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?
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.
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.
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(I am not actually doing this. I was using a hypothetical writing style.)
Read the book by Graeber. It’s pretty easy to find a pdf copy online.
There’s a lot of different reasons and it varies depending on the type of bullshit job, the industry, the country, etc.
Here’s a good example. It might make sense to re-train or fire members of a low performing team. But instead you hire more people to basically just redo the poorly done work. It would make economic sense, initially to fire them and replace them with less people and less rework, but morale, pensions or other factors may make firing them unpalatable.
Risk aversion. If you have a team of twenty people who only put in half days of work, well now you can easily absorb double workload when the business needs to.
Maybe a VP has a big ego and demands to hire a big new team. Most people think it’s a waste, but no one wants to tell the VP “no”. Afraid the industry veteran will quit or worse. So they get their team of questionable value and it makes everyone feel good that this powerful person now leads more people/teams.
The short answer is the market is never fully efficient. I mean, it can’t be. Not even serious capitalists would expect it to be.
Seriously, read the book. It’s not super long.
Thanks for the suggestion & info, I didn’t remember there being a book titled as such as I wrote the question, lol
Read the book by Graeber. It’s pretty easy to find a pdf copy online.
Which book?
Edit: nevermind. Other commenters have mentioned it.
Bullshit Jobs. Graeber’s the one who coined the term.
RIP David Graeber
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)_/¯
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.”
And your competitors would love you for closing your Sales department.
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.
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.
I think a lot of bullshit jobs exist because as a society we have decided that everyone absolutely has to work at a job in order to live. There isn’t enough work to be done for every single person to contribute so we have to invent work so we can pay people so they can make money to live in society.
If some day we manage to implement a universal basic income then I think this will eliminate a lot of the problem.
I’d have to disagree with this. Why would all companies just unilaterally agree to waste money so people can make a living. If that were the drive, they’d also pay thriving wages, etc.
I don’t think it is intentional. I think it is more like a phenomenon. I think entire companies can potentially be bullshit. It’s not like the people working there aren’t making the company money so nobody is deciding to hire people for no reason. It’s just that these people and businesses are mostly working bullshit jobs. So much of the economy is based on doing nearly pointless work so it enables further pointless work.
Really it depends on your exact definition of pointless. If our only goal is to survive then we can probably succeed at that with 5-10% of the work that is being done now. Everyone else isn’t doing something that is directly contributing to humanities survival. That seems a little extreme as I personally believe that things like entertainment, art and making life more comfortable are all meaningful to society. There could be some definition of pointless that a majority agrees on that implies that 25-50% of jobs are not doing much of anything.
Oracle was almost entirely bullshit when my friend worked there in the mid-90s.
You can coast off a high-margin business into pure BS for a while before it catches up. Particularly with an egomaniac CEO who is checked out at the moment.
Why would all companies just unilaterally agree to waste money so people can make a living
The motivations of the company are often very different to the motivations of senior staff within the company.
Mid-level manager is obsessed with building his empire within the company. The bigger their division, the happier they are.
Mid-level manager creates bullshit jobs and justifies them up the chain. “Our team is vital to the company and my staff is swamped. I need to increase my headcount”.
That’s fine. That’s my point though. The intentions are entirely different. I don’t think any company is actively worried about ensuring people are employed. The end result of a bunch of other motivations may be the same, but my statement is about the why.
Because the alternative is a bunch of hungry people with pitchforks and a large amount of free time.
That’s not the alternative. An alternative would be hiring people because it offers some benefit to the company.
if you go by david graeber’s bullshit jobs, some of these are some sort of status symbol, some are made up to diffuse responsibility, there were more that i don’t remember. at any rate bullshit job is labeled as such by a worker
Yeah and hopefully we can get rid of them. I mean the way how we work and what we do change quite fast. 20 years ago there were secretaries taking notes (last time I saw someone listening to a tape recorder and typing down the notes was around 2017, for soon to retire doctor) and calling up people because the boss needed info (etc. etc.) Now even emails start to look has-been. Guess people get stuck sometimes in no-need land.
Maybe those jobs are just the sand in the engine and will be flushed out some day.
Problem comes when those jobs get flushed away, and more and more people end up without decent job prospects while wealth keeps trickling up.
Well yeah cue basic income or something along those lines…
A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).
Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).
Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.
A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.
Managers dont want to be fired so they claim that they are important. At least that is what i got, dont know if it is really true
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.
My guess is that it’s because it takes significant resources for management to identify which jobs are bs. But layoffs are not uncommon, and that’s a form of a business no longer justifying the expense of some jobs.
Can you clarify what, specifically, you mean by bullshit jobs?
For instance, I’ve seen some recent discussions about (mostly IT) jobs where you can do nothing almost all the time. These exist because every once in a while, they are REALLY important. There’s also a lot of mystery about what’s involved, usually from automation changing the workload.
Also non-technical people need to understand that automation makes life easier, but you still need someone who knows how to do it manually to fix the automation in case it breaks or needs updating. That person will do mostly nothing most of the time, but if you didn’t had him full time he would be extremely expensive to hire on demand on a rush, since he could ask whatever price he wanted and you would have to pay it.
Superiors not understanding what the job entails helps. Superior says do task A. Old guy not too computer savvy takes a long time to do task A. Of guy retires and a new young girl gets the role. Superior says do task A. New young girl does it in a few minutes and has extra time. I’ve run into that a lot.
Or the exact opposite, not trying to contradict you here, but I have seen lots of jobs that had to be just stopped (the job itself, not the person doing it) just because the knowledge went away with parting people.
That could go either way. Had a job where a guy retired and they suddenly found out no one knew what he did but it needed to be done. There were legit conversations about offering the retired guy contract work just to teach someone what he did. In that case the manager had the bullshit job that could have been eliminated.
It’s not just that the person would be expensive. Systems like that require system specific knowledge. So it’s possible that it would take an outsider 3 months of study to get to the point where they can fix an issue properly in 5 minutes.
You can’t make a baby in 1 month with 9 mothers. Some tasks just have an upfront cost and SOME IT automation jobs are like that.
And yes, you can try and do bodge job after bodge job “just to keep it going”. And that works for some time. But eventually the small mistakes end up causing large outages. And then you need someone that can piece together how the small issues cause big outages.
I do one of those “IT jobs that you do nothing until you do everything” it’s kinda wild and I have to remember not to completely fuck off and at least pretend to do something work related.
I say as I’m responding to this on company time.
So, what comes to mind when I write bullshit jobs are jobs simply for the sake of jobs, like to say that a business is in fact hiring for some unclear reason, or because of some cultural inertia that insists people must be working so they just make up jobs.
A more realistic form would be the weird busywork kind of jobs that seemingly could be automated but just…Aren’t…For some reason, but these may be more like what you describe where it’s not exactly bullshit yet it can feel very close to it at times.
Sometimes those jobs that can be automated are already. At a previous job a coworker had been asked to prep a weekly report. When he took it on, this would take him half a day. I wanted to work on some excel macro skills so I worked with him to figure out what was needed. Wrote an ugly ass macro that worked for what was needed. I told him in no uncertain terms he should not tell anyone about the time savings. He should use it as he sees fit.
Same job different person. HR business partner called me into her office. Had an excel file open. Ultimately what they were asking was for a simple formatting issue. I’m talking like merge and center or using the format painter. A couple times. It took her longer to explain what she needed than it took to “fix” it. She exclaimed that it probably would have taken her hours to figure that out… there were also salaries on the spreadsheet…
Jobs that exist exclusively for the sake of jobs really only exist in places of government (or caused by government). Otherwise, as you mentioned, the profit motive would kick in.
But what you’re mainly describing here is something different - it’s jobs that exist because someone (possibly many people) are bad at their job. Those unclear job openings? Often, it’s because Bob is leaving, and we need someone to replace him. But no one really knows what Bob does, or how to find another Bob, or even what would happen if they didn’t have a Bob. Or a PHB gets lofty ideas about what Bob’s replacement should do better, with no connection to reality. Or HR interferes with what the engineers say they actually need, and how to screen for that.
The people that can literally be replaced by an Excel macro? Their work is valuable, and often something the business needs. It was probably done on paper a long time ago. At some point it got moved onto a computer, and a process was developed. This person has probably been doing it reliably for 20 years. No one wants to mess with it. Or a really big one, the corporate bureaucracy has stopped everyone that’s tried to make it better.
I can attest that I’ve repeatedly been put on bullshit busywork projects because of managers that were completely detached from reality. Sure, they may sound cool, but it’s immediately obvious to anyone else that it will never actually be used. Or they themselves want to check a box on their own review with higher managers to say they accomplished something, even if they really didn’t.
I’ll say this, as an engineer who’s worked closely with the brass tacks, a lot of the time when new directors or c level people are brought in, they want to own a space. There was a solution existing prior to them, because the company already existed before they joined. But no one wants to be the guy who supports the previous ideas (maintenance on an engine isn’t as sexy as designing it) because the idea doesn’t have their branding. They want to be seen as bold/innovative, etc. So they make some calls and they find a solution that promises everything they have and more. If the new solution is a success, their position is cemented, they are now a stakeholder in the company. Sales guy is going to sell his ass off, maybe the workforce has to be repurposed (need more expertise in new fields), etc. All this creates unnecessary work for people with real jobs just because a boss wants it. In the end, the new director/c level can say, “wow, this was great, look at how our metrics have improved, all thanks to me!” Despite the fact that they weren’t given all the features they were promised, or they didn’t hire/train specialized engineers to truly own the new solution. Or maybe the solution isn’t very effective. A lot of the time it’s mostly politics. People are trying to get headlines just like politicians so they can keep climbing the ladder.
The way you’re describing “bullshit” jobs doesn’t exist, there are no jobs that are inherently, always bullshit. There’s just bullshit work, and a lot of people who’s job it is to do bullshit work
You mean like manual work that can be automated?
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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.
