, as I recall.

I think it's shit - down with private property and all that. There is going to
be a point in the next hundred years where we won't be able to justify
millions of jobs, and none of my representatives seem to have any sort of plan
in mind for when that happens.

------
ikeboy
>Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate
lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss
them.

And how does he think disputes between companies or between companies and
consumers should be handled?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Yeah, a lot of these jobs he talks about are what I call "zero-sum jobs" \- it
sucks that they have to exist, but if any individual firm stopped having them,
that firm would be behind.

Money managers are a good example of this. At the end of the day stock picking
truly is a zero-sum game, and all money managers can produce _in total_ is the
negative effect of their fees on their clients money, yet people pay them
because they take the chance that _their_ money manager will produce a better
than average return.

Similarly, the vast majority of marketing jobs are zero-sum jobs. True, a
teeny minority do inform the public about a new product or service they
wouldn't otherwise know about, but the vast majority are just trying to
convince the public to use your widget over competitor's (actually very
similar) widget. But any individual firm needs marketers, otherwise the
competitors would take all of their business.

~~~
supahfly_remix
> At the end of the day stock picking truly is a zero-sum game

If stocks give dividends, then stock picking isn't a zero-sum game.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> If stocks give dividends, then stock picking isn't a zero-sum game.

I don't understand this. "Stock picking" traditionally refers to buying or
selling stocks through the stock market. It doesn't create or destroy any
stock, and the dividends are invariant with respect to who owns the stock.

That makes dividends perfectly zero-sum. If I buy a stock from you, my gain
from getting the dividend is exactly equal to your loss from losing the
dividend.

What am I missing here?

~~~
jiggunjer
The selling party doesn't lose dividend, they just don't gain it. Losing it
would mean the dividend amount is _subtracted_ from their account.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The more common argument for stock trading being zero sum is that if I
experience a gain after buying a stock from you, you experience an equal loss
(by selling the stock when it would have gone up).

Dividends do not alter that argument in any way. The trade is described as
zero-sum because the total amount of value it produces is zero -- in the trade
scenario, I gain X, and in the no-trade scenario, you gain X. X minus X is
zero. My gain is your loss.

------
bane
This is tough. In many cases I think that people identify as superficially
"worthless", I think there's a justifiable reason for those jobs even if it
takes a little bit of digging to understand why it exists. For example, I know
of a few jobs right now that a person does that, if it disappeared tomorrow,
would have no immediate measurable impact on the company those jobs exist
within. But wait a year or two and those jobs turn out to generate long-term
cost savings to the company.

But in other cases, jobs that seem to be superficially necessary turn out to
not be needed at all. I just said goodbye to a colleague last week and after
they left we went through their entire list of tasks and responsibilities --
things that kept an intelligent, highly educated, adult human fully occupied
for more than 40 hours a week and paid well into six figures -- and entirely
eliminated or rolled over all of those things with no specific impact to our
work. The scary part was that much of it was work producing material that was
highly demanded of by one of our customers -- the bulk of those 40+ man hours
were reports and other deliverable. We simply told the customer that they
wouldn't be getting some of that stuff anymore or it would take a different
shape to satisfy the need and they were ultimately fine with it.

What really concerns me are those jobs that need filling and nobody knows they
exist and there's nobody doing them. Things that would eliminate waste,
consolidate work, or expand business, but some collective blind spot prevents
those positions from being realized. The classic examples in software are good
QA people or in many small companies, good sales and business development
people.

If this still doesn't make sense to this tech crowd. I'll pose this, in the
90s the revolution was "making software useful to people by making the
functions of the software discoverable in a well designed GUI". How many of us
sit in front of entire screen fulls of discovery-free GUI-less command-lines
all day typing out things that took thousands of hours to master and would be
bulk eliminated if somebody just put a nice usable GUI in front of it?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I agree with your overall point, but I don't think the GUI example helps your
case here.

> _How many of us sit in front of entire screen fulls of discovery-free GUI-
> less command-lines all day typing out things that took thousands of hours to
> master and would be bulk eliminated if somebody just put a nice usable GUI
> in front of it?_

We sit in front of "discovery-free GUI-less command lines" to do stuff that is
either impossible to be fully and properly captured by a pointing-device
operated GUI, or would become orders of magnitude less efficient if operated
through such GUI.

The discoverability problem is overblown, IMO - the actual problem is that
we've trained people to no longer feel expected to _learn_ a tool before using
it. The example I usually give is this: no one in their right mind expects to
be able to enter a car for the first time in their life and be allowed to
drive on public roads. It is _expected of them_ to go through a couple-dozen
long training course and learn a bit of theory. People don't complain about
that, because there's a social expectation that you need training. Compare
that with people whining that a program is "unintuitive" because it requires
you to spend _5 minutes_ in a tutorial to acquire basic operational
competency. Compare _that_ to video games, where again there is an expectation
to learn, where people _don 't_ complain about tutorials.

The only way to make software that can be mastered in 10 seconds from first
exposure is to make it have flat learning curve - that is, you can't use it
for anything more powerful than what you can learn in those 10 seconds. This
approach gives you simple toys, not actual tools.

As for discoverability of CLI tools, skimming its manual and looking at usage
examples is equivalent to taking a GUI program and quickly skimming through
all its menus and buttons. The whole problem here is purely of individual
emotions. It's as if some people were simply _afraid of reading_.

~~~
bane
> or would become orders of magnitude less efficient if operated through such
> GUI.

I don't disagree. The reason for the re-rise of the CLI is that it's just
faster to get stuff executed and easier to script and coordinate things. But
there's also a great many CLI tools that don't have obvious command-line uses,
or the docs are poor and users of those tools just "know" how to use them
because of many hours spent learning them. But new and infrequent users spend
lots of time reading docs or rereading them, or looking up examples on the
internet and in many cases those uses would be immediately obvious with some
radio buttons and a couple buttons. There's also the cases of unbreaking
things or unexpected results because of typos.

GUIs make the trade-off of learn-ability with operational efficiency and
frankly, many of the tools we use don't benefit from being able to type them
out quickly and would benefit from just having some buttons to click with all
the options specified.

Also don't think I'm talking only about mousable GUIs. There's plenty of very
good examples of keyboardable GUIs with very fast and efficient use-cases that
also maintain good discover-ability.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Also don 't think I'm talking only about mousable GUIs. There's plenty of
> very good examples of keyboardable GUIs with very fast and efficient use-
> cases that also maintain good discover-ability._

Good point. GUIs of old were heavy on keyboard shortcuts; the web era seems to
have forgotten about this concept.

Incidentally, the best keyboard-only-but-still-GUI I've seen is Magit -
[https://magit.vc/](https://magit.vc/) \- it's operated entirely via keyboard,
but is very discoverable, with visual popups listing keys you can use and
values of various switches. See e.g. [0] - the bottom part of the screen is
the popup that shows when you press 'd' once. For operations you often do, you
quickly learn the mnemonic - e.g. for typical diffing, you'd press 'd d'
quickly. And the list of all command groups is available under '?', as yet
another popup.

\--

[0] - [https://magit.vc/screenshots/popup-
diff.png](https://magit.vc/screenshots/popup-diff.png)

------
d--b
> Left to their own devices, Graeber points out, people tend to do work like
> students at exam time, alternately cramming and slacking. Possibly, they
> work this way because it is the most productive way to work. Most of us
> would assume that a farmer who started farming at 9 a.m. and stopped at 5
> p.m. five days a week was strange, and probably not a very good farmer.

Smart! I never thought of it that way! I'm a remote part-time engineer and I
totally do cram-and-slack. It should be a management style.

~~~
ahartmetz
Developer and son of a farmer here. It's a bad analogy. In farming, there are
very real "deadlines", and you can do 14 hours of useful physical (well...
driving machines) work for a few days at a time. At other times, there really
isn't much to do. You can find something to do if you want, but it doesn't
make much of a difference.

In software, your mental capacity is the most real limit, and it's limited to
about 5-6 hours per day for the most demanding part of the work. You get the
most out of it by using it every day. Having just the right amount of work to
do is hard, but working creatively for more than 6 hours per day is
impossible. I have talked about this with many people and everyone seems to
agree with 5-6 hours. (As somebody with a home office, I find that a very long
break in the middle of the day may allow an extra hour or so)

~~~
swyx
wow, thats a venn diagram. do you see opportunities for software in farming
where you are from?

~~~
ahartmetz
I'm from Germany. A few decades ago, farmers were still several percent of the
population, so I'm not that special. Germany is small and dense and
infrastructure is decent everywhere, so you don't start with a big
disadvantage coming from a farm.

Sure there is software in agriculture today, mostly "ERP"-type, but I don't
think there is an opportunity better than in other industries. Things are
getting more exciting with autonomous tractors and drones and selective
herbicide application based on image recognition. But the underlying
technologies have applications in areas with more turnover.

------
bluedino
The ultimate land of bullshit jobs has to be in college administration

~~~
api
Yeah that's bad. Another big concentration is government contractors,
especially huge ones. We had this idea that we would eliminate waste by
privatizing government work. Hahahahahahahah...

------
potta_coffee
I've finally found a job I'm good at, at a company that seems to make somewhat
of a positive difference. At least, we provide a service our users need
without producing and readily apparent negative impact.

I've never been so happy at work. I fix challenging problems every day. I'm
part of a really small team and I'm able to bring skills to the table that
they are missing, which is fulfilling because I'm really having an impact.

In the past, I've worked at shitty jobs where my work meant nothing and was
even resented by my peers -- mostly because we were an "Agile" shop doing all
the wrong things (death by meetings, retarded micromanagement, un-meetable
deadlines).

I'm super thankful for my current gig.

------
pjc50
It's not really surprising, when so much effort has been invested in erasing
any kind of higher purpose than money from western society. The idea that
there is an obligation towards one's fellow humans and citizens leads to the
idea that the mega-rich might be obliged to share a bit -- so that had to be
silenced.

------
sornaensis
In college I had a (sort of) BS job at a real estate start up that was doing
home renovations. They hired an accounting consultant to help them get their
books together (dude was 75 years old, and they paid him something like
10$k/mo for his consulting) to go to a bank for more money or something along
those lines. One of his ideas was to move everything they had out of
quickbooks online into quickbooks enterprise and remap all of their accounts
into this bizarre configuration. So they hired me to automate this process
(they had hundreds of accounts, each with sub accounts and whatnot).

Anyway the guy was mercurial as all heck, so every day pretty much was spent
starting from scratch and months were spent just figuring out whether they
wanted to move to enterprise or not so I had to write multiple solutions which
never got used. The manager who hired let me do different work when the
consultant was MIA so I ended up writing some web scrapers and different
automation tools that nobody ever used for anything. Eventually they figured
out that the consultant was scamming them and fired him. Thankfully that gravy
train lasted right up to graduation and I was able to get a real job.

I guess it wasn't so much that the job was BS, but that people at the company
had a whole lot of vague ideas about 'increasing productivity' that I was
perfectly happy to oblige, but unfortunately none of them were really
interested in actually taking advantage of them. So the stuff I wrote pretty
much just sat there, and people seemed perfectly happy doing everything
manually. Super weird to me. Also it was stressful because I kept feeling like
I wasn't actually producing anything and that I would be fired at any moment
but the management did not seem to mind that they were paying me a decent
amount of money to play with code all day.

------
WheelsAtLarge
"The boom on Bullshit-Articles on Bullshit-Job Boom," is here.

~~~
davidivadavid
I for one have no idea why this concept gets so much air time given how little
substantial foundations it's based on. I can find justifications that make all
the so-called "bullshit" jobs perfectly valuable within a couple minutes of
thought. I wish the inventor of the concept had invested as much.

~~~
dvtv75
A friend of mine is a camera operator for a small production firm. They have
some really old equipment, including tripods that aren't safe to use for their
cameras, but they still cheap out on them anyway.

He gets paid about $16/hour to stand by the camera for up to 20 hours a week
to make sure it doesn't fall over, which costs around $10k/year. A new tripod
would cost $1500 and could last for a decade, so $it's 100k vs $1500.

Justify that, if you can. I can't, and I'm not being sarcastic or bitchy, I
really want someone to explain it.

~~~
groby_b
Many possible explanations. One of the most common ones is cash flow. If
you're somewhat at break-even, there just isn't any $1,500 around, but there
are enough jobs to pay $320 a week, and do that every week. (This is by the
way the same reason poor people often make "stupid" decisions)

This is the most common case for smaller companies - it's all hand-to-mouth,
and you barely squeak into profitability, so you minimize one-time expenses
that shorten your runway. (What we around here like to call "Ramen
profitable")

There's also the fact that even with a tripod, you probably want somebody
around - assuming they use high-end movie gear, a camera runs between $100k
and $500k. Spending $10k a year on somebody who catches it in case of accident
makes sense.

I'm sure there are other explanations. I'm sure there are places that make
stupid decisions, too :)

------
kjgkjhfkjf
This article is hilarious, and perhaps there's some truth in it, but it seems
to me that the anthropologist David Graeber has a substantial chip on his
shoulder, and to me this taints the overall credibility of his thesis
(inasmuch as the article represents it). The dig at Oxford's PR department
seemed egregiously random to me. (I wonder if he was rejected by Oxford at
some point in his academic career.)

------
mdo123
One of my summer jobs in high school was that of "towel boy" at the swim and
tennis building of a country club. My only job was to sit in front of the
towels, make the guests sign the clip board, and count how many towels they
took. I wasn't allowed to read or do anything because I was told it would look
bad, so I literally sat in a chair all day holding a clipboard. I got so bored
that for amusement I would write down 100 random digits, memorize them, and
recite them to some of the kids running around.

------
ironjunkie
All those articles about bullshit jobs are usually dull and only look at how
far from the "action" you are, giving some moral high ground to the jobs that
are closer to it.

It is always the same thing repeated over. For a nurse for example:

A nurse is a real useful job. The manager of the nurses, are semi-bullshit.
The team of consultants writing softwares to dispatch the nurses to the
patients are almost completely bullshit. The marketing people selling the
software to dispatch the nurses are completely bullshit and non useful.

~~~
tomc1985
That's harsh, is it not? If the software fulfils its stated purpose and
provides value then is it not useless? If the marketing people fulfil their
duty to generate inbound leads are they not useless?

~~~
ironjunkie
it's an oversimplified example, but indeed in this example it supposes that
the nurses would be better off doing this themselves.

As for marketing, this is the definition of bullshit job as I understood it:
They generate leads, and it is needed only because every other company and
competitors are doing marketing, as such it is defined as an "arm race", same
thing for lobyists. If you removed all the marketers and lobbyist worldwide,
the result would be exactly the same. as they are only needed to cancel each
other but have no real effect on the end product or service

~~~
Retra
I drive through the city and see 3 different restaurants all advertising that
they have the "world's best burger(s)." Did they measure that? No, because why
bother? Just put it on the sign, even if it is not true. Sell an ideal and
worry about satisfying it after all the money comes in (if at all.)

Most jobs are bullshit because our culture doesn't seem to value _honesty_ and
_truth_. So you can post outright lies on a big sign right off the road, and
everybody acts like that's just a necessary part of life.

Maybe we can't ask for honesty because people just most fundamentally can't
accept the idea that it's worth giving people what they need to survive
without receiving anything in exchange. So we construct a huge artifice of
bullshit so that we can sleep easy -- ignorant of all the needless and useless
things that people do to survive -- we all feel the stress of it, so we dupe
each other into thinking is both necessary and producing value.

~~~
linkregister
_> our culture doesn't seem to value honesty and truth_

That is inaccurately cynical and is a banal observation. There's an xkcd for
it, but I won't bother.

Isn't our entire economy built on trust? Do you read every EULA, opt out of
every arbitration agreement with companies you use? Do you maintain your own
ledger to check your monthly bank statements? Do you examine the kitchen
conditions of every restaurant you frequent? Do you visit the slaughterhouse
to ensure your meat is processed in sanitary conditions?

Modern life quickly becomes unwieldy without these basic assumptions. This
trust goes back all the way to basic agrarian societies, where you as a farmer
would trust your neighbor to give you her apples when they ripen in exchange
for your wheat now.

Anyone attempting to live a completely trustless existence is a hermit or
ignorant of the immense amount of trust they place in their fellow humans
daily.

------
twetge
My old job was in advertising. Some of what I produced actually informed
consumers about new products. But most it was vanity projects. One example: A
chiropractor paid for a billboard with him standing next to a million dollar
therapy machine, despite the fact that no potential customers would understand
what the machine was. He just wanted to show his competitor that he could
afford a shinier new toy. Since most of the treatments he offered were
medically dubious, it would have still been bullshit even if we made an
effective billboard.

Believe it or not, most of our projects were like this - the result of
someone's vanity or stupidity. But even the good work we did, most of it just
part of some companies advertising arm's race with their competitors. If the
entire ad industry collapsed tomorrow, the only thing we would notice was the
lack of junk mail littering our mailbox.

I'm happier in my new job, though it's no less bullshit. I run a social media
product that doesn't have a measurable impact for 95% of my clients. In truth,
they don't need social media in their industry. But they've been told
"everyone has to be on Facebook nowadays" and that's how I make a living.

------
ramen-san
"A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.” Hannibal, and many
other of the bullshittiest employees, are well compensated, with expanses of
unclaimed time."

Wow... where do I sign up for one of these jobs!

~~~
sxates
I got a summer job in college as a web designer for a startup in Texas. It
paid $40/hr, which was a ludicrous amount of money for a 20 year old in 2001,
or at least it felt like it after having made $5.50 in high school.

So I spent about a month working on the website, and doing buttons and other
stuff, and then I was out of things to do. I literally might have a 10 minute
task in a day, and no other assignments. I could (and did) watch full-length
movies in my cubicle uninterrupted.

Awesome right? It was the most miserable job I've ever had. I'd leave early
and forgo billable hours because I just couldn't stand it. Being without
purpose, but still showing up and pretending you should be there is really
demoralizing.

~~~
komali2
I've recently read "Walkaway" which posited that the most satisfying life is
one living in a community with what amounts to essentially a public Trello
board with tasks on that anybody can do at any time. "take out garbage for the
bread and breakfast" "clean solar panels on hospital roof" "priority:
emergency!!! Man with broken leg needs bones set" that sort of thing.

Given how satisfying I find open source work, I find the idea very
attractive...

~~~
Schwolop
That would be pretty fun to build as a gamified social network. "Bob Smith (2
houses away) received a six-pack of beer from Giselle Citizen (3 blocks away)
for cleaning the graffiti off her fence."

~~~
komali2
Ah, except that was a very key point! Nobody exchanged goods for work done.
What would be the point of that when everyone had access to public 3d printers
that could assemble whatever you needed? The Walkaways were explicitly
cashless in any and all of its forms.

Private property was also rare among them, as were fences...

------
partycoder
I always feel bad when I throw away those supermarket catalogs full of
offers... Whoever is spending time designing them, is massively wasting time
(and ink, paper, logistics).

On the other side, enterprise software upsets me. Problems are usually solved
through hiring rather doing actual work. After long sequence of 10 hires
someone may actually get their hands dirty.

~~~
icebraining
_I always feel bad when I throw away those supermarket catalogs full of
offers... Whoever is spending time designing them, is massively wasting time
(and ink, paper, logistics)._

They're not, though. I know multiple people who follow those offers and goes
to different supermarkets depending on them (and most likely will buy some
other stuff in that particular supermarket due to being there anyway). I'm
guessing the supermarkets know pretty well that those are effective at
bringing people in.

------
afpx
It’s really hard not to be cynical.

Like when I realized that I could drive 10 minutes to a local oat farm and buy
15 kg of oats for $2.50 (the commodity price of oats) Or, I could drive to the
market and pay almost 100x more for oats in the form of cute little Os.

Yes, I know - I’m leaving out many, many, many important details, but still -
that’s quite a ‘value chain’.

~~~
Double_a_92
The bullshit jobs are propably the cause of that value chain factor.

Is the packaged oat really worth 100x more to the consumer? Maybe it's worth
10x more. That means 90% of the work used to make those was bullshit.

------
NKosmatos
In case anyone hasn't seen/read the original article by David Graeber "On the
Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant", here is the link to it
[https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs)

------
jokoon
Sometimes I really want to be able to want to live my life without work and
pursue my personal projects (which could bring money in the end). But the idea
of living off welfare is such an enormous taboo and so politically incorrect,
that I could risk ending up homeless for the mere act of not working in fast
food or looking for a job.

It's not slavery, but the fact that I am obligated to obey is making me
uncomfortable. I'm sure there are many developers who are able to create new
things without having to rely on a degree, a job or a start up. But yet,
sitting at home coding can be viewed like being a poor artist.

------
mnm1
This is the reason liberal arts degrees are so useful and pay off. If you
don't learn how to bullshit by the end of the four years, I would be
surprised. I'm not joking though it may seem like it. I also don't think this
detracts from the intrinsic value of such majors. If it allows more people to
study what they want at university and improve themselves in addition to
providing jobs after university, it's a system that's useful.

------
bigbluedots
As far as I can tell, almost all jobs are here to keep us busy earning to live
to work. There are enough resources for everyone to be fed and comfortable,
however.

------
CalRobert
Guerilla advertising to this effect appeared on the tube briefly.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber-
poin...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber-pointless-
jobs-tube-poster-interview-912)

Timed such that they appeared as most people were heading back to work for the
first day after new years'

------
koliber
I don't agree. Almost everyone's work serves a purpose. However, that purpose
may be tiny, short-lived, subtle, or difficult to see. As the world becomes
more automated, it will become more so.

As many before me have posted in this thread, the purpose of the work is often
not what it appears to be. You could say a security guard sleeping in a booth
is not doing anything or has a purpose-less job. But just by virtual of being
there, he is a small deterrent to would-be thieves. I feel that is the case
with many jobs.

It's very easy to round down from "serving a very small or obscure purpose" to
"purposeless". However, add up all of those tiny purposes and you get a
functioning company or society.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Well, the purpose has always been one: to make money. From the article:

> I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-
> page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy
> meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get
> to that agenda point.

Many people would dream about such an opportunity. Yes, the usefulness of the
final product for the humanity is negligible. However, it allows you to live,
to develop, maybe also take care of your family, give your friends some
happiness - I definitely wouldn't call it "no purpose". If you did that and
received no remuneration - that would be another question.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a given. But the "pointless/bullshit job" label is applied from the
point of view of people who care about more than just getting money - people
who also want to feel like they're actually contributing something to society,
and people who like to take a more global and less selfish view of the world.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
They need to find a specific job, then. It's hard to expect that you come to
just any corporation and will make the world a better place. Moreover, I'd say
that these days the opposite is more probable. We always hear the mantra that
the main purpose of corporations is to increase the shareholder value, and we
reap what we sow.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's more than that. A lot of those bullshit jobs don't really even help
increase shareholder values. They're mini zero-sum games within companies, or
between companies. Jobs that exist to cancel each other out. Zero-sum games
have this magic feature that if you unilaterally opt out of them, you lose. So
they persist, even though if all players simultaneously opted out, everyone
would be better off.

------
ikeboy
>“Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are
too lazy or inept to fix systemically.

Or, fixing the issue after the fact is cheaper than a systemic fix, so duct
tapers are more efficient.

~~~
s73v3r_
Usually for a one-off, it can be cheaper to duct-tape than to do a real fix,
but the problem is that those issues keep happening. So it doesn't take long
for the duct-tape fixes to cost more in total.

------
deevolution
These bullshit job might exist because people need something to keep them
occupied, otherwise they will revolt, vandilize, revert back to barbaric
behavious and society as we know it would collapse.

------
atrexler
"Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"

------
sktrdie
But doesn’t everything we do serve no actual purpose? I mean anything that
isn’t like providing food or shelter or medicine (basic survival needs) is
essentially useless.

Capitalism made it so we created for ourselves these “useless jobs” to have
the money flow around. I think it’s actually quite normal. Jobs are created
because someone has the interest (not a strict need) for what you will do.
Whether that’s a useless PowerPoint presentation or a short-animation movie or
a newly-fashionable pair of shoes, it’s all part of what people are interested
in.

How else would you model a society so that we can make for ourselves all these
peculiar inventions and systems that entertain us?

Sure we could have just everyone work on the sheer necessary stuff; but that’s
boring.

~~~
cup-of-tea
Unless you believe in some "higher purpose" you have to find your own purpose
in life. Mine is to learn as much as I can to become the best version of
myself such that I will leave a legacy. Some people find purpose in
procreation although I would argue that's too easy and not necessary.

I find pleasure in the things I work on. Programming, music, food to name a
few. I use technology when it can make my life easier without sacrifice in
quality or it can do a better job than I can. I don't strive for convenience.
Nobody on their deathbed relishes in memory of a convenient life.

So, for me, work that leads to technology to enable the above absolutely has
purpose.

------
danzig13
I also think some level of the reverse - maybe not - is true. Things are not
that complex and high school graduates can do fairly high status jobs.

------
daodedickinson
No bullshit jobs at my employer. This is a by-product of regulatory capture
disadvantaging small businesses.

------
booleandilemma
My company has at least two people whose primary job seems to be creating
Outlook meeting invites.

~~~
cmjqol
Yeah don't worry I have people like these too , and they also are responsible
to physically call people to make sure they will come to the invite.

------
anm89
Ignoring the fact that this article (and I'm assuming the book it's based on)
seems to just make repeated assertions as to the degree of "bullshit" work in
the economy and then backs it up with mostly anecdotes, my real question is:
what is he actually advocating for.

So should we destroy all of these "bullshit" jobs? Who decides which ones need
to go?

Somehow I feel like the people complaining loudest about all the "bullshit"
jobs would be the first ones rioting and breaking windows if those jobs were
to disappear from our economy.

I guess this is where someone throws out the term UBI and glosses over the
details to assure us that jobs are no longer necessary in the post capitalist
utopia we have found ourselves in. (don't the UBI arguments always focus on
the fact that people will still choose to work though?)

I wonder why Spain, Portugal and Greece haven't realized that their problems
are imaginary yet and started handing everyone a UBI.

------
cup-of-tea
I've been working in a financial company for the past six months and honestly
there's more bullshit than real work. I'm now convinced that the entire
finance world is the biggest scam of all time, but that's another matter
really.

There are entire levels of people whose only real purpose seems to be putting
together PowerPoint presentations for other people. Literally producing
_entertainment_ for others who spends most of their time consuming that
entertainment.

I'm glad other people have observed this too. It makes me feel more sane. I
hope to be back in a small tech company soon.

~~~
nasmorn
I have an anecdote from a good friend of mine who interned at an investment
bank. After 2 days and nights preparing a presentation with other interns they
observed the meeting where those hundreds of slides were flipped through in
10min. Asking why they had to expend so much effort if no one is even
interested in the details the senior banker said. It is not about what you do,
it is about showing the client we can do it.

~~~
t1lthesky
There's a column from Matt Levine where he explains the real purpose of
useless busywork for ibanking associates. He gives an example of a guy making
a PowerPoint who messes up one trivial formatting detail and his boss makes
him redo the entire thing. On the surface this seems dumb and pointless, but
the idea is that when that when that associate is a senior banker and working
on a multi billion dollar deal, making some trivial mistake can potentially
cost millions of dollars. The busywork as an associate is _training_ to not
make those mistakes in the future. Made a lot more sense to me explained this
way. Not that I necessarily agree with it, and if I worked in that industry I
would hate it, but a lot more reasonable than they just make you do it for no
reason

~~~
passiveincomelg
Still makes no sense to me whatsoever. Punishing non-mistakes like that
doesn't magically make future mistakes disappear.

Training an activity will probably reduce the error rate in that particular
activity, but it doesn't do anything for contract negotiation or whatever the
senior banker later does where mistakes can be costly.

~~~
Ntrails
There are two employees. One rarely presents a piece of work with any errors
in. One regularly makes errors which need fixing.

Which employee best demonstrates the ability to thoroughly review their own
work? Which would you want as a senior reviewing other peoples work before
sending/presenting it to clients?

They're not training a specific activity, they're training an attitude towards
mistakes in all cases.

~~~
bena
Yeah, it's the military model. A lot of the stuff they make you do in basic is
to train you to follow orders without question. So that when something
critical depends on you following orders without question, you do it.

~~~
passiveincomelg
That's a bug not a feature in my book (I'm german, we did that order following
thing very very well...)

------
ilamont
_If all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not
even their clients would miss them._

Obligatory _Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy_ "B Ark" reference:

 _The B Ark is technically named "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B". The
Golgafrincham civilization hatched a plan to eliminate its society of its most
useless workers, namely its service sector and its paper shufflers. The
Golgafrinchans created a legend that their world was about to be destroyed and
they needed to build three arks. In Ark A they would put all the high
achievers, the scientists, thinkers, artists, and important leaders. In Ark C
they would put all the blue-collar workers, the people that build and make
things. In Ark B they would put everyone else: hairdressers, TV producers,
insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations
executives, and management consultants. The B Ark was constructed, loaded up,
and launched first. However, it was automatically set for a collision course
with Earth's sun, to finally rid Golgafrincham of these twits. And naturally,
no A or C ark was ever made._

~~~
komali2
Don't forget the phone-sanitizers, the lack of which caused the extinction of
the Golgafrincham people to a rare ear-wax virus.

