Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job?

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-do-so-many-people-think-they-are-in-a-bullshit-job

50 88 3 years ago

Graeber... [defines] a bullshit job as ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’
Empirical data suggested that, in fact, relatively few people appear to consider their jobs as useless...
Graeber acknowledged that it was difficult for one person, or several, to determine universally what makes a job ‘useful’ or ‘necessary’. ‘There can be no objective measure of social value,’ he wrote.

So basically the prediction is that a lot of people have bullshit jobs and are unwilling to admit it, and when you ask them whether their jobs are bullshit, they say "what, no way", which either proves or disproves the prediction, depending on your definition of bullshit job. Also, there is no definition of what a bullshit job is. Glad I know that now!

hcks• 3 years ago

‘I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting,’ he said. ‘The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point.

12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm.

The feeling of bullshitness and alienation from corporate workers stems from the difference between what their time is worth to themselves (subjectively a lot, you only live once, etc) and what it’s worth to their employer (in $, nearly nothing to a multinational).

ejb999• 3 years ago

>12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm.

True, on the otherhand, that is one person - there are probably thousands and thousands of other people, at the same company, doing the same useless tasks - many of which costs a lot more.

You could say the same thing about the project I just left - company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$ - and there are probably 50 or more of the same type of apps being developed by this same company - none of which have even a trivial amount of users, it is an open secret in the IT part of the company, but nobody wants to say anything, because everyone wants to keep their job.

hotnfresh2• 3 years ago

I once worked at an agency and was assigned to a project for a very big athletic shoe brand to create an app for a particular smart watch (no, not that one) to integrate with a run-tracking system they were building. We also built the mobile apps for it.

We got the whole thing done. They paid a lot more than $12k for it, plus whatever else they were spending.

After it was done, but before release, they bought another company that had the same stuff already, and scrapped the whole project.

I’d say 90+% of the development work I’ve done has never made anyone any money, and almost as much has never helped a single person. It’s a weird industry.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$

Perversely, I almost want to try working for a company where the pay is still good but the job has such low stakes. To know that there will never be a stressful fire drill in production because literally nobody uses what I make sounds almost... kind of great.

So weird that businesses are apparently totally cool with just shoveling money into a furnace like that, but hey, if I can be the guy pocketing a few bucks as the rest of it goes into the furnace... not such a bad deal.

paradoxyl• 3 years ago

This is why the elites have to be overthrown, their insane structures destroyed. They are beyond greedy, they are simply stupid. Imagine, wasting 12k on a powerpoint while people in your country starve and struggle on the street with addiction. What sort of psychpathy have you ingested?

hef19898• 3 years ago

The one thing has nothing to do with the other so.

zonethundery• 3 years ago

I hear you, and have been in similar situations with an extra zero on the figure.

At the end of the day, the value wasn't in the memo itself but rather in making the person who asked you for it look competent to their boss ("yes, this agenda item is covered, we are ready for the meeting").

I make no normative judgment on whether or not that is bullshit.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

There are ‘flunkies’, such as administrative assistants or elevator operators, who do work solely to make other people feel more important

From the article paraphrasing Graeber's work. Seems pretty close.

pierat3• 3 years ago

Marx explained this quite well in his capitalist critiques (note: these are different than the communist manifesto). In analyzing Capitalism, Marx found that there's 4 primary types of alienation happening to the worker in a capitalist enterprise. This was expanded from Hegel's 3 types of alienation.

Alienation 1: From a worker's product.

Alienation 2: From the act of production

Alienation 3: From a worker's human nature

Alienation 4: From other workers

Wikipedia has a great intro writeup here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

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But, what is a "bullshit job"? It's a job where you cannot see what you do, cannot see its impact on the whole of production, cannot see how others fit in with what you do, and siloed so that you do work in exclusivity of others.

But there it is. Marx wrote about these problems, and there were starting to be these problems. Now, we have computation as its own force that serves to radically separate us from each other's contributions, so that *only* the management and owner class can see how things all go together.

And as to Alienation 4, we see this explicitly with "gig workers", being pitted against each other. There's only so much work, and gig companies figured out they could make workers compete with each other to who will accept the least money for a parcel of work, all the while giving up essential social obligations workers fought in blood to get (workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc).

People believe they're in bullshit jobs because they have been removed as far as possible from what they and their colleagues do, as a control point by the ownership and managerial class.

In reality, almost all jobs are not bullshit.

throwboatyface• 3 years ago

Wait, so most workers are alienated, and alienation makes a job bullshit. But most jobs are not bullshit?

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

- Ursula Le Guin

haltist• 3 years ago

That's a good quote.

pierat3• 3 years ago

No. Most workers are alienated for the 4 aforementioned reasons.

The alienation *makes you think* the job is bullshit, because you are kept from the whole view of what you do and how you work within the organization. The whole view (read: the non-alienating view) is from the managerial and ownership positions.

The reason management class wants to further alienation of the workers is so that the workers can be exploited by management class, and the workers won't know any better.

JohnClark1337• 3 years ago

As a small cog in a large corporate machine, I get this. You just keep spinning and spinning, seemingly doing the same kinds of projects and the same work over and over again, often with no understanding of where the projects are coming from or whether or not the hard work you're putting in has any real value. And then there's constant changing and revisions and sometimes the project gets dropped, which is a clear indication that your hard work was basically wasted by higher ups who seem to have no understanding of the work that has to go into the projects.

I get paid though, so I'll keep spinning and find my value as a human outside of work.

danwee• 3 years ago

I think all the jobs I have had in the past (over a decade) as a software engineer were BS.

- I have worked for a bank. You tell me why do we need yet another bank nowadays, and why on earth do we need to make a fancy SPA with effects and all? Anyway, they paid good money and I gained experience

- I have worked for an e-commerce platform. Again, if it disappeared from the internet no one would complain. We were into "let's build more microservices" mindset. A waste of talent (the engineers I worked with were intelligent people) and time. But hey, I was a Staff engineer, and so I got a bunch of money in exchange for my wisdom in distributed systems (but I still wonder why do we need distributed systems when a one big machine or a couple of them would have done the job)

- I have worked for a SAAS company. The classic pay per customer per month. Totally useless as well (there dozens SAAS companies like us out there). In this one we were more worried about using "boring technology" (PHP, nginx, Postgres) instead of asking ourselves why do we even exist as a company

- And a long etc.

In every company I have been I never felt we were doing something meaningful for the society. I don't feel bad, whenever I see around I see useless companies (not only in IT). I just take as granted, in the capitalist society we live in, that people just want to make money, send their kids to good schools, enjoy vacations in a sunny place, and then retire in peace... so useless jobs/companies are needed.

What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, while we don't put the same amount of resources to solve a real problem like what's going in Israel/Palestine/Russia/Ukraine where people are dying.

danielmarkbruce2• 3 years ago

Competition is meaningful. If you weren't there putting on the pressure, we'd have a bunch of fat lazy companies with expensive, crappy products.

malcolmgreaves• 3 years ago

Competition isn’t sufficient: there already are fat, lazy companies with expensive, crappy products today. Multiple players in an arena don’t necessarily lead to a better product emerging either. It can, for instance, create an oversaturated market that leads to unsustainable prices or costs and no one wins.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

we'd have a bunch of fat lazy companies with expensive, crappy products.

But we do have a bunch of fat lazy companies with expensive, crappy products.

robertlagrant5• 3 years ago

What makes me a little sad from time to time is to see us, the human race, spending brains, time and billions in Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok

We don't spend billions on those things.

jzb2• 3 years ago

We don't? Twitter sold for tens of billions, and it apparently costs hundreds of millions a year to run (or more). Those platforms also generate billions in ad revenues which means we're spending billions on that.

willi59549879• 3 years ago

That's a pretty bleak way to see your job. how are you still able to do it? Banks pay a lot and are needed for functioning of society, I guess that could be seen as useful, mindset matters

lacker• 3 years ago

If you're wondering whether a job is worthwhile, the person who works at a job isn't the best person to ask. The person who is paying for that job to be done is the best person to ask.

At a large corporation, that's the manager. Often there's a job that's important, but you can only understand why it's important if you understand how the whole organization works. Someone writes memos that get ignored 90% of the time? Works on projects that get canceled 90% of the time? Well, that can make sense, if the 10% is valuable enough that it pays off.

As a manager, it's your responsibility to help make it clear to the people on your team why their work matters. By default, they won't understand this as well as you do.

registeredcorn• 3 years ago

I'm not saying that you're wrong, but isn't there also an obvious incentive for someone in a managerial position to insist that the people that they manage are doing important work, because it raises the profile/importance of their own position in turn?

I suppose this thought is probably an overly pessimistic viewpoint, but generally speaking, many people want to justify the importance of their work so they can continue to be employed - it seems logical that if you're job is to manage others, then a very big part of what your job actually is, is hyping up the importance of those peoples work to justify them needing a manager.

pixl972• 3 years ago

Eh, even that isn't a great metric at scale. Some managers just grow teams to have a large team size. Saying nothing about the job that needs done.

jzb2• 3 years ago

If you're wondering whether a job is worthwhile, ask "what happens if this stops being done / being staffed?" And you can extrapolate to whatever level and timescale you like.

That is, what happens if you stop doing your job? To the company, to the industry, to the world at large. What happens in a month, year, etc. (Assuming the function is not replaced.) Hell, what happens if your department or even company stops existing? Is there a negative effect overall on the world?

If you're satisfied making a difference at the company level, and you see an immediate or even medium-term impact on stopping what you do - then congrats, your job isn't bullshit. If you need an impact beyond that, it may be harder to feel your job isn't bullshit.

A job may be crucial to an organization but still feel like bullshit if you feel a need to contribute to the world overall. If you stop making / marketing / selling widgets, will that matter?

Ferret74462• 3 years ago

That valuation is not something that can be accurately determined by one organization, let alone one person. It is precisely why centrally planned economies fail.

avgcorrection3• 3 years ago

If people feel that their job is “BS” then telling them that it is unknowable for them doesn't help.

Why am I on trial? That's not for me understand.

praptak• 3 years ago

At a large corporation, that's the manager.

Definitely not at FAANG. One day you are told your product is super important, the next day it gets destaffed and your manager is as confused about this as you are. On the other end of the totem pole there's SVP who might see the spreadsheet columns which dictate this kind of decisions but is too far from the line workers to have any clue about their reality.

antisthenes• 3 years ago

At a large corporation, that's the manager.

Not necessarily. The manager just above the employee usually has almost 0 say in the hiring and compensation process. The hiring manager does have some say in it, but the decision to open up the position in the first place may have been made above the hiring manager by a director level position.

And the director that's made that decision is not necessarily the one that is in charge of paying for it.

In other words, it's usually more complicated.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

Well, that can make sense, if the 10% is valuable enough that it pays off.

Even so, that's still a job that's 90% worthless.

supportengineer• 3 years ago

It's a bullshit job when, if you don't do it, or don't do it well, there really aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone.

There are other ways the job could be done, but your management doesn't want them done that way.

onetimeuse923044• 3 years ago

That's a bad test. Sometimes the consequences are so nebulous and spread over thinly over large population or far in the future, etc. that it is hard to argue this test can be useful.

For example, if you decide to stop doing research (say into genetics) then there are no immediate consequences to anybody. But we still think that genetics research is important and worthwhile cause. Even if not every researcher is able to provide ground breaking results, collectively they help us resolve important problems like improving our longetivity, drug research, etc.

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

Sometimes the consequences are so nebulous and spread over thinly over large population or far in the future, etc. that it is hard to argue this test can be useful.

But they are consequences, so the research example passes OP's test.

There are plenty of actual jobs out there where if they stopped being done, nothing bad would happen, at any scale and within any time frame. People writing reports that exactly zero people read. People making things that just get thrown away. People digging holes that other people just fill with dirt. That's what OP is getting at.

fuzzfactor2• 3 years ago

It's a bullshit job when, if you don't do it, or don't do it well, there really aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone.

OTOH, sometimes if you do an outstanding job with great pride, performing beyond expectations, there aren't any meaningful consequences for anyone either.

When both are true you've really got a double-ringer.

netbioserror• 3 years ago

I have the privilege of working at a smaller company, where I get to pick my tools and write software primarily solo in an engineering context, and where the requests of the peers and clients using my tools make their way to me with great detail. I have lengthy mathematical analysis discussions with my boss on a nearly daily basis. I can see the value I am creating almost directly.

I consider myself incredibly lucky and count my blessings every day.

conqrr• 3 years ago

Simplest reason: The Incentives, pressure, ownership and motivation for work at most places do not justify the outcome, rewards and appreciation.

Analogy: Making a burger end-to-end and handing to customer feels good. Assembly line where your part is just flipping buns all day is pretty meaningless.

onetimeuse923044• 3 years ago

1. Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society.

2. Because even if they contribute something to the society, they don't see the connection between what they are doing and a worthy cause. Seeing connection between what you do and the goals of the company and then understanding those goals is not very common, according to my experience.

oarabbus_• 3 years ago

Because they are? There are whole industries that are more or less total BS. Whatever you do for these companies you are pretty much not contributing anything worthwhile to the society.

Well, according to you maybe. The customers/patrons of the company probably have a differing view.

henry2023• 3 years ago

Gamblers and Casino Owners would agree that casinos are essential in our society.

taeric• 3 years ago

This does somewhat expose it isn't just so many people thinking they are in these jobs, it is some many people thinking others are in these jobs.

tomcar288• 3 years ago

not necessarily. so many products are bought from a top down approach where the end user is not the decision maker. i mean, how many times has a company's top managers purchased abysmally awful software, taht then needs to be used by it's employees. it happens govt all the time. our school district has purchased subscriptions to an absolutely awful online homework platform: it's clear the designers of this platform didn't do any usability studies. and now all the students and teachers in this district are screwed and forced to use this abomination.

guiriduro• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of the way Star Trek explains in the 24th century the Federation doesn't use money[0]. By that yardstick, all jobs whose only purpose is moving or charging rent on money , e.g. the entire banking/finance sector, is pure bullshit waste. I tend to agree. (Not that there wouldn't need to be some efficient algorithmic distribution of resources to maximise human wellbeing, of course; To each according to their need etc.) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh3xPatEto

cactusplant7374• 3 years ago

I think once has to look below the surface. A lot of people would say cruises are decadent and waste of money. Yet they give older adults a lot of joy before they die. But maybe this doesn't meet the lofty expectations of aspirational people?

onetimeuse923044• 3 years ago

I think cruises is a more complex case.

First, let's agree that just because people want something does not necessarily mean the cause is worthy. For example, people want cigarettes but you would probably agree working for a tobacco companies is not pursuing a worthy cause.

Is producing ads a worthy cause? Maybe... companies have to somehow make the customers aware of their products.

Is creating videos en masse with no content and creating huge platforms to keep people glued to shiny rectangles just for ad impressions a worthy cause? I am pretty sure stealing astronomical amounts of hours from billions of people will be seen in the future as one of larger crimes committed in our times.

Ditto polarising entire societies and screwing up with our brains through exploiting human biases to keep engagement up on social media even though an official goal might be connecting people together.

I think it is fine to pursue a goal to make people happy and enjoy their lives. Unless this is just a cover story for really doing more harm to the society than good.

VancouverMan5• 3 years ago

I'm not finding highly relevant terms such as "government", "public sector", "bureaucrat", and "union" in the article.

I don't see how this situation can be discussed without considering the roles of government and unions.

Both government and unions introduce significant distortions when it comes to people doing work.

Most government "jobs" are a net loss to society as a whole. These government "jobs" typically involve decreasing the productivity of the private sector in some way, without providing any real (in the economic sense) value on their own.

Thanks to these pointless government "jobs" and the burden they impose on society, the private sector gets stuck involuntarily creating more pointless "jobs" to try to deal with, or otherwise defend themselves from, the government "workers" and their interference.

There's a multiplier effect going on, where one pointless government bureaucrat "job" can necessitate the creation of many other pointless private sector "jobs" just to deal with the pointless bureaucracy that that one bureaucrat creates. None of these "jobs" provide real value, and all are a burden on society because of how they destroy real wealth.

Unions, especially public sector unions, just exacerbate the problem by interfering with the reduction of pointless government "jobs", and worse, by encouraging the creation of new pointless government "jobs" to increase their membership numbers.

As government and public sector unions have gotten larger and more invasive over time, of course we should expect to see more and more people stuck doing jobs that are inherently valueless, or even outright harmful to society at large.

nullindividual2• 3 years ago

Those government jobs are there to protect the vultures of capitalism from destroying the world around us or leaving us a subservient rubes to corporate overlords.

Damned straight the government should be yanking the corporate choke chain -- HARD.

VancouverMan5• 3 years ago

What you're describing there is typically the result of government-imposed regulations stifling free market competition, thus enabling the formation of monopolies (or oligopolies) that wouldn't naturally exist.

It's another example of how pointless government "jobs" cause immense harm.

Without the government interference that enables them, such monopolies/oligopolies simply wouldn't be able to survive, eliminating the problem you're worried about.

jjoonathan3• 3 years ago

Economic Value begs the question "value for whom?" Value for the people with money. Capitalism isn't about doing what people want, it's about doing what rich people want. And what do rich people want? A few extra goods and services, yes, but mostly: to get paid for being rich.

The purpose of capitalism is to ensure rich people get paid for being rich.

Is it any wonder this creates a crisis of purpose for people who aren't rich?

robertlagrant5• 3 years ago

Economic Value begs the question "value for whom?" Value for the people with money.

Yes - e.g. Android phones comprise 80% of the market because people with money buy them... with that money. You can build a supercar for rich people, or fidget spinners for millions of kids. Either can reward you, as long as you do it well.

The purpose of capitalism is to ensure rich people get paid for being rich.

The purpose of capitalism is to allocate resources efficiently, noting that the people doing the work and/or taking the risks can do this much better than a monarch or a bureaucrat.

VancouverMan5• 3 years ago

Economic value transcends "money", "capitalism", "the rich", "corporations" and abstractions like those.

It's a far more fundamental phenomenon.

Simply put, real economic value arises when two entities voluntarily provide mutual benefit to one another, thus improving the overall situation for both.

The voluntary nature of this interaction is critical; when it's missing, there can't be mutual benefit. That's what happens with taxation, for example. The involuntary nature of such an interaction means that the entity who is forced to unwillingly pay the tax is always worse off than if the transaction hadn't happened.

That's why government "jobs" are so inherently pointless and harmful to society at large. They way they're "funded" makes society worse off, and then what the government "workers" do with such resources typically makes society even more worse off than that.

avgcorrection3• 3 years ago

Oh, I was just reminded of a pointless job: most think tank research. Those kinds of gigs where you are supposed to write a dozen pages long report where you reason back from a conclusion. Very popular in ideological areas like deregulation and private enterprise promotion.

VancouverMan5• 3 years ago

That is another good example of how a relatively small number of pointless and unnecessary government "jobs" unfortunately result in even more pointless and wasteful private sector "jobs" existing.

Those kinds of "jobs" and that kind of "work" only exist because of the existence of government-imposed regulation.

If the government-imposed regulation simply didn't exist to begin with, nobody would waste resources writing pointless reports to try to manipulate such restrictions to their benefit.

tr3ntg• 3 years ago

Even if you work at a fast-growing startup, that is making tons of money with few employees, and every single thing you do affects the bottom line, your own role is easily replaceable. I think this overall topic blurs with the concept of "I, as an individual, do not matter to the professional world."

TheIronMark• 3 years ago

If I'm disconnected from the real-world impact of my job, I'm likely to think it's bullshit. That doesn't make it a bullshit job; that just means that I can't see how it fits into the bigger picture. Companies aren't going to keep people employed if they're not somehow contributing to profitability or growth.

ltr_• 3 years ago

as a it contractor for financial institutions i would say that we earned a lot of money just filling holes made by the previous ones and making our own in the process for the next one. that's what it is, make up problems to solve it later. hell, this whole fucking cursed industry is just that. making holes to fill them up later to keep the wheel of incompetence and delusion spinning. sturgeon law all the way.

markwkw• 3 years ago

I think the root cause is increased abstractness of jobs.

A job where you cut and plane wood to make planks that are used to build houses has a straightforward connection to basic life.

A job where you are trying to influence a group of people - so that they organize themselves to efficiently - make a change to a software tool - that affects a process for measuring of a collective endeavour - of a bigger group of people who are trying to optimize the selling and buying - of complex derivative financial contracts that are used to - increase the efficiency of a market of another financial product - which is a virtualization of actual trading of real world goods - so that incredibly complex entities (corporations) can get various and hard to grasp benefits - so that ultimately planks are cheaper ... such a job is virtually impossible to appreciate.

We are transistors in a byzantine supercomputer of global economy.

jacurtis• 3 years ago

Maybe the real secret is to embrace the fact you have a bullshit job. Allow me to tell you a story of my corporate hero.

I'm going to call this guy Jack to preserve his identity, because he continues this ruse to this day. To jump to the punchline, Jack has a bullshit job, but he embraces the bullshit.

So I've had a few run-ins with Jack over the years at my Corp. He's always the guy that is sort of three degrees removed from several projects, but not really leading any projects. So you see him in the background a lot, but never in the foreground. Anyway, I never thought much of Jack. Nothing positive, nor negative. I was merely acquainted with his existence.

One day, I am cleaning up some infrastructure and going through some of our cloud billing. I'm just cleaning up old infrastructure so I could make a mindless report and give it to someone who gives it to someone who eventually summarizes it for someone who then mentions it to another person, which I hope and assume turns into a bullet point on a presentation to someone "important" (you know, like we all do). Anyway, I stumble on some weird stuff that I don't recognize. Its been idle for years, never accessed, never used. This stuff is a great target for me to clean up and improve my metrics. I find this infrastructure and I don't recognize the project at all. I mention it to my team, no one's heard of it. So I go up the chain, no one's heard of it. I actually go up to the CTO and they had never heard of this project either.

So I'm curious, I dig deeper. This is clearly abandoned. It hadn't been logged into in years. But I notice that it was created by Jack. I didn't really know Jack, but I looked him up to see if he even still worked at the company. I looked up his version control access and he still had an active account. I looked at his commit history and in the past 365 days he only had 4 commits. So I assume he was laid off, we recently had a round of layoffs (about 15% of the workforce). But sure enough Jack still works here according to our HRM. Somehow dodging layoffs. Interesting, he must be working on something important. So I coordinate a meeting with Jack before I disassemble his infrastructure.

Jack was very elusive. Coordinating him was harder than scheduling time with my CTO. But I eventually get the meeting. So I start asking him about the project. He barely remembers the project in question (or was just playing dumb). He explained that the project was completed but never got integrated into the main application. So I asked him what he has been working on since then, and he gave me a list of projects, all of which had been cancelled and abandoned. I confirmed the existence and cancellation of 2 of those projects, the others I think he was either lying about or they never made it far enough off the ground to have any record of.

I finally asked who he reports to and he gave me the name of someone that is different than someone in the HRM. So I asked about his current project and he told me several things he was doing. I was familiar with one of those projects is all (and I am generally familiar with every project since I am in those meetings). He then mentioned a project that was actually managed by my team. That's when I realized this guy was just bullshitting. I decided not to call him out on it initially.

I ended up just laughing about the whole situation and sort of dropped it. I simply didn't care enough and I knew me bringing this up the chain would probably get him fired. So I just kept it in my back pocket for a little while.

A few months later I went out to a whiskey bar with some guys from work. We ended up meeting up with a few people that got laid off in the layoffs. We had a few drinks and I ended up asking if anyone knows how Jack avoided layoffs. People were shocked, everyone had the same question, "what is he even working on now?". I said basically nothing. He has only made 4 commits in the last year! He's floating along but he stays in the background just enough that no one questions it. That's when one of the guys told me that Jack was involved in several projects years ago and he got really upset when he had several large and prominent project cancellations. He had made an enemy with the previous head of cybersecurity and the rumor was that he was going to be fired, but then the Head of Cyber got throat cancer unexpectedly and dissapeared. He said ever since then, Jack has been extremely uncooperative at work and no one really likes working with him, so he always gets pushed into the background. He summed it up the best way possible:

"Jack realized that all of his work was going unnoticed, so he stopped working and no one noticed".

Ever since then I find ways to cross paths with Jack. I haven't done anything I just ask him questions and hear what lies and excuses he comes up with. I laugh inside everytime. I eventually drop breadcrumbs around the office about Jack's existence just to see how people react. I find the whole thing very entertaining. Jack still works here. He is extremely active on the Slack #pets channel and I see daily updates of his Corgi each day.

Jack doesn't know that I know his secret. But Jack is in a weird way my hero. He realized he had a bullshit job, so instead of being bothered by it, he just embraced it. He treats his job like the bullshit that it treats him as.

Maybe we can all learn from Jack.

nine_zeros• 3 years ago

I can tell my engineering management's job is utter BS. Their entire job is

0. Scope out work for the next quarter - done by PM and engineers

1. Track engineering work using JIRA points or some status reports - automatically generated

2. Perform some 9 point exercise to stack rank people every 6 months on the basis of JIRA points (automatically generated) and # of commits (also automatically generated) - most of this work is automatically generated

3. Give bonuses to the top of the stack and PIP the bottom - work actually done by HR

4. Open requisition for a backfill - work actually done by HR

5. Interview them for 6 months - also mostly done by engineers and recruiters

6. After they are hired, subject them to the same meat grinder - work done by engineers.

All the work is actually done by someone else. This management role (and all the 7 managers above them) are all just this glue. Why not just automate all this work?

Before someone responds with "people problems" and "management philosophies", please - all the above work is administrative assistant work that does not need higher salaries than engineers. And "people problems" can be handled by HR.

hateful• 3 years ago

If the only reason for your job is to make money to feed yourself and your family - then isn't that important in and of itself? Because if you and many like you are all doing this, then you are benefiting society in a very direct way - one family at a time. I think it would be hard to eliminated these jobs, without any alternative (e.g. UBI or a completely different system altogether. Note: not directly arguing for another system myself here).

isleyaardvark• 3 years ago

That doesn’t mean they aren’t bullshit jobs. Otherwise you could say the same about the classic Keynesian “pay people to dig holes then fill them back up” job.

fuzzfactor2• 3 years ago

Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job?

There is probably some truth to the rumor.

temp0826• 3 years ago

Of course most (all?) jobs are bullshit. No one should want to work for someone else's dream. You work for money or you're a fool.

Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job?

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