The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason?

It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressing as fast as technology allows, but technology just doesn’t work that well. In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker. There are no machines to roll a burrito. There’s no machines to wipe tables, clean bathrooms, clean the kitchen, or even take drive through orders. We don’t, get, have automated ubers, taxis, freight trucks, etc. Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.

There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”

I’m not talking about service jobs. I wouldn’t consider service workers to be rent seekers at all. I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc

I think each one of us has a different idea what a "bullshit job" is. My favorite definition is this:

> When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.

> Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.

(the article itself[0] tells about how banks in Ireland went on strike for 6 months, but the strike was shrugged off as there was no impact)

[0]: https://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-...

Like my recent job as a software tester at state govt. honestly, I swear I got more positive reviews when I didn’t do shit. There was a dearth of meaning since I knew we could all be more trained, systematic and use more auto, less manual. Our testing was not even usually that good. Even mine, though I was among the better; we just checked off the “passed testing” box but didn’t add much value.

These jobs may be bullshit in the feelings they induce in people performing them, or the meaning those people give their jobs, but they are probably not bullshit in the utility they have for the organizations that pay for them.

Could be but I am not so sure. There is something I've seen in at least 10 organisations I worked for: middle managers are afraid their budgets will be reduced if they fire someone and never re-hire the position, so they actively go out of their way to think of a very niche and, yes, bullshitty, activity for them to do.

Seen it happen many times and it made me cynical about the whole "there are no bullshit jobs" meme. IMO there are BS jobs, quite a few of them too.

In my job I see that the managers are focused on automation to cut lower status jobs but I never see them questioning whether anyone in the huge hierarchy of managers is necessary. I think this is because if they question other managers, their own job might be called into question as well. Also, managers tend to think that managing is an important job.

It is indeed a vicious cycle.

I do not doubt that there must be some jobs that are bullshit, I might also assume some companies have more than others because those companies are broken in some way, or perhaps so profitable in some specific divisions that they can afford to have plenty of bullshit around and not even notice it. Finally it might be that some jobs are bullshit part of the time and other parts of the time really important.

But I doubt the distribution can be so high as people are always insinuating in these bullshit jobs subthreads.

Given the desire to always cut the useless non-profit parts of a business there will always be some pressure to find and eliminate bullshit, even as there may be some countervailing pressures to create bullshit. I think though that the feedback loops of capitalism are such that if you end up with too much bullshit at a company over time there would have to be a correction, leading either to the elimination of most of the bullshit or the downfall of the company.

If one believes most jobs or a great proportion of them are bullshit then that person should refrain from complaining about MBAs and their cost cutting measures getting rid of jobs - because probably those jobs were the bullshit ones.

(on edit - assuming bullshit jobs are a disease of the employment place I think for the sake of analogy the percentage should be the same as the flu, so 5 to 20 percent in a company, if a company has 20% or more bullshit jobs that company has an epidemic on its hands and needs to do something. If it's 5% ah, that you can live with.)

All of what you said is correct. That being said, the natural process of trying hard to eliminate BS or die is taking way too long. People just like being cozy -- the BS job employees, the managers, the bosses who like the quarterly graphs, everyone.

It's a process that is going at a glacial pace pretty much everywhere, sadly.

> I’m not talking about service jobs.

This thread is about low wage workers.

> I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc

Why, because you don’t understand what they do? Imagine explaining to those people that Google has “engineers” who just maintain the source repository. I bet they’d think it was a “bullshit job.”

The book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber defines five types of jobs, two of which are "goons" and "box tickers". Goons include hired people who lobby aggressively on behalf of their employer: lobbyists, corporate lawyers, PR specialists. Box tickers are those who use paperwork and process to appear to be busy, even though the real useful work would continue without their intervention.

It's no secret that the top-5 tech firms hire large numbers of lobbyists and corporate lawyers [1].

And I don't think it is a stretch to say that some well-paid engineering positions include work such as maintaining built-in-house duplicates of open source software, or enforcing arbitrary coding standards, that could be considered "box ticking". Present company excluded, of course.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/us/politics/amazon-apple-...

David Graeber is an anthropologist. He apparently did a PhD thesis on "magic, slavery, and politics." What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs? I mean, hell, he's an anthropology professor declaring other jobs to be "bullshit." (But I won't go so far as to say "anthropology professor" is a bullshit job, because I'm self aware enough to realize that I probably just don't understand what economic function they perform.)

Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.

The whole book "bullshit jobs" which is what people are talking about here is talking about useless white collar labor, not service jobs so I'm not sure why you think that that is what's being discussed.

>>Why, because you don’t understand what they do?

I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why.

Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario:

I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms at the customer's website. They had a clerk who would, once per hour, print all the forms that had been submitted, then take that stack of paper and place it on an unoccupied desk in a room on the other side of the building. She would then walk back to her own desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.

After a lot of interviews and digging, I found out the reason for this bizarre process: the unoccupied desk on the other side of the building used to be occupied by another clerk, whose job was to sort the forms based on their destination department, then walk to them to those departments. She would then come back to her desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.

Here's the thing though: she had retired 5 years ago. The stacks of paper that were being piled on her now unoccupied desk were simply shredded regularly by a third clerk about once a week, and it took that clerk four hours to shred everything because she was required to keep an Excel spreadsheet of how many of each form was being shredded. That Excel spreadsheet was then saved to a network drive, where it wasn't accessed by any user, ever.

You might be thinking, "wow, that's pretty crazy, but stuff like that is probably pretty rare." You would be very wrong. I charted out insane processes like this for ten years. Every company has boatloads of them. Bullshit jobs are not only invented, but they are also retained long after they are made redundant and completely unnecessary.

You're describing a different thing. The economy undoubtedly has many jobs that are, in certain specific instances, unnecessary. That's just an uninteresting observation that the economy isn't perfectly efficient. That's different than the concept of "bullshit job," which is more about jobs that are *categorically unnecessary," because, for example, they could be automated away.

So instead of just eliminating the 2 bullshit jobs, they created another one (yours) to analyze the situation...

A.k.a. management & coordination is a hard problem.

I should have clarified: they hired my company to find out these types of problems. I was assigned to the project. After we gave the final presentation, they eliminated the redundant positions I mentioned (along with a host of others across the enterprise) and saved a boatload of money.

I love this anecdote. This is some Office Space stuff.

What were the people receiving the forms from the retired person were doing with them ?

> Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.

No, Costco for example I expect to not have automation because I'm bulk buying and don't want to deal with trying to fit all that on their weight scale for self checkout.

Also, Whole Foods doesn't SKU on all their produce products which makes this a pain for anyone trying to use self checkout.

Stores here in Canada like Loblaws, Metro, IGA, etc are rolling out self checkout. Thank goodness, I don't want to talk to people, asked if I'll donate $1 to something, etc.

Today, I went through Walmart cash checkout because I was buying 7 storage bins for a move. The entire thought process why I didn't go through self checkout:

- Don't have handheld bar scanner

- Someone probably going to stop me because they'll think I've put something inside of bins.

- There's almost no space on the self checkout to actually do large purchases.

People want convenient experiences. I saw older generations +65 starting to use self checkouts at grocery chains.

Spend time watching behavior. Same repeat that happened when McDonald's kiosks rolled out. Now, people get pissed when other people go to use the cash because it pulls someone off the line to deal with someone not using mobile order or the kiosk.

Walmart has security at the door. However you pay will not change if they will ask you for your bill. Things like eye-contact encourage that.

Walmart also has a loss prevention arm.

> The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason?

Yes, at least in a sense. Coordination failures are a thing. (See e.g. https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ for a readable introduction to the issue.)

Author of this book has never held an actual job, FWIW. He is smart, and a good writer, but I'd take his opinions about how business world works with a huge lump of salt.

> You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes

Unfortunately the processes they are squeezing often involve budgets and salaries, like those of factory workers, teachers and nurses. Its a bit hard to sympathise with this kind of 'value' sometimes.

> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker > Grocery checkout automation is atrocious

I don't kniw about elsewhere but in NZ and Japan I'll pick self check out every time it's there. Its a bit sad on the human side of things but it is easier

> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker.

In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.

> There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”

Any job that involves taking a handwritten form which then is processed or oral instructions could be eliminated by providing an interface for the person to input the data directly without having to go through the middle person.

Yes. It is much, much faster...until you get behind someone who: Never used it before; Has no idea what they want to eat; Wants to check the prices on all the sides; Is waiting for their friends to send them a weChat message with their order also so they don't have to wait; The machine can't print the ticket; The machine crashes after taking payment; The person in front of you has friends show up and they start going back through all of the options.

I love it if it isn't during "rush hour," but some people take a long time to make up their minds when given a plethora of options. And then I seek out a counter person as they will just help the next person if someone hasn't made up their mind yet.

> In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.

Right, but in general, people don't. Sure, there are some people who will go to the same fast food place every day, and after a week will be able to input their order blindfolded, but that's not the norm.

The people who get used to the interface and end up incredibly efficient are the paid cashiers who input hundreds of orders for 8 hours each day.

You provided the value of false cover to management.

If you ever have worked at a failed startup than you had a “bullshit” job. Bullshit jobs aren’t all bad, they are necessary hypotheses in the productivity market. The problem with them comes when institutions invert their competency hierarchy (this can happen shockingly fast, just ask an ex-Yahoo employee) and lose their ability to excise the bullshit. Bullshit jobs easily become institutionalized. It is all about managing risk. By the time an organization has a bunch of bullshit jobs the people that could tell management who is who are all long gone.