Comment by Gys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gys | Hacker News Reader

I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.'

Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ?

We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.

Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.

A more nuanced approach might work there. Some people are up at night because their projects keep them engaged, and delivering pizza to those people is not a bullshit job. What Graeber alludes to is when people have pizza delivered because they need to work their own bullshit job and thus do not have time to cook.

In other words: If there were less bullshit jobs, there would be less pizza delivery. Hence, to a certain extent, pizza delivery is also a bullshit job.

I'm not sure I subscribe to this reasoning, but I think this is a more honest representation of Graeber's argument.

> His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.

That is a very subjective definition.

Yes, the new Bullshit Jobs book says:

“Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

“The attentive reader may have noticed one remaining ambiguity. The definition is mainly subjective.”

Then goes on to explain that many cases are obvious: like if an office worker's spending 80% of her time making cat memes. But even in more complicated cases, you're likeliest to know best. (Not managers. The higher up you are, the more people have reasons to hide things from you.) After a couple years at the same company, normally people will learn enough of the company's secrets.

>>So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ?

To some extent yes.

But that covers start-to-end aspects of such jobs. For example, Courier is a highly productive work in the process of delivering iPhone to your door step.

Every job demands involvement of some kind of meta-coordination. Think of it like an operating system. The OS needs to manage things, and is a very important piece of software. But if it starts consuming most of the computer resources at some point in time you are doing a lot of things that don't have to be done.

Some jobs are that way.

In the Pizza job context. Something like 'Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector' would fit in the definition of a BS job.

From the definition given in another comment: 'a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence'

The 'Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector' might think his job is safety related and take that very serious. So then its not a BS job at all. Others might think his daily checkups (just making this up) are over the top and BS, but he himself thinks is neccessary.

Seems to me it comes down to the extend you think your job can be winged. For example a marketing research job. Because you feel your reports are not read by your superiors, you just make up stuff and think its BS. But you could also write very good reports, go up a higher level, ask your boss for better work, etc. The BS is mainly in your mind.

I am still not convinced there is a good definition for BSJ (BS jobs).

> Seems to me it comes down to the extend you think your job can be winged. For example a marketing research job. Because you feel your reports are not read by your superiors, you just make up stuff and think its BS. But you could also write very good reports, go up a higher level, ask your boss for better work, etc. The BS is mainly in your mind.

So a litmus test: what's the delta of impact on company performance between you making a lousy, half-assed job and working your ass off to deliver best results? If the answer is "not much", then your job is most likely pointless. The person spending 80% of the time making cat memes is an obvious bullshit-job holder, but so is the "Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector" iff his inspections don't have a meaningful impact on health&safety.

(Then there's also an aspect of how people in general are qualified to do a job. Take my favourite pick, social media marketer/analyst - unless you are a good statistician and are working with decent data, your job is most likely pointless regardless of your efforts, by the virtue of you not understanding what you're doing, and taking inferences from random noise. But if you actually know what you're doing, you can probably make your customers a lot of money.)

A car inspector might think his job is safety related. Then the inspector who inspects the car inspector could start thinking the same. Then you arrive at a senior manager who is the boss of the inspector who inspects the car inspector.

    | senior manager who manages inspector who inspects car inspector
      | inspector who inspects car inspector
        | car inspector
          | pizza delivery guy

As the hierarchy expands people keep moving away from the real producer. And at some point have nothing to do with the producer.

Now you could say the senior manager might think his job is valid. Well guess what, if you get paid well, and paid well as you go up, doing as little job as nothing, you aren't exactly going to complain about it.

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