Comment by TelmoMenezes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TelmoMenezes | Hacker News Reader

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I think you overlook two important things.

One, that has been pointed out already, is that companies are not hive minds. Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Bullshit jobs are a wealth (and status) redistribution mechanism that works almost as a force of nature under the current state of affairs.

The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. Of course society cannot work like this, and democracies force politicians to align themselves with the interest of the general public -- to some small degree perhaps, but enough here to create enough pressure for such jobs to keep existing.

> Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share.

Sure, but there's competition there. If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.

> The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become.

We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done. Remember that eliminating bullshit jobs wouldn't lower productivity (by definition), so redirecting that effort into productive work would massively boost overall productivity and be good for everyone. Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.

> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.

If you can implement it. Building a large company, or redoing management structure in such, is a very long process requiring buy-in from many people. People, whose personal interests may oppose your goal of eliminating inefficiencies.

My guess is that most "low-hanging fruits" in management styles already got picked, and what remains are the cases where it's actually very hard to build (and maintain) a bullshit-free system.

> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.

Not if some significant chunk of those jobs are bullshit. Just because a job is bullshit, doesn't mean it won't make you - and your employer - money.

“Bullshit” is in the eye of the beholder. One view is that if it makes money, it isn’t bullshit — because someone values it enough to pay for it.

This is a different topic, but the view that if it makes money, it's good is a pretty antisocial and inhumane view - because markets themselves aren't humane, and often optimize for some pretty bad things.

> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.

On the contrary, what is not stable is your more "efficient" situation, because it is only preferable from the perspective of the employer, and the managers/employees are also free agents. Ok, so you cut all the bullshit and create your efficient paradise. This will only make your managers look good. But you are making life uncomfortable for them by denying them status and future salary negotiation leverage. So they will use their current aura of success to look for a more comfortable place. Unless you pay them more to compensate, but then there goes your "efficiency". For a situation to be stable it has to be in the best interest of all the parties. Otherwise an upstart can explore that dissatisfaction to compete with you -- for example by snatching your star employees.

> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.

Making this claim in the context of this discussion is bizarre. It's like you are talking past the very thing being discussed.

> Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.

People are not fungible insects. There is plenty of productive work to be done, but unfortunately the majority of the people do not have the skills to do them. The very point of what is discussed here is that technology replaces the least qualified jobs first. I'm pretty sure that skill sophistication follows a power law. The more qualified a job is, the exponentially less people can do it. The more qualified a job is, the longer it will take for it to be replaced by AI. Nobody has a magic wand that makes full-grown adults useful again.

You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?

> You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?

This is going extremely well, actually. There are more software engineers than ever in the world, and these software engineers are getting paid more than ever.

These efforts have been wildly successful, and this consistent progress just keeps marching on, even today (as more as more people choose to become successful engineers.).

You might counter by saying something like "but we taught a million people to code and only 100K of them became software engineer!".

And this is the wrong line of thinking because getting 100% of them to become software engineers was never the goal.

It was never the goal in the same way that teaching people to read and write never had the goal of causing 100% of literate people to become fiction writers, and yet we all agree that reading and writing is a good thing to teach people.

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