Bullshit Jobs

There is periodic pressure to return to [greater] profitability, at which times companies fire like mad. Either it's a higher level of management realizing one branch of the org chart is stupid and directing its removal, or a directive from the top "figure out how to cull 10% of the workforce".

Between those events, however, managerial accumulation of influence takes over.

Maybe c-suite execs don't rip out excess staffing immediately because, even operationally, it's not all downside:

Within a relatively small branch of the org chart, having more than bare minimum staffing (with some of them doing bullshit jobs) provides a human resource buffer that might be tasked with solving really important problems that crop up sometimes: significant new requirements from a customer, or, if the incentives are right, opportunistically solving non-critical persistent problems (e.g. refactoring more) or automating more. I guess there's not enough pressure from higher management to keep teams to true personnel requirements + a few extra, so the "few extra" grows like mad.

Within a larger branch, occasionally having "excess" staffing for internal corporate competition is good. One of the best strategies for large projects (like larger government contractors) is to run two teams each with half the budget and select the best result. It seems insane from a naive perspective: wouldn't it cost nearly twice as much to have double the headcount? But it doesn't seem to, especially when the vast majority of project costs are labor costs or linearly related to staffing (rather than external resource costs, which are more static—though even for resource-intensive projects, internal competition provides incentive to figure out how to use less resources).

Employees can also be seen as insurance against bottlenecks created by other employees. The more employees you have on hand, the less likely that a particular employee going AWOL will cause a noticeable interruption. I've seen companies make the mistake of only hiring a minimal number of engineers, for instance, and end up in a sticky situation when one of them leaves.

When it comes to an actual companies personality, it basically boils down to the behaviour you reward, the behaviour you put up with, and when exceptions apply. As an example, how many time does the "no asshole" rule get overrides by someone talent? Suddenly you're full of assholes.

Of course patterns emerge. If the market generally rewards empire builders, then you're going to get people empire building in your organisation. Even if you do not directly reward it, they'll just leverage the title and the reports to land a job elsewhere.

Why do we put up with this? Well quite simply, you tend to be hiring for roles you yourself don't understand. Here me out. If your CEO is a sales guy, which is perfectly fine, he's going to be taking a leap of faith somewhere when he picks a CTO.

I read on linkedin on a regular basis that you shouldn't promote your best developer to CTO. There may be some truth to this, but the reality is that there's a bunch of non-technical people vying for the top technical job. Now from your position as CEO, do you pick the guy who's a bit more salesy and familiar, or the tech you don't understand or empathise with? After all, that CTO with 2 years as a junior programmer in 1993 does articulate a really good argument.

Personally, I think you doom yourself to mediocrity by having a monoculture of bean counters run your business. I might be wrong, but if you hire a person who needs to hire a person to do the job, it's likely they'll want to hire someone a bit like them, and suddenly you'll be hiring a person, to hire a person, that needs to hire a person, for many layers, until one of those people will be a person that does a thing.

Bit like this picture:

https://digitalsynopsis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/funny...

The company was a medium-sized animation studio that at the time was doing cut-scenes for a AAA game. My job was to literally stare at a screen with a list of jobs and available computers in the "render farm" and, if any of them turned red or stopped responding, to walk downstairs and press the reset button on the corresponding box. I'd say 80% of my days were just staring at that screen. It felt like the stupidest job ever, even though there was some utility to it, but I was too inexperienced at coding at the time to automate my job.

To kill the boredom, I learned some Python and wrote a Hangman game. That's when I realized I was better off becoming a software engineer and started the career that I have now.

It literally is. Money doesn't circulate on its own so we have to force it to circulate through bullshit jobs.

I wouldn't say that all the jobs I've had were outright bullshit, but they were often made bullshit by the powers that be. When an organization is frequently making sub-optimal decisions that impact the quality of the product, the role of an employee carrying out those decisions can become that of shoddy workmanship, or performing tasks that aren't as beneficial as management thinks.

At this point, I've learned to accept a certain amount of bullshit. As much as I'd like the world to be free of bullshit, there's some utility to corporate bullshit. When companies succeed and grow, bullshit is created to inflate importance and create job security. If the company has entered the "cash cow" phase of its life, actually addressing bullshit almost certainly means threatening at least one person's job. If everyone is making money, why bother, then? Jobs are supposed to suck to some extent, else they wouldn't be jobs. It's not that I wouldn't do what I can to inform a team or business on how something can be done better, but when the forces of business and corporate politics inevitably push back, I let it go. Be somewhat glad that yourself and others get paid to do stupid shit. In any other time in history, our jobs would have been physically a lot more grueling. By tolerating bullshit, we can actually get away with quite a lot. It's one thing if it's a small company where bullshit early on can really hurt them, but why care if BigCo is full of bullshit? If it's full of bullshit, everybody might as well feed from the trough.

I'd say anecdotally there's a heck of a lot of people doing jobs that they themselves don't think really contributes anything worthwhile.

If you loosen the definition a bit you might also count things that the job holder would say could be done vastly better, which would start to encompass some of your middle managers and compliance people.

I dare say most of what we do in society is essentially useless, it doesn't need to be done, and only exists because everyone in the current system needs to be seen to contribute. That need itself grew out of an inherited fear of hunger that might result if we let people slack off, and might take a long time for us to change.

This is quiet a fuzzy and unsupported claim. In what respect are these important and what is their main goal: Coaching the team or sitting in meetings to align and make sure everything is aligned and they are visible? Are their head on the table of the product is not delivered and not flying?

To me middle management has to be redefined with a clear responsibility that has very much changed from the past.

Depends on the company and what those middle managers are doing. By default, middle managers exist to manage risk and distribute blame away from senior management. When middle managers become redundant to the point where an employee has multiple bosses to report to, arguably some of those managers aren't that important. Ever see how, in Office Space, the protagonist has multiple managers bug him when he makes a minor error? That's common in a lot of mediocre companies, and is something I and others I know have experienced at one point or another.

I think the perception window having shifted so hard that this is now acceptable is extremely dangerous to the survival of democracies, which were supposed to serve people.

It's not supposed to replace working, it's supposed to be a transfer from industries that employ no one but generate vast wealth, to people who work in industries where the marginal value created is less than cost of living.

It's also designed to be a cushion for the poor, and replace the various administratively expensive great society programs with a single transfer benefit.

Progressives hate it, because it doesn't solve all the problems, Conservatives hate it, because it offends their sense of propriety about government oughten do - and "gets in the way" of the labor market.

On the other hand, we could probably do a better job of recognizing and admitting blind alleys sooner. In groups, especially, it is very easy that people will convince each other that the path they are on is viable. But I can assure you, even if you worked for yourself, you would still fool yourself often enough. Not only would you still tend to continue working on things that I have already proven to be failures. But you would actively avoid asking the question, “Is this thing I am working on still worthwhile?”. I think once we are in execution mode, switching back to the higher plane of strategy and critical distance is a very hard and counter-intuitive thing to do.

For instance in my 12 FTE team is a colleague. She appeared fine when we hired her, but within the first weeks of her employment she proofed to be incompetent, hostile and all talks went into nowhere. We wanted to fire her within the probation period, but suddenly there was a doctor's note that she is pregnant. Nobody believes her, but we cannot fire her.

He HAVE to employ her. She will go to maternaty leave in month 8 of her pregnancy. Before that she will take her 30 days (=6 weeks) of paid holiday. After the maternaty leave she has the right to work 50% at 90% pay for 2 years and cannot be fired, too, because she is a young mum.

We had our lawyers look into that. Nothing we can do. We will never be able to fire her.

We are also worried that she will manipulate data or sabotage without us being able to fully proof it.

Hence, we gave her a bullshit job.