
The world is full of bulls**t jobs and you might have one - colinprince
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12053320
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BigHatLogan
Some variant of this seems to happen to organizations after they reach a
certain size of people. I used to work at a startup that raised a massive
round of funding and began a hiring spree. I joined one of the satellite
offices shortly afterwards, excited and eager to get to work. What I found was
that the vast majority of our 50-person office was more or less spinning the
hamster wheel, so to speak. The work that needed to be done was parsed and
diluted across so many people that there was hardly any work to fill a full
8-hour workday. I recall missing a day of work once and forgetting to notify
my boss (I had a midterm and was likely in some sort of panic mode). The next
day as I walked in he greeted me by saying, "Hey! Nice job yesterday." He
wasn't being sarcastic either. The amount of work to do was so minimal that my
boss forgot (or didn't even notice) that I wasn't at the office.

I've read some articles recently stating that Netflix and Facebook experience
increases in traffic during traditional work hours. It's an interesting data
point. I think most jobs don't need to exist. They exist for a variety of
reasons: signaling (the company must signal growth), incompetence,
inefficiency, etc.

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mojoe
it's always seemed to me that a likely endgame of automation is government
bureaucracy continuing to make more and more busywork jobs in order to keep
people doing something for their income. I think it's a more likely outcome
(although distasteful to me, personally) than universal basic income, given
historical political trends.

This is all assuming we'll reach a level of automation where the majority of
humans don't actually have to work to produce goods.

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nerdwaller
I don’t know how to say this lightly, but it seems to me that many of the
“administration” type jobs have become this. Admin jobs seem to have
proliferated most industries I can think of that otherwise may not need quite
so many (medical, legal, financial, increasingly technical with some of the
“Agile frameworks”). Most the of those are likely unnecessary, but they’re
there to supposedly abstract away some BS.

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boznz
I dont think there is enough karma in the world to upvote this topic. I've
seem it in every organisation I have worked at and scratch my head in wonder
at the number of meetings, powerpoints and spreadsheets I see that achieve
nothing.

To me it looks like a lot of the pointless jobs are formatting datasets that
nobody reads

