There definitely are bullshit jobs. But its super dangerous when charlatans, which in my opinion are far more common, take the "bullshit job" meme and start firing people that actually do important work and creating extremely toxic work environments.

I feel you about the bullshit project you were on. I've been on similar projects and its such a grind. Helps to have a healthy work-life balance.

Well, charlatans can take over any term by misinterpreting. We do not need to get along with their misinterpretation, though.

For DevOps/Platform Engineering, I found that companies are either ridiculously overstaffed and are developing their own database orchestration from scratch (fun, but not effective in most organizations) or 3 people do everything related to running software somewhere as soon as someone shouts at them. And probably all kinds of permission clicking. Worst when someone in one of those small teams goes off the rails and uses something cause they want to have fun with it (ask me about the bare metal ceph cluster we barely use and nobody knows how to fix when it inevitably breaks)

That reminds me of a buklshit project I was involved with at a previous company. The short of it was they wanted some way to exchange articles between affiliated journalism outlets, and so they spent $6+ million to build what was effectively a clone of CouchDB from scratch. No, I am not making that up. I knew how silly that project was from the get-go, but thought nothing of it because, as far as I knew, it was an organizational pet project that didn't cost that much. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted when I was told how much had been spent on it over a period of a few years. I know at least a significant portion of that budget went to some staff engineers, and it wouldn't surprise me that some blood sucking consultants fed from the trough as well. This was clearly one of those things that may have started out as some developers identifying a problem, having fun with it, and then management decided it to throw a bunch of money its way thinking it was going to give them a big name.

I was ordered once (because I had previously ordered my staff to not do this) to have my staff make a certain internal website comply with accessibility requirements. Except the only authorized users were soldiers and airmen who would be discharged if they had any of the disabilities this was for.

They didn't believe that bird colonel JAG who told them there was no way the law applied. By the time it all got sorted out, we had it done.

Apparently, a memo went around that this was required everywhere all the time and the distinction wasn't made between public-facing websites (where this is true) and this one.

Imagine working for a 100M generic AI unicorn startup, with nothing but a hunch? That's my worst nightmare. Somebody elses dream

But: Big corps need to learn and experiment. Sometimes it's ridiculously expensive. But it needs to be done.

I quit a project (stayed in the company) that is currently running something like 10M euro. I quit when it was 1M. Because I felt my small role was tedious and stupid and not a big learning opportunity. But the job needs to be done. So now less capable people are doing it. And we (they organisation) will kind of maybe succeed. But the fact is: the project is mission critical for the company. So no choice but to do the job. But i can assure you most people working that project hates it. Think their job is bullshit etc. But really. It's just a really really important threadmill.

What i am trying to say: sometimes it's not the job. Sometimes it's you.