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Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

Well, I certainly get 100% of my work done, on time and done to a high standard.

But, I would say that my productive time is less than 50% of my work week. I'll do a 4 hour burst and get 90% of my weeks work done, and the rest of the week is touching up a few things and browsing HN/Reddit or whatever else.

I remember reading a short article that introduced (to me) the idea that something like 30% of corporate jobs aren't required by any means. It's just "job creation", all fluff work that could be automated or simply isn't needed. As time goes on and I get more looks "behind the curtain" so to speak, the more inclined I am to believe this. I'll look around for the article and edit it in if I find it. It articulates the idea much better than I.

Article for reference: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Thanks wortelefant!

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I think a lot of this is also slack (not the chatapp). Its the idea that a company need some idleness to maximize overall efficiency. If you are occupied 100% of the time and you always have a queue of work, then you cannot respond to changes in capacity or urgency. Its a bit like a company keeping you on retainer. Sure most of a department sits around 3 weeks a month, but they are all needed during the last week of crunch time.

It's true that if you are occupied 100% of the time with high priority items that can't be interrupted you will be dropping and delaying other high priority items. But as long as some of your time is doing low priority stuff that can be interrupted by high priority tasks it means you have slack for high priority items.

David Graeber describes this "fluff work" as "bullshit jobs", a sense of purpose in a job seems to be increasingly rare for many people. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...

That's the one I was thinking of!

Specifically, the passage:

>Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.[1]

A sincere thank-you for finding it for me.

--- [1]https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

I share the same feeling. Since Deep Work, I work less and do more. I'm supposed to be 8 hours on my company, but since I do everything in much less time than anybody else (due to make an effort to don't get distracted), I usually spend 7, 7.5 hours at company and nobody complained yet.

Fluff jobs are used by companies if the cost to build and automate is higher than just having humans do it. If the cost of a human in the US or EU/UK is too high then here comes the blood thirsty consultants to do it for you using cheap outsourced labor and terrible work environments.

I'm not referring to jobs that require complex automation systems, but jobs that just... Aren't needed for a company to function. No consultant needed, no outsourced labor needed.

A simple example would be the receptionist at a non-customer facing business. At least where I work, we have zero walk-ins and maybe 5 phone calls a day. We pay someone well above minimum wage to simply answer to phone - despite our VOIP provider offering (for free) an automated system to route calls.

Sounds like you actually need a security guard instead of a receptionist. Or maybe the receptionist is the guard.

I'll let him know he's been promoted!

It’s just bureaucracy, which at a fundamental level is just a lack of trust in individual staff.

The question is why doesn't the market remove this inefficiency.

Because people want jobs, companies want to say they employ X amount of people, and governments like to say "we have low unemployment".

I don't see how any of the above should have a significant impact.

Even if just one CEO decided to prefer profitability and market share over... bragging about employee count (seriously?), they would steal market share from their competitors over time.

I'm no expert but if it was as easy as you are making it out to be, this inefficiency already wouldn't exist. Many CEO's already prefer profitability and market share already, I think.

Perhaps rather than give some off-the-cuff (and admittedly fairly weak) examples, I should have said that I don't think these companies view these roles strictly as inefficiencies - but that they offer some secondary or tertiary value to the company such as boosting various job metrics. (Think not just employment #'s, but things such as diversity metrics, wage metrics, etc.)

This also assumes that the company even recognizes that the job is not really required. I would hazard a guess that, especially in large corporations, many of these jobs fly under the radar. Perhaps something that was essential 20 years ago is now mostly or completely automated, but Mr. Smith has been with the company for 15 years, and isn't going to tell the boss that his position should be eliminated.

you seem to believe that markets are efficient. breaking news: they arent. Between companies - there is some sort of efficiency. Inside companies all such efficiency bets are off. If i walked upto your board and asked for half your CEO's comp to ensure that the same milestones are hit the next quarter, guess what they would say. Similarly at a ballpark estimate, im twice as efficient as some of my colleagues, i doubt im getting paid twice as much. Go figure...

Nope, I'm asking why such inefficiency exists and isn't exploited by competitors. I'm not suggesting it doesn't exist.

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