Huh? No it’s not. He is exactly right that we’ve invented a lot of “bullshit jobs” that don’t add anything of value to society and would not change anything if they were gone tomorrow e.g. How many jobs out there just prop up rent seeking?
It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressing as fast as technology allows, but technology just doesn’t work that well. In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker. There are no machines to roll a burrito. There’s no machines to wipe tables, clean bathrooms, clean the kitchen, or even take drive through orders. We don’t, get, have automated ubers, taxis, freight trucks, etc. Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.
There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”
> When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.
> Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.
(the article itself[0] tells about how banks in Ireland went on strike for 6 months, but the strike was shrugged off as there was no impact)
[0]: https://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-...
Seen it happen many times and it made me cynical about the whole "there are no bullshit jobs" meme. IMO there are BS jobs, quite a few of them too.
But I doubt the distribution can be so high as people are always insinuating in these bullshit jobs subthreads.
Given the desire to always cut the useless non-profit parts of a business there will always be some pressure to find and eliminate bullshit, even as there may be some countervailing pressures to create bullshit. I think though that the feedback loops of capitalism are such that if you end up with too much bullshit at a company over time there would have to be a correction, leading either to the elimination of most of the bullshit or the downfall of the company.
If one believes most jobs or a great proportion of them are bullshit then that person should refrain from complaining about MBAs and their cost cutting measures getting rid of jobs - because probably those jobs were the bullshit ones.
(on edit - assuming bullshit jobs are a disease of the employment place I think for the sake of analogy the percentage should be the same as the flu, so 5 to 20 percent in a company, if a company has 20% or more bullshit jobs that company has an epidemic on its hands and needs to do something. If it's 5% ah, that you can live with.)
It's a process that is going at a glacial pace pretty much everywhere, sadly.
This thread is about low wage workers.
> I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc
Why, because you don’t understand what they do? Imagine explaining to those people that Google has “engineers” who just maintain the source repository. I bet they’d think it was a “bullshit job.”
It's no secret that the top-5 tech firms hire large numbers of lobbyists and corporate lawyers [1].
And I don't think it is a stretch to say that some well-paid engineering positions include work such as maintaining built-in-house duplicates of open source software, or enforcing arbitrary coding standards, that could be considered "box ticking". Present company excluded, of course.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/us/politics/amazon-apple-...
I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why.
Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario:
I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms at the customer's website. They had a clerk who would, once per hour, print all the forms that had been submitted, then take that stack of paper and place it on an unoccupied desk in a room on the other side of the building. She would then walk back to her own desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.
After a lot of interviews and digging, I found out the reason for this bizarre process: the unoccupied desk on the other side of the building used to be occupied by another clerk, whose job was to sort the forms based on their destination department, then walk to them to those departments. She would then come back to her desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.
Here's the thing though: she had retired 5 years ago. The stacks of paper that were being piled on her now unoccupied desk were simply shredded regularly by a third clerk about once a week, and it took that clerk four hours to shred everything because she was required to keep an Excel spreadsheet of how many of each form was being shredded. That Excel spreadsheet was then saved to a network drive, where it wasn't accessed by any user, ever.
You might be thinking, "wow, that's pretty crazy, but stuff like that is probably pretty rare." You would be very wrong. I charted out insane processes like this for ten years. Every company has boatloads of them. Bullshit jobs are not only invented, but they are also retained long after they are made redundant and completely unnecessary.
A.k.a. management & coordination is a hard problem.
What were the people receiving the forms from the retired person were doing with them ?
No, Costco for example I expect to not have automation because I'm bulk buying and don't want to deal with trying to fit all that on their weight scale for self checkout.
Also, Whole Foods doesn't SKU on all their produce products which makes this a pain for anyone trying to use self checkout.
Stores here in Canada like Loblaws, Metro, IGA, etc are rolling out self checkout. Thank goodness, I don't want to talk to people, asked if I'll donate $1 to something, etc.
Today, I went through Walmart cash checkout because I was buying 7 storage bins for a move. The entire thought process why I didn't go through self checkout:
- Don't have handheld bar scanner
- Someone probably going to stop me because they'll think I've put something inside of bins.
- There's almost no space on the self checkout to actually do large purchases.
People want convenient experiences. I saw older generations +65 starting to use self checkouts at grocery chains.
Spend time watching behavior. Same repeat that happened when McDonald's kiosks rolled out. Now, people get pissed when other people go to use the cash because it pulls someone off the line to deal with someone not using mobile order or the kiosk.
Yes, at least in a sense. Coordination failures are a thing. (See e.g. https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ for a readable introduction to the issue.)
Unfortunately the processes they are squeezing often involve budgets and salaries, like those of factory workers, teachers and nurses. Its a bit hard to sympathise with this kind of 'value' sometimes.
> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker > Grocery checkout automation is atrocious
I don't kniw about elsewhere but in NZ and Japan I'll pick self check out every time it's there. Its a bit sad on the human side of things but it is easier
In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.
> There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”
Any job that involves taking a handwritten form which then is processed or oral instructions could be eliminated by providing an interface for the person to input the data directly without having to go through the middle person.
I love it if it isn't during "rush hour," but some people take a long time to make up their minds when given a plethora of options. And then I seek out a counter person as they will just help the next person if someone hasn't made up their mind yet.
Right, but in general, people don't. Sure, there are some people who will go to the same fast food place every day, and after a week will be able to input their order blindfolded, but that's not the norm.
The people who get used to the interface and end up incredibly efficient are the paid cashiers who input hundreds of orders for 8 hours each day.