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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right that line employees often lack the "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not required.

An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."

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Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced, presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not - maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more likely that not, there is an actual reason that task needs to be done.

I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.

The point is that they think it's bullshit. The operation of copying rows itself exists for an intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts), but the dedicated role of "row copier" is a bullshit job from the vantage point of the people working it.

No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.

Yes, this is thread is developing some weird capitalist inverse of marxist 'false consciousness' theory.

Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist."

The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."

>The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."

The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.

I think people mistake middle-brow contrarianism spoken with confidence with actual intelligence.

I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.

It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we recognize the possibility that self-perception of the value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good measure of the value of that job.

We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-perception because it doesn't align with our perception of their role.

Further, how can we trust our perception is the better measure of the value of that job? If the person performing the role can't even assess the value properly, how are they providing that value?

Can't you simply test by asking what happens if the person stops doing their job? If nothing detrimental happens, then the job was probably bullshit.

some consequences have feed-back loops with long delays.

go remove some guys that do legal compliance stuff and when the random inspection happen years later, you'll find out that maybe it would've cost you less to keep that employee.

That is definitely true. One would need to carefully consider what the person does before making such a judgement.

Planes can keep flying without a pilot for quite awhile, until they run out of fuel or crash into a mountain.

Without even specifying the length of time to measure what happens or the nature of job in question?

Bad news: you have been rejected from consideration for any work related to realtime/life critical systems.

Good news: you may have a future in politics, at least in the county I live in.

Ideally the point is to ask this question before you have them stop doing the job.

"What will happen if this person stopped doing their job?"

"Oh the important monthly reports will stop going out."

"Oh, okay, we better not have them stop doing that then."

IIRC one of the examples in the book is someone who just stopped doing their job or showing up and nothing bad happened, and the bureaucracy of their organization kept paying them.

> We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-perception because it doesn't align with our perception of their role.

I submit that not only can we, but we must, admit that in some individual cases the person in the position knows best, and in others, they don't.

You're quite right. The true value could be much lower on average than the average self report held it to be. I hadn't considered that Graeber might have under-reported this phenomena if people are consistently over-optimistic.

Or maybe, absent other evidence, it might make more sense to tentatively take people's self reports at face value. Or at least hold off backing some particular elaborate alternative which involves people being wrong about the things they have most information on.

What a brilliant summary of this thread.

The operation of copying rows might as well exist because some manager wants to have a big headcount and be important / promoted.

This doesn't contradict what I've said!

Then shouldn't the title be something like "Self-proclaimed Bullshit Jobs".

Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could have variables that make the job of having an IT guy drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in many computers becoming broken costing more in money and downtime than having a trained professional drive in and move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few visits a year.

It's an anthropological book; you, as a reader, are expected to understand that the framing is subjective.

Compare The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1]: tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve any understanding of the contents, and would only make the author come across as smarmy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You...

In the Preface, the earlier inspiration for what's a "Bullshit Job":

> Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything...

> This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible.

> Clearly, then, we have an important social phenomenon that has received almost no systematic attention.

There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?"

It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary, including society's perspective, which goes beyond the personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.

One of the first things he does in the book is define the term "bullshit jobs", and refine that definition to specifically include that the workers feel it is bullshit. I think it's fair to make a larger statement of social phenomenon using that definition, the same way many people can make statements of depression or poor mental health without everyone expressing those feelings being clinically diagnosed.

> Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.

The qualification is that even the person doing the job thinks it's bullshit. That doesn't mean the definition relies solely on them thinking it's bullshit.

Frankly, reading through the article, it feels like the definition keeps shifting and much of it is his struggle to even define what it means. He then goes on to start giving his definitions of the what he thinks are types of bullshit jobs.

The article I don't think is all that consistent and shouldn't be taken too seriously.

> ...much of it is his struggle to even define what it means

Exactly. Like many of us, Graeber writes to understand.

His stated purpose is abundantly clear. Many, many people were sharing with Graeber complaints of a similar theme. So he tried to name and describe it.

Rightly, wrongly, or otherwise, it's all in the book. For other people to pick apart and response to.

How else is scholarship supposed to function?

Would Graeber have been more effective as an op ed columnist, churning out saccharine blather which confirms everyone's priors? eg The World is Flat and Bobos in Paradise?

I don't have a problem with Graeber writing about bullshit jobs, and think it's a worthwhile topic to discuss. My issue was with people narrowly defining the qualification of a bullshit job as being solely based on the perspective of the person doing the job, without looking at the bigger picture.

I think there are definitely jobs that a computer or robot should be doing, but a human is there instead because of what our economy and society currently values. However, until the computer or robot is actually doing the job, I don't think I'd call it a bullshit job. That's not to say society shouldn't consider the impacts of grinding people's lives away with rote repetitive tasks.

Its his opinion about society. Not something like scientific/statistical facts that can be improved by having precise definition approved by IBRAA (International Bullshit Recognition and Accreditation Agency).

He's welcome to his opinion, and I am not necessarily disagreeing with the concept. I am stating that his definition is broader in scope than only considering the employee's perspective.

> ...understand that the framing is subjective

Certain critics have adopted a labored, willful misunderstanding. eg Brad DeLong.

Graeber became public enemy #1 with Debt: The first 5000 Years. Some economists just couldn't wrap their heads around the anthropological viewpoint. Graeber is talking about people and societies evolving relationship(s) to debt, not economies and finance.

Economists and anthropologists like to dunk on each other. It's now something like a blood feud.

I agree with the driving IT guy example. I used to be a technician who would travel via plane to another state to fix "broken" production lines for pharma companies. After I made the fix, they would have me sit in the cafeteria for two days doing nothing but drinking coffee and reading the paper (pre-smartphone era). When I told the plant manager I felt guilty about sitting around doing nothing, he said that the profits from 5 minutes of the production line running paid for my two days of doing nothing. So it was worth it for them to pay me to hang around just in case there was another problem.

THIS, and it applies to far lower tech than modern pharma. A century ago, one of my grandfathers was a blacksmith in a little farming town, which had a little canning factory. During harvest season, when that factory was running 24-hour days, grandpa was paid to sleep there every night. Canning food is a complex, time-sensitive, and safety-critical activity. If production is halted even "briefly" - you may have to start throwing out large quantities of spoiled food, waste more time re-sanitizing things, etc.

The term "bullshit job" is confusing and probably intended just to be entertaining instead of informative.

A more informative title would really be "boring jobs whose purpose isn't understood by the people doing them"

As others have pointed out, “bullshit” is the wrong term here. More like “extremely tedious and mind numbing”

How is this job that different from being on an assembly line and all you do is tighten the screws on something that passes by?

> More like “extremely tedious and mind numbing”

To me it seems clear that that is not what this book is about. It's about the purpose, not the contents.

Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”

Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days.

Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.

Years ago at my sysadmin job, I thought about having a lapel button made:

      I WAS REPLACED
      BY A CRON JOB

Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.

I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.

They're doing it with Excel today -- the most widely used programming tool ever.

And still handling exceptions manually.

A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates “bullshit” jobs. Consider when someone is doing something simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done it” with no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. When business goals or processes change, these jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and more recent obsolescence)

Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some things are the way that they are, but people with limited perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and it's hard to tell which is which.

Sure, but the chestertons fence scenario isn’t a bullshit job. It’s just not understanding the system. My point was more pressing back on the idea that someone can just be a cog without knowing the larger machine.

Carl Icahn offers a great illustration of the point that executives can think it's BS too. He once acquired a firm that had an office whose business purpose nobody was able to explain to him so he fired twelve floors of workers.

https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...

bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty common scenarios: department and role duplicity, unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you mentioned.

Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?

That's an executive failure to communicate (the big picture). Sometimes they don't know that they're failing, and sometimes they're just beyond their depth.

Perfect example of how RPA with a sprinkling of LLMs will change the world of work.

in my experience the big picture is usually not given for bullshit reasons, for instance because someone thinks it is not required.

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