Businesses are in it for the money, employees tend to be one of the larger expenses, so maintaining some bullshit positions that would cost them money doesn’t make fiscal sense, so what’s up?
Being bullshit does not mean unprofitable. Most of the financial sector is socially useless, a complete waste of talent as well as effort. But it pays well.
The entire health insurance industry too. That is likely over a million people.
I’ll also add that managers don’t think like normal people…
IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.
But Sales. Well that’s all profit. So we should give them all the money.
Even if we closed sales most people who want our stuff will still buy it from us, but nothing will get done without IT…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And your competitors would love you for closing your Sales department.
IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.
This was the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss repeatedly when I was in a pure IT position. As in, he would bitch about, “Every time I come into your office you’re just sitting here playing Doom.” (It was not, for the record. At the time, it was Half Life 2 or, more occasionally, Unreal Tournament 2K4. But to your common-or-garden PHB, all first person shooters look alike.)
I had to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that your IT guy sitting around playing “Doom” is the ideal scenario during business hours. Why? Because if I am sitting here doing this, that means none of the millions of dollars of mission critical IT infrastructure that your building full of engineers relies upon every second to perform work for billable hours is on fire. If any of said infrastructure catches fire, I am here, on site, to put it out. Not on call. Not four hours away. Right here, right now. Then I go back to playing “Doom.”
There are no bullshit jobs. There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. These are propaganda pieces to suppress wages of the most vulnerable of society.
Facebook paid an HR professional six figures for over a year to not do any actual work. Good for her and all but it does sound like her job wasn’t much of a job.
So, she did do something, just not her specific job duty because she got fired after 6 months for a TikTok video. She was doing a bunch of training and was told to learn how things are done at Meta. At a large company, I would not expect a new hire to do much of anything for the first few months as they learned the ropes of how things worked. The more forward facing, theonger I’d expect. Hiring people? That’s forward facing. You’re choosing who to spend money on. Developers? Customers see the application. I wouldn’t let them touch anything significant for a bit. I’m sure it applies to other areas as well.
TFW you’re so anti-capitalist that your integer overflows and you become pro-capitalist again.
Those two things are not at all similar. The idea of bullshit jobs is not a propaganda thing like unskilled labor. The guy that wrote this book Bullshit Jobs would probably find that what most people think of as unskilled labor are some of the most not bullshit and most important jobs there are.
Although the guy has a lot of debatable ideas that I don’t fully agree with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Bullshit jobs are another issue, it’s well paid jobs, sometimes very well paid but whithout an objective way to quantify what they do. Think about the manager who organizes workshop on improving communication between team in a company or the person who does long post on Yammer to praise the company for their green transition as from today there is charging stations on the parking and directors will be given a Tesla rather than a Mercedes and other executive will be given an e-bike rather than a train card.
The don’t really feel like they do something complex (or linked to there training) but just use common sense to do basic tasks. Unfortunately, these are still necessary in a large structure
I think you misunderstand the original author’s point.
To me, it looks like there are different levels of bullshit jobs.
There are jobs that are entirely bullshit. Like the military sandbags example: guys filling bags, other guys emptying the same bags. This is a waste of time, money, and resources, AND contributes nothing to society. Jobs like this should not exist, and CAN only exist in an environment (like the military) where essentially nobody actually involved in the process has any profit motive, or any incentive whatsoever to make the process efficient or good.
There are jobs that are bullshit to society, and this is where a lot of corpo jobs fall. They contribute nothing to society, they are meaningless to the person doing them, but somehow, some way, they contribute something to the purpose of making money for other people. And under capitalism, making money for someone other than yourself is the reason literally any job exists. If your job does not contribute to the almighty SHAREHOLDER, your job will not exist.
So if it feels like your job is bullshit, look for who you’re making money for, or who you’re protecting from losing a few pennies of profit. That’s who your job matters to. Not you, personally. The people who decided your job should exist don’t give a single fuck about you as a human being and never will, ever. But your job matters to them because your job getting done means they make more money than if it didn’t, and that’s all they do care about.
The same reason the military gets soldiers to fill sandbags and other soldiers to empty the same sandbags. Because the system only has to be good enough not to fail.
It mostly revolves around the belief that a successful company needs a certain set of moving parts. Workers. Management. HR. Accountant. Etc. Usually it’s not necessarily a bad premise, but often they just hire to fill these rolls first, rather on need and the right time.
So you get a bunch of people mostly sitting around with unclear or obtuse duties because the same people need to justify their job. That cyclical pattern basically becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and can even take down established companies if they don’t keep up with the markets they are in.
Do not assume that most people in a corporate management structure work towards company profit. Having people under you makes you powerful and helps your career.
As a career-hunter, I convince corporate leadership that I can re-architect their dying and mismanaged software if I get a team of 20 cheap outsourced devs and four years. It will be everything the old system was plus several new and innovative ways to capture the market. This is not remotely possible, but I manage to convince corpo that it is.
Everyone under me are doing bullshit work that will accomplish nothing, but we have SCRUM and promotions and time tracking and all the toys in the box to distract everyone.
After four years, I have lead a department of 20 people successfully for four years, which gives me momentum to move up the ladder.
Or maybe the thing is killed in mere two years, and I can fail upwards. I dared to dream and I managed a deparment for two years and am the right person to do New Thing X.
100% this. My company is going through a reorg and I now have to work for 10 new managers who know absolutely nothing about the company or the business. Their track record of failing at some other similar competitor and being ousted got them in the door here.
deleted by creator
(I am not actually doing this. I was using a hypothetical writing style.)
The Lumberghs in charge haven’t gotten around to bringing in the Bobs, and Lumbergh’s too chickenshit to do the job himself, so…
I always took the term ‘bullshit jobs’ to refer to jobs that produce something that society doesn’t really require, and typically only exists because they need someone to deal with the output of someone else’s bullshit job.
Society isn’t really good at knowing what it requires. And sometimes it’s better to be cautious. Also capitalism breaks down in certain markets, one of which is the “job market”.
Any market that involves a lot of players and little oversight will get manipulated like crazy, including the job market. Employers try to counter that, but in the end the people that are best at getting hired for a job get that job, not the people that are best at doing that job. How could it not be?
And that includes the jobs of the people that do the hiring. So it’s a market that’s rife with inefficiencies.
It breaks down a lot because most things arent markets.
Think of a rushing river. Huge volumes of water roll through, but you still have swirling eddies and stagnant pools at the edges.
It’s the same thing. Positions get overlooked. A business practice gets outmoded but not phased out right away. Miscommunication or misalignment between departments leaves goals unclear. Perverse incentives encourage inefficient behavior.
When I worked in an office, we were running behind on inputting paper forms to the database. Because we were behind, we were ordered to hire more clerks, and did. But the bottleneck was the database; we were only allowed two connections at a time. To ensure maximum efficiency, only the two or three most experienced clerks were allowed to input to the database, and the rest of us did triage on the paper forms. I carved out a role for myself (as the roughly sixth most senior clerk) as the guy who trained new hires how to pre-process the forms. And I was always busy, because we were always hiring, because we were ordered to, because we were further and further behind, because of the database bottleneck that adding more staff did nothing to address. I came away with six extra weeks of pay and two letters of recommendation, and I haven’t worked an office job since.
What do you do now, if you don’t mind my asking?
I wait tables
Respect, my wife waits as well
P.l.e.a.s.e.
no one cares if they’re collecting a fat paycheck. source: i am embedded in such bullshit.
Despite how people act, we are fundamentally flawed and generally imperfect.
Whether we’re talking about daily life or global industry, mistakes are often made, plans go awry, and processes are almost never perfectly efficient or optimized. Even the most highly engineered, well oiled machine has inefficiencies.
Businesses are just the same and they actually waste a fuck ton of money every day, but all of that (plus a healthy profit margin) is ultimately factored in to the prices that we pay for goods and services. In other words, many people have bullshit jobs that don’t actually improve services optimization or production, and that wasted effort is actually paid for by all of us, the consumers.
On top of that there’s another variant of bullshit job that’s actually useful to the economy or society in some way, but might be inherently unfulfilling or unsatisfying on a personal human level. (For example, something like corporate data entry jobs come to mind. Potentially useful to someone, and better than being homeless, but maybe not a very meaningful way to live in the long term.)
Other commenters have covered the organizational inefficiencies that allow bullshit jobs to exist pretty well. I’d like to also point out that larger organizations have more of these inefficiencies (part of what is known as “diseconomies of scale”, the counterpart to the more well-known term “economies of scale”). Our capitalist society actively subsidizes larger organizations, both literally and figuratively, resulting in more bullshit jobs and more economically wasteful behavior in general.
A non-capitalist free market society (such as a mutualist one) would have significantly smaller and more efficient organizations across the board. One can’t eliminate organizational efficiency entirely, but we currently have a lot of room for improvement.
A long line of passing down responsibility to someone else, all the way from the very tippy top executives. they hire someone to oversee operations. Those people hire people to oversee different parts of operations, all those people hire people to oversee parts of operations. Paperwork gets assigned, reports are shuffled around, meetings meetings meetings.
None of it at all relevant to making dog toys to sell, even though all of them are much higher ranked than the people that make dog toys at Dog Toy Inc.
