True, on the otherhand, that is one person - there are probably thousands and thousands of other people, at the same company, doing the same useless tasks - many of which costs a lot more.
You could say the same thing about the project I just left - company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$ - and there are probably 50 or more of the same type of apps being developed by this same company - none of which have even a trivial amount of users, it is an open secret in the IT part of the company, but nobody wants to say anything, because everyone wants to keep their job.
We got the whole thing done. They paid a lot more than $12k for it, plus whatever else they were spending.
After it was done, but before release, they bought another company that had the same stuff already, and scrapped the whole project.
I’d say 90+% of the development work I’ve done has never made anyone any money, and almost as much has never helped a single person. It’s a weird industry.
They may not always survive the year, but everything I do matters to the company.
I've worked on several projects that were experimental and built to validate business theories that turned out not to be true, and the projects were scrapped. Does that mean they were bullshit? No, it means the business learned something about the market with the experimental project that was never certain to begin with.
People think they have bullshit jobs because they can't see the forest for the trees, and because of that viral book & thinkpieces surrounding it -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless.
That's a dangerous thing to believe in a highly developed economy, frankly. And it's just wrong.
> Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless.
The book version, at least, isn’t so simplistic or stupid.
Perversely, I almost want to try working for a company where the pay is still good but the job has such low stakes. To know that there will never be a stressful fire drill in production because literally nobody uses what I make sounds almost... kind of great.
So weird that businesses are apparently totally cool with just shoveling money into a furnace like that, but hey, if I can be the guy pocketing a few bucks as the rest of it goes into the furnace... not such a bad deal.
At the end of the day, the value wasn't in the memo itself but rather in making the person who asked you for it look competent to their boss ("yes, this agenda item is covered, we are ready for the meeting").
I make no normative judgment on whether or not that is bullshit.
From the article paraphrasing Graeber's work. Seems pretty close.
12k is approximately nothing to a multinational firm.
The feeling of bullshitness and alienation from corporate workers stems from the difference between what their time is worth to themselves (subjectively a lot, you only live once, etc) and what it’s worth to their employer (in $, nearly nothing to a multinational).