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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Many times when we believe a job is bullshit we are falling victim to the paradox of the library.

Go to your favorite library. Take one book and destroy it. Is it still a library? Yes, of course. Destroy three more ... still a library. But what if you keep going? Clearly one book is not a library. So ... where is the crossing point?

The same is true of many jobs. Yes if I was vaporized tomorrow my team would still function pretty fine. But that doesn't mean my job is bullshit. It means that we're overstaffed for the average demand. It probably also means that 9-5 is a bit silly. But if you got rid of all of us you'd have a problem, and the company can afford a bit of slack capacity.

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The book (and interview) are about REAL bullshit jobs. It's defined pretty rigorously. There's a range of types, but this REALLY is stuff that is bullshit, not just jobs in a bureaucracy complex enough that you can't tell if your job matters. Your exact concern is discussed in the book.

Consider the case of the guy hired to run a communications system nobody uses because the people in the office actually prefer to avoid each other. And when he tries to quit, they give him raises because they like having him around so that they can avoid each other and have some excuse about this communications system. He sits around all day doing nothing, sometimes someone asks if there are messages, but there aren't because nobody uses the system. That's the sort of bullshit jobs we're talking about. REAL bullshit.

For a medium sized business you're probably right, but for a huge C-Corp? What possible project is Bank of America going to undertake that will actually, to borrow a metaphor from cars, redline their staff? Where everyone is coming in and working nonstop from open to close to get something done?

Is BofA going to redline all of their staff? No. But absorbing a spike at a single department or branch is another story, and it wouldn't surprise me if having excess capacity already on hand is more efficient overall than trying to reassign individual workers on demand.

Besides, actually working on a team that's redlined is exhausting, and doing it for more than a few weeks is a recipe for burnout. There's real business value in high employee morale and a low turnover rate, and having some amount of built in slack at normal operating capacity seems like a relatively cheap and reliable mechanism to safeguard that value long term.

Except the article is saying that employee morale in these places is in the toilet, so apparently it's not all that effective.

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