Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the bs work hypothesis is it assumes important human work is like a horse's work. The horse spends an hour pulling a carriage, the work is measurable and continuous.

The most valuable thing humans do are nothing like that. They involve coming up with new ideas, resolving conflict, persuading people to do things, and fixing problems. No one knows how to measure this kind of work in terms of inputs and outputs and it is clear when it is happening successfully it involves a lot of downtime and extraneous communication. Also, it's often times really unclear who the key or effective people are in this kind of work even in success. So you may need ten people developing scripts -- nine of whose work is going to be cast aside-- to get the one really valuable film script. And yes, as the author points out a lot of people exploit that pretend to be doing something useful when they aren't.

The growth of this kind of work isn't a new sickness in society, it is that we need less people working like horses and we need more people doing work we can't measure the input of effort or the output of work.

This is people saying their own jobs are useless, not other people judging their jobs as useless.

Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens. I worked at a firm that fired its entire marketing team. There was no effect on sales that anyone could notice. They just made bad ads that had no effect on anything.

You don't understand what I am saying. >> This is people saying their own jobs are useless

Yes, people have jobs that they know are useless. They know they are just going through the motions. They are in complicated organizations that can't measure their value and they know they are free riding. However, there are also people in the same type of organizations who think they are really valuable, who may actually have a negative value. My point is that in certain types of work it is hard to measure and this results in poor attribution or exploitation (pretending you are doing something).

>> Ultimately it is testable. Have people quit or get fired and see if anything bad happens.

No, that's exactly what I disagree with. You are also thinking about work the way a horse does it and not considering real world situations. Let's say I have three development execs at a movie studio and I fire one. Does something bad happen? I am still going to pick a script from one of the other two and it will be a hit or a flop. That tells me nothing about what the work out put of the third fired executive, which I might not be able to judge the impact of until I look back a few years. I know-- from experience-- that is the same with the creative director of a video game. You may not know for sure if their ideas are good or if they are did a good job unless you see through what they are doing. Or artists who are most time the useless, or mediocre, but every now and then produce an essential piece of key art.

In case it isn't obvious I work in entertainment. But I believe their are similar cases in software engineering, recruiting, strategy planning, human resources, general leadership, etc. Where firing a person tells you nothing about what they would have done had they worked for a year.

(edited for spelling)

My team handles all code, documentation and release through Github.

I was asked (more like forced to) have someone in my team copying zips of our releases and converting all code documentation into google doc files (with company logo, proper format,…). All of this code and documentation is for internal use only.

No one has ever read any of those documents, since the only people that would use it are in my team, who obviously prefer not having to fill a whole page of useless fluff just to save a useful command or a quick note about the method they just wrote.

There’s a LOT of BS in jobs, even in tech.

For the sake of that person's sanity, I hope they were able to automate the generation of these write-only files from the actual documentation on GitHub.

As programmers, we have the ability to automate such things (given enough time).

Not everybody is so lucky.

i did exactly this...

i worked for a couple of months as a data entry and my job was to convert a bunch (thousands) of pdf files into excel spreadsheets. Since the format of the files was the same (because they were generated by a program) it wasn't hard to automate this job...

Also i disliked the company so i didn't tell it to anybody

You are doing horse work-- copying and converting files-- directed by a decision maker who is making bad decisions. It's easy to measure your output. Sadly the work you do is useless because you are being directed by someone for whom the quality of their decision (in your opinion, which btw sounds like is not getting traction) is bad.

PS: You need to learn about doing the non horse work of inventing ways to get people to listen to you when you say your time is being wasted. That's work that is hard to measure, unlike copying files, but that we would both agree is valuable.

I mean, a bullshit job is someone who spends their entire workday in meetings, answering e-mails and generating reports. None of which is useful if it isn't actually in support of _real_ work.

If you were to mediate conflicts all day between super talented, but very quarrelsome, experts: that's useful work. If you spend your entire day mediating conflicts between mediocre developers bikeshedding over logging frameworks, a topic that only came up because of nihysim: that's a bullshit job. Those developers are not useful, and neither are you.

> I mean, a bullshit job is someone who spends their entire workday in meetings, answering e-mails and generating reports. None of which is useful if it isn't actually in support of _real_ work.

What counts as real work? How many levels of indirection is allowed?

Exactly one. The whole point of supporting someone doing real work is that you are valuable to that person and therefore your work is real. The moment the number of levels of indirection can go beyond 1 is where it spirals to infinity, and you enter the bureaucratic nightmare world.

That's completely arbitrary. Why not 0? Why not exactly 4?

It might be arbitrary, but it doesn’t have to be. You can measure the human perception of indirection. The trolley proplem has a different answer if you order someone to pull the lever instead of pulling the lever your self. The Milgram experiment only works if there is at least one level of indirection, and works better the more levels there are.

I would guess an expert anthropologist would know about this cognitive effect and count for it.

I take your point, but citing Milgram is a bad idea. The Milgram experiment turns out not to work that well at all, or at best to require very specific sort of conditions to get people to behave as they did for his iteration.

Regardless of the conclusion, the experiments are robust and show that people behave differently with different levels of indirection. So the experiments can still be used to argue that the effects of indirection are real and probably measurable.

Indirection is irrelevant on its own.

What would be the impact if that job and/or person disappeared right now (aside from personal relations; on the job, business, organization)?

Would they be missed for more than the candy jar they stocked on their desk? Would something critical go undone? Why? Was their job as a pass through (notify Alice that Bob is done)? Was the job a meaningful check (verify Alice's work then notify Bob)? Is that verification mechanical (a sanity check that can be automated) or does it require expertise (huh, that widget won't work in that gizmo, there's an issue documented at...)?

Obviously, low/negative performers disappearing can always improve things, but usually by the work itself being dispersed to competent people. Assume a competent person in the role, is it actually useful and providing value that would be missed if they left?

Let me take a wild guess here… you do _real_ work?

I think you’re confusing people who are bad at their jobs, with jobs that are themselves pointless.

Also, you can add software development to the “meetings/email/reports” list, because that too is just another form of admin overhead from the perspective of most businesses that exist to do something other than sell software.

I think it's worth pointing out the difference between "it didn't work" and "it could never work" though, the latter of which seems more like what people mean with BS jobs.

I know a fair number of people in consulting who have seen how the sausage is made, and they don't see how it's useful in any normal way. It's useful for certain parties in a firm, but it's not useful in a general sense of delivering what it says on the tin.

I know a company -- many companies-- where there are people who do nothing all day but talk to people, send emails, and very occasionally produce presentations. I knew a few of people at Disney consumer products who had jobs like that.

Those people could probably sleep in their office some weeks and not have anything very bad happen. Every now and then, not even once a year, those people find and close deals that generate millions of dollars. By your definition they are worthless but really they are a crucial ingredient in setting up projects that create work for dozens of programmers, artists, writers, etc.

If you don't understand why people exist in an organization, it may be because they are useless. But it may also be because you don't understand their purpose.

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