Re:Bullshit Jobs
by TeMPOraL on Thursday August 30, 2018 @08:50AM
(#17876234)
> Seems to me it comes down to the extend you think your job can be winged. For example a marketing research job. Because you feel your reports are not read by your superiors, you just make up stuff and think its BS. But you could also write very good reports, go up a higher level, ask your boss for better work, etc. The BS is mainly in your mind.
So a litmus test: what's the delta of impact on company performance between you making a lousy, half-assed job and working your ass off to deliver best results? If the answer is "not much", then your job is most likely pointless. The person spending 80% of the time making cat memes is an obvious bullshit-job holder, but so is the "Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector" iff his inspections don't have a meaningful impact on health&safety.
(Then there's also an aspect of how people in general are qualified to do a job. Take my favourite pick, social media marketer/analyst - unless you are a good statistician and are working with decent data, your job is most likely pointless regardless of your efforts, by the virtue of you not understanding what you're doing, and taking inferences from random noise. But if you actually know what you're doing, you can probably make your customers a lot of money.)
So a litmus test: what's the delta of impact on company performance between you making a lousy, half-assed job and working your ass off to deliver best results? If the answer is "not much", then your job is most likely pointless. The person spending 80% of the time making cat memes is an obvious bullshit-job holder, but so is the "Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector" iff his inspections don't have a meaningful impact on health&safety.
(Then there's also an aspect of how people in general are qualified to do a job. Take my favourite pick, social media marketer/analyst - unless you are a good statistician and are working with decent data, your job is most likely pointless regardless of your efforts, by the virtue of you not understanding what you're doing, and taking inferences from random noise. But if you actually know what you're doing, you can probably make your customers a lot of money.)