What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a bit more idle time at the desk because you always tap some wall that's out of your control. Maybe AI saves you a Google search or a doc lookup here and there. You still need to check everything and it can cause mistakes that take longer too. Here's an example from today.
Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records. AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong address because it's for a different doctor with the same name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes like this happening at scale is making the other time savings pretty close to a wash.
Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.
There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands.
Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though.
Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.
But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while.
LLMs might not save time but they certainly increase quality for at least some office work. I frequently use it to check my work before sending to colleagues or customers and it occasionally catches gaps or errors in my writing.
Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email.
Consider, for example, the following python code:
x = (5)
vs
x = (5,)
One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both are valid code.
Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You won't see it.
> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.
He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else.
That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.
> There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code?
I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense.
A lot of code is written because you want the output from Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar are made by different people. With open source, someone writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else has to write it because they just use what's published.
In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has the same problem has to write it again, but they don't publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the work that only really needed to be done once, which makes for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99 bullshit jobs.
"They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people."
Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs that person to employ them. For example, a senior manager padding his department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for decades.
Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit Jobs was based on people who self reported that their jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the negative psychological impact this can have on employees, and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense economically, the bureaucratization of the health care and education sectors for example, in contrast so many other professions that actually are useful. Other examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-tapers, etc.
I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact.
> They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people.
Not necessarily, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that were just flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark.
> It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.
> Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually.
Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world
> The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.
But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular.
Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia.
Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.
This is what I have been saying for sometime. Working inside different Goverment department you see this happening every day. Email and report bouncing back and forth with no actual added value while feeling extremely productive. That is why private sector and public sector generally don't mix well. It is also one reason why I said in some of my previous post LLM could replace up to 70% of Goverment's job.
Edit: If anyone haven't watched Yes Minster, you should go and watch it, it is a documentary on UK Government that is still true today as it was 40-50 years ago.
At least in my experience, there's another mechanism at play: people aren't making it visible if AI is speeding them up. If AI means a bugfix card that would have taken a day takes 15 minutes, well, that's the work day sorted. Why pull another card instead of doing... something that isn't work?
> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value?
I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).
I think it’s more likely that the same amount of work is getting done, just it’s far less taxing. And that averages are funny things, for developers it’s undeniably a huge boost, but for others it’s creating friction.
And in the type of work where AI arguably yields productivity gains the workers have high agency and may pay for their own tooling without telling their employers. Case in point, me, I have access to CoPilot via my employer but don't use it because I prefer my self-paid ChatGPT subscription. If Ai-lift in productivity is measured on the condition that I use Copilot then the resulting metric misses my AI usage entirely and my productivity improvement are not attributed to their real cause.
And the reason the position and the busy work exist is to have someone who is knowledgeable on the topic/relationship/requirements/whatever for the edge cases that come up (you don't pay me to push the button, you pay me to know when to push the button). AI could be technically filling a roll while its defeating the whole point (familiarity, background knowledge) for a lot of these roles.
Exactly. So much terrible usage is out there and no one is talking about it. It takes skill to use, and I bet accountants were way slower when they were learning how to use spreadsheets for the first time too.
We made an under-the-radar optimization in a data flow in my company. A given task is now much more freshData-assisted that it used to.
Was a LLM used during that optimization? Yes.
Who will correlate the sudden productivity improvement with our optimization of the data flow with the availability of a LLM to do such optimizations fast enough that no project+consultants+management is needed ?
No one.
Just like no one is evaluating the value of a hammer or a ladder when you build a house.
But you would see more houses, or housing build costs/bids fall.
This is where the whole "show me what you built with AI" meme comes from, and currently there's no substitute for SWEs. Maybe next year or next next year, but mostly the usage is generating boring stuff like internal tool frontends, tests, etc. That's not nothing, but because actually writing the code was at best 20% of the time cost anyway, the gains aren't huge, and won't be until AI gets into the other parts of the SDLC (or the SDLC changes).
CONEXPO, World of Concrete, and NAHB IBS is where vendors go to show off their new ladders and the attendees totally evaluate the value of those ladders vs their competitors.
But they're not optimizing the average worker's productivity. That's a silicon valley talking point. The average worker, IF they use AI, ends up proofreading the text for the same amount of time as it would take to write the text themselves.
And it is of this lowly commenter's opinion that proofreading for accuracy and clarity is harder than writing it yourself and defending it later.
Bullshit Jobs is one of those "just so" stories that seems truthy but doesn't stand up to any critical evaluation. Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers. While in large enterprises there is some level of empire building where managers hire more workers than necessary just to inflate their own importance, in the long run those businesses fall to leaner competitors.
It's only after decades of experience and hindsight that you realize that a lot of the important work we spend our time on has extremely limited long-term value.
Maybe you're lucky enough to be doing cutting edge research or do something that really seriously impacts human beings, but I've done plenty of "mission critical right fucking now" work that a week from now (or even hours from now, when I worked for a content marketing business) is beyond irrelevant. It's an amazing thing watching marketing types set money on fire burning super expensive developer time (but salaried, so they discount the cost to zero) just to make their campaigns like 2-3% more efficient.
I've intentionally sat on plenty of projects that somebody was pushing really hard for because they thought it was the absolute right necessary thing at the time and the stakeholder realized was pointless/worthless after a good long shit and shower. This one move has saved literally man years of work to be done and IMO is the #1 most important skill people need to learn ("when to just do nothing").
> Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off unproductive workers.
Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone, especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you think that people are laid off because they’re unproductive.
What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit.
It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC.
And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.
Maybe the take is that those reports that people took a day to write were read by nobody in the first place and now those reports are being written faster and more of them are being produced but still nobody reads them. Thus productivity doesn't change. The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better.
What happens if (and I suspect this to be increasingly the case now) you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that nobody reads and those people now use LLMs to not read the report whereas they were not reading it in person before?
Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing more things which other people will not read and/or not reading the things that other people produce (using llms)?
And like the article says, early computerization produced way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion, we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users were able to produce for themselves exactly the computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets became widespread. LLMs haven’t had their spreadsheet moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward, as if more noise meant more productivity.
Not necessarily. You could have 100 FTE on reports instead of 300 FTE in a large company like a bank. That means 200 people who'd normally go into reporting jobs over the next decade, will go into something else, producing something else ontop of the reports that continue to be produced. The sum of this is more production.
Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot less employment needed, freeing up people to do other things.
What a load of nonsense, they won't be producing a report in a third of the time only to have no-one read it. They'll spend the same amount of time and produce a report three times the length, which will then go unread.
I suspect that we are going to see managers say, "Hey, this request is BS. I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" while employees say, "Hey, this response is BS, I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" and then we'll just have ChatGPT talking to itself. Eventually someone will notice and fire them both.
> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing
In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someone is buying it from them, otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but its not the majority.
hattmall|11 days ago
Assistant is dispatching a courier to get medical records. AI auto completes to include the address. Normally they wouldn't put the address, the courier knows who we work with, but AI added it so why not. Except it's the wrong address because it's for a different doctor with the same name. At least they knew to verify it, but still mistakes like this happening at scale is making the other time savings pretty close to a wash.
majormajor|11 days ago
There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands.
Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though.
Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.
But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while.
sanex|11 days ago
nradov|11 days ago
vrighter|11 days ago
Consider, for example, the following python code:
vs One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both are valid code.Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You won't see it.
Aurornis|11 days ago
That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.
He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else.
That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.
AnthonyMouse|11 days ago
I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense.
A lot of code is written because you want the output from Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar are made by different people. With open source, someone writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else has to write it because they just use what's published.
In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has the same problem has to write it again, but they don't publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the work that only really needed to be done once, which makes for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99 bullshit jobs.
EliRivers|11 days ago
Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs that person to employ them. For example, a senior manager padding his department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for decades.
mikem170|11 days ago
I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact.
wiseowise|11 days ago
Not necessarily, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that were just flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark.
ccortes|11 days ago
> Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually.
Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world
wolvesechoes|11 days ago
But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular.
Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia.
DiggyJohnson|11 days ago
ksec|11 days ago
Edit: If anyone haven't watched Yes Minster, you should go and watch it, it is a documentary on UK Government that is still true today as it was 40-50 years ago.
epiccoleman|11 days ago
weatherlite|11 days ago
I think broadly that's a paradoxical statement; improving office productivity should translate to higher gdp; whatever it is you're doing in some office - even if you're selling paper or making bombs, if you're more productive it means you're selling more (or using less resources to sell the same amount); that should translate to higher gdp (at least higher gdp per worker, there's the issue of what happens to gdp when many workers get fired).
cucumber3732842|11 days ago
Society as a whole is no better off since no value or wealth was generated, but the number did go up.
A whole bunch of our economy is broken windows like this to varying degrees.
jama211|11 days ago
mguerville|11 days ago
MeteorMarc|11 days ago
overgard|11 days ago
_DeadFred_|11 days ago
blitzar|11 days ago
i'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on sunday
t43562|11 days ago
i.e. it's not the LLM, it's that they're not being used properly.
I get accused of the no true Scotsman argument because I think agile can be done right, for example. Is work bullshit because an LLM doesn't help it?
jama211|10 days ago
lolive|11 days ago
Was a LLM used during that optimization? Yes.
Who will correlate the sudden productivity improvement with our optimization of the data flow with the availability of a LLM to do such optimizations fast enough that no project+consultants+management is needed ?
No one.
Just like no one is evaluating the value of a hammer or a ladder when you build a house.
camgunz|11 days ago
This is where the whole "show me what you built with AI" meme comes from, and currently there's no substitute for SWEs. Maybe next year or next next year, but mostly the usage is generating boring stuff like internal tool frontends, tests, etc. That's not nothing, but because actually writing the code was at best 20% of the time cost anyway, the gains aren't huge, and won't be until AI gets into the other parts of the SDLC (or the SDLC changes).
fragmede|11 days ago
ViewTrick1002|11 days ago
It’s easy to convince yourself that it is, and anyone can massage some internal metric enough to prove their desired outcome.
jen729w|11 days ago
butlike|11 days ago
And it is of this lowly commenter's opinion that proofreading for accuracy and clarity is harder than writing it yourself and defending it later.
nradov|11 days ago
ccortes|11 days ago
This is not true at all. You can find plenty of examples going either way but it’s far from truth from being a universal reality
busterarm|11 days ago
Maybe you're lucky enough to be doing cutting edge research or do something that really seriously impacts human beings, but I've done plenty of "mission critical right fucking now" work that a week from now (or even hours from now, when I worked for a content marketing business) is beyond irrelevant. It's an amazing thing watching marketing types set money on fire burning super expensive developer time (but salaried, so they discount the cost to zero) just to make their campaigns like 2-3% more efficient.
I've intentionally sat on plenty of projects that somebody was pushing really hard for because they thought it was the absolute right necessary thing at the time and the stakeholder realized was pointless/worthless after a good long shit and shower. This one move has saved literally man years of work to be done and IMO is the #1 most important skill people need to learn ("when to just do nothing").
wiseowise|11 days ago
Companies are obviously not hesitant to lay off anyone, especially for cost saving. It is interesting how you think that people are laid off because they’re unproductive.
protocolture|11 days ago
Most "Bullshit Jobs" can already be automated, but can isnt always should or will. Graeber is a capex thinker in an opex world.
groundzeros2015|11 days ago
Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a common mistake.
bubblewand|11 days ago
It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC.
emp17344|11 days ago
simonask|11 days ago
wolvesechoes|11 days ago
> There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.
Anthropological insight has much more value than anything economists may produce on economy.
gzread|11 days ago
bubblewand|11 days ago
fdefitte|11 days ago
[deleted]
Stromgren|11 days ago
injidup|11 days ago
seanhunter|11 days ago
Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing more things which other people will not read and/or not reading the things that other people produce (using llms)?
Productivity through the roof.
sevensor|11 days ago
NoLinkToMe|11 days ago
Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot less employment needed, freeing up people to do other things.
amelius|11 days ago
Sadly AI is only capable of doing work that has already been done, thousands of times.
finghin|11 days ago
garrickvanburen|11 days ago
Lerc|11 days ago
jasondigitized|11 days ago
wiseowise|11 days ago
jacquesm|11 days ago
zcw100|11 days ago
"What would you say you do here?" --Office Space
weatherlite|11 days ago
In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someone is buying it from them, otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but its not the majority.
kittbuilds|11 days ago
[deleted]