An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."
I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
Someone comes to you and says, "my job is pointless and should not exist."
The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
Further, how can we trust our perception is the better measure of the value of that job? If the person performing the role can't even assess the value properly, how are they providing that value?
go remove some guys that do legal compliance stuff and when the random inspection happen years later, you'll find out that maybe it would've cost you less to keep that employee.
Planes can keep flying without a pilot for quite awhile, until they run out of fuel or crash into a mountain.
Bad news: you have been rejected from consideration for any work related to realtime/life critical systems.
Good news: you may have a future in politics, at least in the county I live in.
"What will happen if this person stopped doing their job?"
"Oh the important monthly reports will stop going out."
"Oh, okay, we better not have them stop doing that then."
I submit that not only can we, but we must, admit that in some individual cases the person in the position knows best, and in others, they don't.
Or maybe, absent other evidence, it might make more sense to tentatively take people's self reports at face value. Or at least hold off backing some particular elaborate alternative which involves people being wrong about the things they have most information on.
I take it as the software version of virtue signaling.
The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could have variables that make the job of having an IT guy drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in many computers becoming broken costing more in money and downtime than having a trained professional drive in and move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few visits a year.
Compare The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1]: tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve any understanding of the contents, and would only make the author come across as smarmy.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Catches_You_and_You...
> Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything...
> This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible.
> Clearly, then, we have an important social phenomenon that has received almost no systematic attention.
There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?"
It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary, including society's perspective, which goes beyond the personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.
The qualification is that even the person doing the job thinks it's bullshit. That doesn't mean the definition relies solely on them thinking it's bullshit.
Frankly, reading through the article, it feels like the definition keeps shifting and much of it is his struggle to even define what it means. He then goes on to start giving his definitions of the what he thinks are types of bullshit jobs.
The article I don't think is all that consistent, and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
Exactly. Like many of us, Graeber writes to understand.
His stated purpose is abundantly clear. Many, many people were sharing with Graeber complaints of a similar theme. So he tried to name and describe it.
Rightly, wrongly, or otherwise, it's all in the book. For other people to pick apart and response to.
How else is scholarship supposed to function?
Would Graeber have been more effective as an op ed columnist, churning out saccharine blather which confirms everyone's priors? eg The World is Flat and Bobos in Paradise?
I think there are definitely jobs that a computer or robot should be doing, but a human is there instead because of what our economy and society currently values. However, until the computer or robot is actually doing the job, I don't think I'd call it a bullshit job. That's not to say society shouldn't consider the impacts of grinding people's lives away with rote repetitive tasks.
Certain critics have adopted a labored, willful misunderstanding. eg Brad DeLong.
Graeber became public enemy #1 with Debt: The first 5000 Years. Some economists just couldn't wrap their heads around the anthropological viewpoint. Graeber is talking about people and societies evolving relationship(s) to debt, not economies and finance.
Economists and anthropologists like to dunk on each other. It's now something like a blood feud.
A more informative title would really be "boring jobs whose purpose isn't understood by the people doing them"
How is this job that different from being on an assembly line and all you do is tighten the screws on something that passes by?
To me it seems clear that that is not what this book is about. It's about the purpose, not the contents.
Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
I WAS REPLACED
BY A CRON JOBAnd still handling exceptions manually.
Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?
https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/i-fired-12-floors-of-...
Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science.
This sounds good, but it's honestly just not realistic in a lot of jobs. How are you going to make working at an Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart? Making fries at McDonalds?
You can give the usual platitudes of how you're helping to make sure that people in your community can get the goods/food/whatever they need, but I think most people know that they're not really contributing to the betterment of society in a lot of jobs.
And to be clear, that's not just menial labor - I've been a PM on some products that could disappear off the face of the earth without making anybody especially worse off (except the guy managing the part of the operation that used our software, but ultimately he'd go to a competitor and all would be fine).
I think that it's often better to forget the idea that work needs to be deeply meaningful and treat people with the respect of recognizing that they're there for a paycheck and nothing else, and then try to do what you can to make the day-to-day work easier and more pleasant.
Meanwhile I'll be hoping against hope that when these meaningless jobs get replaced by robots and AI that we get UBI and people can actually work to find meaning.
I think excluding compensation from those jobs, meaning higher compensation, from the idea of meaning is losing sight of it all. There at a lot of jobs that if people were compensated better they would find it to be more meaningful to engage with. It can be a primary motivation to simply do well because they feel fairly valued.
It’s not all heart and soul stuff
If you talk to these workers, you can tell those who have a careful manager from those who don’t.
Mere tediousness would consign all warehouse jobs and janitorial positions to "bullshit" - which they are not, as specifically called out in the book. They might be unpleasant, but are definitely necessary.
Parent commenter is stating that, with a good manager, they will remind you of the meaning inherent in the work. At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"
"You make a distinction between bullshit jobs and shit jobs in your book. Can you talk a little bit about the distinction between the two?
Well it’s fairly straightforward: shit jobs are just bad jobs. Ones you’d never want to have. Back-breaking, underpaid, unappreciated, people who are treated without dignity and respect… The thing is for the most part, shit jobs aren’t bullshit, in the sense of pointless, nonsensical, because actually they usually involve doing something that genuinely needs to be done: driving people around, building things, taking care of people, cleaning up after them…
Bullshit jobs are most often paid quite well, involve nice benefit packages, you’re treated like you’re important and actually are doing something that needs to be done — but in fact, you know you’re not. So in that way they’re typically opposites."
> At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"
McD is a prime example of a bullshit sector.
"Bullshit jobs are ones ... that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make ... the world ... a better place. "
> Livestock and climate change: what if the key actors in climate change are... cows, pigs, and chickens? ... https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Livestock-and-climate-...
> Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century .. https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth ... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
> In terms of carbon sequestration and dealing w/ climate, it is clear that agricultural land use(especially land used for animal feed) is the largest barrier to ecosystem restoration. Potential for carbon sequestration is enormous (literally enough for the entire 1.5C carbon budget) ... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4.
If a sector (industry) is bullshit, the jobs are too.
> the climate change stuff here is a total non sequitur
I was reacting to
'with a good manager, they will remind you of the meaning inherent in the work. At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"'
Serving hungry people "fresh" hot meal does not alone make it non-bullshit job. Maybe I was not clear enough ... consuming meat & dairy destroys the environment (and animal agriculture is the main culprit), and not consuming meat & dairy is a best way to stop anthropocenic crisis (overshoot). There are enough peer reviewed scientific studies that confirm that. Ask if you want more sources.
> The worst part about being vegan is other vegans
Funny, but somehow relevant: https://i.redd.it/xuwnig93hg6b1.jpg
> There will always be food service jobs, and they will always be tedious and taxing ... serving ideologically-correct foodstuff
By definition those are not bullshit jobs.
Those are not “bullshit jobs” by any definition. An Amazon warehouse worker knows that someone has to do that job. The same is true for your other examples.
If the conclusion of the research is "these jobs are bullshit", then I agree, but if it is about how people are doing in these jobs, it is completely valid. Graeber was mixing these in his book to have more popular appeal, which is bad.
> Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.
That's what Marx called alienation of labor. While it may increase efficiency, it takes all the pleasure out of work. But that's not really the topic of the book: There's entropy in any larger organization, and I'm sure we all have an example or two of people who are a pure waste of energy in their position.
I am almost positive Adam Smith pointed to this problem before with the pin factory example
Because of course, the executive are always driving things in the optimal way, but only them can see it…
In fact, in most orgs the higher in the management position you climb, the more acutely you see the organisational warts of the company, which more often than not, is governed not according to some clever plan from the executives, but instead is the results of political struggles between entities whose leader often hate each other.
There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the ground.
Using BCG consultants for example.
-advice (and an old joke) from a former colleague
Graeber was an anthropologist. Anthropologists want to understand how people feel about their lives and why. They don't take feelings of meaninglessness to imply that, objectively, a job could be cut without consequence. Just that many jobs don't satisfy a human thirst to be doing something subjectively worthwhile.
Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or society at large?
i think it’s likely a problem with both. no matter how many repeatedly delude themselves otherwise, both society and the individual are inextricable.
Been a while since I read Graeber's book but I recall one self reported "bullshit job" being to lift rocks scattered across a field and put them in a pile. The people doing the task thought it was a time wasting activity as they were unaware that winter frost pushes up new rocks every year.
It's possible that a lot of these so called bullshit jobs are just jobs where the purpose hasn't been explained to the employee.
Common theme in most of the executive decisions that I've seen. Lets shutdown product X, it costs us Y to run. We could use ~X from a different company that costs Y-2.5% to run. Then only months to an year later- We shouldn't have shut down X, as ~X is not what we actually want and our initial budgeting didn't cover it but we need 2Y to pay for and rebuilding X could cost us up to 10Y-20Y.
People at the top generally don't have what is 'precisely' needed. And the kind of resources it could to go about achieving it.
No biggie.
And executives do not understand the details of what is actually happening on the production floor. They might be fed inaccurate information or outright fantasies by middle management. This is how Russian leadership believed they had winter uniforms, but in reality those uniforms did not exist. The same power dynamics, hiding of errors, exaduration of what convenient, happens in companies.
>For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
So you could use the same logic to say that electorate has no business complaining about decisions taken by politicians, after all they have no big picture view and don’t have access to the report that politicians do.
Especially at large organizations, they're relying on summaries of summaries of summaries observed by line managers summarizing information. Tons of information is lost that way.
This is why high-level strategy fails. Theoretical ideas hit reality and fall apart pretty quickly. Few executives are grounded enough to actually know how things work.
Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?