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