I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things:
1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress;
2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations;
3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.
As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse.
It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.
Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff.
Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development. ... Three of the university's eight vice presidents will have their offices at Stanford Redwood City.[2]
> The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty.
That's usually the start of a decline. When Mercedes bought Chrysler and wanted to become the next GE in the 80s they built a new huge administrative facility far away from production and moved management there. That was the start of a long decline of the company until they got rid of Chrysler and closed the administrative facility.
It's a very bad design if management gets physically separated from the actual purpose of an institution. They get detached from the actual work and live in their own reality.
This is what happens when a human organization becomes too successful: it generates more money than it knows what to do with and the parasites do take notice.
I wonder if this is also a result of simple career progression.
How do people go up the ladder if there's already people at the top? With people living longer, more women working, etc the organization has to create more positions at the top or lose talent?
Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office.
For 4 months now.
Let that sink in.
What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means that I might have access to privelaged insider information,which means I can't sit with the public teams. But there isn't any seat in the private rooms. So I'm sitting in the cafeteria, reading books, playing on the PlayStation, etc etc.
I ask my manager every single day when I'm going to get a new spot. It's usually 'next week for sure' or 'friday for sure'. Hasn't happened yet. During the first month, I stayed for 8 hours each day, doing nothing. I've gradually stopped giving a fuck anymore and am looking for other jobs now, even though this is a pretty sweet gig.
People are willing to pay big money to set aside time to learn a new, marketable skill. You currently have the opportunity to be paid while doing the same.
I've been getting paid for free for the past four months.
I had a similar thing happen to me once.
I was hired to perform a certain mission-critical task that had to be performed at a particular time two days a week. It's was a significant task involving about a hundred people that had to be done every day of the year, including holidays.
When I was hired, I was supposed to do that task on weekends and then three days during the work week help out the people who had to do the task on those days.
Everything went fine for about three months. Then one of the full-time helpers complained to their union that I was doing a helper job three days a week. In the union's view, I was taking away a helper job, which wasn't really true. I was a bonus helper. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a new three-day-a-week helper position.
The union got all huffy and the result was that I had to come to work, suit and all, and I sat at a computer and got paid six figures to look at LOLcats three days a week.
This went on for five years until I left for another company.
Amazingly, that was the least problematic staffing situation at that company.
Same thing happened with me at my old software development job. Company went through a merger but I left before it completed. I stayed for nine months, working from home, but with no work to do.
I did freelancing but eventually got very depressed. Quit my job, left my apartment and moved back with my parents.
Bear in mind that this makes you an pretty expendable employee, if management decides they need to get rid of people, you are a prime candidate.
One of my past employers was a consulting firm that would have people "on the bench" for weeks to months at a time between clients. When the time comes to get leaner, those who have been "on the bench" the longest are the ideal ones to get rid of, because they're the ones who will hurt the least to let go (specifically because there's leftover responsibilities that need to be assigned elsewhere or silo'd knowledge that may be lost).
I just would like to add a bit of a warning to anybody reading parent's comment and thinking it's the life-it really isn't what it's cracked up to be.
After like a year of doing nothing, like around the 9th month mark, it starts to take a toll. Since my manager was constantly telling me there's not much I need to do other than explain lines of code and what they do in business terms. Often I would prepare something because I'm so fucking bored and then it would be brushed off as "cool but yeah no need".
The reason is that it feels too much like unemployment. Checking reddit, HN, github, eating company snack and getting fat, starts to develop impulsive gambling/day trading....
basically I was spending money to escape the fact how bored I was...it's really fucked up....I'm not sure what the dynamics are but honestly, it sure beats doing manual labor.
the lack of product market fit was painfully obvious by the volume of opportunities we were getting.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here.
Some of the arguments I keep hearing:
1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but the author jumps into conclusion without really understanding why are employees not allowed to bring whatever chair they wish to the office. Then he jumps to another conclusion, that nobody really cares because his psychiatrist note is usually accepted. As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day.
2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.
3/ "There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations." True and totally unrelated. What is the argument?
4/ "Managers like to have large teams." True, and economic forces push against that. This does not explain the apparent pandemic of BS jobs (that I don't see anywhere).
etc.
If you won't mind, I will try some anecdotal evidence and jumping to conclusions myself:
5/ I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would be great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible for compliance is not doing a BS job.
6/ Automation and technology saved us from slaving in the fields and sweatshops. Driving a truck full of confectionery across the US is pretty much a BS job if you ask me. Same as "Shirley, make me 5 copies of this contract before the lunch" - on a typewriter.
7/ BS jobs pandemics is nothing else but a variation of the "Grass was greener when I was young". Developed countries (maybe with the exception of the US) have safer environments than ever, more disposable income than ever and people live longer than ever.
People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"?
Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement?
I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you), but whether something is sustainable and makes sense on a larger, super-human scale (organization, society, species) is tough to determine by any single actor. It's typically left to be played out and then (hopefully) analyzed and learned from.
Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. If a drone-like society turns out to be the most efficient in this sense, full of silly rituals which nevertheless make it more cohesive / stable / whatever, then that's where we're headed. Even though it currently doesn't seem that way, with individualism, science and articulation scoring some spectacular victories.
>Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels.
I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons.
>term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
>Although common resource systems have been known to collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing)...
Except that we know from history that people invent superstitions and act upon those superstitions. Look at all the effort that was wasted telling people to turn off cell phones in flights. Once electronic devices became ubiquitous and there was push-back from passengers, they finally had to admit that if the electronic interference of a handheld device was enough to interfere with onboard instrumentation, natural atmospheric electricity would have rendered flight impossible. The security theater at airports is still ongoing and equally superstitious.
In the case of the OP, the author is pointing out that there is no authoritative test that actual medical doctors can do, so the doctor is not adding any authority to the check. The business is incorrectly ascribing authority to a doctor to form the basis for a prohibition. There is enough information there to pass judgment.
I still have a hint that the larger and super-human scales that you refer to also lack a meaningful architecture in them. They don’t have something in them that would make a thinking sentient being like us(or me) find joy in participating.
That bettering of efficiency in super-human collections of stuff seems just like any other organization-it just strives for survival aka efficiency in a boring meaningless way.
There's a fascinating related example of what you describe: cassava [1]. Proper preparation of this staple food involves multiple steps over multiple days. Few of the steps serve an obvious purpose, yet omitting any of them has deadly long-term consequences. What appear to be "superstitions" or "rituals" to the individual performing them are anything but.
> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time
You'd probably like the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. He makes a strong case that societies evolve very differently from cells/species.
Edit: Thought I'd provide an example. Suppose there is a herd of animals hunted by a predator. Imagine it was possible for a single member of the herd (maybe the oldest/weakest) to sacrifice itself and save the rest of the herd from taking additional casualties. From the perspective of the herd, it's the best option for longterm survival, "reducing energy gradients", as you say. However, that would not happen. You generally don't see animals purposely sacrificing themselves for the good of the larger group. There are some exceptions (e.g. bees) but Dawkins very convincingly argues it's not for the good of the group.
The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've got real problems on their hands. But every now and again a No bullshitters should pop up and say stop this local incident of BS. It just does not happen. I'm one of those that tries to make senior management aware of total time and energy sinks in the corporation. Often it just doesn't click and I move on. Why don't cultures change (fast) enough?
I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.
The problem is that teams in large organizations are not run by the company owners themselves anymore, instead they are run by a middle manager whose job is to run the team.
The middle manager has no incentive to cut down too much on the team size, as that would risk his career, perceived social status, and even directly its job.
If a team of 10 all of the sudden becomes a team of 3, maybe there is no need for the middle manager anymore.
Also it does not look well on the CV to be a manager of a team of 3 instead of 10 people, so its not good for the manager career to cut down the team too much.
If the team size gets reduced a lot, the manager will be asked to do non-managerial tasks again, which would effectively mean a demotion.
> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment.
Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.
A manager foresaw a problem. Right or wrong, that manager didn't have the time or inclination to do a grad-level research project on back pain diagnosis and foolproof verification systems. Instead, they delegate to people who are trained in medicine and make a process by which someone else receives and stores the doctor's note.
This solves the perceived "cowboy" chair problem where everyone brings a custom chair and ends up tearing up the carpet or whatever. Pretty much nobody wants to risk their job by outright forging a note. So few people risk the higher levels of cheating-- like the psychiatrist example-- that the manager can just assume those people have back pain. And, in the event that one of these assumptions are broken by a bad faith actor, someone can go back and read some or all of the doctors' notes.
I would think the bar for "bullshit job" is the 2nd and 3rd boss Peter has in Office Space who parrot the criticism that the first boss gave him. Unless you invoke magic those jobs have no value whatsoever.
In other words, bullshit jobs should be the ones that add no value but cannot be removed because the structure of the organization suppresses the tools necessary to officially measure the employee as ineffective. It's like the king's idiot son-- everyone just has to pretend he isn't an idiot.
Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?".
In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove it, and then it's too late.
If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...
The creation of bullshit jobs probably comes from a combination of 3 things:
- the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc.
- the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager of 10 persons and not 4, so it will keep hiring to fill all positions regardeless of true need - its his social status and his career, and not his money
- the huge amount of automation introduced in the last few decades, making many jobs unnecessary.
There have always been bullshit jobs, just not that many as today.
Regarding the doctor's note thing, isn't it just to present a hurdle that the majority of people wouldn't jump over unless they actually needed to? So as to prevent people arbitrarily demanding an unlimited variety of conveniences that they don't really need?
I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.'
Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ?
We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.
I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward:
1. Wu appears in work with a chair
2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X
3. X asks Wu to remove the chair
4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code
5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it
Why does working a Bullshit Job have to be about ritual or tribal identity or anything else, when the most important thing in that person's life is putting food on the table? Even if a job is bullshit, there isn't enough of a social safety net in most/all of the world to provide for one's needs without taking a job. For an employee with no financial cushion and trying to avoid homelessness/starvation, what the job does or its contribution to society is secondary to the income it provides that allows that person their basic necessities.
Similarly, if those basic needs were met a la Universal Basic Income or a Star Trek society, there'd probably be less bullshit jobs of people doing something, ANYTHING, just to earn enough to live and provide for their family.
I don't think requiring a doctor's note is necessarily bullshit. Special chairs are more expensive so it's a shallow cut to prevent everyone wanting one just because it's available. If they are more comfortable and the two people sitting next to you have one, wouldn't you want one too?
Now obviously there is potential for fraud and so there is some bs as the author notes. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater I can see a reason the company would have this process.
Reminds me of a distant previous job where I requested a 24" LCD for monitoring and doing other tasks, the response was why I need such a large LCD while everybody in company just have 17"? Though it's no written in paper but generally you can't be different than all other employees unless you have a very strong reference. And this case it's doctor's note.
...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a bullshit society: our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect of having the productivity of the people that actually choose (and are able to!) to be productive being lowered by being surrounded by slackers etc..
Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and you can't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible! You might end up with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun" or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark tendencies.
"Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.
I have been unemployed for the most of my life, and i now have a 9to5 job. I think I hate jobs. I love working with code and projects, but it's very difficult or impossible to find a job, even in programming, that has some kind of meaning, good sense, or is stimulating.
Jobs feel like you're playing the role of a robot. It has no soul. It just shows how society has become so mechanized and lifeless and dead boring.
It's not all jobs, but I really feel alien to the society of labor. I might be unable to adapt and do work I don't like, but at least this article is agreeing that I'm not 100% of the problem.
On the other hand, creating a project by one self and making it happen seems hard, but it really shouldn't. My view is that society doesn't really like struggling artists.
Reminds me of an internship I did at a large organization, where the computer I was assigned to was partially unusable (even after formatting it would hang and freeze all the time), but procedures stated that I couldn't change it because it wasn't 3 years old. Procedures also stated that I wasn't allowed to bring my own computer to my workplace, so I ended up spending a lot of time sitting there drinking coffee and reading books, instead of actually doing the work I was supposed to.
Well, I think Dr. Alexander is doing a great job. I mean, he is protecting the mental health of his patients by using the authority he has been given and I think that is what his job is about.
Nevertheless, he might do even better if he would recommend to his patients someone who is better qualified to help them with treating the origin of their physical problems (while still providing them with the letter they require).
[+] [-] normalhuman|7 years ago|reply
1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.
As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse.
It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff.
Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development. ... Three of the university's eight vice presidents will have their offices at Stanford Redwood City.[2]
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administ... [2] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/frequently-asked-questions
[+] [-] stirlo|7 years ago|reply
"Academic staff: 2,219
Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC
Students: 16,430"
Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
[+] [-] snaky|7 years ago|reply
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administ...
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
It's a very bad design if management gets physically separated from the actual purpose of an institution. They get detached from the actual work and live in their own reality.
[+] [-] ur-whale|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shoo|7 years ago|reply
"the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"
[+] [-] nikanj|7 years ago|reply
Takes a lot of people to manage that much money.
[+] [-] mehblahwhatevs|7 years ago|reply
How do people go up the ladder if there's already people at the top? With people living longer, more women working, etc the organization has to create more positions at the top or lose talent?
[+] [-] bagospanners|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theptip|7 years ago|reply
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...
This increase in cost without a commensurate increase in quality is incredibly scary.
[+] [-] Liron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draw_down|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jakidud|7 years ago|reply
For 4 months now.
Let that sink in.
What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means that I might have access to privelaged insider information,which means I can't sit with the public teams. But there isn't any seat in the private rooms. So I'm sitting in the cafeteria, reading books, playing on the PlayStation, etc etc.
I ask my manager every single day when I'm going to get a new spot. It's usually 'next week for sure' or 'friday for sure'. Hasn't happened yet. During the first month, I stayed for 8 hours each day, doing nothing. I've gradually stopped giving a fuck anymore and am looking for other jobs now, even though this is a pretty sweet gig.
[+] [-] tyleo|7 years ago|reply
One of my friend’s coworkers did this but I didn’t know the coworker well enough to see how it turned out. I have always been curious.
[+] [-] dentemple|7 years ago|reply
People are willing to pay big money to set aside time to learn a new, marketable skill. You currently have the opportunity to be paid while doing the same.
[+] [-] bena|7 years ago|reply
https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
I had a similar thing happen to me once.
I was hired to perform a certain mission-critical task that had to be performed at a particular time two days a week. It's was a significant task involving about a hundred people that had to be done every day of the year, including holidays.
When I was hired, I was supposed to do that task on weekends and then three days during the work week help out the people who had to do the task on those days.
Everything went fine for about three months. Then one of the full-time helpers complained to their union that I was doing a helper job three days a week. In the union's view, I was taking away a helper job, which wasn't really true. I was a bonus helper. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a new three-day-a-week helper position.
The union got all huffy and the result was that I had to come to work, suit and all, and I sat at a computer and got paid six figures to look at LOLcats three days a week.
This went on for five years until I left for another company.
Amazingly, that was the least problematic staffing situation at that company.
[+] [-] NathanCH|7 years ago|reply
I did freelancing but eventually got very depressed. Quit my job, left my apartment and moved back with my parents.
[+] [-] foobarchu|7 years ago|reply
One of my past employers was a consulting firm that would have people "on the bench" for weeks to months at a time between clients. When the time comes to get leaner, those who have been "on the bench" the longest are the ideal ones to get rid of, because they're the ones who will hurt the least to let go (specifically because there's leftover responsibilities that need to be assigned elsewhere or silo'd knowledge that may be lost).
I'd be on the lookout for something else.
[+] [-] retox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] village-idiot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wemdyjreichert|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] browsercoin|7 years ago|reply
After like a year of doing nothing, like around the 9th month mark, it starts to take a toll. Since my manager was constantly telling me there's not much I need to do other than explain lines of code and what they do in business terms. Often I would prepare something because I'm so fucking bored and then it would be brushed off as "cool but yeah no need".
The reason is that it feels too much like unemployment. Checking reddit, HN, github, eating company snack and getting fat, starts to develop impulsive gambling/day trading....
basically I was spending money to escape the fact how bored I was...it's really fucked up....I'm not sure what the dynamics are but honestly, it sure beats doing manual labor.
the lack of product market fit was painfully obvious by the volume of opportunities we were getting.
[+] [-] dandare|7 years ago|reply
Some of the arguments I keep hearing:
1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but the author jumps into conclusion without really understanding why are employees not allowed to bring whatever chair they wish to the office. Then he jumps to another conclusion, that nobody really cares because his psychiatrist note is usually accepted. As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day.
2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.
3/ "There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations." True and totally unrelated. What is the argument?
4/ "Managers like to have large teams." True, and economic forces push against that. This does not explain the apparent pandemic of BS jobs (that I don't see anywhere).
etc.
If you won't mind, I will try some anecdotal evidence and jumping to conclusions myself:
5/ I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would be great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible for compliance is not doing a BS job.
6/ Automation and technology saved us from slaving in the fields and sweatshops. Driving a truck full of confectionery across the US is pretty much a BS job if you ask me. Same as "Shirley, make me 5 copies of this contract before the lunch" - on a typewriter.
7/ BS jobs pandemics is nothing else but a variation of the "Grass was greener when I was young". Developed countries (maybe with the exception of the US) have safer environments than ever, more disposable income than ever and people live longer than ever.
[+] [-] Radim|7 years ago|reply
Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement?
I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you), but whether something is sustainable and makes sense on a larger, super-human scale (organization, society, species) is tough to determine by any single actor. It's typically left to be played out and then (hopefully) analyzed and learned from.
Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. If a drone-like society turns out to be the most efficient in this sense, full of silly rituals which nevertheless make it more cohesive / stable / whatever, then that's where we're headed. Even though it currently doesn't seem that way, with individualism, science and articulation scoring some spectacular victories.
[+] [-] IanSanders|7 years ago|reply
I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
>term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
>Although common resource systems have been known to collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing)...
Especially check the "examples" section
[+] [-] BlackFly|7 years ago|reply
In the case of the OP, the author is pointing out that there is no authoritative test that actual medical doctors can do, so the doctor is not adding any authority to the check. The business is incorrectly ascribing authority to a doctor to form the basis for a prohibition. There is enough information there to pass judgment.
[+] [-] everydaypanos|7 years ago|reply
That bettering of efficiency in super-human collections of stuff seems just like any other organization-it just strives for survival aka efficiency in a boring meaningless way.
[+] [-] ramblerman|7 years ago|reply
This is meaningless if you leave out the goal though. Efficiency for what, food distribution? What's the function around which we are optimizing.
[+] [-] ctlby|7 years ago|reply
There's a fascinating related example of what you describe: cassava [1]. Proper preparation of this staple food involves multiple steps over multiple days. Few of the steps serve an obvious purpose, yet omitting any of them has deadly long-term consequences. What appear to be "superstitions" or "rituals" to the individual performing them are anything but.
[1] http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/08/tradition-is-smar...
[+] [-] 3minus1|7 years ago|reply
You'd probably like the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. He makes a strong case that societies evolve very differently from cells/species.
Edit: Thought I'd provide an example. Suppose there is a herd of animals hunted by a predator. Imagine it was possible for a single member of the herd (maybe the oldest/weakest) to sacrifice itself and save the rest of the herd from taking additional casualties. From the perspective of the herd, it's the best option for longterm survival, "reducing energy gradients", as you say. However, that would not happen. You generally don't see animals purposely sacrificing themselves for the good of the larger group. There are some exceptions (e.g. bees) but Dawkins very convincingly argues it's not for the good of the group.
[+] [-] wingerlang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wjnc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vfc1|7 years ago|reply
The problem is that teams in large organizations are not run by the company owners themselves anymore, instead they are run by a middle manager whose job is to run the team.
The middle manager has no incentive to cut down too much on the team size, as that would risk his career, perceived social status, and even directly its job.
If a team of 10 all of the sudden becomes a team of 3, maybe there is no need for the middle manager anymore.
Also it does not look well on the CV to be a manager of a team of 3 instead of 10 people, so its not good for the manager career to cut down the team too much.
If the team size gets reduced a lot, the manager will be asked to do non-managerial tasks again, which would effectively mean a demotion.
[+] [-] taway_1212|7 years ago|reply
Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
A manager foresaw a problem. Right or wrong, that manager didn't have the time or inclination to do a grad-level research project on back pain diagnosis and foolproof verification systems. Instead, they delegate to people who are trained in medicine and make a process by which someone else receives and stores the doctor's note.
This solves the perceived "cowboy" chair problem where everyone brings a custom chair and ends up tearing up the carpet or whatever. Pretty much nobody wants to risk their job by outright forging a note. So few people risk the higher levels of cheating-- like the psychiatrist example-- that the manager can just assume those people have back pain. And, in the event that one of these assumptions are broken by a bad faith actor, someone can go back and read some or all of the doctors' notes.
I would think the bar for "bullshit job" is the 2nd and 3rd boss Peter has in Office Space who parrot the criticism that the first boss gave him. Unless you invoke magic those jobs have no value whatsoever.
In other words, bullshit jobs should be the ones that add no value but cannot be removed because the structure of the organization suppresses the tools necessary to officially measure the employee as ineffective. It's like the king's idiot son-- everyone just has to pretend he isn't an idiot.
Edit: clarification
[+] [-] citation_please|7 years ago|reply
In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove it, and then it's too late.
If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...
[+] [-] vfc1|7 years ago|reply
- the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc.
- the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager of 10 persons and not 4, so it will keep hiring to fill all positions regardeless of true need - its his social status and his career, and not his money
- the huge amount of automation introduced in the last few decades, making many jobs unnecessary.
There have always been bullshit jobs, just not that many as today.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gys|7 years ago|reply
Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ?
We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.
[+] [-] avip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asoplata|7 years ago|reply
Similarly, if those basic needs were met a la Universal Basic Income or a Star Trek society, there'd probably be less bullshit jobs of people doing something, ANYTHING, just to earn enough to live and provide for their family.
[+] [-] xivzgrev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnq|7 years ago|reply
Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and you can't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible! You might end up with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun" or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark tendencies.
"Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.
[+] [-] jokoon|7 years ago|reply
Jobs feel like you're playing the role of a robot. It has no soul. It just shows how society has become so mechanized and lifeless and dead boring.
It's not all jobs, but I really feel alien to the society of labor. I might be unable to adapt and do work I don't like, but at least this article is agreeing that I'm not 100% of the problem.
On the other hand, creating a project by one self and making it happen seems hard, but it really shouldn't. My view is that society doesn't really like struggling artists.
[+] [-] dangom|7 years ago|reply
Nobody cared.
[+] [-] JepZ|7 years ago|reply
Nevertheless, he might do even better if he would recommend to his patients someone who is better qualified to help them with treating the origin of their physical problems (while still providing them with the letter they require).
[+] [-] ainar-g|7 years ago|reply
[1] http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/