I used to think corporations strive to reduce costs and therefore keep their workforce to the minimum necessary. Now my theory is that managers in a company try to maximize their influence and standing and this is mostly done by making sure they have as many people below them as possible. Therefore they hire consitantly for their teams and create new sub-hierarchies below them.
If this is the case, the obvious side effect is the emergence of bullshit jobs as the purpose of hiring is not primarely to finish work but to increase power of managers in corporations.
There is periodic pressure to return to [greater] profitability, at which times companies fire like mad. Either it's a higher level of management realizing one branch of the org chart is stupid and directing its removal, or a directive from the top "figure out how to cull 10% of the workforce".
Between those events, however, managerial accumulation of influence takes over.
Maybe c-suite execs don't rip out excess staffing immediately because, even operationally, it's not all downside:
Within a relatively small branch of the org chart, having more than bare minimum staffing (with some of them doing bullshit jobs) provides a human resource buffer that might be tasked with solving really important problems that crop up sometimes: significant new requirements from a customer, or, if the incentives are right, opportunistically solving non-critical persistent problems (e.g. refactoring more) or automating more. I guess there's not enough pressure from higher management to keep teams to true personnel requirements + a few extra, so the "few extra" grows like mad.
Within a larger branch, occasionally having "excess" staffing for internal corporate competition is good. One of the best strategies for large projects (like larger government contractors) is to run two teams each with half the budget and select the best result. It seems insane from a naive perspective: wouldn't it cost nearly twice as much to have double the headcount? But it doesn't seem to, especially when the vast majority of project costs are labor costs or linearly related to staffing (rather than external resource costs, which are more static—though even for resource-intensive projects, internal competition provides incentive to figure out how to use less resources).
It's a super strong phenomenom, having a lot of people around you, an entourage, a posse. Projects a huge amount of power. And it's done with the whole management chain's approval, the low-level boss has more people then his boss has those same more people too because it's a tree.
I think it's important to remember is corporations are just groups of people, and each individual will have a different personality and motivation. Some will be empire builders, others will only hire when push comes to shove.
When it comes to an actual companies personality, it basically boils down to the behaviour you reward, the behaviour you put up with, and when exceptions apply. As an example, how many time does the "no asshole" rule get overrides by someone talent? Suddenly you're full of assholes.
Of course patterns emerge. If the market generally rewards empire builders, then you're going to get people empire building in your organisation. Even if you do not directly reward it, they'll just leverage the title and the reports to land a job elsewhere.
Why do we put up with this? Well quite simply, you tend to be hiring for roles you yourself don't understand. Here me out. If your CEO is a sales guy, which is perfectly fine, he's going to be taking a leap of faith somewhere when he picks a CTO.
I read on linkedin on a regular basis that you shouldn't promote your best developer to CTO. There may be some truth to this, but the reality is that there's a bunch of non-technical people vying for the top technical job. Now from your position as CEO, do you pick the guy who's a bit more salesy and familiar, or the tech you don't understand or empathise with? After all, that CTO with 2 years as a junior programmer in 1993 does articulate a really good argument.
Personally, I think you doom yourself to mediocrity by having a monoculture of bean counters run your business. I might be wrong, but if you hire a person who needs to hire a person to do the job, it's likely they'll want to hire someone a bit like them, and suddenly you'll be hiring a person, to hire a person, that needs to hire a person, for many layers, until one of those people will be a person that does a thing.
Your observation is a good example of the perverse incentive. Fortunately, everyone can win in this particular scenario. If the company can pay its employees on time and doesn't care that much about minimizing costs, and managers can spread the wealth by providing jobs, then it's hardly the worst thing in the world.
Employees can also be seen as insurance against bottlenecks created by other employees. The more employees you have on hand, the less likely that a particular employee going AWOL will cause a noticeable interruption. I've seen companies make the mistake of only hiring a minimal number of engineers, for instance, and end up in a sticky situation when one of them leaves.
This also applies to startups. At least recently. Many startups (specially in the finance market) try to hire and grow like crazy, because it drives investment (or at least so they think).
If you see startup founders as "managers" with investors being their bosses then the parent comment applies too.
A lot of startup founders' goals is to raise more investment and live off that - this gives them the "startup founder" lifestyle & influence without actually having to take on any of the risk & uncertainty of running a self-sustaining business.
My favorite Bullshit Job was my very own. There was an employee that was hired only because, well I couldn't say No during the interview.
He had nothing to do so they turned him into a human website health checker. He had a page with dozens of iframes of all our websites. He would spend the day refreshing the page, reloading the iframes in intervals. If any failed to load he would report them.
Not knowing what the page was for, i was asked to automate refreshing each iframe after an interval. This meant, he wouldn't have to click the reload button anymore. Just sit and wait until a website failed. I thought his job was bullshit. Until, I realized that I had just automated a bullshit job.
This reminds me of a job that I had almost a decade ago. Arguably, it's less bullshit than the one you describe, but I think it's close. At the time, it wasn't that uncommon of a job in the animation industry.
The company was a medium-sized animation studio that at the time was doing cut-scenes for a AAA game. My job was to literally stare at a screen with a list of jobs and available computers in the "render farm" and, if any of them turned red or stopped responding, to walk downstairs and press the reset button on the corresponding box. I'd say 80% of my days were just staring at that screen. It felt like the stupidest job ever, even though there was some utility to it, but I was too inexperienced at coding at the time to automate my job.
To kill the boredom, I learned some Python and wrote a Hangman game. That's when I realized I was better off becoming a software engineer and started the career that I have now.
"Accordingly, over time, the prosperity extracted from technological advances has been reinvested into industry and consumer growth for its own sake rather than the purchase of additional leisure time from work."
This is what annoy me most, and why I don't want to go back to working in an office.
As one of those people, I’m saving now so I don’t have to worry about money in retirement.
Whatever’s left over was indeed wasted in the lens of my life (and that is bad), but makes for less such waste in my kids’ lives (which partially offsets the previous).
I can't name a single job I've taken that was not a bullshit job. Ironically the better it pays, the more bullshit it is.
I made some good money on these jobs, but I always hated them. I can't think of a single product I worked on (as an employee) that is objectively net positive value to society.
Sure, it has some customers, but these customers are other corporations that are doing bullshit business. The end users themselves probably hate the product.
The only things I worked on that I felt had some positive value to society where things I ended up put out there for free.
This might be cynical but now I think a large segment of the economy is just bullshit excuses to circulate money around.
It's what happens when the government, industry, and investors create feeding troughs of funding, whether it's through deals, grants, VC funding, stock offerings, tax breaks, backroom handshakes, and so on.
I wouldn't say that all the jobs I've had were outright bullshit, but they were often made bullshit by the powers that be. When an organization is frequently making sub-optimal decisions that impact the quality of the product, the role of an employee carrying out those decisions can become that of shoddy workmanship, or performing tasks that aren't as beneficial as management thinks.
At this point, I've learned to accept a certain amount of bullshit. As much as I'd like the world to be free of bullshit, there's some utility to corporate bullshit. When companies succeed and grow, bullshit is created to inflate importance and create job security. If the company has entered the "cash cow" phase of its life, actually addressing bullshit almost certainly means threatening at least one person's job. If everyone is making money, why bother, then? Jobs are supposed to suck to some extent, else they wouldn't be jobs. It's not that I wouldn't do what I can to inform a team or business on how something can be done better, but when the forces of business and corporate politics inevitably push back, I let it go. Be somewhat glad that yourself and others get paid to do stupid shit. In any other time in history, our jobs would have been physically a lot more grueling. By tolerating bullshit, we can actually get away with quite a lot. It's one thing if it's a small company where bullshit early on can really hurt them, but why care if BigCo is full of bullshit? If it's full of bullshit, everybody might as well feed from the trough.
> Manual labor is naturally limited – there is only so much ditch that needs digging, only so much shit to shovel, etc. With computers, the situation is different. There is no end to the amount of text documents, pdfs, spreadsheets and other files that can be created; these then need to be reviewed, revised, have each revision tracked and documented separately; this all gets filed into multiple databases and folder structures that all need to be catalogued in new spreadsheets and pdf:s. There are the endless software updates, subtle UI changes that require frustrating periods of adjusting to get used to, compatibility issues with hardware or other programs that take weeks to figure out.
The definition of “bullshit jobs” is fuzzy. Middle managers are extremely important. Corporate compliance officers exist to represent the interests of external stakeholders in a company.
I’m sure many people resent having to go to compliance training every week (in some highly regulated jobs).
This is quiet a fuzzy and unsupported claim. In what respect are these important and what is their main goal: Coaching the team or sitting in meetings to align and make sure everything is aligned and they are visible? Are their head on the table of the product is not delivered and not flying?
To me middle management has to be redefined with a clear responsibility that has very much changed from the past.
Summary: companies that go “flat” and remove middle managers often end up with informal pecking orders. These orders have power but lack accountability.
Something else to go sider - the removal of middle managers had coincided with the rise of HR departments.
At my work, I won’t have a boss. I have a product manager, HR, a scrum master, a team lead, and the CTO who I never see, but is my direct superior.
I'll say it's quite eye opening to work for a place with ineffective middle management. I did it for a couple years.
When people asked what it was like I quoted the famous phrase "an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters".
Every group was doing something different. People would start numerous projects and then just forget about them. Really important things were never planned for and ended up being a mad rush once some random person figure out how bad the consequences of not doing it were.
The people were all very smart. There was just no management. Nobody to say "no, don't do X, do Y" or a leader to say "yes, we could do all of those things, but we've prioritized these 2".
After a while I was begging for the bureaucracy and paperwork of a big company just so that I could feel like I wasn't just spinning my wheel 90% of the time.
Doesn't it depend on whether the job holder himself thinks the job is BS?
I'd say anecdotally there's a heck of a lot of people doing jobs that they themselves don't think really contributes anything worthwhile.
If you loosen the definition a bit you might also count things that the job holder would say could be done vastly better, which would start to encompass some of your middle managers and compliance people.
I dare say most of what we do in society is essentially useless, it doesn't need to be done, and only exists because everyone in the current system needs to be seen to contribute. That need itself grew out of an inherited fear of hunger that might result if we let people slack off, and might take a long time for us to change.
Ukraine is in a place in which an army is required for survival. But does a peaceful country surrounded by an ocean or by peaceful countries — say, Iceland or Austria — need a large army?
"Iceland's defence forces consist of the Icelandic Coast Guard, which patrols Icelandic waters and monitors its airspace, and other services such as the National Commissioner's National Security and Special Forces Units. Iceland maintains no standing army, the only NATO member for which this is the case.
The Coast Guard consists of three ships and four aircraft"
Depends on the company and what those middle managers are doing. By default, middle managers exist to manage risk and distribute blame away from senior management. When middle managers become redundant to the point where an employee has multiple bosses to report to, arguably some of those managers aren't that important. Ever see how, in Office Space, the protagonist has multiple managers bug him when he makes a minor error? That's common in a lot of mediocre companies, and is something I and others I know have experienced at one point or another.
UBI is probably not the antidote. UBI would not cover rent in many places and the existence of UBI would likely be yet another bullshit excuse for not addressing our housing issues.
Address basics like our housing issues and universal healthcare and the need for bullshit jobs would go way down.
UBI would cover rent for a great many in a vast swath of the country.
It's not supposed to replace working, it's supposed to be a transfer from industries that employ no one but generate vast wealth, to people who work in industries where the marginal value created is less than cost of living.
It's also designed to be a cushion for the poor, and replace the various administratively expensive great society programs with a single transfer benefit.
Progressives hate it, because it doesn't solve all the problems, Conservatives hate it, because it offends their sense of propriety about government oughten do - and "gets in the way" of the labor market.
That would require abandoning the idea that land owners have special rights over people who don't have land. We used to tie voting rights to land ownership. We will have to abandon a lot more special rights to reach any form of equity.
I don't believe it would. We've torn down about a million SROs* since WW2 and largely outlawed the creation of new Missing Middle housing.
We used to build smaller scale housing in walkable neighborhoods as something of a default. Policy changes and the right financing options could help bring such back.
Even before going into the details of why ubi would not work, ubi on itself is a very dangerous proposition as it ties the survival of the lower classes to the whims and magnanimity of the ruling class.
I think the perception window having shifted so hard that this is now acceptable is extremely dangerous to the survival of democracies, which were supposed to serve people.
> very dangerous proposition as it ties the survival of the lower classes to the whims and magnanimity of the ruling class
UBI is very dangerous because it removes a basic right (that is not widely enjoyed, even today): The right to work.
With UBI, peasants can't reclaim their right to work and trade. Government will yield massive control over its populace and have everyone on leash because UBI is the only revenue one can earn; that or a government job. Of course, every corporation will be nationalized or heavily regulated to come under the control of the state. Small/Medium businesses would have already disappeared by the time.
In what country is there a true peasantry still? - beyond that quibble, government already wields massive control, professional licensing, zoning, building codes, safety regulations, business licensing - save for a man working as a subsistence farmer, on his own land, this right is already gone and has been for all of my lifetime - and most do not want to deal with the consequences of bringing it back.
I worked for the government, no one was doing anything. But everyone was stressed and super busy.
I automated two teams of peoples work load, and they said we can't use your code because that's not how it works, the goal is to spend budget and hire more people, so we get more budget next year.
Graeber said that maintaining and repairing software is a bullshit job because you can just write it correctly the first time.
Yeah thanks genius, we're all out here intentionally writing bugs just to keep ourselves employed.
This from a man who developed his theory over a decade from a short essay to widespread social research to talks and interviews then finally to a book. Why didn't he just write the final book the first time?
Graeber's theory is the only thing that is bullshit here. May his theory rest in peace with him.
It's very sad to see how many people admitting they have bullshit jobs in this thread. They almost seem proud of it as well. You would think that, given the choice, (yes, many of us technical people DO have a choice) people would strive to do something meaningful in their jobs rather than just scoop up a paycheck every month while doing bullshit. It feels like some people have simply "given up" even though they are probably capable of finding something better.
When I first read this book I was working at a company building a product that no one used. The company was propped up by investors and eventually folded. It's not a great feeling developing something that no one will miss when it disappears.
On the one hand, this is quite a normal and even healthy thing in nature, and apparently a part of life itself. A plant drops thousands of seeds, but only a few of them will ever sprout. We humans, too, will try many different things, and only a few of those will turn out worthwhile. It is a process necessary to adapt to an ever-changing environment.
On the other hand, we could probably do a better job of recognizing and admitting blind alleys sooner. In groups, especially, it is very easy that people will convince each other that the path they are on is viable. But I can assure you, even if you worked for yourself, you would still fool yourself often enough. Not only would you still tend to continue working on things that I have already proven to be failures. But you would actively avoid asking the question, “Is this thing I am working on still worthwhile?”. I think once we are in execution mode, switching back to the higher plane of strategy and critical distance is a very hard and counter-intuitive thing to do.
Can we talk about bs computing jobs? Some people have the great job of constantly rewriting their sites in the lastest "design language" or even framework. Can we call it bs job?
Bullshit jobs is bullshit. Sure when tasked with some interminablely dull task it can sure feel like bullshit, but the reality is no firm pays for headcount unless it absolutely has to. Large organisations by the nature need a fair amount of box ticking and other admin to allow management visibility and control over an organisations' activities.
Your logical fallacy is assuming competence on behalf of the job creators. Companies waste money on many things, that is certainly true, and so why wouldn’t pointless roles be one of those things?
It’s not just incompetence, it’s much much deeper. Take for instance a consulting company placed on a project for another company. The consulting company might have one key person, but then adds three other workers to the project to impress management. The three excess workers are forced to invent work that justifies their existence. In this case, neither company would have reason to complain.
Not sure that always is applicable. Here in Germany you have too many incompetent, hostile and yet unfireable employees.
For instance in my 12 FTE team is a colleague. She appeared fine when we hired her, but within the first weeks of her employment she proofed to be incompetent, hostile and all talks went into nowhere. We wanted to fire her within the probation period, but suddenly there was a doctor's note that she is pregnant. Nobody believes her, but we cannot fire her.
He HAVE to employ her. She will go to maternaty leave in month 8 of her pregnancy. Before that she will take her 30 days (=6 weeks) of paid holiday. After the maternaty leave she has the right to work 50% at 90% pay for 2 years and cannot be fired, too, because she is a young mum.
We had our lawyers look into that. Nothing we can do. We will never be able to fire her.
We are also worried that she will manipulate data or sabotage without us being able to fully proof it.
Let me get this straight, you don't think she's pregnant, but she has the supporting documentation for pregnancy (from a doctor no less), and you think she'll manipulate data or sabotage without being able to prove it (in other words, without evidence).
To me, it sounds like to me you've gone through the cognitive dissonance to justify her relegation to a shit job on the basis of her sex.
I know of a doctor who was caught supplying hundreds of fake notes to asylum seekers in Antwerp.
He is still exercising his profession and his cabinet is doing well, I was told.
Here in Belgium, corruption around medical certificates is so widespread that anything that requires subsidies has to be approved by anonymous doctors working for social security.
If this is the case, the obvious side effect is the emergence of bullshit jobs as the purpose of hiring is not primarely to finish work but to increase power of managers in corporations.