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Comment by ironjunkie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Nothing about “make a boatload of money” is bullshit unless we treat capital / wealth as meaningless. The issues that structuralize incentives different from reality is what makes an activity bullshit.

The marketing people are there to discover / address possible customers to feed back to sales, and sales’ purpose beyond simply “just sell” is to work personally (read: emotionally) with powerful decision makers into developing a relationship with the company. And that is the crux of it all - with power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at companies (mergers do not help here), there is a mass, highly lucrative industry of bullshitters so removed from reality and mostly interested in emotional responses trying to sway these specific people to make high-impact (in terms at least in dollars and real results ideally) decisions. It’s similar to a lot of real estate and car commercials catering to the tastes and cultural norms of the already-wealthy - working with those politically or capitally deficient is a sucker’s game, which only further reinforces the status quo of the powerful primarily accomplishing tasks through higher level relationships built indirectly on the backs of non-bullshitters than anything connected directly to material, concrete real world outputs (the less bullshit work). To me that is the bullshit, not sales and marketing jobs in itself (I have plenty of respect for sales and marketing as professions - the good ones make it clear there is a need and benefit for society to have them around). In practice, many higher level decisions are also meant to make one’s organization appear better than it really is whether it’s to impress outsiders or for internal political capital. But unfortunately for humans at scale, perception becomes reality because so many things get bootstrapped just because people believe in it working.

Nurses are "dispatched" by the charge nurse or a triage nurse, not by software.

Software in hospitals started as direct substitute for paper records, and now has expanded to cover inventory and compliance checklists.

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?

In the example, the idea is that nurses don't need minute-to-minute coordination - so having people in charge is mostly pointless except for performance evaluation, and software is completely useless.

I believe the commenter was criticising the concept not agreeing with it.

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

No, generating leads is needed because without leads businesses make no money.

You guys think too much inside the system as it is today.

Without bullshit jobs there is no concept of "leads". People would just buy the service they need, and supposedly the best most utilitarian product would survive only based on that.

Yeah? And what would your boss do? Wait for customers to come in?

Who generates the informational pamphlets that people read to learn about your product? Who goes to the trade shows where people seeking solutions might learn about your product? Who keeps an eye out for experts sincerely surveying a space to compare multiple solutions, ensuring that your product is considered?

Marketers do all that stuff every day, and your system would still have them. You seem to be against advertising, which is a tiny subset of marketing.

You make the best widget X in the market. Google's widget Y and Microsoft's widget Z are far inferior. You are in your bedroom, holding your newly invented widget X... now what?

In the proposed lack of marketing system, you take geographically local position and sell the products to clients that find them. Knowledge about the improved product spreads by word of mouth. If it is not much better, you will obviously lose to established competition in the long run but probably not disappear, just like Amazon hasn't killed local shops yet.

The endgame is very similar still - one with higher reach and budget wins. Unless the competition is vastly superior.

You post the news about it on your company's website. You show it on a trade show. People like it, buy it, the news spread, you get orders.

Of course it won't work that way, because Google and Microsoft will spend shit ton of money spamming the Internet about their widgets, so yours dies in the noise. Therefore, you need to spend your money and time to shout louder and louder.

This is what it means to be in a zero-sum game. Pure waste, which unfortunately cannot be stopped from within the system.

“You show it on a trade show”

You of course understand that is marketing right?

Yes, but it's pull, not push.

Going to a trade show, and putting yourself in front of thousands of others, is definitely push. So is building a website, or doing any type of SEO. Even telling your friends or mom about your new cool widget is push... it's all necessary and it's all marketing.

It's pull from customer's point of view. I go to a trade show explicitly to seek out offerings. I have no choice with advertising invading all spaces I'm in and all media I consume. This is the difference - putting yourself out there to be found by those who seek, vs. shouting at everyone to pay attention to you.

What about sponsoring a talk where my product is mentioned?

Not sure I understand the difference between your definition of push/pull. Customers always try doing market research to find the nest value (pull). Companies always try to put their product in front of the customer (push).

Literally, everything a company does is push, and everything a customer does is pull. Hell, even the act of making your widget in your basement is a push, you put the effort into making it so people would use it.

Then let them go out of business.

I reject the idea that I have to hear about ambulance chasing lawyers and diet pills and ways to make $$$ fast and cars I can't afford and watches I don't want and household cleaning products I don't trust and kitchen appliances I have no use for and websites solving problems I don't have.. because it's my responsibility to endure it so those poor businesses can continue existing.

Like it's some kind of charity and I'm obliged to give them my attention just in case I'm part of their target market. Spare just 2 hours per month to ensure this Chigaco company sells more product.

In the limit case, there are more companies and more products than I could learn about if all I did was watch advert show for the rest of my life.

And they would be perfectly happy to waste the rest of my life showing me adverts because my life is meaningless to them compared to even $1 more profit.

No.

Then your problem is with the targeting of advertising more than the idea of advertising. Which in itself is only a sliver of what marketing is.

No, my problem is with the advertising itself.

Consider a world with perfect targetted advertising. I would benefit from an XYZ in my life. Suddenly I am inundated with emails, phonecalls, text messages, instant messages, from a planet full of XYZ sellers. Every billboard I see, every surface, every YouTube advert, every radio intermission, every pre-film trailer, every in-film product placement, every web banner advert, every Windows start menu product placement, every smartphone iAd, every Spotify break, all adverts for an XYZ. More adverts for an XYZ than I can take in if I spent a month just watching them.

I'm not magically happy with this state of affairs, just because the ads are relevant or precisely targetted. I am worse off, in fact, because of being creeped out by the targetting, and snowed under with the monotony and repetitive onslaught.

Then I guess we differ on the idea of what "perfectly targetted" means. You're certainly not going to buy all XYZs, so XYZs vendor would be wasting dollars advertising the XYZs you're not going to buy. So it's not perfect. Perfectly targetted advertising would show you the one XYZ you are going to buy, and stop there.

As a marketer, I don’t think you have any idea what marketing is. If you don’t reach people to tell them what you have to offer, no one will ever find you. Marketing is just communication.

I'm not disagreeing with you. Marketing is needed because every one of your competitor is doing marketing. It is an arm race.

But if you removed ALL the marketers from the surface of the planet, people would still have needs and they would find product for those needs without the help of marketers. The end product would not change for a thing.

Let's take one of the most advertised product on the market: cars. Cars are highly utilitarian and are needed by people. Today every brand maker has to advertise in order to remind people that their model exist. If you remove all the ads for cars, people would still need cars and they would buy based on what they think is best suited for them, not based on the most flashy ads.

Even North Korea has ads for it's domestic products.

> they would find product for those needs without the help of marketers

Not very well. All you achieve by getting rid of marketers is ceding control of marketing to random natural factors like geography or chance.

Would that be worse than people actively trying to influence us, often in a dishonest way?

I’m not against companies having their own web sites to “sell” their product, just don’t put your ads in front of me to convince me I need something. If I need it, I’ll go look for it.

What are you saying here exactly? It seems pretty obvious that buying products by random chance is worse than by competition or an "arms race" in the market. It's precisely a well functioning market that allows the best to rise to the top.

By best you mean richest with best marketing.

Not actually best as in most useful.

I’ll grant you that a well functioning market is a good thing. In the absence of ads that create desire, I would use various magazine reviews (Consumer Reports, etc), articles and forums to make buying decisions when I needed to buy something.

I see your point, but I think that this ignores that people make emotional decisions about money and buying things. Maybe that's not you, but I think any marketer or economist would agree with that statement. The things we buy are inherently irrational and based on feelings, not features. So a world that is purely driven by facts and figures and not feelings is a sort of "what if" scenario and not something that will ever actually happen (as long as humans continue to be human).

If you don’t reach people to tell them what you have to offer, no one will ever find you.

If I didn't intrusively steal people's limited time and attention to force my manipulative product spam right into their faces, I might not get what I want, therefore it's ok for me to do that - the ends justify the means.

Many people conflate marketing and advertising. They’re not the same thing.

One is a superset of the other.

Exactly, but I see several comments railing against marketers while only mentioning their beef with advertising.

I didn't mention marketing. Nor did the sentence I quoted. If you mean:

advertising: n. The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.

marketing: n. The activities required by a producer to sell his products, including advertising,

then my complaint applies. Pushing information about your product into my face is both advertising and marketing.

If you mean "marketing: n. The act or process of buying and selling in a market." then your comment is unrelated, because neither I nor the person I replied to were talking about other people trading between themselves.

"Pushing information about your product" is only marketing to the extent that advertising is marketing. "The activities required by a producer to sell his products," includes a lot of stuff that isn't pushy at all. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You think you're describing marketing, but you're actually describing only advertising.

For example, Hacker News is absolutely a marketing vehicle for Y Combinator. Would you say that they "intrusively steal people's limited time and attention to force my manipulative product spam right into their faces"? You choose to come here, and in doing so, it elevates the brand of Y Combinator in your mind and in the world.

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.

> 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.

> 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.)

That is called puffery and it is legally protected expression (at least in the US). If they assert any hard facts you could force them to prove it, but general floaty stuff like "best in the world!" would be puffery

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