Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job?
psyche.co
psyche.co
12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm.
The feeling of bullshitness and alienation from corporate workers stems from the difference between what their time is worth to themselves (subjectively a lot, you only live once, etc) and what it’s worth to their employer (in $, nearly nothing to a multinational).
True, on the otherhand, that is one person - there are probably thousands and thousands of other people, at the same company, doing the same useless tasks - many of which costs a lot more.
You could say the same thing about the project I just left - company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$ - and there are probably 50 or more of the same type of apps being developed by this same company - none of which have even a trivial amount of users, it is an open secret in the IT part of the company, but nobody wants to say anything, because everyone wants to keep their job.
We got the whole thing done. They paid a lot more than $12k for it, plus whatever else they were spending.
After it was done, but before release, they bought another company that had the same stuff already, and scrapped the whole project.
I’d say 90+% of the development work I’ve done has never made anyone any money, and almost as much has never helped a single person. It’s a weird industry.
I've worked on several projects that were experimental and built to validate business theories that turned out not to be true, and the projects were scrapped. Does that mean they were bullshit? No, it means the business learned something about the market with the experimental project that was never certain to begin with.
People think they have bullshit jobs because they can't see the forest for the trees, and because of that viral book & thinkpieces surrounding it -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless.
That's a dangerous thing to believe in a highly developed economy, frankly. And it's just wrong.
> Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless.
The book version, at least, isn’t so simplistic or stupid.
They may not always survive the year, but everything I do matters to the company.
Perversely, I almost want to try working for a company where the pay is still good but the job has such low stakes. To know that there will never be a stressful fire drill in production because literally nobody uses what I make sounds almost... kind of great.
So weird that businesses are apparently totally cool with just shoveling money into a furnace like that, but hey, if I can be the guy pocketing a few bucks as the rest of it goes into the furnace... not such a bad deal.
At the end of the day, the value wasn't in the memo itself but rather in making the person who asked you for it look competent to their boss ("yes, this agenda item is covered, we are ready for the meeting").
I make no normative judgment on whether or not that is bullshit.
From the article paraphrasing Graeber's work. Seems pretty close.
At a large corporation, that's the manager. Often there's a job that's important, but you can only understand why it's important if you understand how the whole organization works. Someone writes memos that get ignored 90% of the time? Works on projects that get canceled 90% of the time? Well, that can make sense, if the 10% is valuable enough that it pays off.
As a manager, it's your responsibility to help make it clear to the people on your team why their work matters. By default, they won't understand this as well as you do.
I suppose this thought is probably an overly pessimistic viewpoint, but generally speaking, many people want to justify the importance of their work so they can continue to be employed - it seems logical that if you're job is to manage others, then a very big part of what your job actually is, is hyping up the importance of those peoples work to justify them needing a manager.
That is, what happens if you stop doing your job? To the company, to the industry, to the world at large. What happens in a month, year, etc. (Assuming the function is not replaced.) Hell, what happens if your department or even company stops existing? Is there a negative effect overall on the world?
If you're satisfied making a difference at the company level, and you see an immediate or even medium-term impact on stopping what you do - then congrats, your job isn't bullshit. If you need an impact beyond that, it may be harder to feel your job isn't bullshit.
A job may be crucial to an organization but still feel like bullshit if you feel a need to contribute to the world overall. If you stop making / marketing / selling widgets, will that matter?
Why am I on trial? That's not for me understand.
Definitely not at FAANG. One day you are told your product is super important, the next day it gets destaffed and your manager is as confused about this as you are. On the other end of the totem pole there's SVP who might see the spreadsheet columns which dictate this kind of decisions but is too far from the line workers to have any clue about their reality.
Not necessarily. The manager just above the employee usually has almost 0 say in the hiring and compensation process. The hiring manager does have some say in it, but the decision to open up the position in the first place may have been made above the hiring manager by a director level position.
And the director that's made that decision is not necessarily the one that is in charge of paying for it.
In other words, it's usually more complicated.
Even so, that's still a job that's 90% worthless.
I consider myself incredibly lucky and count my blessings every day.
> Empirical data suggested that, in fact, relatively few people appear to consider their jobs as useless...
> Graeber acknowledged that it was difficult for one person, or several, to determine universally what makes a job ‘useful’ or ‘necessary’. ‘There can be no objective measure of social value,’ he wrote.
So basically the prediction is that a lot of people have bullshit jobs and are unwilling to admit it, and when you ask them whether their jobs are bullshit, they say "what, no way", which either proves or disproves the prediction, depending on your definition of bullshit job. Also, there is no definition of what a bullshit job is. Glad I know that now!
2. Because even if they contribute something to the society, they don't see the connection between what they are doing and a worthy cause. Seeing connection between what you do and the goals of the company and then understanding those goals is not very common, according to my experience.
Well, according to you maybe. The customers/patrons of the company probably have a differing view.
If you think "the entire banking/finance sector" is just shuffling money around, then the problem is that you have a simplified view of what they do, and therefore think their 10% (or whatever) contribution to the GDP is oversized. Banking/finance is far more than what you encounter day to day (ie. retail banking). They also assess risk, make forecasts, and make decisions on how capital is allocated. All of that requires staff and costs money.
>(Not that there wouldn't need to be some efficient algorithmic distribution of resources to maximise human wellbeing, of course; To each according to their need etc.)
Given how DAOs turned out in the past few years, I'm skeptical that'll ever work out.
I think they were making a critique of neoliberal capitalism, which might be represented as:
1. Capital efficiency
2. ???
3. Social benefit
Obviously, if you've bought in, #2 doesn't feel at all vague to you. But it's not uncommon for many to step back and see the whole enterprise as an underpants gnome scheme that's on track for a lot of underpantsless global citizens.
What about bailouts for financial institutions that are too big to fail - the idea of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses?
Real wages are down and income inequality is up over the last several decades, coinciding with a lot of growth in the finance industry. Subprime and payday loans, 30 year mortgages backed by the government, leveraged buyouts, stock buybacks, tax havens, etc. Private and public debt levels are way higher than at any time prior to WWII. Right from the age of 18 we have kids signing large student loans, the banks don't care about their risk since the loans are federally backed and will follow these kids until the day they die.
A lot of people feel that the general public is being squeezed by financiers. Are they wrong?
First, let's agree that just because people want something does not necessarily mean the cause is worthy. For example, people want cigarettes but you would probably agree working for a tobacco companies is not pursuing a worthy cause.
Is producing ads a worthy cause? Maybe... companies have to somehow make the customers aware of their products.
Is creating videos en masse with no content and creating huge platforms to keep people glued to shiny rectangles just for ad impressions a worthy cause? I am pretty sure stealing astronomical amounts of hours from billions of people will be seen in the future as one of larger crimes committed in our times.
Ditto polarising entire societies and screwing up with our brains through exploiting human biases to keep engagement up on social media even though an official goal might be connecting people together.
I think it is fine to pursue a goal to make people happy and enjoy their lives. Unless this is just a cover story for really doing more harm to the society than good.
A job where you cut and plane wood to make planks that are used to build houses has a straightforward connection to basic life.
A job where you are trying to influence a group of people - so that they organize themselves to efficiently - make a change to a software tool - that affects a process for measuring of a collective endeavour - of a bigger group of people who are trying to optimize the selling and buying - of complex derivative financial contracts that are used to - increase the efficiency of a market of another financial product - which is a virtualization of actual trading of real world goods - so that incredibly complex entities (corporations) can get various and hard to grasp benefits - so that ultimately planks are cheaper ... such a job is virtually impossible to appreciate.
We are transistors in a byzantine supercomputer of global economy.
There are other ways the job could be done, but your management doesn't want them done that way.
For example, if you decide to stop doing research (say into genetics) then there are no immediate consequences to anybody. But we still think that genetics research is important and worthwhile cause. Even if not every researcher is able to provide ground breaking results, collectively they help us resolve important problems like improving our longetivity, drug research, etc.
But they are consequences, so the research example passes OP's test.
There are plenty of actual jobs out there where if they stopped being done, nothing bad would happen, at any scale and within any time frame. People writing reports that exactly zero people read. People making things that just get thrown away. People digging holes that other people just fill with dirt. That's what OP is getting at.
OTOH, sometimes if you do an outstanding job with great pride, performing beyond expectations, there aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone either.
When both are true you've really got a double-ringer.
0. Scope out work for the next quarter - done by PM and engineers
1. Track engineering work using JIRA points or some status reports - automatically generated
2. Perform some 9 point exercise to stack rank people every 6 months on the basis of JIRA points (automatically generated) and # of commits (also automatically generated) - most of this work is automatically generated
3. Give bonuses to the top of the stack and PIP the bottom - work actually done by HR
4. Open requisition for a backfill - work actually done by HR
5. Interview them for 6 months - also mostly done by engineers and recruiters
6. After they are hired, subject them to the same meat grinder - work done by engineers.
All the work is actually done by someone else. This management role (and all the 7 managers above them) are all just this glue. Why not just automate all this work?
Before someone responds with "people problems" and "management philosophies", please - all the above work is administrative assistant work that does not need higher salaries than engineers. And "people problems" can be handled by HR.
- I have worked for a bank. You tell me why do we need yet another bank nowadays, and why on earth do we need to make a fancy SPA with effects and all? Anyway, they paid good money and I gained experience
- I have worked for an e-commerce platform. Again, if it disappeared from the internet no one would complain. We were into "let's build more microservices" mindset. A waste of talent (the engineers I worked with were intelligent people) and time. But hey, I was a Staff engineer, and so I got a bunch of money in exchange for my wisdom in distributed systems (but I still wonder why do we need distributed systems when a one big machine or a couple of them would have done the job)
- I have worked for a SAAS company. The classic pay per customer per month. Totally useless as well (there dozens SAAS companies like us out there). In this one we were more worried about using "boring technology" (PHP, nginx, Postgres) instead of asking ourselves why do we even exist as a company
- And a long etc.
In every company I have been I never felt we were doing something meaningful for the society. I don't feel bad, whenever I see around I see useless companies (not only in IT). I just take as granted, in the capitalist society we live in, that people just want to make money, send their kids to good schools, enjoy vacations in a sunny place, and then retire in peace... so useless jobs/companies are needed.
What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, while we don't put the same amount of resources to solve a real problem like what's going in Israel/Palestine/Russia/Ukraine where people are dying.
But we do have a bunch of fat lazy companies with expensive, crappy products.
We don't spend billions on those things.
Analogy: Making a burger end-to-end and handing to customer feels good. Assembly line where your part is just flipping buns all day is pretty meaningless.
Alienation 1: From a worker's product.
Alienation 2: From the act of production
Alienation 3: From a worker's human nature
Alienation 4: From other workers
Wikipedia has a great intro writeup here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
-----------------
But, what is a "bullshit job"? It's a job where you cannot see what you do, cannot see its impact on the whole of production, cannot see how others fit in with what you do, and siloed so that you do work in exclusivity of others.
But there it is. Marx wrote about these problems, and there were starting to be these problems. Now, we have computation as its own force that serves to radically separate us from each other's contributions, so that *only* the management and owner class can see how things all go together.
And as to Alienation 4, we see this explicitly with "gig workers", being pitted against each other. There's only so much work, and gig companies figured out they could make workers compete with each other to who will accept the least money for a parcel of work, all the while giving up essential social obligations workers fought in blood to get (workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc).
People believe they're in bullshit jobs because they have been removed as far as possible from what they and their colleagues do, as a control point by the ownership and managerial class.
In reality, almost all jobs are not bullshit.
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
- Ursula Le Guin
The alienation *makes you think* the job is bullshit, because you are kept from the whole view of what you do and how you work within the organization. The whole view (read: the non-alienating view) is from the managerial and ownership positions.
The reason management class wants to further alienation of the workers is so that the workers can be exploited by management class, and the workers won't know any better.
Marx's critique of capitalism, and how it breaks is well established economic theory. And it explains the labor market extremely well, even with employment-but-not-really "gig economy" perfectly. And, it also explains why people feel that they have bullshit jobs... if you're aware of the 4 types of capitalist worker alienation.
With capitalist alienation enables the exploitation since the alienation makes you think your work doesnt matter. And with information asymmetry that occurs in the 4 alienations, the worker is unequipped to understand their true value. So, exploitation occurs naturally from that.
No I don't. This basic level of comprehension shouldn't be out of reach. I'm saying you can cite a theory, but that doesn't mean it's true, and certainly doesn't account for reality. E.g. managers are not some hive mind who act in concert. They're individuals with their own motivations and personalities. Assuming that they withold information from their employees (notwithstanding managers are also employees, but this again would be too close to reality for this theory) rather than they just also don't know the information, or the information is speculative, and blaming a worker's lack of knowledge of that information on them is to infantilise employees. Employees are not like children, thinking parents have all the answers and all the money, and just refuse to promise or buy things out of spite. They are grown ups who have chosen a certain path, and who, if they ever choose to become managers, will realise that they knew quite a lot already.
> And, it also explains why people feel that they have bullshit jobs... if you're aware of the 4 types of capitalist worker alienation.
Scientology explains societal problems through literal aliens. That doesn't mean the explanation is good or useful.
I get paid though, so I'll keep spinning and find my value as a human outside of work.
There is probably some truth to the rumor.
I'm going to call this guy Jack to preserve his identity, because he continues this ruse to this day. To jump to the punchline, Jack has a bullshit job, but he embraces the bullshit.
So I've had a few run-ins with Jack over the years at my Corp. He's always the guy that is sort of three degrees removed from several projects, but not really leading any projects. So you see him in the background a lot, but never in the foreground. Anyway, I never thought much of Jack. Nothing positive, nor negative. I was merely acquainted with his existence.
One day, I am cleaning up some infrastructure and going through some of our cloud billing. I'm just cleaning up old infrastructure so I could make a mindless report and give it to someone who gives it to someone who eventually summarizes it for someone who then mentions it to another person, which I hope and assume turns into a bullet point on a presentation to someone "important" (you know, like we all do). Anyway, I stumble on some weird stuff that I don't recognize. Its been idle for years, never accessed, never used. This stuff is a great target for me to clean up and improve my metrics. I find this infrastructure and I don't recognize the project at all. I mention it to my team, no one's heard of it. So I go up the chain, no one's heard of it. I actually go up to the CTO and they had never heard of this project either.
So I'm curious, I dig deeper. This is clearly abandoned. It hadn't been logged into in years. But I notice that it was created by Jack. I didn't really know Jack, but I looked him up to see if he even still worked at the company. I looked up his version control access and he still had an active account. I looked at his commit history and in the past 365 days he only had 4 commits. So I assume he was laid off, we recently had a round of layoffs (about 15% of the workforce). But sure enough Jack still works here according to our HRM. Somehow dodging layoffs. Interesting, he must be working on something important. So I coordinate a meeting with Jack before I disassemble his infrastructure.
Jack was very elusive. Coordinating him was harder than scheduling time with my CTO. But I eventually get the meeting. So I start asking him about the project. He barely remembers the project in question (or was just playing dumb). He explained that the project was completed but never got integrated into the main application. So I asked him what he has been working on since then, and he gave me a list of projects, all of which had been cancelled and abandoned. I confirmed the existence and cancellation of 2 of those projects, the others I think he was either lying about or they never made it far enough off the ground to have any record of.
I finally asked who he reports to and he gave me the name of someone that is different than someone in the HRM. So I asked about his current project and he told me several things he was doing. I was familiar with one of those projects is all (and I am generally familiar with every project since I am in those meetings). He then mentioned a project that was actually managed by my team. That's when I realized this guy was just bullshitting. I decided not to call him out on it initially.
I ended up just laughing about the whole situation and sort of dropped it. I simply didn't care enough and I knew me bringing this up the chain would probably get him fired. So I just kept it in my back pocket for a little while.
A few months later I went out to a whiskey bar with some guys from work. We ended up meeting up with a few people that got laid off in the layoffs. We had a few drinks and I ended up asking if anyone knows how Jack avoided layoffs. People were shocked, everyone had the same question, "what is he even working on now?". I said basically nothing. He has only made 4 commits in the last year! He's floating along but he stays in the background just enough that no one questions it. That's when one of the guys told me that Jack was involved in several projects years ago and he got really upset when he had several large and prominent project cancellations. He had made an enemy with the previous head of cybersecurity and the rumor was that he was going to be fired, but then the Head of Cyber got throat cancer unexpectedly and dissapeared. He said ever since then, Jack has been extremely uncooperative at work and no one really likes working with him, so he always gets pushed into the background. He summed it up the best way possible:
> "Jack realized that all of his work was going unnoticed, so he stopped working and no one noticed".
Ever since then I find ways to cross paths with Jack. I haven't done anything I just ask him questions and hear what lies and excuses he comes up with. I laugh inside everytime. I eventually drop breadcrumbs around the office about Jack's existence just to see how people react. I find the whole thing very entertaining. Jack still works here. He is extremely active on the Slack #pets channel and I see daily updates of his Corgi each day.
Jack doesn't know that I know his secret. But Jack is in a weird way my hero. He realized he had a bullshit job, so instead of being bothered by it, he just embraced it. He treats his job like the bullshit that it treats him as.
Maybe we can all learn from Jack.
I don't see how this situation can be discussed without considering the roles of government and unions.
Both government and unions introduce significant distortions when it comes to people doing work.
Most government "jobs" are a net loss to society as a whole. These government "jobs" typically involve decreasing the productivity of the private sector in some way, without providing any real (in the economic sense) value on their own.
Thanks to these pointless government "jobs" and the burden they impose on society, the private sector gets stuck involuntarily creating more pointless "jobs" to try to deal with, or otherwise defend themselves from, the government "workers" and their interference.
There's a multiplier effect going on, where one pointless government bureaucrat "job" can necessitate the creation of many other pointless private sector "jobs" just to deal with the pointless bureaucracy that that one bureaucrat creates. None of these "jobs" provide real value, and all are a burden on society because of how they destroy real wealth.
Unions, especially public sector unions, just exacerbate the problem by interfering with the reduction of pointless government "jobs", and worse, by encouraging the creation of new pointless government "jobs" to increase their membership numbers.
As government and public sector unions have gotten larger and more invasive over time, of course we should expect to see more and more people stuck doing jobs that are inherently valueless, or even outright harmful to society at large.
Damned straight the government should be yanking the corporate choke chain -- HARD.
It's another example of how pointless government "jobs" cause immense harm.
Without the government interference that enables them, such monopolies/oligopolies simply wouldn't be able to survive, eliminating the problem you're worried about.
Regulation was the chicken, not the egg.
What interaction(s) have you personally had with government?
Do you personally depend on government for your income/existence (as your "job", via welfare, via tuition/scholarship, parent's/guardian's/partner's/supporter's "job(s)", etc.)?
If you think market concentration is a product of regulation, then I don't think the economic world, or indeed the concept of government itself, is going to make much sense to you.
The purpose of capitalism is to ensure rich people get paid for being rich.
Is it any wonder this creates a crisis of purpose for people who aren't rich?
Yes - e.g. Android phones comprise 80% of the market because people with money buy them... with that money. You can build a supercar for rich people, or fidget spinners for millions of kids. Either can reward you, as long as you do it well.
> The purpose of capitalism is to ensure rich people get paid for being rich.
The purpose of capitalism is to allocate resources efficiently, noting that the people doing the work and/or taking the risks can do this much better than a monarch or a bureaucrat.
Correct! But this is a function of the wealth distribution. If it's not too lopsided, chasing volume is a good strategy. In some markets, it still is, and that's great! However, the more lopsided the wealth distribution gets, the more it looks like a palace economy where a rational actor should ignore the masses and spend every waking breath figuring out how to get in the good graces of the nobility.
> The purpose of capitalism is to allocate resources efficiently
Efficiently according to whom? For what purpose? We circle right back to the definition of economic value and how it's wealth-weighted: if everyone has roughly equal wealth, they get weighted roughly equally in the efficiency calculation and the economic definition of efficiency roughly matches the colloquial definition. However, if Mt. Olympus has all the weight, "efficient" means "efficient at extracting tribute from the plebs."
The wealth distribution is getting more and more lopsided every day. This has consequences.
Wealth distribution is a red herring. I would rather live in a society where I am richer even though someone else is billions of times richer, than one where I am poorer and everyone else is as poor as me.
It's a far more fundamental phenomenon.
Simply put, real economic value arises when two entities voluntarily provide mutual benefit to one another, thus improving the overall situation for both.
The voluntary nature of this interaction is critical; when it's missing, there can't be mutual benefit. That's what happens with taxation, for example. The involuntary nature of such an interaction means that the entity who is forced to unwillingly pay the tax is always worse off than if the transaction hadn't happened.
That's why government "jobs" are so inherently pointless and harmful to society at large. They way they're "funded" makes society worse off, and then what the government "workers" do with such resources typically makes society even more worse off than that.
If everyone had equal wealth and equal weight in the objective function, your picture of reality (voluntary transactions etc etc) would be correct! If Mt. Olympus had all the wealth and completely controlled the objective function, my picture of reality would be correct.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to look at the actual wealth distribution function and interpolate world views accordingly.
I think that at least 80% of the economic exchanges I engage in don't qualify as a "voluntary exchange". I engage in them because I have no other choice. The government doesn't enter into this aspect.
Those kinds of "jobs" and that kind of "work" only exist because of the existence of government-imposed regulation.
If the government-imposed regulation simply didn't exist to begin with, nobody would waste resources writing pointless reports to try to manipulate such restrictions to their benefit.