> This idea that rich people create fake jobs in order to have an impressive-looking number of economic dependents runs into a few other problems.
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.
It's the most direct status symbol in the workplace beyond your actual salary. You can flex your salary pretty easily by having expensive cars and meals. Flexing your professional "pull" in an organization is trickier, and the most straightforward way is to have more people underneath you in the org-chart. The more reporters you have, the more important you are.
People are under no obligation to be curious about anything in particular.
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
> I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that 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?
> People are under no obligation to be curious about anything in particular.
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.
Curiosity is no requirement of course, but at least an understanding of the limits of one's own knowledge and authority on a subject is desirable. Sometimes things other people do don't make sense to me, and seem like they could be improved. So I can:
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.
I get a little skeptical when an article about a book says "don't bother reading this book" and then goes on to make a lot of claims about it. There aren't even any quotes from the text. I haven't read Graeber's book, but I just don't like the "trust me to have done the thinking about this topic for you" approach.
It's genuinely one of my favorite books I've read. He has a very plain, straight-forward and matter-of-fact writing style. It reads like an informal, incredibly long but well researched and interesting blog post.
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.
I love this attitude in theory. It would ironically put a lot of writers out of a job, though, if you required their audience to read the primary source before reading their thoughts about it. I mean, the ratio of people reading opinions about Piketty to people actually reading Piketty must have been a million to one.
> Graeber lists a few of these bogus occupations[1]: tax lawyers, marketing consultants, actuaries, HR consultants, financial strategists, etc.
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)
What you named are NOT BS jobs. A BS job is one that, if it disappeared tomorrow, no one would even notice (or things would become _more_ efficient). Your examples would result in carts piling up in parking lots, people with $500 of groceries clogging up self-checkout lines for hours (plus a whole lot of theft) and public spaces looking like hell.
I think even your list isn't bullshit jobs. The world needs cart returners, landscapers, etc. And replacing jobs with the customers doing the job doesn't seem particularly desirable either (and proves those job aren't bullshit).
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.
I’ve consistently found that a good delineator is “does the job require non-trivial decision making, or are you just a robot following highly specified algorithm?”
I am apparently the only one that liked the article a lot. It's certainly a lot better than the original Graeber article which to me is a masterclass in stumbling over well known paradoxes and puzzles in economics and substituting in his own deranged ideas instead of the generally accepted answers among actual economists.
In anthropology there's distinctions between `emic` and `etic` perspectives(adopted from linguistics, so think of phonemic and phonetic here), etic denoting an outsider perspective and analysis of a culture, while emic is an analysis of the culture on the culture's own terms.
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.
Odd Lots just had an episode [0] where they briefly discussed this book as well and the interviewee had some reasonably interesting opinions about why the premise of this book is flawed but was in other respects pretty complimentary of Graeber.
The episode has other very interesting concepts like "accountability sinks".
I haven't read the book, but I find it concerning that this article criticizes Graeber's unrepresentative data collection, and then proceeds to arm-chair about why Graeber is wrong without really introducing any empirical findings.
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:
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.
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.
But these empirical findings do not contradict Coase's theory of the firm at all. Workers are paid to be available and do work as needed.
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.
Medical billing is a great example because it's insane that their are people employed on both sides of the transaction whos job is to maximize profits for their side while catching bad behavior from the other side. Everyone knows that medical billing is insane but once you know some of the specifics it's even more atrocious.
> if we just moved to single-payer health care, the role could disappear entirely.
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.
Some thoughts (from a very biased fan of the original article and book):
> 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.
I don’t get what’s hard to believe about this. Principal-agent problems are everywhere, we’re terrible at measuring effectiveness for tons of things including and especially management (the TL;DR of the research is that we damn near don’t know how to do it at all), zero-sum games abound (a great deal of advertising and marketing, to take one of Graeber’s examples), and there are tons of ways to throw money around in ways that are personally beneficial but net-harmful without falling afoul of the law.
> 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.
He presents an economic theory for how this happens, connecting it to the medieval practice of creating face-saving make-work jobs for talentless aristocrats
Only assuming "Bullshit" to be a though-terminating cliche: It could also be treated as a starting point to understanding how these circumstances came to be, and how to go about effectively untangling them.
>That drives a lot of the empirical research in the book. He cites some surveys, which show that many workers ... don't believe their jobs are worth doing
>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.
Agree. But I like the tendency to criticize celebrated thinkers. This article is just not doing a good job. You could say the writer of this article has done a bullshit job. In a way.
The blog author also has quite a bullshit job, worked mostly in finance-adjacent (and seems to be quite into cryptocurrencies to top it off), and advertisement-related stuff.
Not sure where the author worked, but reading BS jobs resonated with me as someone living in a post-communist country.
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?
This is the entire premise of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B, which Douglas Adams wrote about 25 years earlier. But every conservative parent has made jokes about getting a degree "underwater basket weaving" for as long as I can remember.
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.
Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired 80% of it's staff. Twitter is still perfectly functional (other than scaring off advertisers, but that has nothing to do with head count). Let's not pretend that bullshit jobs are very much real.
And FAANG was able to hire and layoff massive numbers between 2020 and today while increasing revenue. Google is famously a bullshit factory that churns out products only to kill them.
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.
"perfectly" functional? Half the pages require a refresh to display more than a spinner and tweets are shown out of chronological order of you're not logged in.
From anecdotal evidence(just reading news reports) and testimonies (verbal anecdotes from people who still work at Twitter IRL), I think Twitter's current headcount is pretty close to what it was when Musk originally bought Twitter.
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.
It’s typical for KTLO (keep the lights on) effort to be under 10% of an engineering team’s total load.
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.
Twitter/X is not functional at all. You're only looking at it from a technical standpoint and not a money-making standpoint. It has completely collapsed in the money-making department and has lost 71% of its value as a result:
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.
I have no idea what proportion of Twitter's jobs were bullshit or not, but it is DEFINITELY less functional than before.
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.
I have no idea if Twitter was overstaffed or full of bullshit jobs, but this doesn't exactly prove anything. You could eliminate the majority or maybe even the entirety of things like maintenance staff and researchers from plenty of organizations and not see any short-term decline. That doesn't mean they weren't needed. There's also jobs that you know will be needed at some point but not when. This includes obvious things like first responders. Get rid of the fire department and you'll be fine until there's a fire. It includes less obvious things like the mid-career officer bloat in the military, which is there because the military intentionally overstaffs and trains people to do other jobs in case of mass casualty events in which it becomes necessary to immediately move a bunch of people into different jobs.
[+] [-] leftcenterright|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] swatcoder|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] llamaimperative|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] prepend|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Nifty3929|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] golergka|1 year ago|reply
Anthropologists who write books that become culture memes should be under this obligation.
[+] [-] karaterobot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wrs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vundercind|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diox8tony|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] zelon88|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pkulak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] overrun11|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vitalredundancy|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pdonis|1 year ago|reply
For those who don't want to tackle the whole book, the original article by Graeber is online here:
https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
[+] [-] jnsaff2|1 year ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] abeppu|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] overrun11|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Suppafly|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pdonis|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] why5s|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] vundercind|1 year ago|reply
Of course a bunch of jobs are bullshit.
[+] [-] pdonis|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|1 year ago|reply
Or “Hollywood mogul” for a college dropout/failed actor https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-elli...
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pydry|1 year ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] pineaux|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] piva00|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] adamors|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] diffxx|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] demondemidi|1 year ago|reply
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_...
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] mmaniac|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingknife|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] silverquiet|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alephxyz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] etc-hosts|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jhgvh|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] riskable|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ajkjk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] KingMob|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] duxup|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nonameiguess|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kara4151|1 year ago|reply
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