
Meaningless jobs that are killing the human spirit - velmu
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/bullshit-jobs-by-david-graeber-review
======
bryanlarsen
basically a dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389)
. That's an article written by the author of the book.

~~~
rahimnathwani
Who does this guy's PR?

------
nickles
I can't help but think of the telephone sanitizers from planet Golgafrincham
in _Hitchiker 's Guide to the Galaxy_ whenever someone makes the claim that a
class of jobs is useless.

 _These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves
of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would
build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists
and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made
things and did things, and the B ark would hold everyone else, such as
hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of
course the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived
full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease
contracted from a dirty telephone._ [0]

[0]
[http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham)

~~~
pdimitar
I've read a lot about Douglas Adams and it's my opinion that these pieces of
his books are aimed exactly at what the article is about.

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le-mark
_For instance, consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the
ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or
service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you’ve
articulated “speak to an agent” some 16 times to said computer system, waited
20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have
to provide the same information you already gave the system._

So funny and so true. With respect to software development, I've worked on so
many projects that were cancelled before ever being released. Built e-commerce
and warehouse systems for a $300M company that went bankrupt. Millions of
lines of code just disappeared. It's hard to take software development
seriously after experiencing this a few times.

This profession is a money grab, get what you can while you can get it, before
the bubble bursts. Surely developer salaries are in a bubble, right?

~~~
lighthazard
The quote you provide shows a breakdown in process, not software. Wherever
this human being is, they do not have access to the information provided
beforehand (lack of communication between human software and phone software),
did not look/can't find it (lack of training), or they have to go through a
checklist of processes regardless of information provided (managers don't
trust the phone system to do the job right).

Either way, I do not understand your correlation between that quote and how
your lines of code disappear - as with all things, when a company does,
sometimes so do the products they offer - there is nothing different here.

~~~
ForHackernews
The correlation is if you spend months or years working on something that has
no value or that immediately ceases to exist, then your job is BS.

~~~
carleverett
So does that mean the scientists and astronauts that worked on Space Shuttle
Challenger had a BS job?

~~~
ForHackernews
Arguably the entire shuttle program was BS. It was a huge white elephant for
NASA: prodigiously expensive, saddled with impractical requirements by the Air
Force, and producing negligible new scientific results compared to the
unmanned probes.

~~~
AstralStorm
Oh really. The whole point is to figure out ways of inhabiting outer space.
The " negligible" results gave such silly things like advanced radiation
shielding, thermal clothing, advanced air filtering, developments in
radioisotope generators and solar panels, material science, even project
planning (though saddled with bureaucracy).

What it did not improve is the cost of space travel.

------
MBCook
> It hardly matters if Graeber’s history is accurate. His best-selling Dept:
> The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $22.99) garnered some controversy in
> this regard, with academics identifying myriad false claims—for instance,
> that Apple Inc. was started by former IBM engineers.

Sigh. I was thinking of reading the book until that point.

~~~
amha
Here's from a review of it:

> Now, this may sound a little silly - if someone wrote a book called "Metal:
> The First 5,000 Years," and then filled that book with stories of war and
> bloodshed, never failing to remind us after each anecdote that metal was
> involved in some way, we might be left scratching our heads as to why the
> author was so fixated on /metal/ instead of on /war itself/. And in fact,
> that is indeed how I felt for much of the time I was reading Graeber's book.
> The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Graeber continually talks
> /around/ the idea of debt in other ways, mentioning debt crises (without
> reflecting deeply on why these happen), the periodic use and disuse of
> coinage (which apparently is just as bad as debt in terms of enabling the
> capitalism monster), and any other phenomenon related to debt, without
> weaving these observations into a coherent whole.

[http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-
debt-...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-
first-5000-years.html)

------
estsauver
I found one section of this particularly ironic:

"For instance, consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the
ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or
service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you’ve
articulated “speak to an agent” some 16 times to said computer system, waited
20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have
to provide the same information you already gave the system."

We work with rural smallholder farmers in Kenya, building phone systems to
serve them and help them get information about better farming and helping
service their agricultural input loans.

I don't feel my job is pointless at all. Then again, we're on track to build
much better phone systems than the average mega-corporate in the US builds,
but I still think this is amusing.

------
jkingsbery
A few problems:

1\. Lots of basic scientific research historically has not panned out. Does
that mean that scientific research is somehow intrinsically unvaluable? To me,
it seems not. There are lots of jobs out there that end up not themselves
being valuable, but because society tried lots of different things some of
them end up being valuable.

2\. "To the ancient Greeks, he claims, you were either a slave and your whole
life was owned, or you sold a good" \- there certainly were paid laborers in
Ancient Greece. See eg,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_drachma#Value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_drachma#Value)
\- a drachma was roughly a day's wage.

3\. Is the claim people make that the existence of unnecessary jobs is somehow
a unique problem to Corporations in Capitalism? Are there not unnecessary jobs
in socialist of communist societies? Are there not unnecessary jobs in
government? Arguably, governments today "are less and less about making,
building, fixing, or maintaining things, and more and more about political
processes of appropriating, distributing and allocating money and resources"
\- why the fixation on corporations?

~~~
arwhatever
The article felt like it had a definite political slant.

------
zxcvvcxz
>Anthropologist David Graeber’s new book accuses the global economy of
churning out meaningless jobs that are killing the human spirit.

You know what really kills the human spirit? Poverty, starvation, war.

Maybe there are a ton of crappy jobs people are taking, but they are making a
living in the most peaceful and prosperous times in human history.

>“That one person’s time can belong to someone else is actually quite
peculiar”

Huh? You come into this world with nothing, of course you're going to trade
your time for other things you want. It is possible to not do this, but then
you're probably not making money, relying on family/state for financial
assistance, and generally not being productive. Business owners' time is owned
by their customers, by the way, that's how they make their living.

>He says he periodically receives “unsolicited communications” from such
people, who insist that no one “would ever spend company money on an employee
who wasn’t needed.” LOLOLOLOL.

Of course the free market isn't 100% efficient. You can criticize and laugh at
that all you want. But good luck coming up with a better alternative. Lord
knows we've tried, through all of human history.

>By positioning themselves as job creators and maneuvering the political
system to laud any and all jobs, rather than asking if they’re meaningful or
help society or the employees, “they” can maintain power indefinitely. (This
would be Graeber’s ruling elite, the 1 percent targeted by the Occupy
Movement.)

Ah yes, that pesky 1 percent. They earn 21% of all income. But guess what?
They pay 40% of all income taxes [1]. The top 1% pays as much in taxes as the
bottom 90%. Such terrible people.

Of course they're not perfect, let's get rid of all rent seeking behavior, but
let's also not throw the baby out with the bathwater by demonizing the most
productive and highest contributing people in society.

People don't appreciate the foundations of their society that they take for
granted. They have a hard time feeling useful, so they criticize. Nothing new.

[1] - [https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-
tax-...](https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-
data-2016-update/)

