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Comment by justbored123 | Hacker News Reader

The author should change Walden for David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and he would probably get a better explanation of the phenomenon.

"After being in the industry for 15 years, I still do not have a good short answer for what environmental consultants do."

That quote alone says it all. These people are not satisfied because they don't have a real job, they have a bullshit job, and they know it.

The others are more of the same, you have a "coach" of the obvious that even him doesn't practice what he preaches and a member of "multiple projects and committees" that complains about wasting time all day talking with no focus or clear purpose.

They get pay to pretend to work all day by pushing papers, write endless jargon-ridden nonsense and, of course, attending endless meetings.

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From :

https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh...

"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.

In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005."

[edit] Link to the paper discussed by the article:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

The presumably rightful allegation of exaggerated numbers in Graeber's book does not necessarily render the existence of "bullshit jobs" untrue. I see that the (alleged) empirical flaws throw a shade on his hypothesis, but they do not disqualify it in its entirety.

work wouldn't be called work, if they did not have to pay you for it.

There is a wide spectrum here though.

I would still write code if not paid for it. I just wouldn’t write code for you. I am paid to use my code writing interests for your goals.

I have no interest in ever being a toilet paper salesman and would never try to hawk toilet paper in my free time. You need to pay me a lot to do that.

I couldn't read the article because of the paywall. Judging by the quote, there are significant problems with this report. First, “a meaningful contribution to the world” and “the feeling of doing useful work” are vastly different phrases. Comparing replies to them is meaningless. Second, the definition of a bullshit job is not if it makes “a meaningful contribution to the world”. Using replies to that phrase as the share of bullshit jobs is, therefore, wrong. A job is bullshit if the one who is doing it thinks it's bullshit according to Graeber.

> A job is bullshit if the one who is doing it thinks it's bullshit according to Graeber.

Sounds reasonable. My understanding is that Graeber's work concentrates on what Marx described as "alienation of labour", where people are sufficiently specialised that they don't draw satisfaction from their work any more. Some of these bullshit jobs are probably actually useful, but if it makes the worker feel like this then it still has the same ruinous effect on them, and to a point, society. In this case, feelings can trump facts.

I agree it would be nice to have more concrete numbers, but this in itself is a pretty shallow criticism of the bullshit jobs idea.

Part of Graeber's argument, too, is that many of us are employed doing useful jobs in service of others who have useless jobs. Think of all the office staff, product designers, marketers, janitors, factory workers hired by Juicero, for instance. They all had meaningful jobs in service of a product that should never had existed.

I also don't think that Graeber's standard is unfair -- making a meaningful contribtion to the world is quite a low bar for something we spend our entire lives doing for 8hr/day.

Besides, a useless job may be done by an employee who is unable or unwilling to realize it -- "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". It's really tough to find meaningful work that pays a living wage, so many of us try to find small amounts of meaning in the jobs that we have. It doesn't make our jobs any less useless, though.

Apologies for those who can't get around the paywal.

It gets worse for Graeber's thesis. The next paragraph from the ones previously quoted:

"Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers."

So not only are his numbers pretty poor his thesis gets the numbers the wrong way around for those who feel their jobs are of little value.

Link to the paper :

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...

Perhaps that's where my own theory of bullshit jobs diverges from Graeber's then. I'd say a job can be bullshit regardless of whether or not the person doing it agrees.

As for janitors feeling like their jobs are meaningless and office workers feeling meaningful, I'd say that's a reflection of our culture. Universities are full of administrators with fancy titles who probably feel very important, but it's not clear their presence furthers the very important goal of education.

>I also don't think that Graeber's standard is unfair -- making a meaningful contribtion to the world is quite a low bar for something we spend our entire lives doing for 8hr/day.

I'm aware of Graeber's work but haven't read it, so I'm sidestepping it and focusing on your comment here. So what is a meaningful contribution to the world? I've thought about that, and narrowed it down as best I can.

I have a simple list for defining meaningful work: 1) work that gives life-providing help to others (e.g., teachers or physical therapists); 2) working on problems of existence (e.g., medical research); 3) make art.

As I've outlined it, most of us are not doing meaningful work, myself included. Certainly, any criteria for meaningful work necessitates a bunch of not-meaningful work for support—"the office staff, product designers, marketers, janitors, factory workers," etc. you mentioned—but that comparatively low number of people actually doing meaningful work suggests (if my criteria are valid) it's a rather high bar.

"Meaningful contribution to the world" is now a high bar to clear? No wonder the suicide rates in the West are so high. We expect people to invest 90,000 hours of their life into a thing and are offended when they ask it to not be utterly point- and useless...

Eh, I think the Walden aspect is spot on. I downscaled my career, but five years ago - however for precisely the reasons the author cites. I was burned out from needing to be available 24/7 for a decade - spending your life waiting for the sky to fall really takes its toll. My job wasn’t bullshit - it was my business, and I had real responsibilities to my employees, my customers, and my shareholders.

As to the “back to basics” movement, I followed this path, bought myself a laughably cheap home (<€50k) in a laughably cheap country (<€20 tax per year), and while I no longer have access to some of the services I once had, I couldn’t be happier. I do what the hell I want to, whenever the hell I want to. Agency is worth anything.

Over the past year, I have been contacted by a stampede of acquaintances, friends, their friends and acquaintances, who all want to do what we’ve done. Most work in tech, in meaningful senior roles. Rural property prices have suddenly rocketed both here and in my country of origin.

Yeah, it’s mostly apocryphal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, but I think people are just realising that they are miserable, and spending time doing crafts and outdoorsy stuff has made them realise that these things feed the soul.

I've never had a bullshit job, but I have had a lot of rather pointless meetings through my career... If you do take a bs job, isn't that exactly to pass the time while you make money? Or are there also bs demands put on you that you cannot get away from? So you're forced to do pointless stuff through-out the day, that makes little or no impact on the business as a whole? I think I'd become really, really cynical if I had to work like that. Chances are also that I'd become "creative" in such a job, but not in a good way. Or perhaps there are ways to macro such jobs? I'm really curious about these things... :p The only way I can relate to jobs like these are really through movies such as Office Space or Fight Club.

Also a lot of companies will now be combining the worst on-premise practices with the worst WFH practices.

I've been out of a job most of the pandemic and am now working at a marketing company that did just that.

We are required to be present in the office but people do everything (even HR issues) over Slack and e-mail. It's mindnumbingly dumb.

I'd rather have environmental consultants than what 90% of software developers are doing.

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