No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

No one understands the job of the other guy. Managers' job is litteraly to fill the spreadsheets so everything looks fine. Reality of the job or the times you need don't matter. Upper in the hierarchy they are completely blind to what happens in their company.

The best companies are the ones where the information trickle up the best. It's still trickling, but it's enough that at least the people who do some work can do it decently well when they do work.

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.

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.

P.l.e.a.s.e.

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.)

no one cares if they’re collecting a fat paycheck. source: i am embedded in such bullshit.

There's probably bullshit jobs.

But there's probably a lot that you think are "Bullshit jobs" and really you mean "I don't see what they do" I thought "Scrum master" was a joke of a title for someone to do fuck all. Then I had to take over for my scrum master for 2 weeks. Holy shit, that was the most eye opening experience. He's in 6 hours of meetings a day, talking to management, designing future work, working on requirements, dealing with the minutia, dealing with three different PMs who need work done by us, and prioritizing their requests to get everything done, assisting everyone on and off the team, and basically keeping the 6 of us on the team from dealing with what we would call "Annoying pointless shit" which is actually really important for other people.

My scrum master talks about "Seeing the bigger picture" and I get it now. But the thing is it'd also be really easy for someone to think he has a "Bullshit job"... but he's also the reason we work 40 hour weeks and not 80 hours.

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.

The Lumberghs in charge haven't gotten around to bringing in the Bobs, and Lumbergh's too chickenshit to do the job himself, so...

There may be a financial reason, but it feels like bullshit.

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.