The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-david-graeber-work-service

by mjirv • 8 years ago

79 51 8 years ago

mc32• 8 years ago

The rise? It seems many have existed for some time, in one form or another. Maybe there has been an expansion, but not the rise.

Sometimes I agree with the sentiment of "bullshit jobs" but other times, I think without them, the world would be a duller place. That's not to say I like SEOs, or telemarketers or inefficient charities, but they help at the margin and without that I think you get stagnation.

Author also puts down compliance folks. I would disagree with that being bullshit. It ensures people follow the letter of the law --and if they don't AND they get audited, then there can be trouble. And that's the point. It's like saying firefighters are "bullshit jobs".

SerLava2• 8 years ago

That's not to say I like SEOs

Even that has a skewed reputation as bullshit, which only used to be deserved. Now it's a much broader group of people who add a lot more value than 2010 SEOs did, by a mile.

Rjevski2• 8 years ago

What kind of value? I still don't see any value a SEO person provides that a competent developer doesn't already do. SEO is not black magic (despite what the SEO scammers want you to believe). Google even gives you quite a bit of documentation on how to optimise your site for them.

repolfx4• 8 years ago

I think the perception that compliance officer is a bullshit job comes from a political belief that the laws being complied with are bullshit.

For instance, compliance people spend lots of time on trying to enforce sanctions by e.g. blocking IP addresses. Have trade sanctions actually ever achieved much? Iran hasn't changed. North Korea is pretty much the same as it always was - if there's going to be any change there it'll come from Trump doing Trumpian things, not trade sanctions which have been in place for decades. And does anyone really think a nation state can't evade an IP address block? Really?! When you take a step back and ask "what is the actual goal here? is it going to achieve that goal?" it's at least very debatable whether the work is useful or merely bullshit.

TheCoelacanth• 8 years ago

Or people think that compliance officers don't actually do anything to ensure that laws are complied with. A compliance officer's real job is to make sure that their employer doesn't get punished for not complying with the law.

isoskeles• 8 years ago

Nobody ever reads these reports, they’re just there to flash around. It’s the equivalent of a feudal lord — I have some guy whose job is just to tweeze my mustache, and another guy who’s polishing my stirrups, and so forth. Just to show that I can do that.

I imagine that there are some poorly-run larger companies that have elements of this, but this seems cartoonish for the most part.

xapata3• 8 years ago

Ever worked in a megacorp? It's exactly like that. Working at one of the world's most respected companies, I met someone who had been doing the same job for 8 years, the sole responsibility was to create a quarterly report (in PowerPoint) which was the aggregation of a couple hundred other reports. She spent every day copy-pasting from one document into another. Every day, for years. Seemed happy enough. Arrived at 7am, left at 4pm. Earned reasonably well, since she had an MBA from a good school.

When I was a management consultant, the cynical joke was that we stole your watch and told you the time. I learned that, yes, that was my job, but also that most companies are so incompetent that I was providing a useful service.

ACow_Adonis2• 8 years ago

Our joke when hiring management consultants is that we gave them the watch and asked them to tell us the time :P

Its incredibly disheartening to everyone else in the company who already has the watch and can already tell the time and have already been telling everyone the time, but as people experience, that's everyday existence in large corporations.

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

I wouldn't have believed it either before spending some time in a financial company. One time I was sitting with a colleague who had been there many years and he received an email like a newsletter but with more flashy graphics than the newsletter that already went out on Friday. He immediately groaned and said "that's one more email to ignore then".

And ignore it we did. But someone somewhere decided we needed another newsletter, some team wrote the "news" and some other team designed the shiny new graphics. All just to be ignored and deleted by everyone.

The financial sector is rife with this. It is surely the most inefficient part of the economy. Most things are automated now, yet the number of people employed has actually grown and it's mostly bullshit. There are people who literally spend all day creating what can only be described as entertainment for other people in the same company. I wish everyone could see it first hand.

xapata3• 8 years ago

That's not just the financial industry. One company I was at built themselves a TV studio to broadcast the occasional C-suite roundtable. Executives love to see themselves in print (and video).

paulie_a• 8 years ago

I probably actually fully read about 1-2 percent of my email...skim upwards of 10 percent and ignore the rest.

Rjevski2• 8 years ago

Speaking of newsletters, this is probably one of the most useless and delusional industries there is. They consider a 20% "open rate" on their garbage as "good" and anything above is exceptional.

I don't know about you, but if I was running a restaurant and only 20% of people actually bothered to eat my food, I would close up shop and rethink my life choices. But the newsletter/spam-letter guys apparently think 20% is good.

repolfx4• 8 years ago

It's not finance specific. Any company that's highly profitable will experience this. It's just that finance is full of highly profitable companies.

The classical solution is more competition. Unfortunately finance is also full of factors that make it an uncompetitive market (e.g. the old joke that if you want to get into banking you start by buying a bank).

ACow_Adonis2• 8 years ago

I'd go so far as to say no. It is not just "some" poorly-run larger companies.

In my experience, i'd go so far as to say its all of them.

To draw an analogy in biological terms, its a direct consequence of:

a) company/organism complexity and size b) successfully being able to draw in sufficient nutrients (operating revenue and profit) while experiencing a lack of existentially threatening evolutionary competition in that particular ecosystem. It allows such things to naturally develop.

I haven't even thought about it until now, but perhaps one substantial part of the rise of bullshit jobs is the increased size and dominance of the large company as a proportion of the economy :\

oceanghost2• 8 years ago

I recently read this book-- it is nothing short of revolutionary.

totemizer• 8 years ago

I still think he should've mentioned the peter principle and hierarchiology

oceanghost2• 8 years ago

Hierarchiology?

chris_wot2• 8 years ago

Some of these BS jobs aren't BS. Or at least, a subset of people maybe bullshitting their way through the system, but compliance personnel and corporate lawyers are necessary for reasons they don't give.

partycoder• 8 years ago

People that manage people that do not need management amount to a lot of people in tech.

jeffreyrogers• 8 years ago

The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen:

Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day.

Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...

rayiner3• 8 years ago

Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided.

The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.

nickpsecurity2• 8 years ago

"The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided."

It's far from incredibly misguided. I've personally witnessed countless examples of the kinds of things he described. The media even falsely reported on a lot of it. In each case, what's happening is political in the organization instead of rational, scientific management. There isn't a feedback loop saying this is the right thing to do or it's working. There's people in the middle or on top saying certain things will happen for certain reasons that are pretty arbitrary. Then, there's people that exist to make that happen, explain why it isn't, and so on. In most cases, investing in and listening to good people on the ground near the revenue-producing parts of the company seems to produce better results for a lot of stuff.

Big companies particularly seem to have an emotional or cultural hatred for doing that minimizing those people as much as possible while dropping large sums on non-production people, companies, or projects with unproven value. I don't know how much it happens in legal, though, since law firms might collapse by playing it that dumb. Just too far out of my area to know. I have seen the things I describe play out in manufacturing, retail, food, general services, IT, and security. In each case, the workers had either arguments for why it was bullshit or straight-up numbers showing their opinions generated better results than the middle management. That's on top of examples showing middle management might have never done the production work at all or have any understanding of it.

rorykoehler2• 8 years ago

I disagree. In all my experience working in corporate, most problems we solved with technology would have been better solved by having better simpler policies in place.

The real world is unnecessarily complex and messy because a lot of people in positions of authority dont know how to design good systems. This leads to tons of bullshit jobs.

factsaresacred• 8 years ago

"The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided."

Lol. Go to Thailand (3% unemployment) or China and watch the meaningless jobs.

Where the cost of labour is cheaper than the cost of capital and where there's government incentives to present zero unemployment, you will find groups of people waving cars out of condos, gangs of old ladies sweeping up nothing all day, and people acting as human signs.

Much of this is unnecessary, or can be replaced, at least, with more efficient methods.

throw_away22• 8 years ago

So he mischaracterized one misunderstood job. Does that invalidate the whole theory? Has every administrator role this critic encountered been useful and worthwhile?

Also, this criticism only really addresses the first, taxonomic part of the book, which was by far the least interesting.

rayiner3• 8 years ago

Does that invalidate the whole theory?

David Graeber is, as far as I can tell, a professor of anthropology. Which means he doesn't have domain expertise in any of the areas he's criticizing. Indeed, I could (flippantly, but honestly) say that I think "professor of anthropology" is a bullshit job, but then again I'm a severely left-brain guy and I'm going to assume there is a social value there that's just going over my head.

To put things another way: my wife once asked me what my interest was programming-wise. I told her it was compilers and programming languages. And she asked: well, don't they have those already? I strongly suspect if people get a 3% exposure to programming (e.g. writing yet another JS framework), like Graeber is doing with the various jobs he talks about, they'd think that programming is also full of "bullshit jobs." But that would be a conclusion arising out of ignorance.

chris_wot2• 8 years ago

He mischaracterized at least three seperate jobs in the posted article.

He mischaracterized the worth of compliance personnel, corporate lawyers, and PR team members.

cardboardshoe• 8 years ago

This article is missing a category: rain dancers. These people do something pointless but highly visible and take credit when something eventually goes right.

Suppose you a project manager forces a team of coders to run scrums and track progress in JIRA. Unless you're one of the coders, how can you tell whether the PM increased productivity or simply wasted time on making them appear more productive? Either is possible.

gitgud• 8 years ago

That's a good phrase I haven't heard before. A good example of this is economists (not all) who continually make public predictions on TV, but are never held accountable for the results.

taneq• 8 years ago

"rain dancers" is brilliant, I've seen a few of these over the years.

hw• 8 years ago

There are also jobs/titles/positions that are created not out of necessity, but as a way to give someone a back-scratching, wealth-sharing 'promotion' without giving up someone else's, especially if the people involved are buddies or used to work at a same prior company. As employees, you sometime wonder 'Do we really need a Chief Retention Officer' ?

okket2• 8 years ago

There are two previous discussion about David Graeber / 'Bullshit Jobs':

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs (strikemag.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 (5 years ago, 349 comments)

On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs (libcom.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080 (4 years ago, 381 comments)

dang2• 8 years ago

And more recently, since the book came out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389

okket2• 8 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389

This was the huge, recent discussion (470 comments) I remembered but couldn't find instantly due to 'bullshit jobs' -> 'pointless jobs'. Thanks.

pinoyathletics• 8 years ago

This is right in line with the Tiny Homes explosion.

hackerpacker• 8 years ago

The way I see it, the higher up maslow's pyramid, the more BS it is, roughly speaking. This in terms of the function of the job, aside from your own survival and having a job.

The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

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