
The Rise of Bullshit Jobs - mjirv
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work-service
======
jeffreyrogers
The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that
I've seen:

> Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with
> “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts
> whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be
> surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer
> programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and
> university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits
> they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit,
> and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start.
> 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.

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

~~~
rayiner
Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of
resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea
that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly
misguided.

The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between
what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains
that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully
automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple
as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if
you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human
cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high
school graduate working minimum wage over _any_ legal technology I've ever
seen advertised here on HN.

~~~
rorykoehler
I disagree. In all my experience working in corporate, most problems we solved
with technology would have been better solved by having better simpler
policies in place.

The real world is unnecessarily complex and messy because a lot of people in
positions of authority dont know how to design good systems. This leads to
tons of bullshit jobs.

~~~
rayiner
What makes you think those simpler policies would work? The real world is
complex and messy because people are complex and messy. It's like looking at
the Windows or Linux source code and saying it "would have been better solved
by having better simplier policies in place." It's superficially true in that
you could have simpler designs that accomplish any given function of those
operating systems. But for the most part _e.g._ Linux evolved the way it did
for a reason, and almost none of the 20+ million lines in the source tree are
"bullshit code."

~~~
repolfx
Well that depends a lot on your definition of bullshit.

Linux evolved the way it did for various reasons, but how many are still
relevant today?

Would you write a kernel in C these days? I wouldn't. There are production
quality kernels written in _at least_ C++ which benefit from its features, and
it's been demonstrated that you can write entire operating systems in managed
languages like Java as well. Why should we suffer an endless parade of
exploitable memory bugs in kernel space? It's not technical requirements
driving that.

Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. Not much new software is
being GPLd these days, it's all Apache or similar licenses. The policy of
trying to maintain every driver in-tree has caused vast amounts of time to be
spent on workarounds like installers that compile things client-side,
enforcement is poor, lots of time is lost due to needless recompiles, API
churn, poor usability of desktop software and so on. Has Linux benefited from
correspondingly amazing hardware support? No. Desktop Linux is a morass of
bugs that often still can't suspend properly, and in the server realm it's now
more often than not talking to virtualised hardware anyway.

I could go on. There's a LOT of simplification and "bullshit work" that could
be optimised out, even in the realm of a very concrete thing without much room
for innovation like an OS kernel - partly because times changed but Linux
didn't.

~~~
majewsky
> Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. [...]

I think you're arguing a strawman here. The actual reason why drivers tend to
live in-tree is that the kernel-driver API changes all the time, and Linus has
consistently argued that being able to do backwards-incompatible changes to
the kernel-driver API has been necessary to make the drivers as good as they
are.

~~~
repolfx
And yet where is Linux most used? On the server. What hardware do cloud
machines have? It's not even public, much of the time. It's all talking to
hypervisors.

OSv is an example of going back to the drawing board for the majority of
Linux's use cases and creating something radically smaller and with radically
less 'bullshit' (it runs much faster as a consequence).

------
cardboardshoe
This article is missing a category: rain dancers. These people do something
pointless but highly visible and take credit when something eventually goes
right.

Suppose you a project manager forces a team of coders to run scrums and track
progress in JIRA. Unless you're one of the coders, how can you tell whether
the PM increased productivity or simply wasted time on making them appear more
productive? Either is possible.

~~~
gitgud
That's a good phrase I haven't heard before. A good example of this is
economists (not all) who continually make public predictions on TV, but are
never held accountable for the results.

------
mc32
The rise? It seems many have existed for some time, in one form or another.
Maybe there has been an expansion, but not the rise.

Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of "bullshit jobs" but other times, I
think without them, the world would be a duller place. That's not to say I
like SEOs, or telemarketers or inefficient charities, but they help at the
margin and without that I think you get stagnation.

Author also puts down compliance folks. I would disagree with that being
bullshit. It ensures people follow the letter of the law --and if they don't
AND they get audited, then there can be trouble. And that's the point. It's
like saying firefighters are "bullshit jobs".

~~~
SerLava
>That's not to say I like SEOs

Even that has a skewed reputation as bullshit, which only _used_ to be
deserved. Now it's a much broader group of people who add a lot more value
than 2010 SEOs did, by a mile.

~~~
Rjevski
What kind of value? I still don't see any value a SEO person provides that a
competent developer doesn't already do. SEO is not black magic (despite what
the SEO scammers want you to believe). Google even gives you quite a bit of
documentation on how to optimise your site for them.

~~~
SerLava
The term "SEO" is now used to encompass a much broader area of online
marketing than it did in the past (tricking Googlebot and not fucking up
Googlebot).

You'll certainly run into lots of liars and conmen who use it to refer to
outdated voodoo that worked ten years ago.

But in most ecosystems it refers to planning and developing websites and web
content for the purpose of satisfying the needs of people performing searches.
And now the advice is "don't ever trick googlebot or googlebot will end you."

As far as general human value goes, one aspect can be boiled down to "we found
that 10,000 people look for such-and-such each month, but Google serves them
all dogshit, and most of them go away knowing nothing. We will build a page
that solves 5,000 peoples' problems a month, and it will be on your company
website."

A big chunk of the content on the web is there because of this process - and
not just the spammy garbage. Without it, you see marketing teams throwing
years of effort into the black abyss of outer space.

------
okket
There are two previous discussion about David Graeber / 'Bullshit Jobs':

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (strikemag.org)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478)
(5 years ago, 349 comments)

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs (libcom.org)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080)
(4 years ago, 381 comments)

~~~
dang
And more recently, since the book came out:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389)

~~~
okket
>
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389)

This was the huge, recent discussion (470 comments) I remembered but couldn't
find instantly due to 'bullshit jobs' -> 'pointless jobs'. Thanks.

~~~
dang
Don't miss Graeber's appearance in the first thread I listed.

------
hw
There are also jobs/titles/positions that are created not out of necessity,
but as a way to give someone a back-scratching, wealth-sharing 'promotion'
without giving up someone else's, especially if the people involved are
buddies or used to work at a same prior company. As employees, you sometime
wonder 'Do we really need a Chief Retention Officer' ?

------
isoskeles
> Nobody ever reads these reports, they’re just there to flash around. It’s
> the equivalent of a feudal lord — I have some guy whose job is just to
> tweeze my mustache, and another guy who’s polishing my stirrups, and so
> forth. Just to show that I can do that.

I imagine that there are some poorly-run larger companies that have elements
of this, but this seems cartoonish for the most part.

~~~
cup-of-tea
I wouldn't have believed it either before spending some time in a financial
company. One time I was sitting with a colleague who had been there many years
and he received an email like a newsletter but with more flashy graphics than
the newsletter that already went out on Friday. He immediately groaned and
said "that's one more email to ignore then".

And ignore it we did. But someone somewhere decided we needed another
newsletter, some team wrote the "news" and some other team designed the shiny
new graphics. All just to be ignored and deleted by everyone.

The financial sector is rife with this. It is surely the most inefficient part
of the economy. Most things are automated now, yet the number of people
employed has actually grown and it's mostly bullshit. There are people who
literally spend all day creating what can only be described as entertainment
for other people in the same company. I wish everyone could see it first hand.

~~~
xapata
That's not just the financial industry. One company I was at built themselves
a TV studio to broadcast the occasional C-suite roundtable. Executives love to
see themselves in print (and video).

------
oceanghost
I recently read this book-- it is nothing short of revolutionary.

~~~
totemizer
I still think he should've mentioned the peter principle and hierarchiology

~~~
oceanghost
Hierarchiology?

------
chris_wot
Some of these BS jobs aren't BS. Or at least, a subset of people maybe
bullshitting their way through the system, but compliance personnel and
corporate lawyers are necessary for reasons they don't give.

------
hackerpacker
The way I see it, the higher up maslow's pyramid, the more BS it is, roughly
speaking. This in terms of the function of the job, aside from your own
survival and having a job.

------
partycoder
People that manage people that do not need management amount to a lot of
people in tech.

------
pinoyathletics
This is right in line with the Tiny Homes explosion.

