that last discussion was interesting... author and critic (troll?) going back and forth. i missed it the first time around because the idea of bullshit jobs is mostly bullshit[0], an egotistical effort to cheaply denigrate others. as such, the discussions around them tend to be shallow and tedious.

[0] https://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/bullshi...

Given that Graeber himself very clearly says "a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist", your assertion that the idea of bullshit jobs is "an egotistical effort to cheaply denigrate others" doesn't seem to make much sense.

it's a critique on the discussions, not necessarily the book/author.

i'm saying i expect more than some shallow dismissal of flipping burgers being so obviously bullshit to people who bang on keyboards, which is a dismayingly large proportion of most of these discussions, as well as the shallow solution to UBI all the things to fix it.

if it's not obvious what the value of a job is, whether or not it could be solved another way, then you're losing your compassion and empathy for other human beings, their lives, and their livelihoods.

You don't seem to understand the premise. Flipping burgers is manifestly not bullshit compared to filing TPS reports. People eat burgers.

That's not to say that there's no human value to a TPS report, somewhere down the line, but we're sufficiently divorced from it that it's impossible to tell.

not misunderstanding, that's basically my point as well, but that's not how these discussions typically unfurl, which is why an exhortation to better discussion is even needed.

I really hope he'll stop tolerating that crazy person or waiting for something sufficiently outrageous to happen. Assuming nothing changed since that 2018 comment [1], nothing will change for at least a few more years.

Suing for libel and making a formal complaint with Berkeley would be public service [2] at this point.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164707

[2]: not sure "public" is the correct word here, sorry

Though this is an older article from back when the book "Bullshit Jobs" was being promoted, this topic is perhaps worth a new look. In the era of COVID office closings and lists of "essential workers," the past few months have amounted to a massive experiment in which jobs did productive work in our society, and which did not. Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place.

In a related note, there's a front page news article about the PS4's manufacturing being almost completely automated by robots that have even replaced the fine motor skills of human hands, handling flexible tapes and ribbons. There is a series of photos of a factory with more robot arms than people. Much has been made over the past few years of automation and machine learning. Maybe, just maybe the prognosticators were not wrong, just early.

The crisis just illustrates our stratified, ossified society: the "essential" workers are those who barely get by. Supposedly important people ("I need to fly around all week") are not that important after all, but for many reasons some professions are able to extract much more value than they contribute (which is an essence of business, after all).

Sad to see, but not very surprising.

Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.

I'm quite young, and have gone from a minimum wage service worker to a well paid software engineer in a relatively short time. A couple years ago I remarked to my dad that it seemed the more I was paid, the less stressful my work was. He said that he had found the same in his career. At the same time, the more I am paid, the more difficult it is to find someone that knows how to do what I'm doing.

I know it's been said before, but it seems pay is not dependent on how useful to society you are, but is instead dependent on two factors working in tandem.

1) Do those with money perceive you to have a use?

2) How difficult is it to find someone else that can replace your use?

I can't help but wonder if stress to pay ratio works as an inverted bell curve. At the lowest levels of pay you find the most stress. Then we move to middle/lower-upper class levels of pay and find much less stress. To get above those levels of pay, you'll likely have to start your own company or work extreme hours at a high skill job and once again experience heightened levels of stress.

Yes but that does not change the fact that most of us are doing useless work in terms of value. Yes, there is a moat, yes one is not as replaceable (though that is not necessarily true) but a lot of our work is meaningless valueless crap.

I think the stress that people with lower pay experience is related to what companies can get away with due to lax employment laws.

This is very interesting to me. Why did you feel higher stress in lower wage positions?

I only ask because I worked low-to-minimum wage part time jobs from ages 14-22 before graduating from school and getting a "real" job, similar to SWE. I found the eact opposite: stress increased with $.

I always felt low stress in service jobs because I knew exactly what to do every moment, and knew exactly what happens if something goes wrong. Moreover, I knew I could find another job pretty quickly if worse came to worse - there's just so many places that need waiters, factory workers, cashiers, baristas...

In contrast, my new job often has vague tasks and expectations, constant evaluation against my peers, and much more complex outcomes - all of which drive stress for me.

So for me, I get stressed when I have less control over my work / time / etc.

The less you make, the more they tell you exactly what to do, when and how to do it and you lose flexibility. There's no trust.

As I've moved up, I'm largely trusted to know what I'm doing. I can basically set my own hours, do what work I think is impactful and nobody really checks in on me. Some days I accomplish very little and nobody cares, other days, I accomplish a lot.

Bonus points in that I have tons of employee protections (I wouldn't be fired without at least a large severance) and I have so much money saved that I don't need to work for long periods of time. My healthcare is covered and my living finances are less than a quarter of my base salary.

that's because you're talking about competency stress and the parent is talking about existential stress. because stress is primal, it's easy to conflate the two, but they're not the same.

as you get older, your ability to depend (at least as a fallback) on parents diminishes (in many dimensions, not just financially).

My guess would be (having had the exact same experience): - greater autonomy and less micro-management for skilled jobs - more job security because you are difficult to replace

On the other side high skill jobs are more stressful because the stakes are higher and the techniques for success are more uncertain.

In my experience, high skill jobs are less stressful when I am doing something I have prior work experience and I have confidence in my ability. When I don't they can be extremely stressful.

> high skill jobs are less stressful when I am doing something I have prior work experience ... When I don't they can be extremely stressful

This makes sense. I tend to jump between roles (DS, PM, consultant, etc.), which might account for some stress come to think of it...

I generally found that it's reverse.

In lower paid jobs, and especially in menial jobs like when I was selling newspapers on street corners for fixed salary in HS, you work fixed time and 100% check out at the end of the day. Next day is clean slate. At a more involved office job you'd still check out as far as work as concerned, but office politics / boss had a bad day / etc. carry over. As a generic SWE you can't ever fully check out because the state of the project, the long term goals and current problems are always in your head - both the work, and the people. As a highly paid SWE working on online system, you sometimes can literally never check out because of on call, and because if something goes really wrong they'd call you even if you aren't on call.

If you love your job it's great, or at any rate acceptable (I can never get used to on call, so it's a necessary evil for me). As soon as you are on a crappy project or team, it sucks. I'd rather sell newspapers than work on a crappy software project if it paid the same.

I think the false perception of less stress in higher paid jobs actually comes from money itself (and status). You both have more cushion and so feel less dependent on a job, and are/feel less easily replaceable.

Essential workers are not scarce. You need someone to do the job, but there is no shortage of qualified candidates. Hiring and training them is not a huge investment, and they are somewhat fungible. A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity.

On the other hand, a few disgruntled knowledge workers can send a company into a death spiral if enough of them quit at once.

I guess companies don't care so much about their labourers, because there's an unlimited supply of them. Their skilled workers are perceived as an investment, because they're expensive to replace and shape the direction a company takes.

I was having a similar conversation a few days ago. I think that people are conflating how essential a function is with how essential any given person in that function is.

It's simply not true that all essential workers do low skilled jobs.

It's not. I accidentally implied that, but that wasn't my intention.

That doesn't apply at all to doctors, pharmacists, firemen, police and most essential workers.

That's true. I guess I was just thinking about specific people and answered to that.

This argument was used by any number of consumer electronics outlets, and it was never true. Expert floor staff are not fungible. Only poor floor staff are fungible.

It's not even true in department stores. It's simply not true that you can pick someone off the street and train them to sell cosmetics, high-end clothing, or even furniture in a few days.

You can train them to do a bad job quickly, but they're not going to find their stride for a good few months.

I dunno, that may once have been true, back when expertise on the show room floor was either par for course or else a competitive differentiator. To me it looks like that the industry made a conscience decision to cost cut expertise from hiring equation. Essentially, the big box guys (who hire most of the employees) are practically self serve. The associates are certainly fungible.

When I was working retail (in consumer electronics), this was not the case. I was replaced quickly and effortlessly. My resignation wasn't the mic drop I thought it would be.

They don't need experts. They pay minimum wage. They need people to push extended warranties.

> A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity.

Worked in food service and not retail, but I'm going to call bull on this.

If even one of our best left we were screwed for however many weeks it took to find a replacement.

That is when they give two weeks, not when they walk out.

You are mixing up essential and scarce.

Here is an analogy: Just because water is essential does not imply that water will be always more expensive than gold if water is available everywhere.

This may sound harsh but it is almost a universally true law of human behavior.

> Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.

Keep going! You've already made it about 90% of the way to Marxism. The interests of capital and labor are at odds, because capital has no way to extract value from the world without labor. This means capital has strong incentives to keep labor in its place, which leads to situations where billionaires can massively increase their wealth as a result of a global pandemic that shuts down much of the economy, but workers suffer as a result.

I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future.

There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US.

Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx.

Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.

> I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly.

Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles).

You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants.

The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.

As I said, everything is a spectrum, even Adam Smith wanted capitalism with regulation.

What would you say defines Marxism and Leninism? I have spent countless hours and have arrived at the conclusion that most definitions of these are inconsistent and informal.

I will be happy to engage with you if you have a formal and concise definition and I will be ready to change my stance based on that.

Have you considered that "more socialist" countries might have done better had other countries not felt the need to "bring democracy to," or "liberate" them? Or lured them into massive arms races that ultimately neither side could afford?

A lot of people from India and China move to the US. How did the US interfere in India?

Shouldn’t socialist countries be more robust to interference from capitalist countries if they are inherently better?

Otherwise, they seem weak geopolitically and won’t survive long.

Both India and China are market economies. Market economies have the property that certain people can succeed wildly, but also that certain people are left behind. This explains why people leave.

How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question.

That is false.

India was a socialist nightmare. Only recently has it switched to a market economy. It is still recovering and will take decades to recover. This is all well-known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...

China recently lost its legal status as a market economy.

https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/china-lose...

I thought these were well known. If you are willing to rectify this, I am willing to engage more, but respectfully decline to continue further otherwise.

> How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question

You can’t that’s why pure communism/socialism is a disaster almost always.

A better question is why other countries with US interference like Japan and South Korea have ended up being much more richer than before. North Korea without any US interference is much much poorer. (It is almost like a controlled experiment) Why is that?

I am aware of this. India has been a market economy since the 90s. Is almost 30 years not enough for the magic of markets to improve the situation?

Regarding China, "legal status" is irrelevant. Prices in China are set via market mechanisms. That is a market economy, period. Your link boils down to this:

> According to the EU, China subsidizes its industries to a great extent, particularly steel and aluminum, making their sales prices in the international market unfair.

This is essentially saying China is using market mechanisms that the EU does not like.

Moreover, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy#Marke..., "Julan Du and Chenggang Xu analyzed the Chinese model in a 2005 paper to assess whether it represents a type of market socialism or capitalism. They concluded that China's contemporary economic system represents a form of capitalism rather than market socialism...."

Rectified.

In response to your edit: "Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang. North Korea is also a market economy.

In what way has the US interfered in South Korea or Japan since 1950? How does that compare to being sanctioned and embargoed by every major Western nation? Would you like to hear about Cuba instead?

> Is almost 30 years not enough for the magic of markets to improve the situation

We are leaving out the 300 years of colonialism. And 50 years of socialism. 30 years is not enough to move a billion people out of the ills of socialism and colonialism

The US stopped interfering in South America by the 90s. By your own logic, how long do the socialist countries in South America need to recover from US interference? 10 years? 30 years? 100 years? 1000 years?

>In response to your edit: "Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang. North Korea is also a market economy.

You are missing the point here. The illicit market economy is what is helping them survive the legal socialist economy. Thank the market economy for saving the NK.

> In what way has the US interfered in South Korea or Japan since 1950? How does that compare to being sanctioned and embargoed by every major Western nation? Would you like to hear about Cuba instead?

Care to tell me first how the US has interfered in Mexico?

Please stop. Ideological and nationalistic flamewar on the internet is tedious, predictable, and therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please stop. Ideological and nationalistic flamewar on the internet is tedious, predictable, and therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Which part offends: my defense of the claim that India, China, and North Korea are market economies, or the part about how the US interferes in other nations' affairs? Can you be more specific as to what I'm to stop? Did I not mention UBI and land value taxes enough, or something?

None of that. It's the tedious and predictable aspects.

These arguments are an endless carousel. They turn nasty and convince no one. If that's the game you want to play on the internet, there are other carnivals.

Do you think no one in the US suffers horribly?

Consider the bankruptcies, the imprisonment-for-profit, the financial corruption, the racist police violence, the homelessness, the opiate scandals, the gun violence, the fact that most of the population has no safety net of any kind - and that's nowhere close to being a complete list.

There were privileged people in the Soviet Union who were doing just fine, and they had no interest in how well the system was working for everyone else.

We know how that ended.

It's very, very unwise to assume that the US can't possibly make the same mistake.

The central argument about bullshit jobs (the book) was that automation did, in fact, replace a huge number of jobs in the economy. Maybe even as many as were predicted to be lost in the worst doom and gloom scenarios. Graeber's contention is that we simply watered down the work and spread it around to more and more people.

I think that is not too unreasonable to suspect. OTOH, I find it particularly frustrating that we have so many large, structural and environmental problems that we need to solve and so much of the workforce feels that they are accomplishing absolutely nothing. Marx's alienation of labor is conceptually alive and well in today's economy. Sadly, it appears that capitalism has mis-priced the actual resource allocation - workers are complicit with low-value, low-effort jobs, and the market structure will not appropriately reward those willing to tackle "the big problems".

It's unfortunate that "essential" became the label for shelter-in-place-exempt jobs, because it implies that non-exempt jobs are frivolous. That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid.

I'm glad that the coffee shop can stay open for the sake of everyone involved, but I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist. The ability to build a search engine (or any other piece of the Internet) from home doesn't preclude its ability to be fundamental infrastructure for our lives.

I know your point is more nuanced than that, and I know it's true: some jobs aren't very productive. But it also points to this false dichotomy of essential vs frivolous jobs that seems to be shortcutting a lot of people's ability to reason about the economy right now, so I thought it was worth tagging-on to your comment to point that out.

> That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid.

This is the closest we've come to an exploitable global crisis that could serve to precipitate the long-hoped-for revolution. Do not expect even the well-reasoned to leave it on the table.

> I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist

Very, very strong disagree.

Though I do agree with the general concept here that many essential jobs can be done from home. I also think many companies chose to use their "essential" status to drag people to the office who should've stayed home. Management personnel by and large should've stayed home even when line jobs had to be done on-site. HR, finance, etc. are great examples of staff that should work from home even at an "essential" business, that I often found did not switch to WFH during stay-at-home orders.

Many essential businesses could have half their staff working from home and continue essential services, but many would just say their business doesn't work remote and call it good.

Most of the "past few years" discussion happened when many thought AGI was just around the corner, which would allow robots to take over virtually every job. But it's become clear that isn't happening any time soon.

> Many companies switching to remote work have noticed no drop in productivity, but there's two possible explanations for that. Either people are just as productive at home or most workers were never producing much in the first place.

It's neither of those. The drop in demand for the fruits of that productivity has more than balanced out any drop in supply of productivity. Some products and services have a more elastic and/or variable demand than others.

I came up with two more explanations for not noticing productivity drops that I find as plausible as the ones you described: Companies are bad at measuring productivity and companies are trying to save face. I believe there is some truth in all of these explanations.

This is a 2018 book review of David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs.'

It seems like an exceedingly interesting time to revisit this book, though! Keynes in the 1930's predicted fewer of us would be working today, but we still struggle to maintain low unemployment rates, presumably with lots of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs filling the gaps in people's times, and producing a huge amount of collective grief along the way.

And now in the midst of a truly epic global slowdown, the food systems are still functioning, and people still have shelter, so long as we have laws to protect against evictions... Why not get rid of a lot of the bullshit: deploy Basic Income and live freer lives? What if we were working 10 hours a week to cover life's niceties, and had an extra 30 hours to write more music, invent more math, write our novels (and read the new deluge thereof), or truly master starcraft? Or pass on our skills to the next generation with a fraction of the class sizes?

> What if we were working 10 hours a week

Funny but this is the exact number of hours I am working per week at the moment.

How do you do that? Are you able to pay all your bills?

An extra 30 hours to teach our children ourselves. The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought.

The number one way to prevent people from seeking the truth is to saddle them with financial stress.

> The nuclear family is the last bastion of independent thought.

What does this even mean?

A generous interpretation: The "nuclear family" allows children to spend more time receiving personalized education from adult family members. Single parents working 3 jobs don't really have time to help with homework.

An alternate interpretation: It makes it so that the school board doesn't get to decide what "true" is.

I think this will lead to inflation. Why should essential workers keep working if everyone else can stay home and do poetry? The natural response is to raise prices for their labor. Obviously if the same amount of money is obtainable with 1/4th the work (by "non-essential" people), the money is worth 1/4 of its former value.

Was watching the first few sessions of Great Courses The Black Death. The Black Death essentially led to the end of Feudalism, the rise of the merchant class and the rise of cities. Since there were a lot less serfs (in some hard hit areas 50% less) to do the farming Feudal lords raised wages to attract serfs from neighboring serfdoms.

Because slavery is immoral. And that's what you essentially need to do this. Even with extra steps, it's slavery.

That's the big question about automation that I always ask that just gets handwaved away with "We'll pay a lot" or "People will want to".

There's going to be a job gap, if there's not one now, where we have far more people than jobs that are needed.

So the answer for the unemployment situation is basically accepting the post-scarcity nature of the world and just kind of let people live. No means-testing, no qualifications, just people getting X because it's the right thing to do.

So how do you get people to do anything they don't want to? How do you get people doing the jobs no one may want to do but will need to be done?

Right now the system is rolling due to inertia and the promise that this is temporary. Just because something can be tolerated temporarily, it doesn't mean we can sustain it indefinitely.

And I'm not saying things should stay the same. I'm saying that we are not prepared for the changes that are coming. We do not know the answers to the questions we're about to face. It's going to get difficult.

I would argue that for the workers lowest on the totem pole, we're already in a situation not far from what you're calling slavery: people stuck in jobs they hate, with no flexibility, and the threats of crushing debt and eviction to keep them in place. Treatment of low-skill labor is already immoral under our pseudo-capitalist system; can we do better?

More on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

One quibble though: I would extend this to basically everybody who wasn't born wealthy.

We can probably do a lot better, but we are on the road to making it worse.

And I know people like to talk about "wage slavery" and to a large degree, they have a point. However, we didn't call what our ancestors did "subsistence slavery". They had to work to subsist. They had to grow or forage their own food, build their own shelter, etc.

So the concept of "working to survive" is pretty much the norm and not the exception already.

And as hard as that can be, we are approaching the time when we will be past that. Where the vast majority of people won't have to work to survive. And, hooray for them, but I'm still concerned for the minority.

> So how do you get people to do anything they don't want to? How do you get people doing the jobs no one may want to do but will need to be done?

Don't pay them enough to have everything they want. Everyone deserves food, water, healthcare, and shelter. Basic income covers those things (I'd go so far as to just have those things be the "basic income" instead of money).

For anything like Netflix, Rock Climbing gym membership, plane tickets, or video games, you could need a job to pay for them.

I think many of the 'nice to haves' would eventually become basically free under UBI. As people are freed to engage in low-capital creative work, we'll see a lot more of everything, driving down the prices. Similar to Bandcamp, or indie games on Steam: a massive pool of highly-skilled amateurs which eventually drives down prices.

A job doing what?

Imagine automation doing all of the basic things. And most of the others.

Imagine you can only have 2% of the population employed doing the remaining jobs.

Are you saying only 2% of the population deserves Netflix? Or air travel?

Another way to look at this is that maybe our current economic system is failing to find productive ways to put us to work, even though the world is unfinished. We have a world on a collision course with climate change and instead of bullshit, hundreds of millions of people could be diverted to geoengineering and green energy projects. We have housing crises in dozens of cities, but our economies are not putting enough people to work building housing. Children are being left under-educated, elderly under-cared for. Billions live in poverty, but our economies are not creating material comfort for them. And once we take care of all that, we have a system full of dead planets and moons that could be turned into gardens. There is plenty to do, but a failure of incentives to do it.

I have often thought we should have a military style group that teaches kids the discipline and self respect of the military but without the killing aspects and then out them to use rehabbing natural areas, cleaning up manufacturing sites, teaching kids, etc. It's sort of like the civilian conservation corps of the new deal but with a wider scope.

Curiously, a lot of the big problems you mention can be mitigated by slowing things down. We're seeing directly what happens to emissions when we reduce the number of people commuting and flying on a daily basis. And getting rid of bullshit jobs frees up a lot of people for child and elder care, for people they care about beyond their economic relationship.

All of these tasks seem like more useful than assigning jira tickets. How do we fix the incentive structure to incentivize all these tasks?

I'm genuinely interested in helping, but I'm not sure how except through some effective charity.

I feel like you've done a great job of summing up what a large percentage of white collar workers are thinking.

On a personal level I sacrifice income in order to work for an environmental nonprofit. I believe my work is important to my organization and that my organization truly provides value to the world. I also think that very few people have the luxury of making choices misaligned with economic incentives and that preaching personal responsibility is a ridiculous cop out that is often argued in bad faith by leaders that want to avoid addressing an issue. So I think the only way to change the incentives is to change the governance. Vote, protest, advocate, make campaign contributions, run for local political office. Political action may seem like an underwhelming answer, but it is how us humans organize our societies.

I'm one of the those people that have the luxury of making choices misaligned with their economic incentives. What you've mentioned is great, actionable advice.

I also agree that personal responsibility is a cop out, but at least for myself I can switch jobs to an organization that seems to be making the world a better place, beyond the kool aid.

I'll look into what political action I could take. I really appreciate the level headed advice.

I'll give it a stab:

> climate change

Implement a high carbon tax/fee, and companies are now willing to spend money to reduce their carbon footprint, as long as the cost to reduce is less than the tax (so the tax has to high enough).

For the geoengineering case, you can simply to the same thing, in reverse: offer money for carbon capture.

Both of these create an opportunity for new businesses and jobs, since companies usually don't have the climate related expertise in house.

> housing crisis

From what I see, the incentives are already there to build more housing, but the government (and those who already live there!) in many jurisdictions puts up as many barriers as possible to prevent people from actually acting on those incentives. The solution, then, is to convince the government and those who live there to allow people to build (there's already a long line of organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, who'd gladly start build tomorrow if they could).

As dougmwne mentioned, both of these ultimately require political action. I'm not aware of what organizations are advocating for a carbon tax, but in the case of housing, YIMBY does some good work.

to be more blunt, the bullshit jobs are those chasing returns for capital disconnected from commensurate return to the public good, leaving little to tackle meaningful issues.

corrupting forces work relentlessly against economic systems to break the tie between capital returns and returns to public good (a key tenet of capitalism, incidentally), to serve the former at the expense of the latter.

we keep failing to directly face this most critical distortion to incentives in economic systems. fixing that would lead to a better world for us all, not just the selfish and greedy.

We will never eliminate human greed or selfishness. It is a common thread throughout all societies and historical eras. Our challenge is to build a political and economic system that will produce optimal outcomes no matter the "moral fortitude" of the agents working within the system. At its most basic, it probably requires a re-work of currency, though I think we need innovations throughout our economy and government. It's clear to me that this "ism" has't been invented yet, because once it is, it will quickly dominate the world economy as it organizes our labor more efficiently.

yes, the ingenuity of capitalism is redirecting selfishness and greed toward societally productive uses, rather than attempting to eliminate them. but that mechanism has largely been subverted from a relentless onslaught over the last many decades (cartels, regulatory capture, etc.).

but i'm not sure why currency needs reworking? unless you mean the central banking system and where and how money gets injected into the economy?

(having just watched hamilton, the interesting bit to me how instrumental he was in the creation of our financial system as much as anything else--something that didn't stick from high school history apparently)

I mean money is a synthetic concept and can function however we define and people will continue to chase large amounts of it. Bitcoin was an interesting thought experiment but seemed on a trajectory to convert the planet's crust into mining hardware. Money should probably have some kind of variable decay factor similar to inflation or maybe some kind of antipolarity to prevent it from clumping into large, passive collections. Maybe it should decay faster in large accounts than small accounts or decay faster if it hasn't passed through a tax system recently. Maybe small amounts should automatically earn interest to encourage individuals to save emergency funds and very small amounts could grow rapidly to provide basic income. I see no reason that the rich should be able have generational wealth without much incentive to take risks.

ah, interesting to ponder.

but why not also question the role of inflation as (economic) motivator? this tenet forces us to consider monetary factors more than we might otherwise, given the limitations of money to represent everything we value (an idealized premise of economic system as efficient allocator).

the regulatory route is certainly fraught, but a steeply progressive tax on wealth (along with eliminating all the loopholes, like the lower capital gains tax) could drastically reduce money clumping. done well, it could encourage wealth building to a comfortable threshold, say $1MM, and then start to discourage greater wealth hoarding (without discouraging it completely or setting a max).

UBI will never be successful because it short-circuits the innate need to survive. Many people are not self-leaders and some will turn to drugs when they have no purpose to live. In this case, you've taken away their ladder to climb which is used to measure self-worth. Think about how many people struggle to find the discipline to exercise. People need structure, it's a fundamental part of being a pact mammal.

Surely there are nicer ways for people to find structure in their lives than the threat of utter ruin if they don’t perform the mandatory sacrifice?

That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc. With UBI, you'd need to replace that system-structure to reproduce those rewards[1]. This is not possible (or rather, the implications are disturbing).

The inability for many people to put the work ethic effort into building their own rewards is evident by the present time. People will take the easiest path possible to soften the realities of surviving[2]. This is also evident from the design choices behind successful, addicting platforms and video games.

[1] (ownership growth, material gains, physical gains (or rather, losses, since we are talking about fat/cholesterol, et. al), emotional growth, social network growth, personal network growth (trust))

[2] (economically, emotionally; all people, not just the poor)

UBI is also dangerous because it cannot be removed without wrecking havoc on society. It must remain successful, especially once the next generation is born into it.

> That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc.

No, especially jobs at the low end are not rewarding people for their hard work. At best most of these jobs just allow people to subsist.

And even at higher levels of income there is lots of work that's just meaningless. Yeah, they might be getting some financial rewards, but it might not be far off from just giving people financial rewards for playing some video game - I'm not necessarily saying we should do that, but that it would essentially have the same societal effect.

I have so much stuff I'm working on/want to work on but I have no time due to my 9-5. We don't need 100k/yr UBI, we need barely enough to cover basic rent and food so that people can survive working part time while starting businesses or furthering the arts and sciences.

Yea, a lot of people who aren't into that stuff would languish but it's not like they AREN'T languishing right now. How much value does making someone else rich bring to your life if you're pissing it away behind a KFC register?

People are forced into needing external management. The innate nature of life is to self-lead, but 15 years of being told to sit in a chair and listen to someone else blah-blah-ing will kill that idea.

We do want to be valuable to one another. Right now, we are valued by how much money we have. The dream of a UBI is to move beyond such a silly measurement of human worth and let the measure of value be based on actual deeds. We don't need a boss to tell us what to do. We just need to be a part of a community. Stuff happens, we respond.

With the lockdown, many were given permission to do nothing. And many, many people found ways to do something nonetheless. We seek to give, to participate, to find our own way.

The majority of people have so little imagination, they would have no idea what to do with their time.

Tiny anecdote:

I run a prototyping lab. I have one office-type employee, two assembly/mechanical peeps, and myself (electrical engineer and, well, it's my shop so I'll do what I need to do).

Due to COVID, I sent everyone home, and had to let go one of the assembly peeps, she found a new job so I'm not worried about her.

So it's just me in the shop right now.

The coding person is really happy about not having to commute and gets more done.

The remaining assembly person was given a nice solderng station, drill press etc. by me, and passes by whenever when t's time to drop off finished units and pick up parts. This person now tells me that they are working mostly at night, because they want to since they're nocturnal by inclination.

I am not looking at hiring someone else right now BECAUSE we are getting more done this way than how we used to!

The important thing to note here, was that the jobs that existed before were not bullshit from the perspective of you when you hired for those positions.

Now you may realize that those jobs may have not have had value and were possibly even counterproductive, and you seem to have done the rational thing given the info and eliminated those jobs.

But the jobs didn't have no purpose before. The purpose was misguided which exposed itself over time.

The "job" has somehow been elevated to a divine entity in American politics. Just "job". No regards for the quality of labor or product or compensation.

One cynical suggestion is that the economy is set up to keep people stressed with busywork and that it's not by accident.

The number one thing keeping me at my most-likely bullshit job is that health insurance in America is only affordable if you have an employer to foot the bill. If I was single, I don't think I would care much. But I'm married with three kids, and health insurance is a very effective retention tool.

> The number one thing keeping me at my most-likely bullshit job is that health insurance in America is only affordable if you have an employer to foot the bill.

I’d say that is not the number one thing. Even though you consider your job to be “most-likely bullshit” your employer is willing to pay you to do it

When your employer no longer wants you there, regardless of the cost of health insurance, you will not be employed

> I’d say that is not the number one thing.

Well, that's sort of presumptuous of you.

Also your response had nothing to do with my comment nor your rebuttal to my comment.

Yeah I can see that. Health insurance in this country is really expensive compared to what you actually get. If I had a whole family on my insurance then the out-of-pocket maximum would just barely not bankrupt me.

(2018)

edit: I started a poll at the time to see if HN readers had BS jobs [0]. Unfortunately didn't get much traction. But with n=8, the answer was "Yes".

Somebody, feel free to start a new poll. Hope it gets more popular this time around. I am really curious.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880159

How do you create a poll? I've never seen that before.

To be honest don't remember any more. I googled it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

I reject the premise of the book. Nearly all jobs are necessary or they wouldn't exist. The exception seems to be government excess and nepotism (these are a tiny minority of jobs). If a business could actually save money by laying people off that aren't doing anything, why don't they? Why don't their conpetitors? What about hiring someone to do nothing is more valuable than keeping that money instead?

"It’s also phenomenological. If you feel your job is bulls---, it probably is.", says the author

I disagree and maintain the view that the clear reason many people feel their jobs are "bullshit" is because they aren't fulfilled by them, because they aren't productive for a full 40 hours every week, and/or the work that they do accomplish goes unrecognized. Those all may very well be true, but it does not follow that those jobs might as well not exist.

There are a number of reasons to keep people around who aren't providing sufficient utility to a business (from the high-level business's notion of utility).

1. Fiefdoms. A manager is valued by the number of direct reports and charts they can direct upwards. As long as they aren't losing money, the business doesn't usually seek out perfect efficiency.

2. Historical. A position that had value 10, 20, 30 years ago continues to be filled (or is still filled by the same person or people) because "It's how we've always done it." No one with sufficient clout has stepped in to evaluate the situation and remove people.

3. Deliberate bullshitters. Ever seen a job done manually that you know a computer could do faster, more reliably, and with better accuracy? These people know the job isn't useful, or as useful as it should be, but they inhibit the improvement processes that should happen and retain their positions for a long time. They often make themselves important by inserting themselves into other critical business processes.

4. Regulatory. Does anyone really know what "QA" does? (Qualifier: Not testing, a specific person holding the QA title sitting over software and/or engineering) IME, this person usually just checks boxes when final qualification testing is done on critical systems, but few of the QAs I've known have actually brought value to the organization in this role. Most are there because the business knows they need it to meet legal or industry standards.

Markets aren't perfectly efficient, and a belief in their perfect efficiency isn't going to make it so.

Markets aren't purely efficient, but the author's claim that 40% of jobs don't need to exist is so wild and absurd I reject it out of hand. I suspect that the items you listed, while they or may not exist, would only cumulatively amount to a fraction of a fraction of the total jobs out there.

If his argument was "many of us could probably work fewer hours without significant deleterious consequences in terms of productivity" I would be far more open than to the claim that 40% of all jobs don't perform any valuable function.

Another reason is stock market cushion. Notice how stocks go up when companies lay people off. So instead of accumulating profits for a rainy day, which would just be taken for buy backs and dividends, they store away "reserves" in the form of people that they can cut. A bit like a hot air balloon ballast.

Even privately held companies can find the ballast useful. By inflating the employment numbers, they can simultaneously seem like a big company as well as one that promises huge efficiency gains for those buying it and willing to trim the fat.

The larger the organization, the more it can handle excess ballast. These are the ones who can often get rid of small competitors by buying them or by getting regulatory capture to get rid of them. That's part of the regulatory bit -- get politicians to craft regulations that only a large bureaucracy can fill and that is an immediate impediment to small-time competitors regardless of any other start-up costs.

> Nearly all jobs are necessary or they wouldn't exist.

Necessary to what end? Necessary for the survival of the individual holding the job? Perhaps, assuming they can't find any other job. Necessary for the functioning of society? Certainly not. And that is what this book is talking about. The jobs that exist - that if they disappeared - nobody would notice (or care).

I kinda thought the original article was BS. After all, who is more likely to be an authority about whether a job is useless or not: the person willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for it to be done, or some writer?

OTOH, I think there are jobs which could be removed, but the explanation for their existence is far more boring than some great conspiracy to create BS jobs: it's just path-dependency.

The businesses willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands dollars for these bullshit jobs to be done are usually massive faceless corporations where the incentives are far more complicated than you think - and many of them are fed by the government money printer. See many of the corporations bailed out in 2008. Also, anyone in technology who has worked in the IT department of a non-Valley company knows how much utter stupidity and bullshit is wasted on IT simply because no one understands how to do it properly.

Silicon Valley startups are far more efficient at IT and have fewer bullshit jobs, but their mission is often to attract more and more VC money to get acquired by some faceless corporation, or IPO to become a monopolistic rent-seeker. So they’re extremely efficient at working towards their bullshit end-goal.

I'm a big Graeber fan, and it's a good book; but one can get the gist of the phenomenon from the original viral essay: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

This is quite common with many recent books: they are an extended essay. Most essays: an extension of one catchy phrase.

And after that go on a speaking tour for big $ repeating the same points.

I tried reading the book, but stopped mid-way as it goes too far in unfounded deliberations. The essay is straight to the point.

Read the essay, ditch the book.

Ah, maybe the cup is half full, and with Covid there is one more source of good opportunities added to the others:

Net, if you want a good job and can't find one, that is, can't find someone to create a good job for you, then create a good job for yourself.

Historic opportunities: Fantastic, historic, resources -- computing, computing infrastructure, software tools, mathematical methods, and digital communications, all essentially dirt cheap and often essentially for free.

Exploit the resources and go for it! Create a great job for yourself!

You don't have a right to a subjectively not bullshit job. The purpose of your job as your employer sees it isnt to provide meaning in your life. If you think your job is bullshit, then search for a different one or quit, or suck it up and decided that your bullshit job is better than unemployment.

The only bullshit I smell here is these peoples utopian views on the nature and purpose of employment and their entitled attitudes.

I think you misunderstand the premise of the book. What they call a BS job is not the one you dislike, or find it a drudgery. It's rather the one you don't understand the purpose of.

I don't misunderstand the premise at all. Whether your job has purpose or not isn't for the employee to decide. Thats for the employer to decide. It's your job to decide whether you want to trade your time for their money.

If they decide they want to pay you to do something, and you decide that you want to take their money, than your subjective evaluation of whether the job has purpose is irrelevant as long as you keep the job.

keep licking dem boots

By understanding the nature of the system I work in, i make a set off tradeoffs that work for me and its treated me very well over my life.

I promise you I do a whole lot less boot licking than average and I'm happy to bootlick when I decide the trade off is in my favor on a case by case basis.

The people who end up licking boots are the ones who can't see the reality of their situations and go in with unrealistic expectations. Then they complain when things aren't working out for them.

I think the idea here is that employers are paying people for something because they believe it provides value, but it isn't actually providing value. In terms of "should this position exist at the company" the employer gets final say, but if my boss pays me to sit alone in a room and do nothing all day that's objectively purposeless regardless of what my boss says.

An employee's perception of a job not having purpose can have a large impact on their productivity (humans in general tend to do badly when they're expected to do tasks they see as pointless for too long). Because of this, it's in the employer's interest to either explain the value an employee provides to the company sufficiently well that the employee doesn't feel that their job is pointless. If there is no way to convince the employee of that, the employee is likely either unqualified to understand their duties or genuinely doing a job that doesn't need to be done.

I don't really disagree with anything here. Lots of jobs are probably counterproductive to the employer, and probably equally suck from the employees perspective.

But the only entity which gets to make the call for if that job should exist at the end of the day is the employer.

If you don't believe any malicious intent to provide intentionally purposeless jobs on the side of the employer (and while you could say many bad things about modern corporations, I don't think they have any incentives to do this specific bad thing) , the only rational assumption is that their organizational structure, to the best of its decision making ability, thinks the existence of that job does benefit their bottom line.

I think people are reading my response as being some kind of corporate apologetics, and from my opinion that couldn't be further from the case. I intentionally stay far away from large corporate entities in terms of jobs because I think they suck. My point is that is the only vote any off us get and that is the way it should be at the end of the day.

Complaining that some big Corp isn't providing purpose to you is the same as complaining about gravity. I mean you have a right to do it, but you aren't changing anything.

edit: I'll make one exception here. If a corporation was trying to rent seek in the sense that hiring a person who does literally nothing gave them a tax incentive or something, you could end up with an employee who has literally no functional purpose within the organization. They would still be serving a purpose as a proxy for the rent seeking but from their perspective they would be doing nothing.

This is still not a believable scenario in my mind as they employer would already be paying them and would probably have them do some other thing as well. Also the job would still have purpose it would just be very abstract.

> Whether your job has purpose or not isn't for the employee to decide. Thats for the employer to decide.

Says who? The point is, we are free to define what a BS job is anyway we want. This book simply postulates that the job is BS if a person performing the job thinks it is. You are free to come up with alternative definitions.

- A job is BS if a congress committee designates it as such.

- A job is BS if NYTimes editorial board says it is.

- A Job is BS if employer files for bankruptcy.

For me, the definition adopted by the book is at least not worse than the alternatives. Once we defined it we can talk about how many BS jobs there are etc. Or, to rephrase, how many people think they have a BS job.

> It's your job to decide whether you want to trade your time for their money.

And yes, I can trade my time for their money and still have freedom to call their job BS.

> Says who?

Says the company who created the job. They created the job you think is bullshit. They have the right to do so. If you want to make this bullshit job not exist, they are the one you'd have to convince.

What is your goal here? Sure I think a lot of these jobs are BS too. The point is it doesn't matter at all what you or I think unless you're advocating for some specific change.

Congress as far as I know has never outlawed a job for being pointless nor do they have any authority as far as I know to do so.

The NY Times can say whatever they want about any job in the world but they don't have any say in the issue.

If the company goes out of business than the problem resolves itself.

So is your goal to complain to the internet that you don't like the fact that some job exists. If so, sure, scream to the skies about how dumb these jobs are.

If you are saying something should change, that's when the stuff I'm talking about is relevant because you are going to find that your perception of them being bullshit does not give you any avenue to make them not exist.

I love that it's considered entitled to imagine creating a world that's not based on the machinery of capitalism and subjecting people to work jobs that are created by fealty to business.

It's possible to be economically productive and consider the methods in which we create our economy. We are capable of that.

Sure, go start your own company and do whatever the hell you want. Go start a commune and grow radishes and have drum circles. I'm not saying that sarcastically, that actually sounds great and you have the absolute right and ability to go do it and create something purposeful for your life.

But if you go work for Johnson and Johnson what makes you think you are entitled to them providing purpose for you? I mean demand it all you want, they aren't going to give it to you and they shouldn't. They bulk produce soap. It isn't their concern what you subjectively think is purposeful. They need someone to inspect the labels on those containers. The purpose is that it makes them money, not that it provides you happiness and that is the way it should and always will be.

If the job is indeed necessary to bulk produce a household necessity like soap, then that’s not what is defined as a “bullshit job” by Graeber. Producing soap, no matter how boring, is not a bullshit job. He’s talking about jobs that literally do nothing useful for anyone, could be removed with no consequences, not even to the company paying them. These jobs exist, and I’ve seen it.

This is total nonsense. Are you suggesting that there are companies out there, who are making money but do literally nothing?

Or are you suggesting that within companies that do something, there are people who are paid staff but who have no job description?

That doesn't make any sense. Every company claims it does something and claims that every employee has some role. The bullshit jobs part is when people perceive that it doesn't actually matter, not when they literally do nothing and have no job description.

I challenge you to present an example of a bullshit job, given your own criteria, that doesn't also meet mine. I assure you can't because it essentially tautologically cannot exist.

Hedge fund.

I once worked as a software engineer at a YC startup which claimed to provide some kind of an “enhanced credit report” for landlords to check their prospective tenants. Millions of people had used their software. When I checked their codebase I found out that they literally just pulled an existing Equifax report, repackaged it in a slightly different format, and made up some completely bullshit numbers out of thin air (some were literally random numbers that could not be reproduced even with the same inputs). This startup received several rounds of funding in the millions of $ and had over a dozen software engineers.

What does this have to do with bullshit jobs? If the company exists solely to repackage credit scores via marketing and some ui work, and everyone on pay role is doing something related to those tasks than none of them have bullshit jobs. They may have jobs that you don't like or understand the need for but that's not what a bullshit job is.

>The only bullshit I smell here is these peoples utopian views on the nature and purpose of employment and their entitled attitudes.

Shame on these people! Wanting to contribute to society in a meaningful way! The entitlement! Kids these days...

Shame on them for expecting purpose to be handed to them by some employer.

They should want to contribute to society and they should find a way to go do it. But that's not the job of literally every employer. It's their job as a person.

Read the article, not just the headline, my corporatist friend.

I read the book and got the gist but this one getting blessing from Bloomberg feels more like foreshadowing of the white collar purge by wall street cabal.

More often, the Messenger is part of the message!

Most of the Federal government offices have been shut down since end of February barring a few “essential” services. Yet we seem to be functioning normally. Perhaps 70-80% of these jobs are bull shit jobs ?

Tell the people who are still waiting for their federal stimulus checks that things are "functioning normally."

Maybe I'm fortunate... I don't have a BS job, I'm a programmer. I would suspect that most programmers would feel the same. Maybe we have the last useful job?

Eh. That depends what you're programming. I've definitely worked on some projects that left me wondering why it was considered useful.

I second that: Outlook forms design and it's VB 'macros\programming' circa 2001.

Still gives me nightmares.

What if you work at social media company? i.e., Facebook newsfeed algorithm.

Be thankful. Most of us aren't that fortunate, but I haven't met many that would be OK with admitting that - work makes too big part of our lives, and admitting that it doesn't have any big meaning takes some guts

I and other people in my team work pretty hard but I have the feeling a lot of the projects we am working on are ultimately BS. A lot of companies are probably BS in total.

Yeah, doctors save lifes but it isn't as useful as being a programmer.

When it comes to programming, a lot of the higher-paying positions are mostly bullshit around advertising/marketing or the infrastructure supporting that.

There is non-bullshit programming out there, but it's usually hidden away because it's about supporting existing, real-world projects that often use "legacy" technologies that aren't considered cool anymore.

I’m a programmer but I do the exact job mentioned in the article as the most bullshit: call centers / IVRs. But at least mine don’t suck and pass information back and forth unlike the example.

Maybe you're one of the few lucky programmers who actually build something useful.

But I think a lot of developers actually build software that is used by the same people mentioned in the book/article to be more productive at doing their bullshit jobs. And they're happy about it because it feels like they're providing real value to real people.

Also, most of the "enterprise" code I've seen written in the past couple of years was written to justify some big budgets and salaries, while the actual value provided by the related projects was questionable at best.

It's just that when you're a developer focusing on solving a problem you've been assigned, you're just to happy playing with your new toy to even ask yourself if you're actually solving a real problem or that shiny new feature is just something added by someone in a backlog to justify his salary.

> But I think a lot of developers actually build software that is used by the same people mentioned in the book/article to be more productive at doing their bullshit jobs.

I believe Graeber calls it second-order bs jobs.

I certainly felt like my programming jobs were bullshit at times. I've worked on tiny, abstract parts of gigantic businesses, and had long meetings to discuss even tinier aspects of that work, only for the department to be axed or the project shelved.

Now I run a website that tells people how to solve problems that are important to them. I find it a lot more rewarding.

> I don't have a BS job, I'm a programmer.

Honestly I have to suppress the urge to laugh heartily at this statement while I recall all the times over my career that I've seen software rewritten and reinvented not only for no tangible gain, but often to its determent!

I mean, my god man, we currently work in an industry where it is considered reasonable to have a chat program take seconds to load and occupy gigabytes of memory, where the addition a one-off uncustomizable theme is a headline worthy event, and a 1.5Ghz proc with 8GB RAM that runs off <5W is considered 'woefully inadequate' to run desktop software.

I'll say this for current tech though: the high-end computer games look really really good.

> we currently work in an industry where it is considered reasonable to have a chat program take seconds to load and occupy gigabytes of memory

Poor quality output of the field being viewed as valuable in the market is the exact opposite of a BS job.

Bullshit has real jobs hanging off it. You can be a hedge fund day trading, and have real cleaners cleaning real toilets.

That depends on what it is you're programming, surely.

Plumbers and electricians are a lot more useful than programmers.

That website had too many annoyances and content blockers that I had to leave (which wasn’t easy either). I’ll remember Bloomberg. Same with Forbes.

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think COVID has essentially proven the theory behind the book.

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