
Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work - halfastack
https://medium.com/s/story/are-bullshit-jobs-really-bullshit-c6d1fc2f2c44
======
m0llusk
Picking apart the jobs as bullshit metric directly might not be the only or
best path. There is a known and confounding spectrum currently exhibited in
most developed economies where some of the most valued labor such as teaching
the young and caring for the sick and elderly turn out to be among the lowest
paid while some of the highest paid labor is so detailed an specialized that
it ends up in being sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.

Is squeezing most sales per advertising campaign or saving a few pennies per
unit delivered of a mass market product really worth what the economy is
willing to pay for that? Does it really make sense to make that kind of
optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have
meaningful value?

It is really hard to measure bullshit jobs specifically, but it might be more
easy and meaningful to try to characterize this strange gradient where
abstracted work that is distant from people has value far beyond the simple
and necessary basics of human social function. Worry less about the bullshit
label and try coming up with a measure more like dollars lost per human life
improved.

~~~
danmaz74
Saving a few pennies per unit, times millions of units, makes a very big
impact - and is integral to how industrialised civilisations became so rich
compared to previous ones. Ignoring this kind of math isn't going to help
teachers or carers for the elderly.

~~~
blfr
Yes but saving a few pennies is not how industrial civilization got rich. Mass
manufactured goods are orders of magnitude cheaper than their hand-crafted
equivalents.

~~~
danmaz74
My point is that, of those orders of magnitude, some came out of innumerable
penny savings accumulated over 200 years.

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0db532a0
I recently deleted my LinkedIn account after growing sick of the irrelevant
messages from recruiters and the mind-numbing, inane posts from the cult of
self-proclaimed thinkers, influencers, TED luminaries and Elon Musk
sympathisers. One of Oleg Vishnepolsky’s golden posts was the final straw.

I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of the bullshit and self
aggrandisation any more. And why not, since I’d already deleted all of my
other social media accounts long ago. I have the email or phone number of
everyone I need to be in contact with. I had a chat about this with a friend
who himself is a founder of a company and uses LinkedIn to keep track of
developments inside his work network. It made me wonder whether I’d done the
right thing.

Can anyone here who isn’t a recruiter or employer say that it’s worth having a
LinkedIn profile?

~~~
JamesBarney
There is definitely value to LinkedIn, for all the obvious reasons. It let's
you keep up to date with new jobs, and old colleagues.

But you probably already decided that it's not valuable enough to keep you on
the platform. Only thing I can add if you ever start your own company it's
becomes over an order or magnitude more valuable.

~~~
0db532a0
Yes that’s what I’m worried about. Too late now, I suppose.

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danielvf
It’s the second half of the article that contain the real insights - that what
are termed “bullshit” jobs, and despised by the people working them, actually
do create economic value. Today younger people have an expectation of
meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide
it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are
much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be
pretty terrible in the past too.

~~~
bartread
> This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are
> much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be
> pretty terrible in the past too.

I think this is the nub of it: we think things have changed, but they really
haven't. Whilst the content/descriptions may have changed, grim jobs have
always existed and have always been the majority.

I spent the summer of 1998 working in a wines and spirits bottling plant. I'd
either be loading bottles on to the beginning of the line, or stacking boxes
at the end - as a university student, and a temp, I wasn't trusted with the
machines in the middle. Doesn't really matter: the work was beyond mind-
numbing.

The first couple of hours I was checking my watch incessantly. Then I realised
I was driving myself slowly (or, quite quickly) insane and limited myself to
checking every N palettes of bottles, where N was a suitably large number.
After a week or two got to the point where I'd check my watch once during the
morning and it would be nearly lunchtime. Oh yeah: winning at life!

And this was a job that had some tangible output: thousands of gallons of some
beverage started out in a massive tank and ended up in neatly labelled and
packaged bottles ready for sale. Didn't change the fact that the job was
boring as #### and that I hated every minute. But the money was essential to
me at the time, and I was and am grateful to the childhood friend who offered
me that job.

I have no end of respect for people who do these kinds of jobs their entire
working lives for the simple reason that they _have_ to in order to survive. I
know exactly how fortunate I am to have other options open to me.

Perhaps a wider point: over the span of an entire career almost everyone has
at least one, and often several, terrible jobs. E.g., including contracts,
since graduating I've had two great jobs, one good, one that started great and
remained that way for quite a while but became terrible during my final years,
a couple that were all right but nothing special, one that was bloody awful
from start to finish, and one that was entirely bipolar (sometimes from day to
day).

Work isn't always enjoyable, and doesn't always (perhaps not even often) use
you to your full potential. Yes, you may be better than that job, but so are
lots of people, and you _still have to eat_. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try to
find something better, but sometimes - and possibly for quite a long time - we
have to do things we don't enjoy in order to live.

Sorry, I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.

~~~
bloudermilk
I think we have to look pre-industrialization to see fundamentally different
ways of organizing production and work. The digital age has certainly sped
things up, but the 20th century was full of bullshit too.

~~~
notahacker
And before industrialisation the tendency was for everyone to inefficiently
cultivate their own food whilst most semi-skilled tasks were carried out by
small numbers of artisans typically organised around protectionist guilds,
whilst the largest employers (preferring unpaid labour where possible) were
religious orders and landowners conspicuously consuming and fighting their
neighbours. I'm not convinced this arrangement involved less bullshit, but it
certainly entailed less production.

------
lordnacho
The key to BS jobs is that even though the person doing it is being paid by
someone who values it in some sense, it feels utterly senseless that someone
values it.

I know a lot of people who work in the consulting industry (As in Big4, MBB,
etc). None of them are starving, and someone seems to want to pay them to
work. But zero of them can see why there's any point in their work. Whatever
the purported reason for a project, it always seems at least wasteful, and at
worst deceptive.

The other part of it is that a BS job can only be hard due to unreasonable
constraints. If you just plod away on your powerpoint slides, they will
eventually be finished. It only gets stressful because someone is telling you
it needs to be done before the sun comes up. Chances are your client also
isn't listening when you do the presentation, so that's fine as well.

Interesting jobs like coding can fail for the same reasons, but they aren't
the only reasons. You can design a cloud solution badly, even if you had a lot
of time to think about it. Your ML model can... be no better than chance. Even
if you have a phd in it.

That possibility of real failure I haven't seen in the discussion yet.

~~~
xivzgrev
I find the part about the MBB people not seeing any point in their work
surprising. I used to work in strategy consulting.

Their perception of “Wasteful” is probably from the gobs of money these firms
charge for what seems like a relatively small amount of work. But the clients
aren’t really paying for the work. The value is having a trusted, third party
sign off on whatever strategic initiative management wanted to push. And that
IS worth gobs of money to them.

Now I decided to leave because the job was really about helping rich people /
firms get richer, and that didn’t feel meaningful to me. But it wasn’t a
bullshit job.

------
andyidsinga
see also Gervais Principle: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-
gervais-principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/)

edit: elaborating a little on why I referenced the Gervais Principle:

It's an interesting guide to understand the relationship between executives,
middle-management, and the worker/producers and the relationship each has with
"The organization".

Per the gervais principle, a lot of the bullshit job phenomenon is explained
through the relationship an employee has with reality and the organization in
which they work.

In gervais, the sociopaths at the top (executives) and the losers at the
bottom (actual producers of some value) both have some grasp on reality -
whereas the clueless middle are full of cognitive dissonance about the reality
of their position and loyalty to the idea of the organization. So, IMHO, the
clueless category, in moments of honesty are the ones most likely to call out
their position as a "bullshit" job.

------
baxtr
I have noticed that spending time on LinkedIn makes me very unhappy. It’s on
the same level as Insta or Facebook. It’s either ads, or people posting
trivial insights, or, non-substance reading recommendations. It’s depressing.
The only reasons I’m not deleting are: it’s a nice address book for business
contacts and a good source for finding people/to be found.

~~~
thatoneuser
Adding onto all that is the existential anguish one feels realizing that it’s
all bs and that people still buy into it. It’s really hard not to think less
of humanity when we know we’re being so stupid/dishonest, yet everyone keeps
along with it.

------
temp-dude-87844
The LinkedIn angle doesn't contribute to the other points, and even as framing
it doesn't help. While the stuff put on there may be fictitious and the
interactions with it are just signalling, it doesn't relate to the observation
that many people seem to place a higher significance on their work than just a
paycheck, or that they expect some degree of fulfillment, a chance to make an
impact, or an opportunity to leverage their experience and relationships for
later gain.

This mainstream self-actualization of work is probably an artifact of
knowledge work moving from the domain of the intellectual elites towards the
masses, which broadened the prospects of people beyond working on the fields
or factories for a lifetime. Two generations of this during an economic boom
created a recipe that was immortalized in culture, but didn't work as well
this time, and the ones who were spoonfed the dogma are still reeling from the
bust, while the ones who were rich enough or lucky enough have made it through
fine. The angst about the lack of job-related fulfillment transcends
generations, but it mixes with the realization that they likely can't leverage
their job experience and relationships to advance forward. And despite all the
armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum,
people aren't blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect
their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.

Nonetheless, we shouldn't conflate intellectual fulfillment with financial
security, and their respective lack thereof. People earning well who feel
professionally unfulfilled have options to find something they like more,
without the crushing pressure of needing uninterrupted income. And those
engaged in fulfilling work with tangible impacts can get paid peanuts; in
these cases it's often their emotional attachment to their work that keeps
them going. It's most unfortunate when the two conditions coincide. But it
should also not come as a surprise, as there's no morality in the economic
system itself; rather, all money being paid out is coming from somewhere else,
because somewhere someone thinks it's where it should go. The people in
bullshit jobs wish they were in control, but control is harder to come by than
money. Others on a different tier of Maslow's just wish for money, and so on.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the
> economy is not zero sum, people aren 't blind and know that their relative
> losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them
> for life._

Economy as a whole may not be zero-sum, but this reminds me of the stuff we
did on maths/physics classes. You'd have a thing X with some aggregate
quality, but there was a way of "drawing a circle", selecting a subset of X
which has the opposite aggregate quality. It's easy to draw circles over our
economy that surround areas that are zero-sum, or even negative-sum. I think a
lot of complaints about bullshit jobs come from people who realize they're
stuck in one of such areas.

------
killjoywashere
Self-actualized, high-value, "expert" labor (surgeon, physicist, business
owner), requires a person willing to work hard, relatively abstract
motivations (prestige, memory of a loved one, etc), with a potentially
unlimited ability to delay gratification.

Self-actualized, high-value, "skilled" labor (nurse, programmer), requires a
person willing to work, motivations are varied, some requirement to delay
gratification, but not limitless.

Weakly-actualized, minimal-value, minimally-skilled labor (bar tender, data
entry "content" producer), requires minimal willingness to work ("just keep a
roof over my head, please"), motivations are varied in direction and caliber,
minimal requirement to delay gratification (but may paradoxically suffer
severe lack of gratification relative to the surgeon by age 50)

Weakly-actualized, low-value, minimally skilled labor (Guatamalan mountain
family growing what they eat, contributing minimally if at all to external
society): requires minimal motivation (external motivation to survive is
entirely sufficient), gratification isn't even an issue. Ref (1)

De-humanizing, moderate-value, unskilled labor (Guatamalan working in a
concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa). Requires tremendous motivation to get
to Mount Pleasant, gratification is highly delayed (scrap by, send all money
home, hope it gets there). You can imagine how these immigrants' children
become doctors and business owners. Ref (1)

My apologies for those who suffer in the "bullshit job" economy. Maybe at some
point you'll be the director of a PR firm or something. I would point out
though that if you want a "strong storyline" to your life, there are options.
Moving to Guatamala being one of them.

(1)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800808)

------
d0gbread
This is a well written piece and I agree that self-diagnosing your own job as
bullshit in a complex environment is not a great path forward. I also agree
that a good portion of jobs that serve the "metabolism" do create economic
value in an attributable sense.

The truth, though, it probably somewhere in between. Operations management
tools exist to cut down on bullshit (inefficiency) and goal posts are moving
so fast that it's making a lot of room for bullshit jobs, however they might
be defined. Businesses are certainly not optimized, and there's a clear
difference between, for example, needlessly delegating tasks as your sole
responsibility, and actually serving to complete those tasks (at likely a
fraction of the pay).

------
bko
> I was updating my [LinkedIn] profile because not doing it would raise more
> questions.

Is this true in anyone's experience? I've worked at banks for a long time and
I've never had anyone ever bring up my Linked In profile, despite being
connected to many of my colleagues. I doubt anyone is carefully watching my
profile apart from the occasional check to see if I'm still at the bank or
what location I am. I don't feel any pressure to update it. People just don't
care in my experience, or maybe they don't care at my non-management level.

~~~
dimator
I think the whole LinkedIn angle was a vehicle to get the author's points
across, and they are a realistic experience on the platform. The entire model
seems to be built on company loyalists pushing their employer's latest
"innovations." I don't think anyone in the real world assigns any importance
to LinkedIn profiles.

~~~
ianai
It’s going to vary by manager/position/industry/etc. A social media marketer
is going to have their social accounts looked at by hiring managers. For
programmers, LinkedIn might be yet another datum to break an offer, and
another place to look.

------
known
Working longer hours has many drawbacks
[https://www.economist.com/business/2018/11/24/americans-
need...](https://www.economist.com/business/2018/11/24/americans-need-to-take-
a-break)

------
renox
Interesting, I was thinking that there are whole 'bullshit industry' such as
the fashion industry,but in fact it's not really the same thing: the fashion
industry is useful for clothes makers to convince clients to buy new clothes
that they don't need..

------
alexashka
This article, while well written, doesn't bring anything to the table, other
than poking the obvious holes in someone else's mediocre work.

The reason people feel like what they're involved in is bullshit, is because
it is. There is no grand conspiracy.

It's bullshit so much of the time is because people are more interested in
succeeding personally, than in not screwing things up for tens, hundreds,
millions, billions, of others.

Is your job bullshit? Then quit and get a potentially lower paying job that is
less bullshit. Have you done that? No? End of debate. If you actually can't
afford to get paid any less, you are not busy moaning about your job being
bullshit. People in survival mode are hustling, not moaning.

This is not news and there is no cure that doesn't involve re-structuring,
which always involves many at the very least getting their life ruined. Re-
structuring doesn't guarantee that things get better, only that they change.
Until by some miracle, intelligent people with integrity end up at the top,
have enough power to cut heads, get away with it and understand that it's
necessary, nothing is going to really change. It'll merely re-structure.

Capitalism today, communism tomorrow, we're still dumb, selfish apes that are
largely uninterested in the welfare of others unless it directly affects us.
Most people I know didn't start to care about anyone other than themselves
until they had children. Now they care about themselves and their children -
so we have private schools instead of improving the school system. Selfish to
the bone, this will not change.

~~~
southerndrift
So, bring back tribal structures where everything is structured with child-
relations.

If every tribe has its private school(s), there is no need to fight for
spending on public schools.

With the internet at hand, are there any structures that cannot be implemented
with tribal relations?

------
perfunctory
"Arendt’s notion is that labor—the realm of metabolism, maintenance, and
consumption—has colonized and supplanted work—the realm of craft, fabrication,
and use. "

Could somebody explain what this sentence means?

