Bullshit Jobs and the Labourisation of Work
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Is squeezing most sales per advertising campaign or saving a few pennies per unit delivered of a mass market product really worth what the economy is willing to pay for that? Does it really make sense to make that kind of optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have meaningful value?
It is really hard to measure bullshit jobs specifically, but it might be more easy and meaningful to try to characterize this strange gradient where abstracted work that is distant from people has value far beyond the simple and necessary basics of human social function. Worry less about the bullshit label and try coming up with a measure more like dollars lost per human life improved.
This could be a fun 'fuzzy metric' to kick around for a while, I like it.
It would likely be way too inaccurate across different professions & regions to tie directly to anything with major consequences - especially quantifying "improved" - but it does seem likely to turn up some helpful insights.
I'd certainly be happy to see a more accurate reflection of this in how various workers are compensated. I expect there are more than a few superstars of positive human impact in our world just barely scraping by who are rarely properly acknowledged for their value.
I think the reason this is a problem is that there is no foundational vector for progress which we can universally agree upon a measurement metric for. So capital allocation becomes the default measure, and money becomes a proxy for value.
So in that sense, what is most easily measurable is more valuable, and something which is easily measured and increases the unit of measurement by the largest factor becomes the most valuable.
Eg. If one unit of money is input and some multiple of that unit is the result, the system with the least amount of work or fastest iteration time (high margin) becomes the place where resources pool.
I'm skeptical whether humans could even define in a meaningful or measurable way how to better allocate resources than individual resource allocation on a common unit of measurement aka "markets."
Cleaning staff are often paid orders of magnitude less than the people they clean for but work harder and longer, because the perception is that anyone can do their job.
I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of the bullshit and self aggrandisation any more. And why not, since I’d already deleted all of my other social media accounts long ago. I have the email or phone number of everyone I need to be in contact with. I had a chat about this with a friend who himself is a founder of a company and uses LinkedIn to keep track of developments inside his work network. It made me wonder whether I’d done the right thing.
Can anyone here who isn’t a recruiter or employer say that it’s worth having a LinkedIn profile?
But you probably already decided that it's not valuable enough to keep you on the platform. Only thing I can add if you ever start your own company it's becomes over an order or magnitude more valuable.
But I use it as hunting grounds. Can't stand how people portray themselves on LinkedIn - so much bullshit going on.
It keeps throwing up the occasional article that I actually want to read, often because some random person I'm mysteriously connected to liked it.
If the algo gets "too good" I find it gets too samey.
Also there's some humour to be found when every other person is a "thought leader" but graduated less than 10 years ago. The self-puffery is kinda fun to watch. You can imagine how deflated the person would feel if you met them IRL and started asking proper questions.
You could make anyone unhappy by "asking the proper questions," irrespective of what they have in their LinkedIn profile. Doing that is called "being mean."
Frankly, I find the almost passive aggressive lack of asking proper questions to be a little condescending and mean in and of itself. One of my favorite movies has several themes, but that's one of them. It's name, very interestingly enough, is Mean Girls.
https://othersociologist.com/2017/07/15/where-are-you-from-r...
I'm somewhat of the opinion that the people you're talking about will have considered answers to the so-called proper questions you have. It may be that they need to think to answer some.
Constructing some fictional individual who's bullshitting on LinkedIn and then tearing them down is top-shelf insecure behaviour.
For a competent person, a few proper questions present an opportunity to better explain their proposition, thesis, or thinking, and an opening to a potentially great conversation.
For an incompetent answerer, a few proper questions merely reveal the shallowness of their thesis and thinking. if they're smart, it'll be an indication that they should go back to the drawing board. If not, it'll just be an embarrassment, but informative to the questioner (as in, this person's ideas aren't worth more time).
If your only goal is maintaining superficial social connections, then proper questions should be left out (and there are times where this is indeed the goal and so appropriate). If the goals are more broad, then ask away...
You don't have a career, you have a job. You shall change jobs throughout your life. The moment the word "loyalty" is uttered you should laugh as you run as far away as reasonable if not possible. I am open to thinking otherwise.
Meaningful work is not about fulfilling someone's dreams or them "becoming entrenched in the doing of it".
It's about the work itself having meaning.
If farmer Joe didn't farm, people wouldn't be able to eat their veggies.
If some office drone doesn't do his job, chances are nothing much would change to the output of their company (assuming the company is actually doing something meaningful and not harmful itself). If anything, some jobs just create more work for other parts of the company, without meaning (e.g. just to satisfy some state or company bureaucratic procedures) as opposed to improving workflows.
>ut how common is it for Newboy Johnny to boisterously look upon the world with his newly minted College University degree in hand and say "Yes, this one lifetime career path is just for me and I'll take it!"? It's not 1952 any more. I don't know why anybody younger than I am still believes that any of this is real.
They might not believe that any of this is real today, but they could very well believe that the old way is better, and that as active citizens that shape our society and steer it (as opposed to mere pawns that go this or that way randomly as technology or time changes) we should recreate that kind of environment.
Changing multiple jobs throughout one's career should be a personal choice, not something imposed by a thankless and merciless corporate consensus -- alongside discarding people after a certain age because they can hire young starry eyed idiots to pay them way less while overworking them.
In the Graeber "hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at" sense, it literally is exactly this. It all kicked off with an article whose most concrete example was a former musician who had failed to sell enough albums to not end up as a corporate lawyer instead, but remained convinced his music provided more value to a society that hadn't shown much interest in paying for it.
I suspect pretty much everyone who failed to have a successful music career and subsequently ended up on a production line at a farm, as Graeber puts it in his original litmus test for bullshit jobs "rant about how pointless and stupid their job is" if asked about it at parties. And for that matter I'm also sure there are a whole bunch of people flogging zero-insight reports to the network they made at business school that genuinely believe what they do is extremely valuable to society, even if they never get repeat customers. So the claim that the meaningfulness of work is better defined by the employee than the employer is far from convincing.
I doubt many bright graduates disillusioned with their inability to make much difference to how their corporate employer operates and convinced some of the decisions they're required to implement are counterproductive (yep, I know that feeling well) would start considering the work they performed meaningful if they were redeployed to pressing buttons on a food production line, even if their link in the food production chain directly stopped hundreds of meals from premature decomposition every day. It might even make some of them nostalgic for micromanaging task allocations, whiteboarding brand values, taking this week's compliance course and politely telling the customer to try turning it off and on again. After all, Marx's theory of alienation which Graeber updated for the service industry was entirely focused on people who actually directly contributed to making stuff whilst still feeling useless, powerless and disassociated from what they actually made.
The irony is that there actually is a vast literature out there on principal-agent and adverse selection problems in the workplace, positional goods, regulatory capture etc means that employers might actually pay for services which don't increase their output, but this gets far less currency than Graeber really all about "the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"; a theory which doesn't survive contact with reality.
We evolved to be hunter gatherers. Millions of years of evolution brought us there. Then in the recent thousands of years we found ourselves being repurposed for efficiency. But at the end of it, were spear throwing carnivores still. We just don’t have the physiology and mental wiring to be happy going into the same place for decades doing bs abstracted work.
This is just another opinion though; an opinion based on generalizing value on as broad a dataset as individuals across an economy. The author may be right in some cases, but so might be many employees. What's still missing from this conversation are methodologies for identifying and articulating individual value from leadership, down to the individual whose job it is.
One possible solution (from my own career perspective) is solving a rampant issue with "management" being a step in a career path rather than a career in its own right, promoting functional employees based on tenure rather than their ability to manage (and manage _people_, not projects and tasks). In practice, this results in micro-managing at the expense of vision, creative freedom, and general flow, replacing it with anxiety across the board and employees slipping into a "peace and pay" mindset (or worse yet, hopping jobs every couple years as is the trend, only to experience similar conditions).
At the end of the day, no one wants bullshit jobs. So whether that's remedied via better management, or molding it into a better job, some kind of action needs to address this considering how much Graeber’s original article resonated with, well, far too many people.
Only there's no proof, just some handwaving. I'd rather trust those actually doing the jobs for their assessment of them.
By definition, non-owner employees are insulated from that economic value. It's unclear, then, why you'd prefer their assessment over that of someone looking at the business as a whole.
That someone's willing to pay for it doesn't automatically imply the job is useful on the societal scale, and the latter is IMO a more important concept. There are plenty of businesses that can earn money even though everyone would be better off if those businesses weren't being done.
To give a deliberately absurd example a rich madman made $5 million per year from his vinyard and winery for personal and spend $1 million on running the place to the highest quality, $0.5 million buying piles of bananas and $2 million on mercenaries paid to beat the piles of bananas with baseball bats so they don't plan a rebellion he would still make $1.5 million a year profit could make $4 million a year profit if he didn't spend so much money on repressing fruit.
Silly example aside it is possible for both employee and employer to be both right or both wrong. An employee might notice low level waste that could be avoided by not repairing defects, and the employer knows that the cost of labor to fix it is more expensive than materials for a new one. Even if the one strategy is right both have a point.
Or in the reverse both employee and employer could think that the new fangled automobile won't be able to compete with horses because of vast fields of grass for free on the plains and even hay being cheaper than gasoline.
The fact that you can have a net profit doesn't mean you operate anywhere near 100% efficiently, or that you don't have tons of BS jobs. After a point of profit, wages are only a tiny part of the cost of a company.
Besides industries and companies get bailed out, VC money pay for tons of useless jobs (and/or indulgences) and then companies crash, etc.
Not to mention: we're not looking for economic value, but to value to society. You can make a good profit in all kinds of leechey businesses too.
I think this is the nub of it: we think things have changed, but they really haven't. Whilst the content/descriptions may have changed, grim jobs have always existed and have always been the majority.
I spent the summer of 1998 working in a wines and spirits bottling plant. I'd either be loading bottles on to the beginning of the line, or stacking boxes at the end - as a university student, and a temp, I wasn't trusted with the machines in the middle. Doesn't really matter: the work was beyond mind-numbing.
The first couple of hours I was checking my watch incessantly. Then I realised I was driving myself slowly (or, quite quickly) insane and limited myself to checking every N palettes of bottles, where N was a suitably large number. After a week or two got to the point where I'd check my watch once during the morning and it would be nearly lunchtime. Oh yeah: winning at life!
And this was a job that had some tangible output: thousands of gallons of some beverage started out in a massive tank and ended up in neatly labelled and packaged bottles ready for sale. Didn't change the fact that the job was boring as #### and that I hated every minute. But the money was essential to me at the time, and I was and am grateful to the childhood friend who offered me that job.
I have no end of respect for people who do these kinds of jobs their entire working lives for the simple reason that they have to in order to survive. I know exactly how fortunate I am to have other options open to me.
Perhaps a wider point: over the span of an entire career almost everyone has at least one, and often several, terrible jobs. E.g., including contracts, since graduating I've had two great jobs, one good, one that started great and remained that way for quite a while but became terrible during my final years, a couple that were all right but nothing special, one that was bloody awful from start to finish, and one that was entirely bipolar (sometimes from day to day).
Work isn't always enjoyable, and doesn't always (perhaps not even often) use you to your full potential. Yes, you may be better than that job, but so are lots of people, and you still have to eat. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try to find something better, but sometimes - and possibly for quite a long time - we have to do things we don't enjoy in order to live.
Sorry, I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.
If you put yourself in the position of this not being a summer job, but a real job, then it would likely not be a career either. It would be a stepping stone to working on areas with more responsibility, allowing you to pick up expertise with the full operation of the production line. You would have to have zero ambition to do it for your entire life, and I've not seen many people who did; there's always progression and more responsibility even for those who don't have a good education, but do have a desire to improve themselves and show they are capable.
I used to work in a brewery, as an analytical chemist, but this also involved some time on the bottling and canning lines taking samples and calibrating the equipment, so I did see a lot of what went on, from the depalletisers loading the empty cans and bottles onto the conveyors, to the fillers, pasteurisers, labellers and the packaging and warehousing. They did employ a number of temporary workers to do some of the simpler stuff, like what you were doing. But since each line was several million pounds worth of state of the art German engineering, the people operating and maintaining it were well compensated for their expertise. If you'd stayed, then you could have worked your way up the ladder to do that, perhaps including part time study for an engineering degree or industry-specific qualifications.
A lot of industries like this do have good prospects for career progression. But they do require time to be served at the bottom before working up the ladder. And even the bosses have to do the menial stuff when required from time to time; I've seen the production site manager doing your job when they were caught short-handed. One of the great things about this environment is that you have everyone working across a whole site in synchrony to make the whole process work; and on the site I worked at, it was a great place to work.
Not in this place it didn't: nobody had a degree, and even the permanent staff weren't on particularly good money. For sure, better money than I was on, but not by a wide margin in most cases, and I'm talking here about people who in some cases had worked their for decades. As for the chemists, my degree was half biochem and half chemistry and I'd just finished my third year so I was probably "better qualified" than they were. They absolutely knew their jobs but, again, no degrees.
I know a lot of people who work in the consulting industry (As in Big4, MBB, etc). None of them are starving, and someone seems to want to pay them to work. But zero of them can see why there's any point in their work. Whatever the purported reason for a project, it always seems at least wasteful, and at worst deceptive.
The other part of it is that a BS job can only be hard due to unreasonable constraints. If you just plod away on your powerpoint slides, they will eventually be finished. It only gets stressful because someone is telling you it needs to be done before the sun comes up. Chances are your client also isn't listening when you do the presentation, so that's fine as well.
Interesting jobs like coding can fail for the same reasons, but they aren't the only reasons. You can design a cloud solution badly, even if you had a lot of time to think about it. Your ML model can... be no better than chance. Even if you have a phd in it.
That possibility of real failure I haven't seen in the discussion yet.
Their perception of “Wasteful” is probably from the gobs of money these firms charge for what seems like a relatively small amount of work. But the clients aren’t really paying for the work. The value is having a trusted, third party sign off on whatever strategic initiative management wanted to push. And that IS worth gobs of money to them.
Now I decided to leave because the job was really about helping rich people / firms get richer, and that didn’t feel meaningful to me. But it wasn’t a bullshit job.
A factory worker could make tons of widgets and not see any point because they are nine levels of abstraction deep from anything they can relate to. Similarly in WW2 many in Bletchly park worked completely devoid of context in what seemed to them literally pointless like repeatably rolling dice and writing the numbers down. It was important but they may feel alienated.
Meanwhile someone could be utterly convinced that their job as a paid entourage is vitally important when really they have no purpose but to signal a person's wealth and status. Their job is bullshit but they're not alienated.
edit: elaborating a little on why I referenced the Gervais Principle:
It's an interesting guide to understand the relationship between executives, middle-management, and the worker/producers and the relationship each has with "The organization".
Per the gervais principle, a lot of the bullshit job phenomenon is explained through the relationship an employee has with reality and the organization in which they work.
In gervais, the sociopaths at the top (executives) and the losers at the bottom (actual producers of some value) both have some grasp on reality - whereas the clueless middle are full of cognitive dissonance about the reality of their position and loyalty to the idea of the organization. So, IMHO, the clueless category, in moments of honesty are the ones most likely to call out their position as a "bullshit" job.
This mainstream self-actualization of work is probably an artifact of knowledge work moving from the domain of the intellectual elites towards the masses, which broadened the prospects of people beyond working on the fields or factories for a lifetime. Two generations of this during an economic boom created a recipe that was immortalized in culture, but didn't work as well this time, and the ones who were spoonfed the dogma are still reeling from the bust, while the ones who were rich enough or lucky enough have made it through fine. The angst about the lack of job-related fulfillment transcends generations, but it mixes with the realization that they likely can't leverage their job experience and relationships to advance forward. And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum, people aren't blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.
Nonetheless, we shouldn't conflate intellectual fulfillment with financial security, and their respective lack thereof. People earning well who feel professionally unfulfilled have options to find something they like more, without the crushing pressure of needing uninterrupted income. And those engaged in fulfilling work with tangible impacts can get paid peanuts; in these cases it's often their emotional attachment to their work that keeps them going. It's most unfortunate when the two conditions coincide. But it should also not come as a surprise, as there's no morality in the economic system itself; rather, all money being paid out is coming from somewhere else, because somewhere someone thinks it's where it should go. The people in bullshit jobs wish they were in control, but control is harder to come by than money. Others on a different tier of Maslow's just wish for money, and so on.
Economy as a whole may not be zero-sum, but this reminds me of the stuff we did on maths/physics classes. You'd have a thing X with some aggregate quality, but there was a way of "drawing a circle", selecting a subset of X which has the opposite aggregate quality. It's easy to draw circles over our economy that surround areas that are zero-sum, or even negative-sum. I think a lot of complaints about bullshit jobs come from people who realize they're stuck in one of such areas.
Self-actualized, high-value, "skilled" labor (nurse, programmer), requires a person willing to work, motivations are varied, some requirement to delay gratification, but not limitless.
Weakly-actualized, minimal-value, minimally-skilled labor (bar tender, data entry "content" producer), requires minimal willingness to work ("just keep a roof over my head, please"), motivations are varied in direction and caliber, minimal requirement to delay gratification (but may paradoxically suffer severe lack of gratification relative to the surgeon by age 50)
Weakly-actualized, low-value, minimally skilled labor (Guatamalan mountain family growing what they eat, contributing minimally if at all to external society): requires minimal motivation (external motivation to survive is entirely sufficient), gratification isn't even an issue. Ref (1)
De-humanizing, moderate-value, unskilled labor (Guatamalan working in a concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa). Requires tremendous motivation to get to Mount Pleasant, gratification is highly delayed (scrap by, send all money home, hope it gets there). You can imagine how these immigrants' children become doctors and business owners. Ref (1)
My apologies for those who suffer in the "bullshit job" economy. Maybe at some point you'll be the director of a PR firm or something. I would point out though that if you want a "strong storyline" to your life, there are options. Moving to Guatamala being one of them.
The truth, though, it probably somewhere in between. Operations management tools exist to cut down on bullshit (inefficiency) and goal posts are moving so fast that it's making a lot of room for bullshit jobs, however they might be defined. Businesses are certainly not optimized, and there's a clear difference between, for example, needlessly delegating tasks as your sole responsibility, and actually serving to complete those tasks (at likely a fraction of the pay).
Is this true in anyone's experience? I've worked at banks for a long time and I've never had anyone ever bring up my Linked In profile, despite being connected to many of my colleagues. I doubt anyone is carefully watching my profile apart from the occasional check to see if I'm still at the bank or what location I am. I don't feel any pressure to update it. People just don't care in my experience, or maybe they don't care at my non-management level.
The reason people feel like what they're involved in is bullshit, is because it is. There is no grand conspiracy.
It's bullshit so much of the time is because people are more interested in succeeding personally, than in not screwing things up for tens, hundreds, millions, billions, of others.
Is your job bullshit? Then quit and get a potentially lower paying job that is less bullshit. Have you done that? No? End of debate. If you actually can't afford to get paid any less, you are not busy moaning about your job being bullshit. People in survival mode are hustling, not moaning.
This is not news and there is no cure that doesn't involve re-structuring, which always involves many at the very least getting their life ruined. Re-structuring doesn't guarantee that things get better, only that they change. Until by some miracle, intelligent people with integrity end up at the top, have enough power to cut heads, get away with it and understand that it's necessary, nothing is going to really change. It'll merely re-structure.
Capitalism today, communism tomorrow, we're still dumb, selfish apes that are largely uninterested in the welfare of others unless it directly affects us. Most people I know didn't start to care about anyone other than themselves until they had children. Now they care about themselves and their children - so we have private schools instead of improving the school system. Selfish to the bone, this will not change.
If every tribe has its private school(s), there is no need to fight for spending on public schools.
With the internet at hand, are there any structures that cannot be implemented with tribal relations?
Could somebody explain what this sentence means?