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Comment by ramen-san | Hacker News Reader

"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!

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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.

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...

So basically The Witcher.

Minus rewards offered for tasks completed and political power structures, yes.

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."

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...

Strangely enough, most people I've worked with, seem fairly content to do as you described.

I've heard it justified as 'earning a living', 'for the mortgage', 'for my family' and so on.

Perhaps being young and single and not having any large financial obligations like a mortgage contributed to my willingness to walk away. If my family depended on the paycheck I brought home with my misery, maybe I'd summon the strength to stick it out.

My job is one of those. I do about 35 minutes a day, I'm paid SFA (legal minimum) for turning up to stand around for a few hours. I can't swear enough to underscore how much I hate it and I would leave in a cold second.

The worst part is that they rely on my skill when stuff goes wrong, which happens very rarely, although they've just assigned me a high end graphics project (I'm not a graphic designer by any definition of the term), a $10,000 project that they've promised to pay me about $100 for.

Most days, I'd rather just drive into the oncoming truck than go there.

> The worst part is that they rely on my skill when stuff goes wrong

In itself this is valuable for the company. If the system was more transparent, you could be called once a month, stay at home the rest of the time and be paid the same amount.

If you are the guy fixing everything in emergency, what would it cost to the company if you left for good and worked somewhere else ?

ive tried to explain why jobs like this suck to people who think they would be so happy in the cause they pay well. i guess some of them would be, but i have to think people like us are not a small minority.

I've had jobs like that. Watching videos and consuming content gets old fast. Then I started learning other languages, contributing to OSS, working on my own project, etc.

Riskier than watching videos, though.

Any advice on getting one of these jobs? Which employers are hiring for these "jobs"?

Mostly luck. Government or government contracting. Or large corporations. But I've also worked at smaller companies and things get slow sometimes.

Or, sometimes things are busy and I just need a break. So I'll take half a day and work on something tangentially related to work.

I once had a job where we had six months to train employees in the "India development center" how to do our current work and then we were supposed to find new jobs. Due to timezones every question took a minimum of a day to answer.

I would show up late, answer yesterday's questions, dash off an email with some new description (6 months was far too much time to explain the job to them) and then spend the rest of the day reading in my office, taking long lunches, and running out for an "errand" which would involve going home to play league of legends for a couple hours.

It was amusing for a time, but I enjoy being productive more.

My first paid internship, in college, involved printing out websites and putting them in a binder for easy reference. (Also helping the office come to a consensus on from where to order lunch.)

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