I would venture that many of the jobs in any large (where large means > 10,000 people) corporation are bullshit jobs. For example, take Human Resources. Yes, you need a certain amount of HR to make sure that labor laws are being followed and that hiring/firing paperwork gets processed. But at most large corporations, the vast majority of HR's output appears to have no justification save to justify spending more on HR. Employee "engagement" surveys come to mind as the prime example of this.

I would be willing to bet that you could halve the HR workforce at many corporations (especially with some effort invested into automating HR functions) and not notice any drops in productivity.

More generally, a lot of "middle management" falls into this category. From what I see, it really looks like a lot of management work is really just make-work created by... other middle managers. Yes, some level of management is necessary to coordinate teams, but from where I sit, I see my manager spending literally 8 hours a day creating PowerPoint presentations that have no meaningful content whatsoever. And the funny thing is, he hates it more than I do! He's a (ex)programmer. He'd rather be writing code! But somehow the organization has decided (as a consequence of some managerial fiat, far above my pay grade) that it is more "productive" for my manager to be making PowerPoint presentations than writing code.

Yes, the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is far worse in government than in the private sector. But it's still here in industry, and the larger and older the industry, the more prevalent it is. Software companies haven't accumulated as much cruft, but that's largely because companies in software tend to die before they have a chance to accumulate the cruft that's present in industries with higher barriers to entry.

EDIT: Tyler Cowen [1] has an excellent term for this phenomenon: "zero marginal product" work.

[1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/zer...

"Can you give examples of this kind of job, other than those created directly by the government?"

Plenty of "useless jobs" exist. It comes back to the classic agency problem. What is best for the market/company/shareholders is often not what is best for the employees working at the companies.

>Can you give examples of this kind of job, other than those created directly by the government?

The guy standing in front of Little Caesars with a Hot N Ready sign, dancing.

All HR jobs

All jobs and businesses related to sales and marketing