For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom <comment><USER3> A large company I worked for was spending >$1M/year (data + data pipeline + personnel) on "Social Media Analysis." Every month a "Social Media Report" PDF was emailed to "key stakeholders and decision makers." When we asked them what they were doing with it everybody said they never really looked at it. When we asked them how it could be more useful they shrugged their shoulders.

And yet the company was constantly talking about how great they were at their social media presence and using social media Analytics to keep their customers happy.

I guess a sending out a monthly PDF on social media is self-explanatory to the value of if. So many people involved in something that was zero value.

<comment><USER4> You've just described 95% of projects at large companies.

If you consult for any of them you quickly realize there are like 5 people running the entire company and 49995 somehow pushing forward through inertia.

<comment><USER5> And this, kids, is why a small startup can beat a big incumbent.

<comment><USER6> "can" but can also suffer from other idiocy. I know, i've worked many times in big, medium, and small companies.

The problem with small companies is... the _lack_ of inertia! You get the CEO reading an article and decide to 'rebrand', throwing away whatever plan there was in motion to do the previous fad.

Then he goes to a show, and comes back all bouncy about the new cool stuff we HAVE to start integrating or else we won't be relevant when coming to market.

Been there, done that, got a whole pile of t-shirts ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The root cause is complexity. People don't understand their jobs: sometimes they are told to do stupid things, other times they do useful things but they think they are useless. Companies always relied on their employees to adjust their work to the overall goal - if they cannot understand the whole structure then this crucial organizational maintenance fails. If they see that their reports are not read - then they or their bosses should intervene - but now people don't understand what is the purpose of those reports, who should read them and why.

Another thing is that in a complex organization there are many internal zero- sum mini-games - bosses that employ people only to increase their own importance, etc - then the job of these employees must be kind of useless. But the root cause of that is the same - it is the job of the boss of the boss (or maybe the CEO, or the board or the owner) to reduce that, but they don't because the complexity hides it. And then those mini-games add to the complexity itself creating a positive feedback loop.

Jobs like lobbyists or corporate lawyers or much of PR departments are also about zero-sum games - but in a bigger organization - the nation as a whole. Military is a zero-sum game on yet bigger scale.

<comment><USER8> Former submariner:

The military is about as far from zero-sum as you can get.

Gear is manufactured, used, worn out and discarded, at surprisingly high cost overall.

Soldiers are recruited, trained, serve, and leave. Training funds, time, and gear are necessary but never recouped.

Every military operation of any scale uses food/fuel/every other supply imaginable - all used and lost from other productive use.

Every 'build a civilization' game ever assigns expenses to military units created, never any production value.

(Ok, military R&D is sometimes practical and useful outside of the military... a small sop in an other wise large sinkhole.)

<comment><USER9> I think he means it in a sense that you have to have one as a nation and the more powerful yours is, the less other countries can project power. Though nukes change this IMHO.

<comment><USER10> nukes only threatened to change this, drones will change this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I didn't quite understand what he was saying about President Obama's thinking, so here's the full quote from Obama:

 _" Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.' That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"_

So it seems that Obama didn't pursue a single-payer system because keeping 2-3 million "bullshit" jobs was more important than efficiency in the health care system, or at least it was part of his reasoning.

<comment><USER12> Joe Leiberman would not have voted for single payer. He opposed moving Medicare eligibility to 55 and over so that had to be taken out of ACA. He (or any single Democrat) was the margin for passing the bill in the Senate with 60 votes to avoid the GOP killing the bill in the Senate.

Also, if I remember correctly, the ACA is similar to but not identical to a GOP plan from the 90's and the state plan adopted when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts in the way you describe - continuing to use existing insurance companies.

<comment><USER13> Just to underscore this, Lieberman represented Connecticut, which is home to some of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. Lieberman killed the public option in the ACA.

[https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/16/16766/elimination...](https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/02/16/16766/elimination- public-option-threw-consumers-insurance-wolves)

<comment><USER14> Lieberman was (and is) certainly bought and sold by the insurance companies, but the lion's share of the blame for not having single payer - let alone a public option - lies squarely on Obama's shoulders. Obama's man in the Senate, Max Baucus, at Obama's direction, barred all single-payer and public option advocates from the conference rooms and negotiating table from the very beginning. Nancy Pelosi and Obama cajoled Dennis Kucinich into supporting the ACA in exchange for a promise that they would bring his single-payer bill to the floor for a vote, to at least put Congressman on the record. Obama brought Kucinich on Air Force one to make this promise. They lied. Kucinich never got his vote - Pelosi and Obama never allowed single payer to surface at all.

Lieberman is certainly worth of endless condementation, but trying to pretend Obama didn't do everything he could to kill single-payer and a public option in order to implement Romneycare is just wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain > as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole_

The incredible thing is that this happened without being a master plan of any government or even a cultural meme (an ideal like recycling, minority rights, literacy).

No one sat in a meeting room in the 1950s and said, "Well, we're going to have massive unemployment in the decades to come, so let's start creating lots of meaningless jobs."

It just happened. Gradually and without anyone noticing. Amazing.

<comment><USER15> That is how most things happen. They emerge from evolutionary pressures, game theoretic dynamics, or just as emergent properties of the rule set in operation. The result looks like a conspiracy but in reality it's driven by the furious mad piping of the blind idiot gods of evolution, economics, and complex systems.

<comment><USER8> Lovecraftian Economics... just saying that makes me shudder a little but I see it, can't unsee it.

<comment><USER15> Steve Jobs once quipped that conspiracy theory is optimistic. It assumes that someone somewhere has some idea what is happening and can actually steer the ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Still, I think Graeber too often confuses "tough jobs in negative- or zero- sum games" with "bullshit jobs." I view those as two quite distinct categories. Overall he presents the five types of bullshit jobs as flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters, but he spends too much time trying to lower the status of these jobs and not enough time investigating what happens when those jobs go away.¹

¹ [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bull- shit-jobs-theory.html)

<comment><USER17> That was great.

My favorite excerpt:

 _> Overall, I fear that Graeber's managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day._

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is one lesson you learn if you work in consulting. The biggest, most important companies in the world are chock-full full of glorified paper pushers. I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.

<comment><USER19> After 10 years in consulting, my conclusion is that we haven't really figured out how to run a large company properly. Its Kafkaesque and causes so much suffering.

<comment><USER20> Your assumption is that avoiding personal suffering or miserable beuracracy is the goal, that isn't the point. Maximizing return on investment is the point, of course these other goals won't be met.

<comment><USER19> How is wasting a million dollars on unread social media reports "maximizing return on investment"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Last are "taskmasters," divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, > who manage people who don't need management, and bullshit generators, whose > job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.

This is the most irritating aspect of any company I've worked for. I can deal with the fact that certain people are "duct tapers", people who take pick up the slack, "box tickers", etc. But people's belief that others need to be managed, especially when those others are already motivated, is demoralizing and destructive on so many levels.

The bias of management creates a feedback loop when the employee does the work the way they would have done it had management not been looking over their shoulder, and the manager thinks to themself "It's a good thing I'm here, because nothing would get done!"

<comment><USER22> Equally there is value in herding cats.

My role is often times just to ask people what they think they need to do. often they know, often they just need to speak to department x and work together. for whatever reason they don't so my department herds the cats together and works to focus on what is the right problem to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The purpose of my job is to make me money. I make money by doing things that my company thinks is productive. Today I helped write some internal APIs. Last week I worked with legal on some stuff. Building "sexy" web applications or "disrupting industries" is great. But I can't pay my rent or go to the movies because I shifted some paradigms. The purpose of my job is to make me money, regardless of what the job is.

<comment> cup-of-tea But do you think they are productive? That is the key. There are many things my company thinks is productive but I think they are a waste of my life.

Feeling good about "making money" isn't something that lasts. Eventually it's just that thing you have to do to maintain your completely normal lifestyle that you now take for granted. At that point you'd better hope the thing has more meaning than just "making money".

<comment><USER24> It is productive if it feeds and shelters your family. I once made peace with this and now I'm happier.

<comment><USER25> If your only goal is just to make money for yourself, then you're a part of this "work bullshit" problem.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, but I don't really have the time or the freedom to care about whether or not I am part of the problem. At the end of the day, I need to live, and everything else takes a back seat to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a frontender. My speciality is client-side JavaScript. I'm not horrible at it.

I freaking love my job and would do it for funsies of there weren't companies prepared to pay me to do it, but my job has been completed bullshit for as long as the role has existed. When the revolution comes I'll be the first against the wall against the wall alongside the digital marketing managers and the agile coaches.

<comment><USER28> don't you think you help people navigating websites by making them more user- friendly ? I would believe that what you do doesn't really fulfill the definition of bullshit job as it helps people down the line.

<comment><USER29> Yes, for maybe the first 2 years. Then a maxima is reached, but UI designers gotta justify their paycheck, so they keep innovating right off that peak into the next valley

<comment><USER17> Aren't they usually designing the UI for new features of the software? Backend developers can't just ship an API in a B2C environment.

<comment><USER30> Plenty of new features are bullshit as well. Added without much reason and used by few customers. There's often a lot of pressure on product teams to continuously make things better and no incentive for them to say "the best thing we could do is to leave this alone for now". This gets internalised to the point everyone has their own little hobby horse and actively lobbies to get it on the agenda. Hey presto you have a "dynamic and creative" team constantly churning the periphery of the product core.

<comment><USER31> For many years now I have wondered if it might be practical for software engineers to be kept "on retainer", as lawyers often are, by companies. I once purchased an absolutely fantastic FTP client called BulletProof FTP. But it followed the sad trajectory of so much software. It reached very near to absolute perfection. And then they just kept working on it. It grew like a cancer. It destroyed everything good about the software and eventually made it worthless. It was clear, to me at least, that there was simply some manager somewhere who had personal problems and couldn't tolerate sitting still, forcing developers to just keep bolting garbage to the side of the thing.

A lot of it boils down to the Protestant Work Ethic having no place in the modern world. It made sense for situations where 'work' was physical labor. That benefits from perseverance and endurance. Mental work does not benefit from perseverance and endurance. It suffers tremendously from them. The brain simply does not work that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The price of labor is so cheap now apparently there is almost no incentive to clean this up.

Consider that even small sandwich shops consider it worthwhile to hire a guy to stand on a street corner waving a sign or dressed as a pickle.

I suppose we as a society have decided to do this rather than guaranteed minimum income or any other livable social safety net.

</comment><comment><USER33> At my company, a small startup, I recently attended a meeting whose invitation list included 4 managers and 2 workers. From that I can extrapolate that the bullshit to work ratio is 2 to 1. They're working to fix it, though: they're hiring more managers.

</comment><comment><USER34> Larger airlines create really well produced (and expensive) safety guideline videos as a supplement to the safety speech before each flight, and they still have attendants pantomiming the safety procedures. Smaller flights just have the attendants. I think this is a form of branding, it "feels" like a better product when you have a video with expensive production values.

Is it necessarily true that a bullshit job has to server no purpose? I think a doorman is like the safety video. It makes the product feel more expensive. I agree it's a bullshit job, but it contributes to the impression your company is making. Maybe a well produced Analytics Report makes a sort of impression like this too. At a glance you can prove you are a high end company that has everything together, and produces sophisticated reports as evidence. Even if it's a bullshit report, spending 5 figures to make the report is worth it, if it secures a bunch of 6 figure customers.

I'm not saying we should secure bullshit jobs, I'm just trying to voice some more perspective.

<comment><USER35> > I think this is a form of branding, it "feels" like a better product when > you have a video with expensive production values.

I'm only familiar with Air New Zealand's productions, but they are totally marketing / patriotism / more marketing. In that sense they form a very important function: they do some crazy video that gets them in the news again, reminding people they exist and solidifying the idea that they are a fun airline you should totally pay slightly more than the competition to fly with.

(full disclosure, I am a New Zealander who will fly AirNZ if given the opportunity, so clearly it worked on me!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the > workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can > acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every > morning compiling useless reports

This passage starts getting into why these jobs have to exist.

1\. There are fewer useful things that need doing than employable people, so not everyone can get a useful job.

2\. Everyone needs some kind of income.

3\. Basic Income and welfare are politically difficult because of our Protestant cultural belief that income _must_ be earned through work.

If 1, 2, and 3 are true, then bullshit jobs must be created, or people starve/riot.

<comment><USER37> Is it rooted in Protestantism or just generalized zeitgeist for our planet? Even in the Soviet Union you had to work to eat, as I recall.

I think it's shit - down with private property and all that. There is going to be a point in the next hundred years where we won't be able to justify millions of jobs, and none of my representatives seem to have any sort of plan in mind for when that happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> >Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them.

And how does he think disputes between companies or between companies and consumers should be handled?

<comment><USER39> Yeah, a lot of these jobs he talks about are what I call "zero-sum jobs" \- it sucks that they have to exist, but if any individual firm stopped having them, that firm would be behind.

Money managers are a good example of this. At the end of the day stock picking truly is a zero-sum game, and all money managers can produce _in total_ is the negative effect of their fees on their clients money, yet people pay them because they take the chance that _their_ money manager will produce a better than average return.

Similarly, the vast majority of marketing jobs are zero-sum jobs. True, a teeny minority do inform the public about a new product or service they wouldn't otherwise know about, but the vast majority are just trying to convince the public to use your widget over competitor's (actually very similar) widget. But any individual firm needs marketers, otherwise the competitors would take all of their business.

<comment><USER40> > At the end of the day stock picking truly is a zero-sum game

If stocks give dividends, then stock picking isn't a zero-sum game.

<comment><USER41> > If stocks give dividends, then stock picking isn't a zero-sum game.

I don't understand this. "Stock picking" traditionally refers to buying or selling stocks through the stock market. It doesn't create or destroy any stock, and the dividends are invariant with respect to who owns the stock.

That makes dividends perfectly zero-sum. If I buy a stock from you, my gain from getting the dividend is exactly equal to your loss from losing the dividend.

What am I missing here?

<comment><USER42> The selling party doesn't lose dividend, they just don't gain it. Losing it would mean the dividend amount is _subtracted_ from their account.

<comment><USER41> The more common argument for stock trading being zero sum is that if I experience a gain after buying a stock from you, you experience an equal loss (by selling the stock when it would have gone up).

Dividends do not alter that argument in any way. The trade is described as zero-sum because the total amount of value it produces is zero -- in the trade scenario, I gain X, and in the no-trade scenario, you gain X. X minus X is zero. My gain is your loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is tough. In many cases I think that people identify as superficially "worthless", I think there's a justifiable reason for those jobs even if it takes a little bit of digging to understand why it exists. For example, I know of a few jobs right now that a person does that, if it disappeared tomorrow, would have no immediate measurable impact on the company those jobs exist within. But wait a year or two and those jobs turn out to generate long-term cost savings to the company.

But in other cases, jobs that seem to be superficially necessary turn out to not be needed at all. I just said goodbye to a colleague last week and after they left we went through their entire list of tasks and responsibilities -- things that kept an intelligent, highly educated, adult human fully occupied for more than 40 hours a week and paid well into six figures -- and entirely eliminated or rolled over all of those things with no specific impact to our work. The scary part was that much of it was work producing material that was highly demanded of by one of our customers -- the bulk of those 40+ man hours were reports and other deliverable. We simply told the customer that they wouldn't be getting some of that stuff anymore or it would take a different shape to satisfy the need and they were ultimately fine with it.

What really concerns me are those jobs that need filling and nobody knows they exist and there's nobody doing them. Things that would eliminate waste, consolidate work, or expand business, but some collective blind spot prevents those positions from being realized. The classic examples in software are good QA people or in many small companies, good sales and business development people.

If this still doesn't make sense to this tech crowd. I'll pose this, in the 90s the revolution was "making software useful to people by making the functions of the software discoverable in a well designed GUI". How many of us sit in front of entire screen fulls of discovery-free GUI-less command-lines all day typing out things that took thousands of hours to master and would be bulk eliminated if somebody just put a nice usable GUI in front of it?

<comment><USER44> I agree with your overall point, but I don't think the GUI example helps your case here.

> _How many of us sit in front of entire screen fulls of discovery-free GUI- > less command-lines all day typing out things that took thousands of hours to > master and would be bulk eliminated if somebody just put a nice usable GUI > in front of it?_

We sit in front of "discovery-free GUI-less command lines" to do stuff that is either impossible to be fully and properly captured by a pointing-device operated GUI, or would become orders of magnitude less efficient if operated through such GUI.

The discoverability problem is overblown, IMO - the actual problem is that we've trained people to no longer feel expected to _learn_ a tool before using it. The example I usually give is this: no one in their right mind expects to be able to enter a car for the first time in their life and be allowed to drive on public roads. It is _expected of them_ to go through a couple-dozen long training course and learn a bit of theory. People don't complain about that, because there's a social expectation that you need training. Compare that with people whining that a program is "unintuitive" because it requires you to spend _5 minutes_ in a tutorial to acquire basic operational competency. Compare _that_ to video games, where again there is an expectation to learn, where people _don 't_ complain about tutorials.

The only way to make software that can be mastered in 10 seconds from first exposure is to make it have flat learning curve - that is, you can't use it for anything more powerful than what you can learn in those 10 seconds. This approach gives you simple toys, not actual tools.

As for discoverability of CLI tools, skimming its manual and looking at usage examples is equivalent to taking a GUI program and quickly skimming through all its menus and buttons. The whole problem here is purely of individual emotions. It's as if some people were simply _afraid of reading_.

<comment><USER43> > or would become orders of magnitude less efficient if operated through such > GUI.

I don't disagree. The reason for the re-rise of the CLI is that it's just faster to get stuff executed and easier to script and coordinate things. But there's also a great many CLI tools that don't have obvious command-line uses, or the docs are poor and users of those tools just "know" how to use them because of many hours spent learning them. But new and infrequent users spend lots of time reading docs or rereading them, or looking up examples on the internet and in many cases those uses would be immediately obvious with some radio buttons and a couple buttons. There's also the cases of unbreaking things or unexpected results because of typos.

GUIs make the trade-off of learn-ability with operational efficiency and frankly, many of the tools we use don't benefit from being able to type them out quickly and would benefit from just having some buttons to click with all the options specified.

Also don't think I'm talking only about mousable GUIs. There's plenty of very good examples of keyboardable GUIs with very fast and efficient use-cases that also maintain good discover-ability.

<comment><USER44> > _Also don 't think I'm talking only about mousable GUIs. There's plenty of > very good examples of keyboardable GUIs with very fast and efficient use- > cases that also maintain good discover-ability._

Good point. GUIs of old were heavy on keyboard shortcuts; the web era seems to have forgotten about this concept.

Incidentally, the best keyboard-only-but-still-GUI I've seen is Magit - [https://magit.vc/](https://magit.vc/) \- it's operated entirely via keyboard, but is very discoverable, with visual popups listing keys you can use and values of various switches. See e.g. [0] - the bottom part of the screen is the popup that shows when you press 'd' once. For operations you often do, you quickly learn the mnemonic - e.g. for typical diffing, you'd press 'd d' quickly. And the list of all command groups is available under '?', as yet another popup.

\--

[0] - [https://magit.vc/screenshots/popup- diff.png](https://magit.vc/screenshots/popup-diff.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b > Left to their own devices, Graeber points out, people tend to do work like > students at exam time, alternately cramming and slacking. Possibly, they > work this way because it is the most productive way to work. Most of us > would assume that a farmer who started farming at 9 a.m. and stopped at 5 > p.m. five days a week was strange, and probably not a very good farmer.

Smart! I never thought of it that way! I'm a remote part-time engineer and I totally do cram-and-slack. It should be a management style.

<comment><USER45> Developer and son of a farmer here. It's a bad analogy. In farming, there are very real "deadlines", and you can do 14 hours of useful physical (well... driving machines) work for a few days at a time. At other times, there really isn't much to do. You can find something to do if you want, but it doesn't make much of a difference.

In software, your mental capacity is the most real limit, and it's limited to about 5-6 hours per day for the most demanding part of the work. You get the most out of it by using it every day. Having just the right amount of work to do is hard, but working creatively for more than 6 hours per day is impossible. I have talked about this with many people and everyone seems to agree with 5-6 hours. (As somebody with a home office, I find that a very long break in the middle of the day may allow an extra hour or so)

<comment><USER46> wow, thats a venn diagram. do you see opportunities for software in farming where you are from?

<comment><USER45> I'm from Germany. A few decades ago, farmers were still several percent of the population, so I'm not that special. Germany is small and dense and infrastructure is decent everywhere, so you don't start with a big disadvantage coming from a farm.

Sure there is software in agriculture today, mostly "ERP"-type, but I don't think there is an opportunity better than in other industries. Things are getting more exciting with autonomous tractors and drones and selective herbicide application based on image recognition. But the underlying technologies have applications in areas with more turnover.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The ultimate land of bullshit jobs has to be in college administration

<comment><USER15> Yeah that's bad. Another big concentration is government contractors, especially huge ones. We had this idea that we would eliminate waste by privatizing government work. Hahahahahahahah...

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've finally found a job I'm good at, at a company that seems to make somewhat of a positive difference. At least, we provide a service our users need without producing and readily apparent negative impact.

I've never been so happy at work. I fix challenging problems every day. I'm part of a really small team and I'm able to bring skills to the table that they are missing, which is fulfilling because I'm really having an impact.

In the past, I've worked at shitty jobs where my work meant nothing and was even resented by my peers -- mostly because we were an "Agile" shop doing all the wrong things (death by meetings, retarded micromanagement, un-meetable deadlines).

I'm super thankful for my current gig.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's not really surprising, when so much effort has been invested in erasing any kind of higher purpose than money from western society. The idea that there is an obligation towards one's fellow humans and citizens leads to the idea that the mega-rich might be obliged to share a bit -- so that had to be silenced.

</comment><comment><USER50> In college I had a (sort of) BS job at a real estate start up that was doing home renovations. They hired an accounting consultant to help them get their books together (dude was 75 years old, and they paid him something like 10$k/mo for his consulting) to go to a bank for more money or something along those lines. One of his ideas was to move everything they had out of quickbooks online into quickbooks enterprise and remap all of their accounts into this bizarre configuration. So they hired me to automate this process (they had hundreds of accounts, each with sub accounts and whatnot).

Anyway the guy was mercurial as all heck, so every day pretty much was spent starting from scratch and months were spent just figuring out whether they wanted to move to enterprise or not so I had to write multiple solutions which never got used. The manager who hired let me do different work when the consultant was MIA so I ended up writing some web scrapers and different automation tools that nobody ever used for anything. Eventually they figured out that the consultant was scamming them and fired him. Thankfully that gravy train lasted right up to graduation and I was able to get a real job.

I guess it wasn't so much that the job was BS, but that people at the company had a whole lot of vague ideas about 'increasing productivity' that I was perfectly happy to oblige, but unfortunately none of them were really interested in actually taking advantage of them. So the stuff I wrote pretty much just sat there, and people seemed perfectly happy doing everything manually. Super weird to me. Also it was stressful because I kept feeling like I wasn't actually producing anything and that I would be fired at any moment but the management did not seem to mind that they were paying me a decent amount of money to play with code all day.

</comment><comment><USER51> "The boom on Bullshit-Articles on Bullshit-Job Boom," is here.

<comment><USER52> I for one have no idea why this concept gets so much air time given how little substantial foundations it's based on. I can find justifications that make all the so-called "bullshit" jobs perfectly valuable within a couple minutes of thought. I wish the inventor of the concept had invested as much.

<comment><USER53> A friend of mine is a camera operator for a small production firm. They have some really old equipment, including tripods that aren't safe to use for their cameras, but they still cheap out on them anyway.

He gets paid about $16/hour to stand by the camera for up to 20 hours a week to make sure it doesn't fall over, which costs around $10k/year. A new tripod would cost $1500 and could last for a decade, so $it's 100k vs $1500.

Justify that, if you can. I can't, and I'm not being sarcastic or bitchy, I really want someone to explain it.

<comment><USER54> Many possible explanations. One of the most common ones is cash flow. If you're somewhat at break-even, there just isn't any $1,500 around, but there are enough jobs to pay $320 a week, and do that every week. (This is by the way the same reason poor people often make "stupid" decisions)

This is the most common case for smaller companies - it's all hand-to-mouth, and you barely squeak into profitability, so you minimize one-time expenses that shorten your runway. (What we around here like to call "Ramen profitable")

There's also the fact that even with a tripod, you probably want somebody around - assuming they use high-end movie gear, a camera runs between $100k and $500k. Spending $10k a year on somebody who catches it in case of accident makes sense.

I'm sure there are other explanations. I'm sure there are places that make stupid decisions, too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This article is hilarious, and perhaps there's some truth in it, but it seems to me that the anthropologist David Graeber has a substantial chip on his shoulder, and to me this taints the overall credibility of his thesis (inasmuch as the article represents it). The dig at Oxford's PR department seemed egregiously random to me. (I wonder if he was rejected by Oxford at some point in his academic career.)

</comment><comment><USER56> One of my summer jobs in high school was that of "towel boy" at the swim and tennis building of a country club. My only job was to sit in front of the towels, make the guests sign the clip board, and count how many towels they took. I wasn't allowed to read or do anything because I was told it would look bad, so I literally sat in a chair all day holding a clipboard. I got so bored that for amusement I would write down 100 random digits, memorize them, and recite them to some of the kids running around.

</comment><comment><USER28> All those articles about bullshit jobs are usually dull and only look at how far from the "action" you are, giving some moral high ground to the jobs that are closer to it.

It is always the same thing repeated over. For a nurse for example:

A nurse is a real useful job. The manager of the nurses, are semi-bullshit. The team of consultants writing softwares to dispatch the nurses to the patients are almost completely bullshit. The marketing people selling the software to dispatch the nurses are completely bullshit and non useful.

<comment><USER57> That's harsh, is it not? If the software fulfils its stated purpose and provides value then is it not useless? If the marketing people fulfil their duty to generate inbound leads are they not useless?

<comment><USER28> it's an oversimplified example, but indeed in this example it supposes that the nurses would be better off doing this themselves.

As for marketing, this is the definition of bullshit job as I understood it: They generate leads, and it is needed only because every other company and competitors are doing marketing, as such it is defined as an "arm race", same thing for lobyists. If you removed all the marketers and lobbyist worldwide, the result would be exactly the same. as they are only needed to cancel each other but have no real effect on the end product or service

<comment><USER58> I drive through the city and see 3 different restaurants all advertising that they have the "world's best burger(s)." Did they measure that? No, because why bother? Just put it on the sign, even if it is not true. Sell an ideal and worry about satisfying it after all the money comes in (if at all.)

Most jobs are bullshit because our culture doesn't seem to value _honesty_ and _truth_. So you can post outright lies on a big sign right off the road, and everybody acts like that's just a necessary part of life.

Maybe we can't ask for honesty because people just most fundamentally can't accept the idea that it's worth giving people what they need to survive without receiving anything in exchange. So we construct a huge artifice of bullshit so that we can sleep easy -- ignorant of all the needless and useless things that people do to survive -- we all feel the stress of it, so we dupe each other into thinking is both necessary and producing value.

<comment><USER17> _> our culture doesn't seem to value honesty and truth_

That is inaccurately cynical and is a banal observation. There's an xkcd for it, but I won't bother.

Isn't our entire economy built on trust? Do you read every EULA, opt out of every arbitration agreement with companies you use? Do you maintain your own ledger to check your monthly bank statements? Do you examine the kitchen conditions of every restaurant you frequent? Do you visit the slaughterhouse to ensure your meat is processed in sanitary conditions?

Modern life quickly becomes unwieldy without these basic assumptions. This trust goes back all the way to basic agrarian societies, where you as a farmer would trust your neighbor to give you her apples when they ripen in exchange for your wheat now.

Anyone attempting to live a completely trustless existence is a hermit or ignorant of the immense amount of trust they place in their fellow humans daily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> My old job was in advertising. Some of what I produced actually informed consumers about new products. But most it was vanity projects. One example: A chiropractor paid for a billboard with him standing next to a million dollar therapy machine, despite the fact that no potential customers would understand what the machine was. He just wanted to show his competitor that he could afford a shinier new toy. Since most of the treatments he offered were medically dubious, it would have still been bullshit even if we made an effective billboard.

Believe it or not, most of our projects were like this - the result of someone's vanity or stupidity. But even the good work we did, most of it just part of some companies advertising arm's race with their competitors. If the entire ad industry collapsed tomorrow, the only thing we would notice was the lack of junk mail littering our mailbox.

I'm happier in my new job, though it's no less bullshit. I run a social media product that doesn't have a measurable impact for 95% of my clients. In truth, they don't need social media in their industry. But they've been told "everyone has to be on Facebook nowadays" and that's how I make a living.

</comment><comment> ramen-san "A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls "a shit job." Hannibal, and many other of the bullshittiest employees, are well compensated, with expanses of unclaimed time."

Wow... where do I sign up for one of these jobs!

<comment><USER60> I got a summer job in college as a web designer for a startup in Texas. It paid $40/hr, which was a ludicrous amount of money for a 20 year old in 2001, or at least it felt like it after having made $5.50 in high school.

So I spent about a month working on the website, and doing buttons and other stuff, and then I was out of things to do. I literally might have a 10 minute task in a day, and no other assignments. I could (and did) watch full-length movies in my cubicle uninterrupted.

Awesome right? It was the most miserable job I've ever had. I'd leave early and forgo billable hours because I just couldn't stand it. Being without purpose, but still showing up and pretending you should be there is really demoralizing.

<comment><USER37> I've recently read "Walkaway" which posited that the most satisfying life is one living in a community with what amounts to essentially a public Trello board with tasks on that anybody can do at any time. "take out garbage for the bread and breakfast" "clean solar panels on hospital roof" "priority: emergency!!! Man with broken leg needs bones set" that sort of thing.

Given how satisfying I find open source work, I find the idea very attractive...

<comment><USER61> That would be pretty fun to build as a gamified social network. "Bob Smith (2 houses away) received a six-pack of beer from Giselle Citizen (3 blocks away) for cleaning the graffiti off her fence."

<comment><USER37> Ah, except that was a very key point! Nobody exchanged goods for work done. What would be the point of that when everyone had access to public 3d printers that could assemble whatever you needed? The Walkaways were explicitly cashless in any and all of its forms.

Private property was also rare among them, as were fences...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I always feel bad when I throw away those supermarket catalogs full of offers... Whoever is spending time designing them, is massively wasting time (and ink, paper, logistics).

On the other side, enterprise software upsets me. Problems are usually solved through hiring rather doing actual work. After long sequence of 10 hires someone may actually get their hands dirty.

<comment><USER63> _I always feel bad when I throw away those supermarket catalogs full of offers... Whoever is spending time designing them, is massively wasting time (and ink, paper, logistics)._

They're not, though. I know multiple people who follow those offers and goes to different supermarkets depending on them (and most likely will buy some other stuff in that particular supermarket due to being there anyway). I'm guessing the supermarkets know pretty well that those are effective at bringing people in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's really hard not to be cynical.

Like when I realized that I could drive 10 minutes to a local oat farm and buy 15 kg of oats for $2.50 (the commodity price of oats) Or, I could drive to the market and pay almost 100x more for oats in the form of cute little Os.

Yes, I know - I'm leaving out many, many, many important details, but still - that's quite a 'value chain'.

<comment><USER65> The bullshit jobs are propably the cause of that value chain factor.

Is the packaged oat really worth 100x more to the consumer? Maybe it's worth 10x more. That means 90% of the work used to make those was bullshit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> In case anyone hasn't seen/read the original article by David Graeber "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant", here is the link to it [https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs)

</comment><comment><USER67> Sometimes I really want to be able to want to live my life without work and pursue my personal projects (which could bring money in the end). But the idea of living off welfare is such an enormous taboo and so politically incorrect, that I could risk ending up homeless for the mere act of not working in fast food or looking for a job.

It's not slavery, but the fact that I am obligated to obey is making me uncomfortable. I'm sure there are many developers who are able to create new things without having to rely on a degree, a job or a start up. But yet, sitting at home coding can be viewed like being a poor artist.

</comment><comment><USER68> This is the reason liberal arts degrees are so useful and pay off. If you don't learn how to bullshit by the end of the four years, I would be surprised. I'm not joking though it may seem like it. I also don't think this detracts from the intrinsic value of such majors. If it allows more people to study what they want at university and improve themselves in addition to providing jobs after university, it's a system that's useful.

</comment><comment><USER69> As far as I can tell, almost all jobs are here to keep us busy earning to live to work. There are enough resources for everyone to be fed and comfortable, however.

</comment><comment><USER70> Guerilla advertising to this effect appeared on the tube briefly.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber- poin...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvq9qg/david-graeber-pointless- jobs-tube-poster-interview-912)

Timed such that they appeared as most people were heading back to work for the first day after new years'

</comment><comment><USER71> I don't agree. Almost everyone's work serves a purpose. However, that purpose may be tiny, short-lived, subtle, or difficult to see. As the world becomes more automated, it will become more so.

As many before me have posted in this thread, the purpose of the work is often not what it appears to be. You could say a security guard sleeping in a booth is not doing anything or has a purpose-less job. But just by virtual of being there, he is a small deterrent to would-be thieves. I feel that is the case with many jobs.

It's very easy to round down from "serving a very small or obscure purpose" to "purposeless". However, add up all of those tiny purposes and you get a functioning company or society.

</comment><comment><USER72> Well, the purpose has always been one: to make money. From the article:

> I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two- > page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy > meeting. The report wasn't used in the end because they didn't manage to get > to that agenda point.

Many people would dream about such an opportunity. Yes, the usefulness of the final product for the humanity is negligible. However, it allows you to live, to develop, maybe also take care of your family, give your friends some happiness - I definitely wouldn't call it "no purpose". If you did that and received no remuneration - that would be another question.

<comment><USER44> That's a given. But the "pointless/bullshit job" label is applied from the point of view of people who care about more than just getting money - <USER2> who also want to feel like they're actually contributing something to society, and people who like to take a more global and less selfish view of the world.

<comment><USER72> They need to find a specific job, then. It's hard to expect that you come to just any corporation and will make the world a better place. Moreover, I'd say that these days the opposite is more probable. We always hear the mantra that the main purpose of corporations is to increase the shareholder value, and we reap what we sow.

<comment><USER44> It's more than that. A lot of those bullshit jobs don't really even help increase shareholder values. They're mini zero-sum games within companies, or between companies. Jobs that exist to cancel each other out. Zero-sum games have this magic feature that if you unilaterally opt out of them, you lose. So they persist, even though if all players simultaneously opted out, everyone would be better off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >"Duct tapers" are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically.

Or, fixing the issue after the fact is cheaper than a systemic fix, so duct tapers are more efficient.

<comment><USER73> Usually for a one-off, it can be cheaper to duct-tape than to do a real fix, but the problem is that those issues keep happening. So it doesn't take long for the duct-tape fixes to cost more in total.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> These bullshit job might exist because people need something to keep them occupied, otherwise they will revolt, vandilize, revert back to barbaric behavious and society as we know it would collapse.

</comment><comment><USER75> "Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"

</comment><comment><USER76> But doesn't everything we do serve no actual purpose? I mean anything that isn't like providing food or shelter or medicine (basic survival needs) is essentially useless.

Capitalism made it so we created for ourselves these "useless jobs" to have the money flow around. I think it's actually quite normal. Jobs are created because someone has the interest (not a strict need) for what you will do. Whether that's a useless PowerPoint presentation or a short-animation movie or a newly-fashionable pair of shoes, it's all part of what people are interested in.

How else would you model a society so that we can make for ourselves all these peculiar inventions and systems that entertain us?

Sure we could have just everyone work on the sheer necessary stuff; but that's boring.

<comment> cup-of-tea Unless you believe in some "higher purpose" you have to find your own purpose in life. Mine is to learn as much as I can to become the best version of myself such that I will leave a legacy. Some people find purpose in procreation although I would argue that's too easy and not necessary.

I find pleasure in the things I work on. Programming, music, food to name a few. I use technology when it can make my life easier without sacrifice in quality or it can do a better job than I can. I don't strive for convenience. Nobody on their deathbed relishes in memory of a convenient life.

So, for me, work that leads to technology to enable the above absolutely has purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I also think some level of the reverse - maybe not - is true. Things are not that complex and high school graduates can do fairly high status jobs.

</comment><comment><USER78> No bullshit jobs at my employer. This is a by-product of regulatory capture disadvantaging small businesses.

</comment><comment><USER79> My company has at least two people whose primary job seems to be creating Outlook meeting invites.

<comment><USER80> Yeah don't worry I have people like these too , and they also are responsible to physically call people to make sure they will come to the invite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Ignoring the fact that this article (and I'm assuming the book it's based on) seems to just make repeated assertions as to the degree of "bullshit" work in the economy and then backs it up with mostly anecdotes, my real question is: what is he actually advocating for.

So should we destroy all of these "bullshit" jobs? Who decides which ones need to go?

Somehow I feel like the people complaining loudest about all the "bullshit" jobs would be the first ones rioting and breaking windows if those jobs were to disappear from our economy.

I guess this is where someone throws out the term UBI and glosses over the details to assure us that jobs are no longer necessary in the post capitalist utopia we have found ourselves in. (don't the UBI arguments always focus on the fact that people will still choose to work though?)

I wonder why Spain, Portugal and Greece haven't realized that their problems are imaginary yet and started handing everyone a UBI.

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea I've been working in a financial company for the past six months and honestly there's more bullshit than real work. I'm now convinced that the entire finance world is the biggest scam of all time, but that's another matter really.

There are entire levels of people whose only real purpose seems to be putting together PowerPoint presentations for other people. Literally producing _entertainment_ for others who spends most of their time consuming that entertainment.

I'm glad other people have observed this too. It makes me feel more sane. I hope to be back in a small tech company soon.

<comment><USER82> I have an anecdote from a good friend of mine who interned at an investment bank. After 2 days and nights preparing a presentation with other interns they observed the meeting where those hundreds of slides were flipped through in 10min. Asking why they had to expend so much effort if no one is even interested in the details the senior banker said. It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it.

<comment><USER83> There's a column from Matt Levine where he explains the real purpose of useless busywork for ibanking associates. He gives an example of a guy making a PowerPoint who messes up one trivial formatting detail and his boss makes him redo the entire thing. On the surface this seems dumb and pointless, but the idea is that when that when that associate is a senior banker and working on a multi billion dollar deal, making some trivial mistake can potentially cost millions of dollars. The busywork as an associate is _training_ to not make those mistakes in the future. Made a lot more sense to me explained this way. Not that I necessarily agree with it, and if I worked in that industry I would hate it, but a lot more reasonable than they just make you do it for no reason

<comment><USER84> Still makes no sense to me whatsoever. Punishing non-mistakes like that doesn't magically make future mistakes disappear.

Training an activity will probably reduce the error rate in that particular activity, but it doesn't do anything for contract negotiation or whatever the senior banker later does where mistakes can be costly.

<comment><USER85> There are two employees. One rarely presents a piece of work with any errors in. One regularly makes errors which need fixing.

Which employee best demonstrates the ability to thoroughly review their own work? Which would you want as a senior reviewing other peoples work before sending/presenting it to clients?

They're not training a specific activity, they're training an attitude towards mistakes in all cases.

<comment><USER86> Yeah, it's the military model. A lot of the stuff they make you do in basic is to train you to follow orders without question. So that when something critical depends on you following orders without question, you do it.

<comment><USER84> That's a bug not a feature in my book (I'm german, we did that order following thing very very well...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> _If all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them._

Obligatory _Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy_ "B Ark" reference:

 _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._

<comment><USER37> Don't forget the phone-sanitizers, the lack of which caused the extinction of the Golgafrincham people to a rare ear-wax virus.</comment></comment>