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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Could be but I am not so sure. There is something I've seen in at least 10 organisations I worked for: middle managers are afraid their budgets will be reduced if they fire someone and never re-hire the position, so they actively go out of their way to think of a very niche and, yes, bullshitty, activity for them to do.

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.

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In my job I see that the managers are focused on automation to cut lower status jobs but I never see them questioning whether anyone in the huge hierarchy of managers is necessary. I think this is because if they question other managers, their own job might be called into question as well. Also, managers tend to think that managing is an important job.

It is indeed a vicious cycle.

I do not doubt that there must be some jobs that are bullshit, I might also assume some companies have more than others because those companies are broken in some way, or perhaps so profitable in some specific divisions that they can afford to have plenty of bullshit around and not even notice it. Finally it might be that some jobs are bullshit part of the time and other parts of the time really important.

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.)

All of what you said is correct. That being said, the natural process of trying hard to eliminate BS or die is taking way too long. People just like being cozy -- the BS job employees, the managers, the bosses who like the quarterly graphs, everyone.

It's a process that is going at a glacial pace pretty much everywhere, sadly.

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