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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

It really make me think. If LI was just business profile, jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering would they need? I’m not saying to go Twitter mode and fire everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards something largely viewed as useless.

Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI’s case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40 hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay taxes and end up contributing to something like education because they have to, but it’s a pretty inefficient way of making the world better.

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LinkedIn also have tools for recruiters and sales folks to find people. I believe this is where a big part of their revenues come from (they are paid tools). Although, again I cannot imagine it being that complicated.

Well I got invited to Twitter HQ back when it was still called that. It was some obscure team offering an app library of some sort, IIRC. It certainly wasn't something close to the main product.

I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.

You should check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article:

   A 2021 study empirically tested several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs were increasing over time and that they accounted for much of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.

Many jobs that appear bad are actually needed, often only because of regulatory requirements or because their importance is misunderstood.

These are self-reported, though.

I wouldn't tell my boss or my colleagues the job I do is useless for hopefully obvious reasons, but when I really think about it in the grand scheme of things it really is a Bullshit Job. Basically any SaaS is (with some exceptions of course) just a collection of Bullshit Jobs.

But there's also nothing really wrong with that. We live in the society we live in, which basically necessitates the existence of many Bullshit Jobs in order for things to keep working as they do. I'd even argue basically anything that isn't to do with Healthcare, Education or similar things along those lines count as bullshit jobs really.

>study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.

These people are self-reporting this. Quite frankly with the number of people in bullshit jobs who think they're doing work I wouldn't really put a lot of value in those types of self-reports.

"I Have People Skills! I Am Good At Dealing With People!"

In my opinion, in today's world most jobs (at least office jobs) are "movers". They take something from point A to point B.

Often you'll have a chain of movers A - Z. Each link can almost be it's own company depending on the industry. Naturally each thinks they're important, because someone has to move it around. Of course, you could go from A straight to Z and eliminate 25 companies.

Point is many, maybe most, companies don't actually produce direct value. They facilitate and they move. Now that's much harder to analyze.

Spoken like one of the six managers every single person needs to have.

>And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article

It's "probably junk" because some random EU survey in 2021 said so?

>often only because of regulatory requirements

Textbook "bullshit job" (that doesn't exist, of course).

I should read this. I really struggle with doing work which falls into this category. It’s bad for me, and even worse it strikes me as seriously problematic to society. I don’t want to earn money for nothing, even if most people involved feel as though that in itself is worthwhile. It has been a fairly significant factor in any struggle I’ve had finding work. I have to ask myself, is this a bullshit job? The answer is often yes.

I’ve recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific and practical basis in the products and outputs. Unfortunately I’m not a scientist, only a programmer, so my utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup scene.

Not commenting specifically on LI ranking, but Byrne Hobart wrote a terrific rebuttal of the main premise of this book https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-c...

While I don't disagree with the notion of the existence of BS jobs, UBI is not needed. Instead we need more companies to take on more and more interesting and world-solving things.

We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care, spacecraft, etc...

I used to support UBI but I’ve soured on it. What people need isn’t income it’s opportunity. Housing, food, and healthcare are the basics we want people to have regardless of their dollar cost. Education and maybe cash to start a business would be other forms of opportunity.

My largest problem with UBI is that there will be a large percentage of the population that will just sit at home. There will be a growing demand for people to work, and prices will just skyrocket to pay the wages of the few willing to work. As those wages go up, more people on UBI will finally get off their butts because even they will no longer afford a cheeseburger at $45 each. but the cycle will just keep going.

In the end we have witnessed that we need stable inflation. If we have fast inflation, then unlimited numbers of people are left behind, for no fault of their own. If inflation is relatively stable, people can adjust slowly, carefully, and both companies and employees benefit from that.

I think UBI will lead to inflation, which is the main reason I prefer simply giving people the opportunities they need rather than having them buy them. This isn’t the same as food stamps, though, since food stamps are gated by income, leading to a cliff. Instead, we should gate essential goods by need.

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