Zooming out, I bet a lot of the economy is like this. In LI’s case literally some of the smartest people, people with PhDs who were maybe even born in another country, thinking for 40 hours a week about how to rank one piece of meaningless drivel above another one. This is instead of solving real, tangible problems that everyone can see. Ok maybe those people will pay taxes and end up contributing to something like education because they have to, but it’s a pretty inefficient way of making the world better.
I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.
A 2021 study empirically tested several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs were increasing over time and that they accounted for much of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.
These people are self-reporting this. Quite frankly with the number of people in bullshit jobs who think they're doing work I wouldn't really put a lot of value in those types of self-reports.
I wouldn't tell my boss or my colleagues the job I do is useless for hopefully obvious reasons, but when I really think about it in the grand scheme of things it really is a Bullshit Job. Basically any SaaS is (with some exceptions of course) just a collection of Bullshit Jobs.
But there's also nothing really wrong with that. We live in the society we live in, which basically necessitates the existence of many Bullshit Jobs in order for things to keep working as they do. I'd even argue basically anything that isn't to do with Healthcare, Education or similar things along those lines count as bullshit jobs really.
It's "probably junk" because some random EU survey in 2021 said so?
>often only because of regulatory requirements
Textbook "bullshit job" (that doesn't exist, of course).
Often you'll have a chain of movers A - Z. Each link can almost be it's own company depending on the industry. Naturally each thinks they're important, because someone has to move it around. Of course, you could go from A straight to Z and eliminate 25 companies.
Point is many, maybe most, companies don't actually produce direct value. They facilitate and they move. Now that's much harder to analyze.
I’ve recently remedied this to a degree by lowering salary expectations and looking in fields with a more scientific and practical basis in the products and outputs. Unfortunately I’m not a scientist, only a programmer, so my utility is seriously limited and finding work is quite a bit harder than if I were to stick within the SV startup scene.
We keep saying we need UBI but at the same time "we don't have enough homes". Then instead of UBI, maybe people should "make homes"? (That's just one example - there are also jobs in food, healthcare, mental illness care, spacecraft, etc...
In the end we have witnessed that we need stable inflation. If we have fast inflation, then unlimited numbers of people are left behind, for no fault of their own. If inflation is relatively stable, people can adjust slowly, carefully, and both companies and employees benefit from that.
I mean, not nobody. I follow a lot of people that post very thoughtful things that spark discussion, and it's one of the only places I know of other than here where I can discuss topics related to my career or field with peers, and for me that's useful.
Not just about viewership - if you are applying to positions, LinkedIn gives preference to candidates who are more engaged ON the network (posts, likes, comments, Pulse) over lurkers. [1]
So this is only getting worse. You'll have to see a lower quality feed just because the algorithm is forcing everyone to boost their own metrics anyway.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi - See your own tracking, look at the metrics description
Even now LinkedIn is possibly the worst platform for being polluted with "AI slop", I cannot understand why they are looking to advance this further. Hell, when you go to write a post now there is a big flashing button saying "USE AI TO WRITE THIS POST"...?!?!
“Networking as a concept was highly intimidating to me, until I reframed it in my mind as ‘making friends’ instead of the traditional meaning which made me feel like I was using people as stepping stones.”
https://www.nysscpa.org/article-content/gen-z--now-networks-...
If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching function, it would still be LinkedIn.
But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.
Nobody really wants to read the LinkedIn feed, so it's perfectly acceptable that it gets flooded with AI generated content. In effect, the content on LinkedIn is that picture of a happy family on your insurance brochure. You can't not have a photo of something on that kind of marketing document, and you can't be a social network without some sort of doom-scrollable content.
This is just a cheap way to generate some wallpaper.