Hacker News Reader

Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy. Meanwhile a lot of people who do actual work like raising children, taking care of elder parents, or educating themselves are not considered to be “working” because they’re not generating someone else a profit.

What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? I don’t think so. But if all the unpaid work out there went undone, yes, society would quickly fall apart.

I don’t follow the “anti work” movement so I won’t pretend to know what they as a group believe. But for me, I believe we can drastically redefine the concept of work and come out ahead.

View on HN

The number of people in this subthread who think true bullshit jobs don’t exist because they’re inefficient astonishes me. You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort.

Or senior executives for that matter.

In big companies, cash cows subsidize all manner of boondoggles. That’s why we have a term for cash cows.

Ever have a long term project cancelled, either for a good reason, or just because a new VP showed up and the project didn't have his brand on it? Did that cancelled project make the company money? Companies only do things that make money, right?

Never saw a high level goal in your company that was misguided? A roadmap for getting there that was misguided? Never seen a process (methodology, etc) that wasted a lot of time, but one important person swore by? I could go on.

This is why I roll my eyes when I see people suggest that government is wasteful and should be run like a business. It's like they have never worked a job in their lives.

As someone whose done both they don’t compare. One is bad, one is even worse.

exactly. Reason is, businesses that engage in lots of inefficiencies get outcompeted, and if the inefficiencies/mistakes are egregious they go out of business. Government has the ultimate monopoly, where the only remedy available for most "shareholders" is to vote out the "CEO" and "directors" once every couple of years. In the private market, you can take your business to a competitor if you don't like how one company treats you. Or as a shareholder you can sell your shares in company A and buy company B instead. The only real remedy against government incompetence is to emigrate, and then you find yourself in a new one that also acts like it's the only game in town for it's citizens - because it is.

Maybe this would be true if there were thousands of competing businesses in a market. In this world of oligopolies businesses only have to be slightly more efficient than competitors to survive, and even then they can make up for the bullshit job related inefficiencies with different pricing models.

If you're waiting for elections to make your opinions about governance known you're leaving "money" on the table. And if you think you can do anything on that level with businesses you're fooling yourself, they don't care -- and you probably won't even know about the bullshit jobs they're propping up, anyway. If you don't believe me, why not email the CEO of Proctor and Gamble and see what he or she does?

> You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort.

Is being bad at a job make the job “bullshit”?

It does when you get to do that job indefinitely, and perhaps have a whole career of doing that job in different places. Lots of bad middle managers out there have whole careers being bad middle managers.

Nobody gets to keep waiting tables or cleaning bathrooms if they are bad at it.

Employees can be pretty terrible at their jobs and keep them if they can show up on time and sober. Schedule coverage is more important than almost anything else.

In this case it's the middle manager creating or propping up bullshit jobs to make themselves look more important.

It might. Suppose I was a policeman and my job was to reduce crime in the city. I spend my days cruising, talking to coworkers, doing paperwork, meetings, and sending emails. When there's some emergency near me I show up, but kind of wait in the back while other officers do anything.

I would be bad at my job, and if I kept doing it indefinitely, i.e. if I wasn't quickly fired, then there would be a discrepancy between my nominal job (reducing crime) and what I actually did (nothing).

Not talking about the manager’s job. Talking about their reports.

Unfortunately, the notion of bullshit jobs extends beyond jobs that are simply low value within a company. Whole organizations within a company or entire companies can be considered bullshit.

Many of us on this site are most likely contributors to bullshit. How many of us work on something that is tracking and spying on people with the purpose of selling or using that data to manipulate them later?

> At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy.

I am not going to argue that some work is more essential than other work, but I disagree that some jobs are created just to keep people busy. Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. The people who control the money aren't worried about keeping people busy, they are worried about making more money.

Now, is there a large part of our economy that only exists because people who have capital will pursue anything in order to grow their capital? Yes, absolutely, but those jobs still exist because someone else will give them money to obtain what the job produces. Companies aren't sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"

I would accept reasoning that on some level specially the large organizations are dysfunctional. And they don't necessarily optimize for costs on all levels. Sometimes it is just higher-ups wanting more resources and people under them. Even if it is not productive or needed... And what of the stuff people doing end up being productive?

And then sometimes I really question is that new version website really needed?

> Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening.

I’ll give you an example. My wife worked as an intensive case manager, where the job was ostensibly to help severely ill people manage their lives. Was that her actual job though? No, her actual job was filling out reams of paper work instead of actually helping anyone. That paperwork was sent to the state and the company got paid, with the vast majority of the money going to executives.

What would happen if her job were eliminated? Would the people be worse off? No, the whole point was to not help them and keep the state aid checks coming in. My wife wasn’t using her skills and was depressed and stressed all the time so she’d be better off if that job had never existed. Then there were the 3 layers of middle management coordinating all of the form filling. Their job was wholly redundant, and they didn’t do any meaningful work at all. Did they even need to exist? It’s not clear, but their existence didn’t work toward actually helping any real people. They just helped collect government checks. They were paid well though.

The people who would be harmed the most by that “work” not getting done are the executives.

Ha! I have family members who were the bureaucrats who audited that paperwork your wife sent in. The situation is exactly the same on the government side. Over qualified people doing meaningless paperwork while politically connected upper managers make tons of money joining conference calls from the golf course. It's great at crushing the spirit of anybody who actually wants to accomplish whatever the organization's mission is.

And when the service being provided are also paid for by the government the taxpayers take it on both ends!

Edit: Is my comment unpopular because some people think I'm endorsing the status quo or because some people find this state of affairs inconvenient to their world view?

Lol yeah. The main job of those middle managers seemed to be reviewing reports so they didn’t make it sound like they were driving people anywhere, even though that was half the job. The state side bureaucrats probably did the same thing! So it’s even worse than a useless job, but a useless job done twice!

Ok, I see where the disconnect is. You are talking about work that has no value for ‘real people’, or humanity in general. They aren’t providing a good or service that anyone wants directly.

However, they are clearly providing value to SOMEONE. The person paying your wife gets more value (money) than they pay your wife to do the job. They aren’t trying to keep her busy, they are trying to make money.

You could call this rent seeking, which is a completely fair criticism. It just isn’t the same as ‘make work’ that is simply trying to keep someone busy. They are trying to extract value in a way that is not good for society as a whole.

I would say it is precisely exactly the same in the vast majority of cases. These jobs exist to help some rich fucks extract even more value from society in a way that benefits them personally at the expense of society. They are worse than useless, they are actively making the world worse.

That isn't the same as "employing someone just to keep them busy", though. They are employing them to make more money; it just so happens that the work they are doing doesn't actually provide value to society.

It might seem like a minor distinction, but I think it matters when trying to understand the motivations involved.

Right, I would define something like getting an education to be work, because it’s done with the intention of bettering one’s self to better society; while going around and breaking all the windows in town just to be paid to fix them again is not work, even if some individual ends up getting rich in the process. It’s a net loss for the rest of us.

I guess from a physics pov it all depends how you define the boundary of the system, and I draw it at a society level.

I think you're both right to a degree. Yes, nobody's specifically hiring people just to keep them busy. But there are many instances where people are employed to make some manager (and it could be management at any level) look good, or retain power within the organization or even just for them to retain a management position within the organization long past the time when their position could've been eliminated. This is more likely in larger organizations, but can also happen in mid-size ones as well.

>Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy<

This happens _constantly_. It is a side effect of how the promotion ladder in the management profession typically works at large companies: your likelihood of being promoted to the next grade depends entirely on a small number of metrics one of which is how many people you manage.

I actually have been documenting a very strong example of this for a book I have been thinking about writing about what destroyed a high flyer after the dotcom. After the collapse of the dotcom, one group, which had the CEO's ear as "the project that will save us" had effectively unlimited headcount even while the rest of the company was in cuts-and-freeze mode for 2+ years, and because of the headcount = promotion issue, they hired armies of people that they were barely even interviewing. The project ended up 2-4 years late depending on whether you count the first release as a viable product (it wasn't).

I have seen this behavior in every single large company I have worked for. I'm not going to give more details because it would ID me, but this is very common and I was in a position to witness it with actual data, not just a leaf node engineer telling myself stories about why XXX got a promotion to VP or whatever.

This is accurate. As an engineering manager, one of the primary criteria I'm judged on when interviewing for new roles is the size of the teams I've managed previously. Bigger = better.

This is why over time large companies tend to slide and then fail. Instead of growing and growing until they take over the world.

When I was younger and crasser I noted that most large companies end up infested with tumors that exist to serve the tumor and not the company. Now that I'm older, I observe that truly large companies actually even develop an analog of the hypertumors that whales get where the tumors find it easier to steal from one another than from the rest of the company.

Actually working for large companies has left me with a very bleak outlook on human organizations.

Just think of the human organization that is orders of magnitude larger - the government.

Governments are not orders of magnitude larger than the largest corporations. Walmart employs 2.3 million people. The US federal government employs 2.85 million.

Don't overlook 1.3 million servicemen. Don't overlook state & local government.

Don't overlook all of wal-mart's vendors and service providers then, I guess? Those aren't one organization, but thousands.

> sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"

This is exactly what the Federal Reserve does with its mandate for "full employment". When there aren't "enough" jobs, it loans out of a bunch of new money at low interest rates, for bankers to spend on outlandish bets - like say polluting the environment with electric scooters and hoping they'll turn into a recurring revenue stream.

"Full time employment" in 1950 was 40 hours per household. The definition was never adjusted when women entered the workforce en masse, so it's now 80+. With technological advancement, "full time work" should mean an individual works around 15 hours per week (with that "exempt" loophole closed). Economically, workers should have accumulated surplus and then demanded lower working hours regardless, but the previously described economic feedback loop saw that didn't happen, and instead the gains got siphoned upwards as housing and other economic rent.

That's the macro. At the micro level there are certainly motivations to create useless jobs. For one, the more people you manage/employ the more powerful you are, even if they're spinning idle. Also, adversarial entities can create jobs beneficial to their own self-interest while the overall situation remains nonproductive or even antiproductive (eg healthcare billing).

A good example is legally required "security guards" for every apartment building but not defining the tasks or qualifications for the position. As a result there is an elderly person sitting at a desk in every building lobby, watching TV. The govt doesn't need to support these people as their benefits cost has been offloaded onto apartment owners.

There are books about this![0]

> Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy?

1) flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;

2) goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, community managers;

3) duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;

4) box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;

5) taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

The one I object to would be airline desk staff: managing large bodies of people is actually a fairly important job - panic and stampede are real risks and crowd dynamics are non-linear regardless of how smart any one person in that crowd is.

Companies are, internally, command economies. Of course they're full of inefficiency and crazy shit like people hired to do nothing. Competition curbs it somewhat, but economies of scale and various moats and probably some under-the-table collusion and such are very effective at protecting them from what we might consider desirable market effects.

>What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow?<

It can't. Some of the bullshit work is actually just to provide a bizarro-world downtime where you can't just tell people to take extra vacation because that is unthinkable: "fairness" complaints, worries that idle time makes people more likely to consider their options, and frankly the inconceivability of the idea in and of itself. So what you do is have this kind of idle time work that doesn't actually need to be done but keeps people busy. Think of it as the workplace version of engagement tweaking.

As a concrete example, in the ASIC space, the sub-teams involved routinely finish their part of the current generation, and in some cases the next generation work isn't ready to start yet. One thing startups used to do (and were still doing in my direct observation as recently as 4 years ago) was lay off their ASIC guys as they finished the current generation until they could see whether the chip was getting traction, and then they'd hurry up and hire for the next generation of so.

And so on.

What the companies eventually started doing by ~2000 was creating bullshit background work projects that were clearly, at least to most observers, either senseless (like bumping the generation for a low-volume ASIC where even just the mask costs would never be paid back if the project shipped) or speculative-but-not-productive projects.

> What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end?

Honestly, it might. It would take an extraordinary amount of work to correctly identify all the work that's actually bullshit, and there might not be any time left for anything else.

There's work that's bullshit, but no-one realizes it because it's very hard to have an expansive yet detailed view of everything. There's also work that seems like bullshit, but performs an important, non-obvious function [1].

[1] Sort of like Congressional earmarks: they were attacked for a long time as corrupt waste. Now that they're gone, it seems like they might have actually been grease that helped keep polarization in check.

Like with any process there is some waste (bullshit jobs), but the question is, it worth committing the extra resources to eliminate these bullshit jobs or would those resources be better used elsewhere.

Essentially not all waste is actually worth eliminating.

what kind of bullshit work do you mean exactly? Who is wasting their money paying people to do "bullshit work" that doesn't actually need to happen?

Tons and tons of organizations. It's extremely common.

It makes more sense when you consider that companies mostly don't experience market effects internally, but operate much more like the Soviet Union, and that, especially for very large companies, the effects of external competition are rather less than ideally efficient, to put it mildly. Throw in a heaping spoonful of principal-agent problems up and down every organization, the fact that information is very far from perfectly available and distributed to managers, and more than a little good ol' incompetence, and it'd be weird if it wasn't common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com