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Comment by throwaway29812 | Hacker News Reader

It's more simple than that. Most jobs don't need to exist, but most people need jobs for a society to function.

There is a basic conflict then between business (who optimize for cost) and government (who optimize for stability).

So why then would private business not eliminate those unnecessary jobs in order to control cost? If they are set in their ways, then why don't they get outcompeted by more efficient companies that skip those vestigial roles?

They are (or will soon), and that will create massive problems for stability of society at large (which is why government will have to intervene).

The simple answer is that the people who would make those decisions are the people who hold those jobs. It's a classic instance of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

And it's systemic. The product of management is reports. The product of management is meetings. To them (and the people who ultimately run the company) these are the solutions. Have a meeting, write a report, do a review. Those are the tools they know. They have hammers. Everything is nails.

> The simple answer is that the people who would make those decisions are the people who hold those jobs.

We just went through a season of layoffs - I find it hard to believe that no one thought to get rid of the so-called bullshit jobs for greater efficiencies.

For arguments sake, lets say the conspiracy for bs jobs goes all the way to the top (C-suite, boards) in established companies: how about startups then? Where are the streamlined startups that are more efficient than incumbents by simply not creating those "unnecessary" roles?

I suspect that coordination problems necessitates these roles as companies grow larger - call it corporate carcinization if you will. If you were to start your streamlined org today, it will evolve into a crab-like form.

> how about startups then?

The business model of a startup is to work everyone you have beyond their natural limits, this doesn't scale to an entire economy.

I know a few startups that laid off most of the revenue drivers in sales and marketing, but kept expensive founders and coders. They are on paper leaner, but not necessarily more efficient.

Because it's a nonsense argument repeated ad nauseum by people in technical fields (and, to be fair, sometimes in other fields; but I see it more often in technical fields). Most of us don't understand the work being done by the people we claim don't understand our work; that's fine, it's normal, people on both sides have spent years and decades learning how to do their jobs, and it's unreasonable to expect someone in another field to fully understand your job.

The problem is that we often think that if we don't understand something, it must not be valuable; and I think this problem is exacerbated by high levels of education and/or intelligence, because we usually understand things, which must mean the things we don't intuitively understand are obviously not valuable.

The reality is, there is some bloat which gets introduced as businesses grow. But it's not as much as we often think.

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