“Bullshit jobs” is a terrible, curiosity-killing concept
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The article does not really go into depth on this one. I think it happens quite often. I would expect over-hiring is a problem most of us might have experienced first hand, especially in bigger IT companies. Managers hiring more people to delivery faster ending up in more processes, meetings and even slower results. In some cases ven external experts get hired to make these processes more efficient. Once someone does get a "bullshit job", they find enough reasons to keep that job going for longer than necessary.
They create bullshit jobs that sound important so that they can get to hire more, you are right nobody hires without such descriptions but that doesn't mean that such descriptions means they aren't bullshit jobs. Haven't you heard about the concept of "use your budget or lose it", that goes for headcount as well, managers are greatly encouraged to invent bullshit jobs to not get their budget shrunk.
And no, managers don't get paid for delivering results, they get paid per headcount first and foremost. As long as they can convince their superiors that they are doing a good job it doesn't matter what the results are.
And yeah, as you say this is dysfunctional, but most giant orgs are dysfunctional, that is the norm, otherwise small companies would have no chance in hell competing against the giant well oiled machines.
I have seen this org, and regrettably worked in one. It exists and it's way more common than people in our industry believe.
"An organization" doesn't hire people; it's a manager that hires people based on his ability to convince upper management of their necessity. That necessity doesn't need to be real, it just needs to be convincing. Furthermore, some other part of the organization might be starving for staff but be unable to convince the organization of that necessity.
This doesn't even make the whole organization dysfunctional; this is just the nature of any group of humans getting together to do anything. There will always be lairs, cheaters, over-ambitious, under-ambitious, workaholics, slackers, geniuses, and idiots.
This is key. You're getting hung up on the semantics of 'value'. Bullshit jobs are not valueless jobs. These are jobs that have some value to someone who's funding them.
The failure point for utility theory is that all utility is not fungible
Sure, there probably is some explanation to be found for why the 345th gear in the contraption improves the target production metric by 0.013% and some theory as to why that difference meaningfully impacts some member of society for 34 seconds on Tuesdays in May on odd numbered years. And sure, those who are curious to find that may be fascinated by it or may find some emotional grounding for the work they find themselves doing.
But it's not especially tragic, and can sometimes be personally and societally valuable, to step back and look at that whole situation from further away and just say "Fuck it, I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that is"
That's really all the antropoligic and oral history view of a "bullshit job" is
How can you possibly make that claim unless you understand what they're doing, and how can you understand what they're doing unless you're earnestly curious about it?
The implied relationship between the two things mentioned here doesn't actually exist. It's perfectly possible to understand a system without ever being curious about it.
E.g:
1) when food depends on it
2) when absorbed via osmosis or a byproduct of curiosity about an entirely unrelated topic.
I have a robust understanding of quite a number of topics that I can promise you I've never been curious to learn anything about. I just soak it up like a sponge.
Curiosity certainly helps. But to suggest that curiosity is a foundational requirement for understanding something misses the forest for the trees.
Neither (1) nor (2) will help you discern which jobs are bullshit and which are not.
I disagree. I think curiosity is the key ingredient to a successful and productive career as well as life. An inherent wanting to know separate from being paid is very important.
Of course, it’s not an obligation like everyone must. People are free to suck and no one will force them to succeed.
I think I’m just cynical from interacting with youngsters saying “they don’t pay me enough to care.” I think the caring comes first, then the pay. And you can’t pay someone enough to love a thing.
I care because I'm paid to. Otherwise, why bother?
Anthropologists who write books that become culture memes should be under this obligation.
1. Assume they are doing it wrong.
2. Assume they are doing it correctly for reasons I'm not privy to, at least by their own assessment, incentives and constraints, and dig no further.
3. Do #2, and then allow my curiosity to lead me to uncover their reasons and motivations.
I don't like #1, but numbers 2 and 3 seem like reasonable choices.
His book Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a little denser and more academic but also excellent. He might be one of my favorite authors of all time, which makes it all the sadder that I missed a chance to meet him before he died.
jeez, i was thinking cart returner, cashier, some landscaping jobs, ...
Jobs that either could be easily replaced by tech(cashier, waitress),
easily replaced by the customer themselves(shelf stockers vs costco style pallets, cart returner vs aldi style coin system),
or things that society deems desirable but are not realistically valuable (landscaping is sometimes useless, but society sees it as valuable)
actuary has 100% value, we NEED to know the percent chance of something happening, so we can account for billing(if not used for profit mongering, its still required to run an altruistic insurance). I'd say actuary, whether for insurance company or for studies, is a necessary job forever. (not accounting for AI)
There are people with real bullshit jobs; you can find people describe them online. Where they are employed, they actually do work, but they know that work doesn't contribute anything. They are usually depressed about it.
We are probably heading towards a world where unexpected slices of labor here and there are about to be automated away. Which ones exactly? I don't think that's the right question. Also, early automation is unlikely to categorically wipe out positions. Instead we'll just see fewer positions. Are we okay with that?
Another perspective of the same problem is you're doing a startup. You don't hire DevOps for a whole year and instead rely on sst.dev or Cloudflare hosting. Are we okay with that?
Graeber's an anthropologist who took a broadly emic approach. He also happens to be an anarchist living in a capitalist, class-based society. This book is making a systemic critique of jobs and meaning under capitalism. While Graeber's a product of the culture he's critiquing, he doesn't buy what the culture is selling and diagnosing the symptoms he sees around him.
This response here is by someone who's embedded in the power structures of that culture(he's a finance guy!), and the response is filled with hand-waving or justification of those symptoms as unavoidable or even positive features capitalism, without ever really engaging in the actual meat of Graeber's work, which is that the very structure of our economy, culture, and world is arbitrarily decided by those in power, and our job if we want to survive is ultimately to reproduce that structure, even if it's not really to our benefit or to outsized benefit to those in power. This blog isn't even a defense of the structure: it gestures to our current setup as normal or natural and the results of rational action, without making any effort to justify it besides saying that if it didn't work, we wouldn't have it. That's shallow at best. It's an emic defense to an emic critique, but it's not operating at the same level that Graeber is working at. At the very end it hand-waves any phenomenon that doesn't seem rational in our economy as merely 'weird', and seems to cross it's arms and say "that's just how it is!". This finance guy's response is too narrowly emic in this way, a result of being too deeply embedded in something to actually critique it. He can't incorporate negative data into any analysis of the system he(and us) are in, because he won't allow himself to critique it. You could say it's a terrible, curiousity-killing blog. Read more David Graeber instead.
For those who don't want to tackle the whole book, the original article by Graeber is online here:
The episode has other very interesting concepts like "accountability sinks".
The author has a book[1] out about this as well.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/dan-davie...
[1] https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/
There are surveys about both how much time workers actually 'work', and how much of that work they see as productive. They seem to suggest that a reasonable share of worker's time is not spent on actually doing anything:
https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-report-only-12-perc...
https://www.worklife.news/talent/hours-in-workday/
But also, Hobart's arm-chairing here seems to take the perspective of whether something is useful to the firm, rather than if something is useful overall. Medical billing apparently charges typically 4-10% of the value billed. Clearly for the medical billing firm, having workers knowledgeable about CPT codes etc is worth it, and medical providers find it more economical to hire such a firm than to keep their own billing specialists on staff -- but if we just moved to single-payer health care, the role could disappear entirely. It's a bullshit job because it's solving a problem that doesn't need to exist.
https://neolytix.com/what-is-the-going-rate-for-medical-bill...
Similarly, Hobart mentions tax lawyers more than once. And certainly companies that having good tax advice can save them a lot of money. But I think most experts agree that a drastically simpler tax code would be more efficient overall, both because of the reduced need for tax lawyers and accountants, and because all the weird (inefficient) tax-minimization strategies could disappear. Being useful to a firm does not mean the job is not bullshit.
Everything Graeber brings up has an explanation in basic economic theory but he makes no attempt to meaningfully engage with it or even show he is aware an alternative explanation exists.
I disagree; what is called "single-payer" health care does not solve the actual problem, which is that the people who are getting the services, the patients, have no idea what they cost and therefore have no way of knowing whether the services they are getting are worth what they cost. In that environment there will always have to be people whose ostensible job is to control costs, since the normal mechanism of markets that does that is prevented from operating.
(Note that similar criticisms could be made of Graeber's own claims.)
> It's a bullshit job because it's solving a problem that doesn't need to exist.
I agree with this, but not for the reason you give. See above.
> If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others.
Graeber solicited testimonies from people who felt that they have a bullshit job.
> public transportation workers can, indeed, shut some cities down if they decide not to work. But this is not a characteristic of the job, but of how employment is structured: if all the workers are declining to show up at once, the term is a "strike," and their employer can't just swap them for someone else. There are plenty of people who would do these jobs, at their current pay, if that were an option, so the ability to paralyze a city like this is a function of unions, not of the job itself
Unions are intended to protect workers. If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed.
> In a sense, the book is a work of pathological optimism about the capitalist system. Graeber estimates that roughly half of all work fits his fake job categorization, which implies that the economy's productive capacity is roughly twice the output we actually get. It would be a pretty big deal if this were true: we could have a lot more leisure, and a lot more stuff.
I'd argue that I'd be able to produce 50% more value in my own role if my employer gave me 50% of my time back. But instead it's spent on politics, baby-sitting and duck tape. It's not their fault (nor my own) but rather a consequence of the system we're in. And I see no issue with having someone actively critiquing it.
Of course a bunch of jobs are bullshit.
But they actually don't.
> If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy.
Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, unions do not help to do this. In fact they hinder it. In one strike I personally observed (not of public sector employees but I think the case is fairly typical), the union and the company agreed on a deal on Day 92 of the strike that was identical to the deal the company proposed on Day 2 of the strike and the union indignantly rejected. Who suffered the most from all this? The very workers the union was supposed to be protecting, who got no pay during those 92 days and had trouble paying their bills and could not even seek alternate jobs temporarily because the union prohibited it. And in fact many of those jobs now are automated away, because it was easier for the company to do that than to keep dealing with the union.
> This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed.
Not necessarily "corporate" greed; in the public transportation case it's a government employing the workers.
That said, unions themselves share many of the dysfunctional charateristics of large corporations, and for much the same reasons.
Sure sometimes unions get it wrong, but that's not the vast majority of cases, and in fact that union that got it wrong likely got it right more often than not and those employees were better paid, even with the strike, than they would have been otherwise, when you consider a larger time scale.
I'm not sure that's true. As I said, I think the case I witnessed was fairly typical.
> that union that got it wrong likely got it right more often than not and those employees were better paid, even with the strike, than they would have been otherwise, when you consider a larger time scale
That I know is not true for the case I described: non-union employees in the same industry, working for other companies, were better paid.
>That I know is not true for the case I described: non-union employees in the same industry, working for other companies, were better paid.
Better paid or better compensated overall? Often the benefits of being in a union are access to healthcare, retirement, vacation time, and other benefits that aren't reflected in hourly pay. Often it's just the piece of mind that you aren't going to be randomly laid off in the middle of the week for bullshit reasons or the adequate PPE is going to be provided. If it were strictly money, no one would work at the lower paid company.
You don't know what knowledge or facts I have. So it's you who are making assertions based upon no real knowledge or facts.
> Better paid or better compensated overall?
Both.
> Often the benefits of being in a union are access to healthcare, retirement, vacation time, and other benefits that aren't reflected in hourly pay.
The union I was referring to did not offer any of these things. The company employing the union workers did. The union did not do anything that I saw to increase the level of those benefits that the company was providing.
Also, one of the primary rationales for unions in the first place was that they could do a better job of managing the skills of the work force than faceless corporations. The union I was referring to did not even have an apprenticeship program--much to the chagrin of many workers who had children they wanted to bring into their trade but got no support from their union for doing so. Many workers in fact protested, and it ended up being one of the issues that caused a change in the union leadership--but even that didn't make things any better.
> But they actually don't.
Unions protect workers as an abstract group, but consequently not all individual workers.
Lobbying for a minimum wage will induce structural unemployment: the union would rather keep some people unemployed, to maximise the combined income of the group.
In an international labour market, unions are just protectionist for some local population.
I’m sure some international socialists will disagree.
Or “Hollywood mogul” for a college dropout/failed actor https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-elli...
>There are people right now who are miserable at work because they'd much rather be hiking
Yeah, but not worth doing and not fun are very much not the same thing are they?
This article is absolute trash. The author sets out to deliberately mislead with the same straw man that always seems to crop up when somebody attacks bullshit jobs.
Most of the public sector jobs are worthless and people are literally paid to pretend to work. The same mentality seeps into the private sector as well, between morning coffee, lunch break and afternoon coffee then rushing home, people work a good 3-4 hours a day in an office. And that’s on a good day, add in a couple of meetings and that gets reduced to 2 hours. How is that not a BS job?
Such a project would take at a minimum six months, three of which would just be setting up the project and codifying in writing precisely what needs to be done and how the automation needs to work. Then there would be two months figuring out who was going to create it and who was going to be responsible for maintaining it in production (which by policy must not be the same people that designed/created the automation!).
Also, there's a limited number of project managers and skilled people to get things like this done so even if the company wanted to do it, it just won't happen for a long time unless such an automation gets a big upgrade in priority. Besides, some manager gets to say they have one more employee working under them and that's super important for a manager's career! (when interviewing at another company the first question they always ask is, "how many people did you have working under you?")
So that guy basically has a stable job forever as long as that task he does needs to happen. When he's not doing that task the company gives him endless busywork to perform from mandatory corporate training (which changes constantly) to 72-page security surveys to endless meetings where he really isn't needed but he's there "just in case" something comes up that needs his expertise.
Is that guy's job a "bullshit job"?
Yes. Consider if he were hit by a bus tomorrow, they wouldn't hire a new person to do that job, they'd just have someone already employed spend 5 minutes to do that job instead. Every job I've ever worked there have been tons of near retirement aged people doing jobs producing spreadsheets and reports that no one reads, mostly by copy and pasting all day. When they retire, either someone else figures out how to do the same job copy and pasting automatically or figures out that no one had been looking at those reports for years anyway.
That's the reason why I know about this situation... I know the guy that now has to do the old guy's "once a week" job (in addition to his existing one). He'll get the hang of it eventually... Probably. Maybe. :shrug:
The replacement was given four days to train with the retiring person to learn how to do the job. It wasn't enough, obviously.
I think real bullshit jobs are, for example, how third-generation children of billionaires get CEO roles on fictional companies / non-profits only to receive insane compensation, while the board does all the work. Just look at any modern dynastic family in the US, ignoring even the famous names.
[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...
That said, yeah, I agree that it sounded like most of Twitter was bullshit. Actually I'm confused why the OP said "let's not pretend like bullshit jobs are real". Twitter seems to be pretty clear evidence that they are.
(I happen to think they're everywhere and that this article is just terrible. but even worse than bullshit jobs are the bullshit grift economy. After all lots of tech does make money, by doing stupid misanthropic shit. It's bullshit, but not because it's unproductive: just because it's productive at making the world worse for everyone else. Different problem.)
As another poster mentioned, it requires very little technical staff to just keep the lights on if you're not doing anything to move the business forward.
How many employees are “not necessary” depends on your priorities. If you mostly want to keep a site up and running, the requirements are relatively slim. Musk also laid off a large part of the Trust and Safety team, who don’t have much to do with keeping the site running technically but were responsible for moderation. Whether their jobs were “not necessary” depends on your assessment of how much moderation Twitter needs.
I understand that that's how things are right now, but let me tell you, I fucking hate it. Whatever or whoever will burn it all to the ground, or allow it to, I will support. Disingenuous or not. I don't like the guy and I think he's stupid and has a big ego. But I'm more interested in total marketing death.
Elon, before he bought Twitter, thought of himself as the customer. He talked about all the things he would do to make his own experience better. But he was never the customer, he was the product. He fired everyone involved in making Twitter work for its real customers and revenue has suffered for it.
It's a hell of a thing to realize that your only real function in an organization is as a part of some VP or other's empire.
When the monkeys are finished writing the story on the typewriter, it doesn't take as many monkeys to hit print on the copier.
And yes, there are bullshit jobs. Lots of them.
From images routinely failing to load, to the current mess of logins that is the dualistic nature of x.com vs twitter.com (where which accts appear logged in fluctuates constantly), to my current favorite bug of the last month, where it's always stuck in dark mode in mobile browsers...
Honestly, they might as well bring back the Fail Whale.
Almost every company "could" run with fewer people. But I think that's more a choice than a demonstration of "bullshit job".
The idea that you have to race to a cliff of able to function to figure out what is bullshit seems absurd at face value.
Normally this is so the other 90% of effort can go toward additional functionality; but there’s always the option of simply firing a ton of people and reducing the amount of feature development.
The discussion around the twitter purge was dumb because basically nobody involved had experience as an organizational leader.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/02/x-twitter...
He's lost about $31 billion so far. The website may still function (sometimes, LOL) from a technical perspective but from from a business perspective it is far from functional. Everything I've read (just now, in 5 minutes of searching) suggests that revenue continues to drop and nothing suggests it is on anything but a downward trajectory.
Aside: Before Musk purchased Twitter it was on an upwards trajectory gaining in revenue just about every year though continuously operating at a loss.
The difference is they now use a lot of contractors. Many FTE's that survived the acquisition have stayed because the money is good and they don't want to bother with something affecting their work visa status.
I think scaring off advertisers did affect the num of employees needed. Twitter was slightly profitable at the time because they had built out an effective sales org. Musk eliminated most of them, and many of those who kept their jobs soon quit in frustration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
If someone asks why so many young dancers learn ballet, I can say "signalling" and consider the question answered without having to engage with the availability of instruction, tradition, structure and organisation, how ballet differs from other forms of dance, or really engage in any detailed exploration of the subject at all.
Whether you actually believe, for example, a subjugated group in society should have all the rights and freedoms of it's majority, or simply believe saying that will net you social capital, doesn't change whether they do or not, and also doesn't change that such a message is probably, on balance, good to have repeatedly broadcast even if the speaker doesn't believe it with their heart and soul.
Those people don't like their work or the way they are treated and they seem to express that they personally find it meaningless.
There's a ton of nuance in the article and book that isn't in the title. Same with Debt. People just read other people's takes on his work and get busy imputing. A bullshit job of their own design, if you will.
servers today are easily replaced by either tech (ordering system on table, or a bar style ordering system where you get up and order from 2 wait staff). And if we trusted humans(far fetched), a self serve system: pour you own beer, and add it to your tab.
If my task was something the customer could have easily done themselves (and often do for themselves the other 99$ of their life: cart return, bag groceries) I felt useless.
Like I'm walking behind a person littering and picking their trash up. They could just not litter, you know?
I think it was in the context of categorizing the kinds of bullshit jobs and the "cleaning" of useless, bullshit-produced littering was one of the examples
From these discussions I'm thinking the book is quite comprhensive on the topic. Several of the comments here are addressed there in one way or another
Is here:
https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
> food service jobs (and hairdressing) were specifically mentioned as not bullshit jobs
I don't see that in the article; in fact the article mentions "all-night pizza delivery" as a bullshit job (or more precisely a job that only exists because so many other people are working bullshit jobs), which would at least suggest that other food service jobs might be categorized similarly by the author.
> and that distinction between liking the job vs it being bullshit was stated
I don't see this stated in the article. The article does state that the author found many people who believed their own jobs were pointless, and correlates this with those jobs being bullshit; but if anything that suggests that not liking one's job is not very distinct from the job being bullshit.
I distincly recall a section on "Why hairdressers are not bullshit jobs", referring to a Hitchhikers Guide joke, and at least one bit about food services being "shit" jobs (but not bullshit jobs). I recall the latter because it was a point of argument with a friend when we read it.
Someone commented something similar below. When I have time I will check
Every time I come across the concept of a "bullshit" job, I remind myself that it's a self-reported metric, and many people who think that their jobs are bullshit are just wrong.
I'd appreciate it if you could make an argument for this opinion instead of merely stating it as fact.
“for the one doing the job”. We are talking about the importance to the employee here, not the importance to other people. It might have a great deal of importance to other people.
Business owners know well that their job is totally dependent upon doing something of value for others.
Employees know well that their job is totally dependent upon benefiting their bosses.
Ergo, everyone's job is (and is known to be) primarily measured by benefiting others.
The devil is in the details with regard to who those other beneficiaries are, but they are never solely oneself, else it ceases to be a job rather quickly.
The way it is often described to me, the ven diagram of what counts as a bullshit job and that person's lack of understanding / frustration with that job has so much coverage that I'm suspicious of any claim regarding it.
I've certainly worked with people whose job is BS, and seen organizational dysfunction create lost of useless jobs. They exist. But I've almost zero confidence in other people to identify them correctly at scale or identify the reasons. It feels like a very emotional subject.