
On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs - KhalilK
https://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber
======
furyg3
While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking
about a taboo.

White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less
than 40 hours. There are exceptions, and HNers may deny this fact (because the
demographic is different or because the taboo is more powerful in this
circle), but Graeber's inebriated cocktail party confessions match my own
discussions with friends.

However... We've learned a skill, learned the job, and are available for 40
hours. Western culture really doesn't allow us to just show up for the 15-20
hours we really work and get paid the same salary as the 40 we say we do. So
instead of going home early and cooking, working in the garden, bettering
themselves, or watching tv, many show up to work and have strange meetings
about nothing, conversations at the coffee corner, work unproductively on a
tasks that could be done efficiently if they hadn't already been at work for 7
hours, or fuck around online while nobody is looking. It's great for eBay and
Facebook, not so much for the kids in day care.

To some extent, everybody knows this. Employers are starting to tolerate
working from home a lot more, which I think is a tacit acknowledgement of the
situation. I hope that our culture can come to grips with this and acknowledge
that most people in creative jobs can't really put in a solid 40 hours of
truly productive work, while at the same time not condemning them to work as
consultants with no savings or pensions.

~~~
jug6ernaut
I am not going to deny anything you said, its almost 100% true. But I believe
your missing an important "fact"(maybe).

That is its not really physically/physiologically/mentally possible to put in
40 hours of true "work". Not consistently anyways. So as much as it is we not
truly putting in 40 hours, its the entire effort to be available for 40 hours
IMO that you are getting paid for.

~~~
ams6110
It is possible and commonplace in jobs where you physically work.
Construction, any of the trades, factory work, food service... if you work 40
hours you have actually worked very close to 40 hours. There isn't any real
opportunity to slack off or stand around in those jobs.

Office jobs, yeah. Many of those are bullshit jobs.

~~~
VBprogrammer
I know what you're getting at, but I'd be reasonably confident in speculating
that there is just as much slacking off on construction projects as any other
employment. Some of it maybe genuinely waiting for something to happen (crane
to move something, cement truck to arrive etc). I'm not sure whether you'd
count that as slacking off but it's certainly not working.

~~~
randlet
It probably varies. In my experience working construction this was absolutely
not true. There was definitely some down time here and there but the majority
of days we worked close to flat out from 7-4:30 (2 15min breaks + 30min
lunch). Ditto for summer I spent working on an assembly line where there was
even less downtime (although it was not nearly as physically demanding).

Frankly, working a manual labour job would be an eye opening experience to a
lot of white collar workers.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Definitely, and probably better for their health, too. Government workers
should IMO also have worked a physically demanding job at the same (low) pay
rates, to go a bit off-topic here. People shouldn't be allowed to decide for
others if they haven't stood in their shoes IMO.

------
hammerzeit
This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling
some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in
the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics.

Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-
race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good
telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or
they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-
down 1% malfeasance?

To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or
understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think
providing insurance has no value?

Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to
generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an
apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more
musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].

Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker
economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to
consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all
consumer startups and no b2b/enterprise startups.

[1] [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-
an...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-
singers.htm) \-- 167,400 musicians

[2] see
[http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php...](http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php#sotflf)
\-- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw

~~~
shanusmagnus
What always surprises me about articles like this, and the discussions they
produce, is how so many engineers and builders-of-things discard the evidence
of their years of experience and see the world through the eyes of people
who've never built a complex system.

For instance, a couple of years ago I inherited a convoluted, needlessly
ornate and grotesque application that could clearly be rewritten and even
extended in one-fifth the LOC it currently occupied. When I finally got
greenlit to perform the surgery the usual thing happened, which is that I
realized, after much painful effort, that the system had become grotesque
little by little, in much the same way that good people turn bad: by taking
steps that seem appropriate at the time to what the situation demands. My
solution, in the end, was somewhat less grotesque than the original, and
certainly more capable, and yet it was not the glittering jewel that I had
imagined beforehand, and the path to it was littered with bodies. I assume
many people on this site have had a similar experience.

So with regard to repugnant systems (giant commerical banks) and jobs (middle
management) or jobs and systems that are repugnant due to the types and
numbers of people who seem to be filling them (lawyers, politicians) and wrt
established habits and customs and traditions -- to all of it I now perceive
that these jobs and systems are the survivors of a mighty selection pressure,
and the whole creaky affair so vastly outperformed the alternatives that it
has taken over the world to the extent that now it seems as if nothing else is
possible.

Something else is possible, of course; but the costs of these theoretically
more benign and humane alternatives are impossible to envision. And I'm
positive that the whole thing could not be redone, elegantly, in one-fifth the
code.

~~~
wtbob
And that is when stops being an anarchist: when one is mature enough to
realise that there are reasons, if not excuses, for the present situation (no
matter how odd it may be), and mature enough to realise that changing the
present situation will necessarily involve its own compromises, pains and
oddities.

It's the difference between Paine and Burke.

------
rakoo
> The answer clearly isn’t economic

I beg to differ. I totally agree with the paradox (with the advances in
technology, humans should be working less) but the problem, today, is
economic:

\- In order to live you need money

\- In order to obtain money you need to work (except for the lucky too few)

\- Therefore, work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point
of creating "useless" jobs if needs be

How are you going to remove jobs if it so directly means no more revenue for
those people ? The problem here is that we're conflating revenue with work.
The only answer is to decouple them, and introduce something like basic income
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income))

~~~
crdoconnor
This is preferable to Basic Income:

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

For the following reasons:

* It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression.

* We actually do have a lot of infrastructure which needs rebuilding and projects which would make all of our lives better (high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.)

* People actually like to work - to feel useful. Basic Income will prevent the unemployed from starving but nearly ALL of them would rather have a _guarantee_ of meaningful, stable, reasonably paid and respectable work than just getting paid to stay at home all day. The PWA provided that.

There is actually a good example of a public works program that was turned
into basic income (Plan Jefes in Argentina). Unexpectedly, large numbers of
the people who were part of it CONTINUED to work at the jobs (things like
caregiving) even though under the new basic income rules they no longer had to
go.

~~~
rakoo
> People actually like to work - to feel useful.

There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay
home and do nothing useful. I think it's completely wrong, people (most of
them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it
for the money, but for the actual effect it has. Your example shows it. You
can also ask yourselves if chefs, musicians, programmers, mechanics would just
grab the money and stay home; I don't believe so. Only those who do their job
purely for revenues will stop... At least, that's my prediction (and hope). In
other words, useless jobs (as in, not useful for others) will vanish.

~~~
crdoconnor
>There is this common misconception that basic income will make everyone stay
home and do nothing useful.

Rather than answering supposedly common misconceptions that nobody on this
thread actually had - answer me this instead:

What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? They
need money, but they also want to work. During the last depression the PWA
built tons of useful stuff, much of which we still use today. Why would Basic
Income be better than doing that again?

~~~
dragonwriter
> What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money?

If you give them basic income, then the jobs can pay what the jobs are worth,
and no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs
that take time that could be used for focussed training, risky (but
_potentially_ valuable) self-initiated ventures, etc.

Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the actual
value of the work (which is why the same job isn't available in the market
already), so instead treat the premium as basic income, and the job will be
available, through the market, at its actual value (and, with an adequate BI,
you don't need a minimum wage, because the BI provides basic support, so
taking a low-wage job that may be more suitable for other reasons than pay
doesn't have the opportunity cost of not being able to provide basic support.)

~~~
crdoconnor
>no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs

So you are saying that the jobs building the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan and
the Triborough bridge (among many other things under the PWA) were
"economically inefficient make work jobs".

Why?

~~~
dragonwriter
> So you are saying that the jobs building the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan and
> the Triborough bridge (among many other things under the PWA) were
> "economically inefficient make work jobs".

No, I agree that it is an essential function of government (arguably, the
_only_ legitimate function of government) to correct for market failures by
shifting incentives or directly purchasing goods and services so that
exchanges which are a net benefit but which the market fails to provide
because externalized costs or benefits are not taken into account naturally in
market exchanges (as is the case, for instance, when benefits or costs are
particularly diffuse in space or time or both). And many public works projects
fit that bill, and when labor costs are low because of a dip in private market
demand, more of those projects have a positive cost:benefit ratio.

OTOH, the social benefit from an income support is _independent_ of its tie to
employment, and therefore it makes sense for the income support to be
decoupled from any public works program. Coupling the two creates
inefficiency, as individuals receiving the income support are then compelled
to devote time to an economically-inefficient job that could, instead, be
devoted to economically efficient activities, including working at an
economically-efficient job with a lower wage (that would be inadequate income
for basic living on its own) than is provided by the government make-work job
but which provides experience which enables the individual to progress to
better paying jobs and greater contributions to society.

~~~
crdoconnor
>Coupling the two creates inefficiency, as individuals receiving the income
support are then compelled to devote time to an economically-inefficient job

Economically inefficient jobs like building the triborough bridge.

Or providing healthcare.

Or building dams.

Or building schools.

Or building public art works.

Your entire argument is based upon a _theoretical_ presumption that is
disproved by reality: that if the government provides jobs that did not
otherwise exist that those jobs will by necessity be make work.

Economic efficiency is also a terrible measure of whether something is
worthwhile. Was sending a man to the moon economically efficient? Was it
worthwhile?

------
ilamont
Reading this, I was reminded of the "B Ark" from _Hitchhiker 's Guide To The
Galaxy_: (1)

 _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._

The presence of useless B Ark people in company settings has generated a lot
of thought, including this person (2) who suggests dealing with them by
"hiring another “B” Ark person to have meetings with them. Demand that
accurate minutes are kept and that they should meet at least twice day until
the problem is resolved" and engaging them in a useless, circular project.

1\. [http://everything2.com/title/B+Ark](http://everything2.com/title/B+Ark)

2\. [http://infinite-shades.com/2011/02/14/golgafrincham-b-ark-
wh...](http://infinite-shades.com/2011/02/14/golgafrincham-b-ark-what-to-do-
when-you-dont-have-one-handy/)

~~~
JulianMorrison
I hate that particular joke because of how it so casually blames the victim.
Awful jobs exist in the system and people are crammed into them by economic
force.

~~~
thaumasiotes
B Ark jobs aren't awful jobs, though.

A chinese woman once started talking to me in a bakery, saying she wanted to
practice her english. She'd spent time in Australia and recently come back to
China to look for a job.

"What kind of job are you looking for?" I ask.

"I want to get a job in an office."

When "working in an office" is the height of your ambition, a B Ark job is as
good as things get. If you're looking for awful jobs people get crammed into
by economic force, look at obviously-productive C Ark jobs, like being a miner
or a peasant.

~~~
DarkIye
Are you sure it was the "height of her ambition"? Sounds like she was
primarily focused on practising her English and didn't mind too much about the
work.

~~~
thaumasiotes
From personal conversation (in Chinese) with another person:

> What do your parents do?

> They're normal people.

Or, from a Chinese girl's online dating profile:

> 爸爸是农民。妈妈是工人。 [My father's a farmer; my mother is an employee.]

The elevation of the concept "job in an office" isn't a problem with
insufficient english; it's something Chinese people in China do while they're
speaking Chinese. I've also seen a banner at 复旦大学 (generally considered the
third best university in China) advertising a lecture on... becoming an
"office gentleman" or "office lady" (those terms were in english, but the rest
of the banner wasn't).

------
dnautics
"Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where
employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty"

Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a
right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even
make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank.

A lot of laws also require people to be at their desks for 40 hours - because
there's a categorical definition of 'full-time equivalent' \- whether or not
that person is actually (instead of nominally) working all 40 of those hours.

"where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against
school teachers"

Graber misses quite a bit here (read on for the full context); Republicans are
not resentful of teachers in general, just _public sector_ teachers.

~~~
coldtea
> _Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such
> a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and
> even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank._

Yeah, part of this is because few have inherited or other wealth, so without
employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets.

~~~
logicchains
>so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets

That pretty much doesn't happen in any western country now, due to welfare. If
the desire is to prevent starvation and homelessness, transfer payments do a
fine job; there's no need for intervention in the labour market or monetary
system.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Quite a lot of people have died or committed suicide in the UK recently,
because the government decided to change the rules around disability and
chronic illness. It hired a shill organisation to declare that the disabled,
chronically ill, and dying were fit for work.

So bedridden terminal cancer patients have had all benefits cut and told to
look for work.

This is not an exaggeration, by the way.

Graeber has missed something very obvious. We do not have a market economy.
What we have is a <i>status</i> economy.

People who get useful stuff done have low status, because in the bullshit
economy the ability to get and hold status is the most valuable of all skills.

So all transactions become a test of relative status, and people who have to
do productive work have lower status than people who move status tokens (i.e.
'money' and 'power') around. And the weak - the homeless, the ill, the
disabled, the outsiders and minorities - have the lowest status of all.

~~~
arethuza
"What we have is a <i>status</i> economy"

Which actually sounds rather like the original definition of "meritocracy":

[http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment)

~~~
crpatino
How can a system dominated by posers be called a "meritocracy"? I am sure it
looks superficially the same, but in essence is the exact opposite.

------
bryanlarsen
As hammerzeit mentioned, a lot of bullshit jobs are there because of an arms
race. Your competitors have marketers, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, so you
need them too. If everybody fired 90% of their marketers, marketing dollars
would go 10x as far, and things wouldn't change much.

Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up
newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side
effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad
side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces,
breaking up TV shows, et cetera.

This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the
externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of
marketing 10x more expensive?

Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective
due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of
bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money
to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and
hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which
also increases the number of jobs.

Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would
have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I
would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there
is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment.

Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced.

Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this
arms race.

~~~
pidg
If being a marketer is a bullshit job, then being a web developer is a
bullshit job too.

Most people could spend a week with a marketing book and do some basic
marketing. Likewise, most people could spend a week learning WordPress and
create a passable website. So let's reduce the number of web developers by 90%
too!

Think of the billions it could save in inflated invoices from web agencies
(commissioned by clueless marketers).

Let's just reduce all jobs by 90% and make everyone teachers, doctors and
street cleaners. I have a really good feeling about this.

~~~
bryanlarsen
If it costs you $1M per marketer rather than $100K, you're only going to hire
the absolute best.

~~~
solistice
Where are you pulling those numbers from? According to Payscale the median
rate for a marketing manager in Germany is €48,785 per year. A senior web
developer actually makes €48,896 on average, which is about 100€ more than
that.

Now if you want to hire top tier marketing talent (which are most likely
consulting or teaching anyways ex. Seth Goding, Dan Kennedy) you might end up
spending around that or higher. Hell, their small group seminars cost 27k$ and
last 3 days, so I'm just going to go on a hunch here that getting that tier of
marketers to write copy for you is going to be very expensive.

And I'm going to disagree further. Marketing is not a "bullshit" job at its
base. Say we outlawed it. You're not allowed to tell people about your
products. They have to walk into your store and ask about them, and you're
only allwed to hand out a datasheet if they ask. What does that do to new
products? I'm going to say that if your average joe tries to buy a mobile
phone and first has to dig through 20-30 pages of chipset info to find out the
features of it, you're not selling any mobile phones anymore. You're asking
why you don't just write out the features that matter? Sorry, that's allready
in the realm of sales copy. Sharing your enthusiasm about it? Nope, go
straight to jail, do not collect 200$. Because that's what good marketers do.
They try to understand what they're selling, who they're selling it to, and
how to convey their enthusiasm about it to who they're selling it to in order
to make a sale.

Now there is the argument that a lot of marketing is annoying, wasteful,
ineffective and so are a lot of CRUD apps that have been churned out by fresh
behind the ears Java programmers. There's a fair share of programmers that
don't know about proper variable naming, splitting things into objects
cleanly, designing usable user interfaces, and a thousand other things that
seperate them from the crême de la crême of software engineers. And there is a
fair share of marketers that don't know about targeting, hooks, blind bullets,
cost per customer, tracking, split testing and a thousand other things that
seperate them from the crême de la crême of marketing. Should we discount the
field as useless because there's a lot of rhinestones to the diamond? Then
it'd only be fair to throw programming out of the window with it.

By the way, i'd recommend giving something like the Robert Collier Letterbook
a read, he goes through things like how highlighting a single trait in the
coal he was advertising saved a mine or how he repeatedly sold the Harvard
Classics through using half a dozen of different approaches, or pick up
something like Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. I personally think
that the only Ninja in Tech should be a Marketing Ninja, because when great
advertisers sell you, you don't notice it. Well, maybe server admins too, but
i digress.

------
xpto123
Workers in the beginning of the 20th century worked 70 hour 6-7 days weeks,
now in many countries we are down to 35h / 5 days. In the next 10 years we
will get to 30 or less, we are at a threshold of the 4 day work week that's
why its taking longer to cut down on the work hours.

The 4 day work week will imply social changes, and therefore the resistance
but it will come in the next 20 years.

The author understands that its a slow process and it takes time, but
congratulations on talking about a taboo.

Concerning the value of jobs, in the Philippines, go to a restaurant: one guy
comes and set the dishes, the other the glasses, the other takes the order,
etc.

The root cause for this is I believe overpopulation unprecedented in the
history of mankind.

Not to defend lawyers, but who would solve disputes? Everybody bashes lawyers,
but the day an employer tries to make you sign an indemnity paper that is less
than you have right, you are glad that there is a lawyer there to defend you.

~~~
jahaja
I don't think those rationalisations hold ups. The facts of workforce
expansion and productivity & efficiency gains can't simply be shrugged off by
"overpopulation". This is intentional political policy, nothing else.

~~~
kissickas
So you agree with this statement?:

> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with
> free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen
> when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).

I was with him until there... I'd like to believe things like that and blame
it all on the "evil politicians," but I'm really not sure the "ruling class"
is that organized. Then, at the end of the article, he says something that
seems much more reasonable to me, although contradictory:

> Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a
> century of trial and error.

So I'm not sure what exactly he's trying to say is the cause.

~~~
shkkmo
I believe he is implying that the goal, "keep the general population
employed/occupied to prevent unrest" is consciously held by some 'oligarchs'.

However, the systems which accomplish that goal have emerged via trial and
error and were not consciously designed by the 'oligarchs'. The 'oligarchs'
watch the broad trends and have supported changes to the system that supported
their goal and have hindered changes to the system that do no support their
goal on a case by case basis.

I suspect the 'oligarchs' striving for the above goal is not a 'conspiracy'
among the elite so much as a shared cultural belief in stability.

~~~
wavefunction
Of course, one oligarch's stability is another working man's stagnation...

------
insickness
What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what
nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have
managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick
themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital
are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on.

The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what people do. And with
hierarchy, there is also more chance of waste and having a bullshit job.

But those bullshit jobs can come at almost any level. My first job out of
college was at an environmental firm with extensive government contracts. The
firm got paid for every hour they logged under my name on maintenance of
projects that didn't require much maintenance except on paper. So the firm got
paid for me showing up and doing nothing.

But I can confirm that it was horrible. At first I liked that I could come in
at 10 and leave at 3. After a while though, it killed me inside.

~~~
VLM
"After a while though, it killed me inside."

Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was
being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I
automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5
randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was
instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week.

1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable
pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more
formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also
apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of
crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about
my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I
might have ended up working for him.

2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books
although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM
mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals,
at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out
bitsavers.org and reading some.

3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a
lot of programming books.

------
talos
I find it incredible that we're at almost 200 comments, and no one has brought
up the phenomenon of people doing real (often clerical office work they don't
care too much about, except that it's in a field they're interested in) for
_free_ \-- unpaid internships.

Despite the fact that this is quite illegal, there is no enforcement
([http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-labor-
department-l...](http://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-labor-department-
let-companies-off-hook-for-unpaid-internships)).

~~~
gambiting
Maybe because not everyone on HN is from US and it's not illegal everywhere?
In fact, it is _de facto_ standard in some countries(as sad as that is).

------
rmsaksida
Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to
software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop
building bullshit and focus on real problems. An engineer at Kittygram is
likely to be working on a bullshit, ultimately irrelevant job, but few people
would question the value of an engineer's work if he's doing groundbreaking
medical software.

Of course, people don't always choose to have bullshit jobs, and getting to
the level where you can build something of impact is not easy. I'm far from
there myself. But I have the feeling many of us don't really look for
meaningful jobs - truth be told, we don't even _think_ about these things.

~~~
heydenberk
It's not quite that simple. Engineers at Kittygram might build a new, open
source system for efficient object recognition which then revolutionizes
medical imaging. ImportantMedicalCo, with its government contract to modernize
medical records, might go over budget and out of business, having a chilling
effect on investment in medical record modernization. People do think about
these things, but they're hard to reason about.

~~~
rmsaksida
Very good point.

Isn't this kind of innovation restricted to the Kittygrams that operate at
large scales, though? Kittygram will need to reach a large mass of users, get
bought out, face the need to extract specialized data from images, and finally
hire expert engineers to work on that problem before they can innovate.

How many startups get to that point? Even if the Kittygram founder had a
vision of building an innovative object recognition solution and merely used
Kittygram as the means to an end, it feels as if there must be a more
efficient way to solve these problems.

------
tmylk
Graeber's idea on the solution to the problem: "revolt of the caring classes"
instead of mass dropout is even more interesting in this interview.

[http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1...](http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/)

To put it in a naive tech twist - maybe there should be an online tool that
allows me to distribute a proportion of my wages to a list of "people who care
for me and things I care about".

Basically, can I create my own tax system and transact most of my affairs in
it? Would anyone be interested in joining? Has DogeCoin already tried to do
that?

I would never live completely outside of state taxation, because of obvious
practicalities like the military. (By the way, Graeber has an argument that
army is the reason for existence of both money and taxes in his book on Debt.)

In technical terms, post-bitcoin there is no reason for the state to be
involved in the tax system. DogeCoin was a close attempt at an ecosystem where
money goes around and contributes to good causes, not sure what is going on
with it now.

There are successful local currencies(Brixton pound) that support local city
councils, can the same thing be done on a global scale?

~~~
vanderZwan
Off-topic: I've seen that link a few times, and have yet to figure out why it
reads "help us thomas piketty the 1s sick and twisted new scheme"

~~~
pjc50
Cry for help from the person running the CMS?

------
tim333
Interesting article but Graeber seems to mix up some different issues:

a) We're not working 15 hour weeks. I'd say that's mostly because people like
to do things. Give people enough money to not need to work and they'll still
want to go build stuff

b) His musician mate made loads as a lawyer, not much as a musician in spite
of contributing more to society as a musician. That does seem to be a market
failing. Gandhi types preaching peace and making a big positive impact can
make nothing, patent trolls can make a fortune while screwing society. Not
sure how to fix that.

c) "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population
with free time on their hands is a mortal danger" \- not convinced by that
one. I think it's a failing of the human mind to attribute what are probably
emergent market phenomena to plotting human bad guys.

~~~
lsseckman
Comment C) is right on! The amount of coordination and planning it would take
to secretly pull it off greatly surpasses even the most talented and motivated
groups.

It's interesting you use Gandhi as an example, there is some substantial
evidence he had access to a great deal of the world's bounty due to his
positive impact. This would seem like a market efficiency.

It seems this artist had significant exposure to the potential customer, along
with a recording contract which would suggest promotional funding. With my
cold-hearted economist hat on it's tempting to assign this less to a market
inefficiency than not contributing much to society.

------
klunger
The "elephant in the room" of this article was wealth redistribution.
Technological advancements _should_ make it possible for people to work 15-20
hours a week. In theory. The problem is that those same technological
advancements go hand in hand with increased concentrations of wealth. It is
the regrettable observed tendency of people with considerably more wealth than
the masses to be stingy with that wealth, feel they inherently deserve it and
lack empathy.

So, if people in general are to benefit from technological advancements, there
needs to be legislated wealth redistribution to overcome the inherent miserly-
ness of the 1% whose wealth is largely a function of that technology.

~~~
solistice
What about the Giving Pledge[1] or the 2,000,000 people the Antony Robbins
Foundation is trying to feed this year[2]? Whilst I agree with the assessment
that charitable giving among the billionaires of the world might not be what
it could be, there are shining examples of charitable giving amongst them, and
I think that the generalization of stinginess, entitlement and heartlessness
is overly broad and extremely harsh.

[1] [http://givingpledge.org/index.html](http://givingpledge.org/index.html)
[2]
[https://www.anthonyrobbinsfoundation.org/](https://www.anthonyrobbinsfoundation.org/)

------
binarymax
I just had a great trip to a cousins wedding and saw a lot of family. My
Parents' generation are now just past the 'age of retirement' and are in their
late 60s and early 70s.

The majority of them are still working in their bullshit jobs. I asked several
if they were going to retire soon and they all replied the same. If they
retire what would they do? Even though their work is mostly pointless from a
job function perspective, it gives them something to do and keeps them active
and social. It is not stressful for them and they enjoy it for the most part.

I wonder if we are all working these jobs because there is nothing better to
do.

~~~
tomp
I can't help but pity people who say "there is nothing better to do" (but then
again, maybe that's because I'm employed, working 10 hours a day).

We live at a time when "I have nothing to do" is a really bullshit excuse. You
have the whole internet available!

\- learn languages (e.g. Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic,
Spanish - to cover most of the world's population)

\- learn new stuff (statistics/machine learning, quantum mechanics,
chemistry/biology, philosophy, programming, ...)

\- do crowd-funded science
([https://www.zooniverse.org/](https://www.zooniverse.org/))

\- help with open source projects (they need both programmers and non-
programmers)

\- teach people English (or any other language you know)

\- entertain yourself (chat, watch movies, read books, play games)

Even for older generations, who might not be so comfortable with technology,
there are plenty of useful things they can do in the real world.

\- mentor kids

\- tidy up parks and other public spaces

\- participate in or organize hackatons/hardware hackatons/makerspaces

\- experiment with learning/science/research in your home (make a spice
garden, grow plants using hydroponics, prototype using 3D printing, redecorate
your home with cheap materials)

\- hang out with lonely (often elderly) people

\- (learn to) cook

\- work out (bodyweight exercises - you'll live longer)

I seriously cannot imagine ever being bored with nothing useful to do (except
when I get home after work, I'm tired and I only have an hour or two of free
time, so there's not much time to start anything meaningful - but even so, I
spend a lot of time programming my personal projects).

~~~
binarymax
Great points - but honestly, I could classify most of those as jobs. Want to
be a translator, or a teacher, or an open source developer? We can all do
those things alone, sure. But going (or remoting) to a workplace gives us a
collaborative experience. And not to mention, not all people can easily
motivate themselves to keep something going on their own, and need external
pressure and motivation. The vibe I was getting was that my elders were afraid
of devolving into couch potatoes, were they to leave the jobs they enjoyed.

~~~
tomp
> but honestly, I could classify most of those as jobs.

Ok, so maybe that is where we differ. A "job", for me, is "work I do for
money". If I had a passive source of money that would give me the _option_ of
not working ever again (and fully supporting my family, and future
generations, etc), even if I still "worked" on the same stuff as I do now, I
wouldn't call it "a job" (as it would be completely voluntary and optional)
but "a hobby".

------
Animats
This is the price of competition. It takes a lot of extra labor, over doing
the stuff, to keep a competitive market going. There are a large number of
items where the advertising and marketing cost exceeds the cost of production,
from soft drinks to movies to pharmaceuticals. This is an overhead of
capitalism, and it's a big one.

The financial system has especially bloated overhead. The US used to have a
financial system with three big, independent sectors - commercial banks,
savings and loan companies, and stock brokers and markets. The Glass-Stegall
Act kept them separate. Trouble in one sector didn't crash another sector,
because the sectors couldn't invest in each other. That ended in the 1990s.
Trouble soon followed.

The whole hedge fund / "private equity" industry is a net lose. "Private
equity" is really leveraged buyouts using equity-to-debt conversions to reduce
taxes. It's an artifact of tax policy, not a real industry. In many cases, the
money ultimately comes from low-cost borrowing by banks from the Federal
Reserve.

With different tax and regulatory policies, the finance industry would be
about as big as it was in the Eisenhower era, far smaller than it is now. This
isn't a secret, but it's not something discussed in public much.

On the medical care side, the US spends about as much in public funds on
medical care as the European nations with state-paid medical care do. But
that's less than half of US medical spending. Find out what a "prescription-
benefit management company" does, and how big they are.

------
esquivalience
This seems to me like an employee's opinion, rather than that of a founder. I
mean that the worker's view of a company is as a job-creator, whereas a
company founder sees a company as a tool to fill a market niche (and usually
generate profit).

The argument against the article's proposal is quite simple - if people will
pay for a service, doesn't that fact give the service value over 'bullshit'?

It's not that either's wrong and I don't know anything about the author's
backgound. Just interesting to think from the other person's POV.

~~~
pedrosorio
"There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it
say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand
for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists
in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the
disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is
useful or important, not anybody else.)"

~~~
dnautics
Isn't it interesting that the one example Graeber comes up with is possibly
the profession writ large whose demand is largely influenced by a social
structure outside of the free-market? Likewise, a over promulgation of workers
in finance is suggestive that maybe there is some non-free-market force is
incentivising individuals to go into that field...

~~~
cstross
"A social structure outside of the free-market" describes, by some estimates,
over 75% of all human interactions.

Non-market interactions are invisible to conventional economics because
they're not priced, but they're by no means insignificant. They range from
developing-world peasants farming land to which they simply have no title
deeds, through to the form of communist praxis which is the dominant social
structure of the supposedly free-market west -- the nuclear family. (Or do you
present your kids with a bill for their personal care and feeding? Non-
dysfunctional families run along lines Marx described as, "to each according
to their needs, from each according to their abilities": sharing without
reference to individual wealth is explicit in state-recognized marriage vows.
That the power/money relationship often reverses a generation later, as adult
children support or nurse their aged parents through their last year, just
underlines the pattern.)

Graeber, as an anthropologist, is interested in _all_ human interactions, not
just marketized ones. And his particular field has been the intersection of
the market sector with the non-marketized greater cloud of human
relationships.

~~~
dnautics
Yes, he makes that point in "Debt" \- but most free-market people would
consider volunteerism, as a 'free-market' activity, because internally an
individual makes a choice (based on personal utility) to do activity X versus
'something else' which is a micro-market.

I thought it was a stretch for Graeber to basically call everything socialism
in the (roughly speaking) second section of Debt - especially since there is a
categorical distinction between Marx's tagline ("to each... from each...") to
what actually happens (in families etc), which is, "to you according to what I
perceive to be your need, from me, according to what I can afford to give".

------
7952
In more professional settings certain job titles seem pointless but actually
add a diversity of thinking that would otherwise be lacking. For example, you
may not really need a lawyer to check something. But good lawyers have a knack
of identifying logical inconsistancies and always find spelling mistakes which
is useful. Or an IT expert operating in an office of social scientists will
think about problems in an entirely different way. Sometimes maintaining a
multi disiplinary team is more important than being 100% efficient on an
individual level.

------
Cthulhu_
From my POV, working 40 hours a week instead of 15 is a conscious choice. I
could probably start my own company or source of income and get away with
working 15 hours or even less a week, but I'm not going to.

One, working for a boss is secure - I know what I'm gonna earn by the end of
the month, no stress there.

Two... I honestly wouldn't know what to do with the remaining time. I'm not an
artsy hipster that spends all that free time being creative, I'd probably
spend the extra time playing video games and growing fat. I for one need the
structure in my life.

~~~
72deluxe
This is quite true. Some of my friends and family work for themselves and I
could not possibly cope with the stress of having to win jobs or worry if I
was going to get paid at the end of the month. Despite the romantic ideas of
working for yourself, it appears to offer LESS flexibility instead of more -
they're always working! Instead of "I can work when and where I want!" it
turns into "I am always working, anywhere"

I could happily find things to do in my spare time though. Like playing an
instrument, or reading.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I coped by adding a column to my spreadsheet: satisfaction. I charged more per
hour for instance for family time, than for engineering time. So trading one
for the other was obviously wrong. Still, the spreadsheet total has to meet a
bar. I ended up working about 30 hours per week.

------
jdmichal
I'm surprised to see no mention of the wage stagnation that has been
occurring, at least in the US. Quite simply, people can't stop working if they
need the money that 40 hours of work brings. Meanwhile, inflation keeps
ticking up and housing bubbles at rates far above inflation.

It could, in fact, be argued that we have made negative progress since 1910.
In that same time period, most households have gone from one worker to two as
women join the labor force. So now, on a household basis, we are looking at
60+ hours per week instead of 40.

------
jcfrei
The author himself notices half way through the text that he might have gone
out on a limb. If his description of "bullshit jobs" was at least followed by
some statistics on marginal valued added (to a product, service) by that
particular job (and how this margin has become lower and lower) then we could
start a serious discussion about it. But now his extraordinary claims just
stand there as a shallow rant, more like a romantic anecdote to Victorian
economics than a fundamental analysis of capitalism.

~~~
coldtea
So, essentially he has to add some bullshit statistics to his description of
bullshit jokes...

I find those kind of statistics pointless. Most of the time they are based on
incomplete data and as much guesswork as any rant.

An intelligent opinion on the other hand, based on observation and with a
coherent point of view, is worth more than all those statistics (to paraphrase
Alan Kay, who said "A point of view is worth 80 IQ points").

~~~
jcfrei
Statistics help in testing and validating an author's claims. Eloquent
deductive reasoning can easily lead to wrong conclusions, which is why we need
to test them with empirical results. This author in particular appears to put
a prohibitively large value on physical goods over any kind of service. He
dismisses the fundamental transition from an industrial economy to a service
economy, simply labeling most of the new jobs as pointless. while his
arguments might be convincing for a few jobs such as telemarketing, he appears
to forget about the highly increased complexity of a modern economy, which
requires people working in corporate law, financial services and the
administrative sector. in my opinion those regulations weren't just invented
because

 _The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with
free time on their hands is a mortal danger [...]_

but rather because: 1) modern technologies require a more extensive management
(with an entire workforce dedicated to maintaining them). 2) because
globalization creates a much more complex framework for corporations
(different local laws). 3) there are much more financial options available
today to both individuals and corporations. a small company from Utah can
today raise money from investors in Abu Dhabi and an individual from Europe
can invest in Australian mining companies - just to name a few examples. this
range of services is unprecedented and requires an accordant workforce.

~~~
coldtea
> _Statistics help in testing and validating an author 's claims._

There's 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. I find that stats
and figures mostly help in giving an impression of "validity", where in fact
there could be all kinds of flaws in them, how they were collected and what
they cover.

------
protonfish
The simple social rule that explains this is pecking order. One of the most
basic human desires is dominance over others. When you have the money, you
hire as many submissive minions as you can. "Bullshit jobs" are just an
entourage. Then you display dominance over them by making them do meaningless
work - the more humiliating the better. If you hired people that were actually
useful, you'd be reliant on them so only get as many as you actually need to
keep your organization from going under.

------
api
Bullshit jobs are central to how our economy works, and their history goes way
back. Most "work projects," unless they are to build infrastructure, are
bullshit jobs. I'm convinced that a significant proportion of the military
activity in the world is one big exercise in very pompous and important-
seeming bullshit jobs in the defense sector. Whole sectors of the economy are
bullshit.

The more I see, especially since 2008, the more I think Keynes was really onto
something re: monetary velocity. Our biggest problem is excessive pessimism
and a zero-sum mentality, manifesting as various paradoxes of thrift. Without
monumental efforts at hand-waving to keep the money flowing, our tendency is
to deflate all the way back to the dark ages.

Bullshit jobs are a semi-conscious hack to keep this from happening-- to keep
people "working" so they get paid so the money flows.

The other crazy hack around this problem is inflation, and fiat currency in
general.

The Austrian types who preach how all this nonsense is a result of these
things are precisely wrong. Don't blame the hack for the thing it's fixing.

If we can find a more permanent solution to the problems that we're hacking
around, maybe we can dispense with the bullshit. Maybe that's a guaranteed
minimum income.

------
mianos
A funny thing about this story is the photo is of the SSE. The very same place
where I worked on the trading system and got down voted for '2300 a second
sustained. I was doing that on PA RISC under HPUX in 1995. BFD'. More relevant
to the story at hand, when the bell went for lunch, most of those people
crossed their arms and put their heads down on them for a nap. I am sure many
never left their desk.

~~~
tmylk
Did you find working there meaningful? Half of the time I found playing with
cool HFT tech fun just for the tech part of it and no thoughts about meaning
at all. But when there is a boring patch, the meaningful/meaningless question
is tantalising.

------
aaron695
Lol

Take something everyone thinks and talks about (Like all childish thought
games) put a crappy explanation on it and people buy in.

> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with
> free time on their hands is a mortal danger

Seriously... and man didn't land on the moon.

Conspiracy's happen, but it's about broken processes and complicated feedback.

This is a interesting topic, it's a real shame people are fooled so easily by
essays like this.

~~~
backlava
I agree. When he started talking about how capitalism shouldn't create these
BS jobs, I assumed a reasoned economic argument was coming. Then this passage.
It's a cabal of elites who have decided to spend their own money occupying the
masses. What a joke. He could have just as convincingly claimed it was space
aliens creating the jobs.

------
tpeo
Graeber makes no distinction between "useful" as in: a) creator of exchange
value to it's maker; b) creator of utility to it's holder; b) psychologically
"meaningful" to the worker. And while the core of the article deals with the
latter, by not making this distinction he dangerously suggests the two former.

As much I'd like to believe that managers are stupid, they're not crazy to
hand out free money. If an employee generated no additional income to it's
employer, there would be no reason to hire him in the first place. Similarly,
if the holder of a good derived no enjoyment from it, it would be of no value
at all to him.

It's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no
social value. The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid
them in the first place. The job of a corporate lawyer is to ensure
corporations are compliant with all the paperwork necessary to their
operation. For sufficiently large corporations, they're a necessary condition
for it's functioning.

For me, the only reason why his argument might seem personally intuitive is
because the majority of things in capitalism are of no use at all to any given
particular person, even if all of them are "useful" in some way. Paparazzi,
dog-washers and all-night pizza deliverymen are useless for all but the people
who demand their services. It's not hard to see why consumers would have
little interest in contract law if they deal so little with it, and when they
do, their job of understanding it has already been cushioned by a specialist.

I see little point in coffee shops. Nonetheless, people flock to places with
well-developed service economies that offer such things (e.g. New York, San
Francisco) along with dog-washers. Perhaps because they know they'll cater to
their bullshit tastes too.

~~~
crdoconnor
>It's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no
social value.

It REALLY isn't that hard.

>The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the
first place.

Right, they run the full gamut from avoiding legal battles with communities
that are trying to shut down polluting factories that damage their health to
avoiding legal battles with people who have suffered injury, incapacitation or
even death from using their products. Using every trick available.

Their job is to make sure that large corporations are protected from us and
they are paid handsomely for it.

You consider this 'social value'?

~~~
notahacker
Some corporate lawyers also persuade upper management they're going to be in
serious trouble if they don't drop the unfair terms from their employment
contracts, prevent their companies from being taken advantage of by predatory
rivals, kill off patent trolls and prevent utterly frivolous lawsuits from
ever seeing the light of day.

Poet-musicians seldom play for such high stakes, though ones that can't sell
enough albums to pay the recording costs or get enough live gigs to feed
themselves haven't necessarily left their audiences feeling happier on
aggregate.

It's really easy to believe that certain corporate lawyer jobs have no social
value, or negative social value. It's also really easy to believe that
somebody who _enjoyed_ being a "poet-musician" is rather bitter about the fact
they now spend sixty suited hours a week wearing a suit composing boilerplate
prose, and their whining about what a massive waste of time their job is isn't
a particularly good illustration of misallocated resources. It's natural to
believe that stuff you enjoy doing is more socially valuable than stuff you
don't, but personal feelings of validation are an even worse proxy for social
value than the market system.

In particular I'm unconvinced by the link drawn between "talented poet-
musicians" failing to get their recording contracts renewed and
maldistribution of incomes, as if the 99% were unable to afford to patronise
poet-musicians rather than seeing no value in doing so. And funnily enough, if
the poet musician suffered from being undiscovered rather than untalented,
they could probably benefit from the endeavours of people involved in the
drudgery of service sector "bullshit" jobs like A&R man, ad exec, or analyst
for music retail platform.

~~~
crdoconnor
>It's really easy to believe that certain corporate lawyer jobs have no social
value, or negative social value.

Because it's largely true. They are there to let corporations use the law as a
tool to make higher profits.

They make so MUCH money not because they can convince corporations that they
need to drop unfair terms from employment contracts but because they can
figure out a way to get them included. That makes them very profitable as well
as unethical, hence their high wage.

If all they did was the kind of thing you're talking about - ensuring
compliance with the law rather than creative ways of getting around it - their
pay would be average or low because they are not making the company money.

>In particular I'm unconvinced by the link drawn between "talented poet-
musicians" failing to get their recording contracts renewed and
maldistribution of incomes, as if the 99% were unable to afford to patronise
poet-musicians rather than seeing no value in doing so.

Really? I'm convinced. Are most Americans financially secure enough to be
patrons of the arts? HELL no. Rent, healthcare and education are #1 priorities
because they're so fucking expensive.

Why are they so expensive?

Because the corporate (debt) beast needs to be fed.

------
osehgol
Glad that it's shared, the Economist talked about it last year,
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-
markets-0). Don't think these jobs exist because there's some scheme to keep
people free and happy "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and
productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think
of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the
‘60s)." Just that not many people actually build things. Currency and paper
money also has a role to play here. I'd like to see that many people are
encouraged to build things on a level playing field.

------
martingordon
I wonder if the problem is exacerbated in the US by the lack of guaranteed
time off.

That is, European workers (for example) can better fill a 35-40 hour work week
because they only have to work ~47 weeks of the year, whereas in the US, many
feel lucky to have even two weeks off.

------
jordanpg
Link to original: [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

In this particular case, I think linking to libcom.org instead of
strikemag.org is doing a significant disservice to the author.

------
DanielBMarkham
I am reminded of a quote from an economics professor. "Why do big nations have
a lot of jobs, no matter how much they are producing? As it turns out, this is
a very interesting question"

This is the robots-are-coming-for-us fallacy rearing its head again. Once
again, the premise is that we only need certain things -- food, shelter,
electricity, internet, health care. Once robots make these things, well dang,
there won't be anything else for the rest of us to do, will there?

No, no, a thousand times no. Humans value not only things to keep them alive,
but scarcity and novelty. As the basic needs become automated, huge industries
will continue to explode devoted to creating scarce and novel things for other
humans to collect and consume. Most of these "bullshit jobs" are in this
sector.

I find these essays always have some kind of value statement, either implied
or outright -- "what does it say about our society that it seems to generate
an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently
infinite demand for specialist in corporate law?"

It says that if you had a magic wand, we'd have more poets. If I had one, we
probably would, too. But it tells us absolutely nothing about why there are
jobs that folks don't like, or jobs that you or I might find useless.

~~~
normloman
I see what you mean about the robots: productivity goes up, but we always find
new things to consume.

But

1\. Is there a limit to how much we can consume? Look at the super rich. They
have more money then they know what to do with, so they stash it in hedge
funds. The middle class drives consumption more than the rich. Leads me to
think there's a point where consumption doesn't grow with your income.

2\. The bullshit jobs discussed in the article are not about creating novel
and scares things to consume. Advertising, corporate law, etc, has an arms-
race element. Companies spend more on advertising to keep up with their
competitors.

------
tawan
For me, it boils down to two questions: 1) Given, that let's say only 20% of
the population does real work (doctors, teachers etc..), why should they do
their work, if everybody else is enjoying spare-time all the time? And if you
propose that they also could work less, therefore we would have more doctor
positions to be filled, guess what, people that have valuable jobs are also
the ones who really like their job, and are happy with working 40 hours, or
even more. It's somehow ironic that people won't do work, just because they
like what they do, they also want to be acknowledged monetary, no matter how
much they like their job, which I can understand. Somehow we have a situation,
i.e. from a doctor's perspective, like: "Yea, I'll treat you, but only if you
are also getting up at seven every morning and commute to some office and do
stuff."

2) I think for biological reasons, people need status more than spare-time. We
need some kind of hierarchy to determine who is more entitled to spread their
genes. If everybody is unemployed, how do you know who has more status? Money
and consequently buying power does simplify this problem very neatly, reducing
it to a one-dimensional metric scale, easy to compare and communicate.

~~~
shkkmo
I think that we should offer basic income to everyone, in return for
reversible sterilization.

Then the only people working be those who want to (either for extra money or
status).

The only people having kids would be those who are motivated enough to find a
way of getting off public income for long enough to have them.

------
strangename
Keyne's "15 hour workweek" projection cited within is an interesting thought
experiment, but it ignores effects of necessary overhead.

For example, let's look at the cognitive overhead I face as a programmer.
There's a certain amount of time I spend just spooling content into my brain's
working store. I'm not contributing anything new; I'm just keeping the old in
my brain and coordinating with the changes my coworkers are making. Let's
pretend that forms a nice, round 10 hours of time a week. If I work another 5
hours, that time has a 2:1 overhead:production ratio. Since the productive
time is what's being sold, it operates at a steep 300% cost inefficiency. The
next 5 hours brings it down to 200%, the next 10 to 150%.

There's a lot that would change in our economies if we could eliminate
transaction and overhead costs. But physical and temporal limitation utterly
forbid that in practice. One should always take those highly abstracted
economic projections and starting points of analysis: see what assumptions
lead them to be skewed from reality. That post-analysis is, in my experience,
often the truly enlightening part.

------
notdang
Don't want to defend Soviet Union, but this is very different to what I
experienced while living in USSR:

"Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where
employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up
as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took
three clerks to sell a piece of meat). "

It was quite the opposite. Just one person serving a huge queue.

~~~
DanBC
Three huge queues?

You queue to say what you want and get a ticket. You take that ticket to a
different queue and pay for the item and get a different ticket. You take that
ticket to a third quue to collect the item.

------
artursapek
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478)

------
nevergetenglish
If I had to cope with a bullshit jobs that required only physical
capabilities, I should try to advance in my start-up or whatever high thinking
I am doing. Newton created his gravitation law when the university was shut-
down because the pest. Doing something really nasty make you enjoy a lot your
mental work in your real passion.

Also, having your mind free but your arms working is a good way of thinking
deeply.

Edit1: I should add I don't like bullshit jobs!

Edit2: Addendum For example you should try to learn and read a lot at night
but just some core points, and the next day while working physically you
should echo mentally all those material, discussing, analysing all in your
head.

When I was younger I could reason without writing, now I should need to write
thing down, anyway the desire to get out of a bullshit job is a great force,
the most boring the job stronger the desire to escape from that job and
greater the concentration you find to center into your real passion, your real
job, the one you adore.

------
netcan
I think he's talking about jobs where this is arguable (though never entirely
provable) from any perspective: employee, employer or consumer.

What is the point of FMCG marketing people? Do they really serve a purpose in
society or do they just funnel funds from the competitive process (which as a
whole might be productive) into different hands, including their own. There
are some positive externalities like television, but that kind of incidental
value is hard to find meaning in.

How about all the lawyers playing zero sum games? Social media people for
office supply companies? Paparazzi? Are reward programs offering blenders in
exchange for credit card miles really necessary?

I think the point he's making is somewhat valid, especially from a personal
intuitive perspective. The wider question is can society work differently? Can
we trade work for leisure? Can we find self definitions and motivation outside
of work?

~~~
sunnybg
Leisure doesn't have to be indulgent. It simply gives a lot more
possibilities. If you could work on any project or interest or hobby you
wanted to right now, what would you work on? If you could learn any new thing
you wanted, what would you learn about? Any family, friends, neighbors, or
others going through a hard time right now, how would you like to help them?
This is the sort of stuff we should be teaching kids in schools too, about the
possibilities of free time. It can be about a lot more than just recovering
from the exhaustion of work.

~~~
netcan
I think we might be talking about different things. My understanding of this
articles is:

(A) A lot of work is bullshit from either a 'gives your life meaning' or a 'is
useful to the world' perspective. (B) Everyone working full time is such a
foundational part of our society that we don't know how to change it without
breaking the world. Work is our identity, our drive to get good grades in
preschool, the way money is distributed in society, a politically stabilizing
force, etc.

You're talking about what we could do if we lived in that world.

~~~
sunnybg
In the US, what about a state-level constitutional amendment lowering full-
time hours from 40 to 35? It just seems to me that public support isn't even
there right now for something like that, but that support is necessary for
getting there.

A basic income, even a very low one, would be another way to get there. We
could do away with the idea of full-time / salaried work entirely, and
everyone is just part-time hourly. People could work enough hours just for
subsistence, or more up to whatever comfort or consumption level fits their
desired lifestyle.

If a person believes their paying job is at the core of who they are, they are
either very lucky (working a dream job), or very unlucky (overworked,
unfulfilled, and/or indoctrinated). All people, not just the wealthy or
beautiful or lucky, deserve as much freedom and autonomy as their society can
provide to them. Every person deserves a chance to become a great thinker,
visionary, artist, scientist, craftsperson, and you can't do those things
without plenty of free time to explore and experiment.

Wanting a better world and believing it's possible is the first step to
getting there.

------
wallflower
Related: An epic Reddit answer to 'Why Americans get so little vacation time'

Short answer: Communism lost

[http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d8eiv/why_do_ameri...](http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d8eiv/why_do_americans_get_so_little_vacation_time/c0ybdup)

~~~
confluence
That answer is complete bullshit.

> _In the United States, socialism is virtually nonexistent._

Except for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Unemployment.

And don't forget the military.

~~~
dirktheman
By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state.
Government services like these do not equal socialism.

I live in The Netherlands, a pretty liberal kingdom with excellent social
security and unemployment benefits. But don't be mistaken, it's not a
socialist country. Not by a long shot. The biggest political parties are
liberal-conservative and social-democrats. The latter lean towards the left,
but our only true socialist party is much more to the left. They're only the
sixth party by size.

~~~
ceejayoz
> By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state.

Much of the US believes that to be the case.

~~~
mercurial
It's endlessly bizarre to see Americans throw around the word "socialist" as
if it was a curse. Western Europe is made of social democracies. Northern
Europe in particular has made the choice to live with high taxes and better
social services. It does not mean that they are governed by unelected
oligarchs, they get the same kind of elected oligarchs as the rest.

~~~
ceejayoz
There has been a concerted campaign in the US to convince people that other
countries' social services are inefficient, dangerous, and hated by their
populations.

In a fun example, an American financial newspaper claimed
([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/hawking_british_and_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/hawking_british_and_alive/))
that if Stephen Hawking were British and subject to the NHS that he'd be dead.
He is, of course, British.

~~~
mercurial
Either there are vested interests at work, or Hawking is in fact a zombie.

------
mathattack
_The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class
has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their
hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began
to be approximated in the ‘60s). 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._

I just don't buy this. If you view capitalists as evil, they are doing it to
pocket money, not as some grand conspiracy to keep people busy. If it were
economically possible to keep people busy in a capitalist society, inflation
would be zero.

------
rglover
_The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class
has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their
hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began
to be approximated in the ‘60s). 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._

This has always bothered me, even before I was old enough to join the "work
force." I had a hunch back in the day and have subsequently confirmed it early
in my career: working less promotes better, clearer thinking, and ultimately a
higher volume of results (i.e. when I work less, I end up getting more done).

This is incredibly telling of our times:

 _Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time
working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they
were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they
are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the
task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of
fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with
resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more
time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying
responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly
cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really
does._

I encounter this more often than I'd like to admit. Brilliant, talented,
positive people finding their core competencies squashed under meaningless
political bullshit. I constantly shudder at the idea of what these people
might accomplish if they were given the resources and freedom to do what they
were actually good at.

I've been reading Freedom From the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti and this one
excerpt really speaks to this problem:

 _For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by
our books, our saints. We say, `Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the
hills and the mountains and the earth? ' and we are satisfied with their
descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and
empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told,
either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by
circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences
and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves;
nothing original, pristine, clear._

~~~
vinceguidry
The answer is individual. Build skills in your spare time that will let you
switch jobs, industries, and fields until you are in an environment where you
can grow.

Then, once you're there, have side projects. Do personal stuff on work time.
Spend less time working and more time thinking. Use your expertise to extract
the time you need. Remix and refactor the insights you get from the stuff that
you do. Network and build up a support group that will help you when it's time
to spread your wings.

------
gills
Also, in the US, people are willing to work full time at whatever job will
provide health insurance.

------
jongraehl
Conclusion is not supported by what came before:

> If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the
> power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better
> job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The
> remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally
> reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do
> nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives
> and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and
> particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a
> simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable
> social value.

------
edw519
Let's not forget about how much bullshit government adds to non-bullshit
jobs...

My Typical 8 hour day

1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley):

    
    
      7 hours: code
      1 hour:  overhead
    

2002 to 2014 (after Sarbanes-Oxley):

    
    
          1 hour: insure rigorous Requirements documentation
          1 hour: insure rigorous Test Plans (whether used or not)
          1 hour: peer review (of devs I would have never hired)
          1 hour: code review (for what peer review missed)
          1 hour: answer auditors' questions
          1 hour: status reports
          1 hour: status meetings
      55 minutes: bitch to boss
       5 minutes: code

~~~
crdoconnor
Sarbanes Oxley was created to prevent executives from looting their own
companies (a la Enron) and then feigning ignorance and blaming their
underlings when everything blew up.

The reason why it seems to be ridiculously onerous is because it gives the
government the power to slam execs in jail if they do not have sufficient
control over the company.

It's executive bullshit that ruined your day, which is caused by executive
paranoia about going to jail which was caused by executives __who stole from
their own companies __.

~~~
personZ
Has it worked? I'm not supporting any opposition to SOX, however we all know
of many processes that offer no real checks or value, but we have to do
it...just because why not, you're getting paid for it. In the case of SOX and
the like, the argument can be "well everyone else has to do the same illusion
of control work, so the drag is similar".

Most businesses are filled with processes that everyone knows are done for
absolutely no value to anyone, but we do them anyways and they absolutely sap
our soul.

~~~
crdoconnor
Unfortunately it's not enforced. Obama _could_ slam half of the CEOs of Wall
Street in jail with Sarbanes Oxley violations for wilfully looting their own
firms exactly as was done to Enron, but he made an executive decision not to
(a quick glance at who pays Clinton's $500,000 post presidential speaking fees
might give a hint as to why).

Unfortunately the lack of any real enforcement means that it hasn't been all
that successful.

That doesn't mean it's a bad law.

------
ownedthx
I work 40 hours a week at a _minimum_ , every week, and have always done so.
I'm a programmer primarily, but also do other related things (build, devops,
customer support). But if I have a week with nothing but programming, I will
still work a minimum of 40 hours a week.

The idea that you can't do more than 15-20 hours a week is not true.

I do love my job. Perhaps that's why I work this much.

I admit that I have a hard time relating to this general idea I see over and
over about the need to fill up time with non-work. Also, over the years, I've
met my fair share of those who also work just as hard.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And yet, here you are, posting on HN. Is this part of work? Or are you off
work now? Curious.

~~~
ownedthx
I don't work at an office. I guess you can say I'm on a break.

------
atmosx
I like that fact that the decrease of working hours per day, is becoming a
mainstream discussion. I've seen other articles popping up elsewhere the last
couple of years. That's good.

------
rwmj
So why doesn't competition push out the "bullshit" jobs? This article mentions
that competition is supposed to fix it, isn't fixing it, but doesn't explain
why.

~~~
dropit_sphere
Answer: the jobs are caused _by_ the competition. Competition is what makes
them necessary. If a company doesn't spend on marketing, other companies will
outmarket it. If a company doesn't have a legal department it will crumble
under a barrage of high-digit lawsuit damages. If a country doesn't spend on
defense, it will be annexed by one that does (that some countries manage to
escape this is an illusion stemming from the fact that the U.S. or similar
large bloc effectively owns them already and is spending on defense in their
behalf).

There is one job of value to society that teachers, etc., are failing (or
succeeding; take your pick) to do: managing their own sustainability. The
unlisted list item on all job descriptions is "protect this job from
backstabbing, layoffs, budget cuts, or impoverishing or killing the person who
takes it." Snarky aside on engineers: we are usually bad at this, because,
just like I said, it's not in the requirements.

------
evoloution
Choose your friends carefully, you never know when your life is going to land
on HN: * Corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm * A poet in the
past * Front man in an indie rock band in the past that his songs made it to
the radio There shouldn't be more than 10 people fitting the description...
__Admits that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the
world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

Btw great article!

------
jbogp
From one of the comments at the bottom of the article:

[http://www.bullshitjob.com/](http://www.bullshitjob.com/)

Some of these are pretty amazing.

------
gohrt
Previously on HN, when this article was originally published:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478)

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs ([http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/](http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)) 528 points by gu 351 comments

------
squozzer
At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, I would say my job is to make
money. With the additional condition of enjoying the liberty to spend the
money, which is why I avoid lucrative but illegal activities, at least to the
extent I can consciously avoid doing illegal things.

------
RVuRnvbM2e
It's a ridiculously widely recognised phenomenon. I immediately thought of
this song:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6J7TUHDzC8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6J7TUHDzC8)

------
mrottenkolber
I achieved the 15 hour week. I like to do 20 hours some weeks (I get paid the
hour, so its attractive, but I really don't have to). Note that I am not rich.
Also I am young and healthy and don't have kids.

------
GoldenHomer
While we are on the subject of bullshit: [https://github.com/bullgit/bullshit-
job-titles](https://github.com/bullgit/bullshit-job-titles)

------
sauere
As long as the President's success is measured by the unemployment rate, these
jobs will exist.

------
JLB25
Interesting article and a strong feeling that there is something there that we
all know but we don't say, declare to ourselves and to the others. So I think
there another point to add here: everything manages to stick together not
because of an not well explained hate for 'real workers' (I can see that it
exists, but how does it contribute to keep everyone in its place?).

On one hand it is the most stupid of all the answers: its' because of money,
the salary that you get paid to do this pointless jobs.

And on the other hand it is because of something less clearly perceivable, yet
profound and 'democratized': a part from the 'real' jobs mentioned in the
article - physical labor jobs, agriculture, health services - almost all the
other workers are equated by the secret perception of being paid more instead
of the value of their job, the value of their real work effort and
contribution. But this perception alone won't do the job. It works because it
is matched by a counter-perception, almost as unmentionable: if most of the
employees feel they manage to get paid more than what they do (not of what
they deserve because this implies other personal, political, social,
intellectual considerations), most of the employers do feel that are paying
their employees less than what they contribute to the wealth of the company or
organization, less of what their contribution's value is.

I believe that this is at the parallel combination of these perceptions is, at
least one, of the main reasons why everything keep staying the way it is, why
we don't work less.

What to do?

Organize the work differently. Start-ups have the potential to structure a
division of labour, responsibilities and remuneration that provides a better
sense of empowerment, equal contribution to the common aim of that the
organization/company has, fair returns from the effort done. It doesn't last
long thou. As soon as the start-up become institutionalized, e.g. direct
control is lost over certain operations and processes, the
company/organization become bigger, certain part of the work done is captured
only with quarterly reports or similar simplification, tales of the work done,
the objective achieved, it tend to become as any other existing company,
recreating that dual perception that I've mentioned before.

Bottom line is (probably): perception for perception, let's ask more often and
with less fear(?) to our colleagues, to the other people in general how much
do they earn? what does really involve their job? It may sound a futile
exercise but I believe that by communicating to each other, by spelling it
out, we will play around with other possibilities, with alternative
organizations and modes of labour.

------
squozzer
I liked the illustration better when this story appeared in Strike! magazine.

------
gregorious_c
^^

------
byEngineer
I work at a large bank in the US. We build websites. Internal websites. The
company employs maybe 300k people in the US alone. None of the websites gets
more than 10 hits a day! There are 5 websites. And we have 40-50 people to
support just that! If all these websites disappeared overnight there would be
no difference to the bank. And to the society. The best part: the bank has
been rescued by tax payer money. If it went bankrupt -- as it should have -- I
would be working productively somewhere else. Unless "somewhere" else is also
supported by the tax payer money and artificially cheap credit, FED rates at
0% full economic cycle now. The solution is more capitalism, not socialism.
I.e. let them go bankrupt! This is what capitalism is all about. You take
risks. You win, big payout! You loose, you go bankrupt! This is capitalism,
not tax funded corporations. That's socialism for the rich. But don't call
that capitalism, please! Interest rates at 0% for 7 years?! Set by whom?
Capitalist free markets? Or socialist bureaucrats who know it all better?! Who
sets the rates? Mr. Market or Ms. Yellen? Get rid of the FED too. You will see
jobs like mine disappearing. And forcing me to do something more productive
than slacking off for $120k / year curtesy of the tax payer.

Capitalism in crisis is all about reallocating work force from unproductive
work at looser companies to do something great at productive companies! That's
what bankruptcies are all about. Yes, my bank should be history long time ago.
Its assets should be taken over by a bank that didn't make the stupid
mistakes. And smart people who avoided those mistakes. This is what the
bankruptcy process is about. Then this new CEO that weathered 2008 crisis
making his small bank winning party here and taking over assets of bankrupted
banks -- would see that nonsense and fire half of the staff. So they can go do
something productive! This is how it works in true capitalism. We don't have
it though because we believe in socialism. So yep, pay for your zombie bank
(and my salary!) because the people who you voted into the office, didn't let
the markets work!

~~~
dognotdog
Don't take it out on socialism! Under those principles, the banks either would
not have existed in this form in the first place, or been allowed to go
bankrupt just as you suggest.

What happened with the bank bailout was pure capitalism, the banks simply
bought the government!

~~~
byEngineer
Tea Party members voted against bank bailouts. Not democrats, not old-
republicans. My point is, yes, you can buy democrats and some republicans to
vote in favor of more government spending. But you apparently can't buy them
all to do it.

During cold war you could try to buy Moscow communists as much as you wanted
so they allowed you open bank branch in USSR, but this would never happen.

You can try buy guys like Ron Paul all day long in attempt to get bailout, but
you won't get it.

The problem is with the voter. If the feeling at the Capitol was that there
will be severe punishment for the bailouts, our beloved Senators and
Representatives would be too worried to loose their office to vote for that
nonsense. Mind you they can sell their services to other industries too and
make money in the process without the risk of loosing office (aka
"everything"). The voter allowed them to do that. Because voter doesn't
understand that bankruptcy and crisis are important parts of economic cycle.
And are needed! To remove excesses from the system. To relieve workers from BS
jobs too! So you can start over after 1-2 years in healthy economy without
zombie banks. We didn't allow capitalism to work. Blaming capitalism for that
doesn't add up.

BTW, I respect socialism and socialist movement. I'm liberal on social issues
as liberal you can get. But for the economic issues Right just gets it.

~~~
shkkmo
I was always sad the the Tea Party and the Occupy movement never managed to
figure out that they were on the same side...

~~~
baggachipz
Let's be honest here: Racism got in the way of that. The Tea Party started
_very_ differently from where it ended up.

~~~
shkkmo
I think the racism of the Tea Party and the hooliganism of the Occupy movement
were deliberately overplayed in the media to keep the two groups from seeing
each other as allies.

------
cylcon
what a bunch ob crap, only large super corporations can keep "bullshit" jobs.
Otherwise the market corrects this.

Funny to see all the hn readers advocating for more welfare and central
planning. Typical neckbeard communism.

------
spindritf
How is this weak political agitation on top of HN? It reads like a paroody.

 _You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a
lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very
definition of wasteful social expenditure.)_

Yes, yes, if you disagree with our good professor here then you must be a
tabloid-reading simpleton. A person of any sophistication would easily
recognize the value of this largely fact-free critique of capitalism. Where
capitalism is represented by the academia, the most competitive of industries.

 _Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative
responsibilities in British academic departments_

The whole thing is nothing but ideological signalling.

 _if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call
“the market”_

 _This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to
speak of dignity in labour_

 _Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way
things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism.
You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers_

Let me just say (before I go back to reading Daily Mail and bashing teachers)
that I can totally understand why he spent so much time thinking about
bullshit jobs.

~~~
ludoo
Actually, he's a well known anthropologist and author of an excellent book,
which you should maybe read before labelling him as a political agitator...[1]

[1] and given it's freely available, it won't cost you anything...
[http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years](http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/Debt,_The_First_5000_Years)

