The Rise of Bullshit Jobs
jacobinmag.com
jacobinmag.com
> Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. 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.
Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.
It's far from incredibly misguided. I've personally witnessed countless examples of the kinds of things he described. The media even falsely reported on a lot of it. In each case, what's happening is political in the organization instead of rational, scientific management. There isn't a feedback loop saying this is the right thing to do or it's working. There's people in the middle or on top saying certain things will happen for certain reasons that are pretty arbitrary. Then, there's people that exist to make that happen, explain why it isn't, and so on. In most cases, investing in and listening to good people on the ground near the revenue-producing parts of the company seems to produce better results for a lot of stuff.
Big companies particularly seem to have an emotional or cultural hatred for doing that minimizing those people as much as possible while dropping large sums on non-production people, companies, or projects with unproven value. I don't know how much it happens in legal, though, since law firms might collapse by playing it that dumb. Just too far out of my area to know. I have seen the things I describe play out in manufacturing, retail, food, general services, IT, and security. In each case, the workers had either arguments for why it was bullshit or straight-up numbers showing their opinions generated better results than the middle management. That's on top of examples showing middle management might have never done the production work at all or have any understanding of it.
The real world is unnecessarily complex and messy because a lot of people in positions of authority dont know how to design good systems. This leads to tons of bullshit jobs.
Linux evolved the way it did for various reasons, but how many are still relevant today?
Would you write a kernel in C these days? I wouldn't. There are production quality kernels written in at least C++ which benefit from its features, and it's been demonstrated that you can write entire operating systems in managed languages like Java as well. Why should we suffer an endless parade of exploitable memory bugs in kernel space? It's not technical requirements driving that.
Would you write a GPLd kernel these days? I wouldn't. Not much new software is being GPLd these days, it's all Apache or similar licenses. The policy of trying to maintain every driver in-tree has caused vast amounts of time to be spent on workarounds like installers that compile things client-side, enforcement is poor, lots of time is lost due to needless recompiles, API churn, poor usability of desktop software and so on. Has Linux benefited from correspondingly amazing hardware support? No. Desktop Linux is a morass of bugs that often still can't suspend properly, and in the server realm it's now more often than not talking to virtualised hardware anyway.
I could go on. There's a LOT of simplification and "bullshit work" that could be optimised out, even in the realm of a very concrete thing without much room for innovation like an OS kernel - partly because times changed but Linux didn't.
I think you're arguing a strawman here. The actual reason why drivers tend to live in-tree is that the kernel-driver API changes all the time, and Linus has consistently argued that being able to do backwards-incompatible changes to the kernel-driver API has been necessary to make the drivers as good as they are.
OSv is an example of going back to the drawing board for the majority of Linux's use cases and creating something radically smaller and with radically less 'bullshit' (it runs much faster as a consequence).
Lol. Go to Thailand (3% unemployment) or China and watch the meaningless jobs.
Where the cost of labour is cheaper than the cost of capital and where there's government incentives to present zero unemployment, you will find groups of people waving cars out of condos, gangs of old ladies sweeping up nothing all day, and people acting as human signs.
Much of this is unnecessary, or can be replaced, at least, with more efficient methods.
Also, this criticism only really addresses the first, taxonomic part of the book, which was by far the least interesting.
David Graeber is, as far as I can tell, a professor of anthropology. Which means he doesn't have domain expertise in any of the areas he's criticizing. Indeed, I could (flippantly, but honestly) say that I think "professor of anthropology" is a bullshit job, but then again I'm a severely left-brain guy and I'm going to assume there is a social value there that's just going over my head.
To put things another way: my wife once asked me what my interest was programming-wise. I told her it was compilers and programming languages. And she asked: well, don't they have those already? I strongly suspect if people get a 3% exposure to programming (e.g. writing yet another JS framework), like Graeber is doing with the various jobs he talks about, they'd think that programming is also full of "bullshit jobs." But that would be a conclusion arising out of ignorance.
To illustrate with a drastic example: Suppose you have two workers, one who digs holes and one who shovels the same dirt back into the hole to close it. Outside the system, it's obvious that they're not doing any meaningful work. Inside the system, there's probably some argument why these jobs are useful. (Maybe government regulations require that their company dig at least X holes per month. Or you could argue that it's good because it increases GDP or reduces unemployment.)
I'm not going to defend every single professor of anthropology, but "studying human societies and cultures and their development" sounds like a useful thing in general and is exactly what this work is.
He mischaracterized the worth of compliance personnel, corporate lawyers, and PR team members.
Suppose you a project manager forces a team of coders to run scrums and track progress in JIRA. Unless you're one of the coders, how can you tell whether the PM increased productivity or simply wasted time on making them appear more productive? Either is possible.
Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of "bullshit jobs" but other times, I think without them, the world would be a duller place. That's not to say I like SEOs, or telemarketers or inefficient charities, but they help at the margin and without that I think you get stagnation.
Author also puts down compliance folks. I would disagree with that being bullshit. It ensures people follow the letter of the law --and if they don't AND they get audited, then there can be trouble. And that's the point. It's like saying firefighters are "bullshit jobs".
Even that has a skewed reputation as bullshit, which only used to be deserved. Now it's a much broader group of people who add a lot more value than 2010 SEOs did, by a mile.
You'll certainly run into lots of liars and conmen who use it to refer to outdated voodoo that worked ten years ago.
But in most ecosystems it refers to planning and developing websites and web content for the purpose of satisfying the needs of people performing searches. And now the advice is "don't ever trick googlebot or googlebot will end you."
As far as general human value goes, one aspect can be boiled down to "we found that 10,000 people look for such-and-such each month, but Google serves them all dogshit, and most of them go away knowing nothing. We will build a page that solves 5,000 peoples' problems a month, and it will be on your company website."
A big chunk of the content on the web is there because of this process - and not just the spammy garbage. Without it, you see marketing teams throwing years of effort into the black abyss of outer space.
For instance, compliance people spend lots of time on trying to enforce sanctions by e.g. blocking IP addresses. Have trade sanctions actually ever achieved much? Iran hasn't changed. North Korea is pretty much the same as it always was - if there's going to be any change there it'll come from Trump doing Trumpian things, not trade sanctions which have been in place for decades. And does anyone really think a nation state can't evade an IP address block? Really?! When you take a step back and ask "what is the actual goal here? is it going to achieve that goal?" it's at least very debatable whether the work is useful or merely bullshit.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (strikemag.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 (5 years ago, 349 comments)
On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs (libcom.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 (4 years ago, 381 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935
This was the huge, recent discussion (470 comments) I remembered but couldn't find instantly due to 'bullshit jobs' -> 'pointless jobs'. Thanks.
I imagine that there are some poorly-run larger companies that have elements of this, but this seems cartoonish for the most part.
When I was a management consultant, the cynical joke was that we stole your watch and told you the time. I learned that, yes, that was my job, but also that most companies are so incompetent that I was providing a useful service.
Its incredibly disheartening to everyone else in the company who already has the watch and can already tell the time and have already been telling everyone the time, but as people experience, that's everyday existence in large corporations.
A guy I met consulted on improving company performance. He told me he went to the people on top to ask them what they thought and promised to investigate further to solve their problems. Then, he went straight to the workers in production and supportive positions asking what they thought about their job, what it entailed, what was needed, and what wasn't. He then asked the middle managers about their thoughts. He said the workers he asked usually had all the good ideas that he was paid to deliver to the higher-ups.
Almost everyone doing that sort of thing knows that. One other thing he said that some people have to learn is that the people on the top couldn't use their workers' innovations. The way things work at lots of these organizations is that the people on the top want to look superior and control things top down. The visible effects have to look like that. If they let workers tell them, their model and egos break where they probably should let workers do a lot more. Instead, they often asked a consultant who invisibly asked workers. Then, they can say they solved the problem hiring a consultant who gave them options that they would enforce in a top down way. They get to feel in control while grabbing credit.
Another way that helps when the situation isn't that bad is a tie-breaker between people or groups that can't agree. The consultant doesn't find the real solution. The consultant is just there to be the person that decides and gets the blame if it's bad. The consultant is cutting through the political bullshit that really run the company instead of the rational, economic, strategic choices that many folks pretend companies run on.
And ignore it we did. But someone somewhere decided we needed another newsletter, some team wrote the "news" and some other team designed the shiny new graphics. All just to be ignored and deleted by everyone.
The financial sector is rife with this. It is surely the most inefficient part of the economy. Most things are automated now, yet the number of people employed has actually grown and it's mostly bullshit. There are people who literally spend all day creating what can only be described as entertainment for other people in the same company. I wish everyone could see it first hand.
I don't know about you, but if I was running a restaurant and only 20% of people actually bothered to eat my food, I would close up shop and rethink my life choices. But the newsletter/spam-letter guys apparently think 20% is good.
The classical solution is more competition. Unfortunately finance is also full of factors that make it an uncompetitive market (e.g. the old joke that if you want to get into banking you start by buying a bank).
In my experience, i'd go so far as to say its all of them.
To draw an analogy in biological terms, its a direct consequence of:
a) company/organism complexity and size b) successfully being able to draw in sufficient nutrients (operating revenue and profit) while experiencing a lack of existentially threatening evolutionary competition in that particular ecosystem. It allows such things to naturally develop.
I haven't even thought about it until now, but perhaps one substantial part of the rise of bullshit jobs is the increased size and dominance of the large company as a proportion of the economy :\