This bullshit job argument has never made much sense to me, but I see the argument a lot. If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit. Obviously, they (the company) derive value from these jobs or else such jobs would not exist (or at least not for long).

The parent argues that it's "a useless but noisy zero-sum jockeying for a rungs on the socio-economic ladder"

And you argue "If companies care about maximizing productivity and profits, and given America's hyper-competitive economy and super-fickle stock market where the difference between meeting the earnings estimate versus missing it by a penny can make the difference between a stock being up 10% or down 10%, why would a company waste money on jobs that are bullshit"

This is the same argument, just with a different spin. In the instance of Facebook, it was able to provide it's core utility with some software cobbled together by one guy in his dorm room over a couple weeks. So what are the other 25,000 employees for? It's not to make Facebook more useful, it's to prevent some other college kid from building a social media network that displaces it. It's all just a silly game that isn't very fun to play. One could argue that Facebook's core utility is now in delivering ads, but nobody likes looking at ads, and companies would rather not spend on ads if they didn't need to to compete, so again, it's all just a silly game. Very little of it is doing anything that is either useful or wanted.

To be fair, the stock market is bullshit. Its legalized professional gambling where some participants have way more information than others. The fact the vast majority of business exists to try to "win" the stock market game than provide real productive returns to the economy reaffirms the bullshit economics involved.

IE, vast amounts of effort from major globalcorps is dedicated towards tax avoidance. You spend tremendous amounts of resources to avoid taxes, which is only beneficial to the shareholders in the short term, because the long term economic damage of tax fraud and avoidance cripples economies and stunts growth. But the stockholders need not care since they already made their dividends off all the smuggled money as the country burns around them.

I think you're a bit too cynical. The financial system isn't optimal, and the stock market is less important now than it used to be (because it's easier to raise private capital), but it's not gambling. The rate of return is positive over pretty much any long-term horizon, and it allows companies to raise money when necessary. I agree that many companies engage in unproductive, but short-term profit maximizing behavior though.

the whole point of capitalism is to align incentives s.t. when businesses act selfishly to "win" in the markets, they are producing real returns to the economy

The jobs are useful to the company, they're not useful to society.

Companies are far from all-knowing and perfectly rational agents. They are made of people.

Also, growing from a lean company into a too-big-to-fail behemoth (which happens all the time) is very valuable to CEOs & co. It what makes you graduate from billionaire to billionaire with political power.

Yet large companies often have hugely bureaucratic and wasteful practices. When I was contracting I would go from one business with an IT department of 100 to another employing 1,000. They were broadly similar organisations, yet there was plenty of variance in their efficiency.

It is a little counter intuitive, but it's real.

Check this article out: http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

Spoken like somebody who has never actually worked in a large company.

Picture a stereotypical manager who does nothing but attend pointless meetings all day. (S)he attends reliably, and is good at appearing busy and authoritative and otherwise managerial.

This manager will not be fired, as (s)he's outwardly doing work duties and not doing anything specifically incompetent or negligent.

Other management-layer folk like this person as they confirm to middle class white collar norms socially.

Nevertheless, this person is useless. Every company is full of people like this.

Adding complexity often makes it harder for others to compete. So companies do that(via regulation, or technology, or contracts, or ad campaigns,etc...). And than complexity breeds complexity.

Companies are awful at culling bullshit jobs when the economy is good. That's why they never hire back as many as they laid off during recessions.