“Bullshit jobs” is a terrible, curiosity-killing concept

The article does not really go into depth on this one. I think it happens quite often. I would expect over-hiring is a problem most of us might have experienced first hand, especially in bigger IT companies. Managers hiring more people to delivery faster ending up in more processes, meetings and even slower results. In some cases ven external experts get hired to make these processes more efficient. Once someone does get a "bullshit job", they find enough reasons to keep that job going for longer than necessary.

Sure, there probably is some explanation to be found for why the 345th gear in the contraption improves the target production metric by 0.013% and some theory as to why that difference meaningfully impacts some member of society for 34 seconds on Tuesdays in May on odd numbered years. And sure, those who are curious to find that may be fascinated by it or may find some emotional grounding for the work they find themselves doing.

But it's not especially tragic, and can sometimes be personally and societally valuable, to step back and look at that whole situation from further away and just say "Fuck it, I/they/we must be able to do something more than whatever that is"

That's really all the antropoligic and oral history view of a "bullshit job" is

jeez, i was thinking cart returner, cashier, some landscaping jobs, ...

Jobs that either could be easily replaced by tech(cashier, waitress),

easily replaced by the customer themselves(shelf stockers vs costco style pallets, cart returner vs aldi style coin system),

or things that society deems desirable but are not realistically valuable (landscaping is sometimes useless, but society sees it as valuable)

actuary has 100% value, we NEED to know the percent chance of something happening, so we can account for billing(if not used for profit mongering, its still required to run an altruistic insurance). I'd say actuary, whether for insurance company or for studies, is a necessary job forever. (not accounting for AI)

Graeber's an anthropologist who took a broadly emic approach. He also happens to be an anarchist living in a capitalist, class-based society. This book is making a systemic critique of jobs and meaning under capitalism. While Graeber's a product of the culture he's critiquing, he doesn't buy what the culture is selling and diagnosing the symptoms he sees around him.

This response here is by someone who's embedded in the power structures of that culture(he's a finance guy!), and the response is filled with hand-waving or justification of those symptoms as unavoidable or even positive features capitalism, without ever really engaging in the actual meat of Graeber's work, which is that the very structure of our economy, culture, and world is arbitrarily decided by those in power, and our job if we want to survive is ultimately to reproduce that structure, even if it's not really to our benefit or to outsized benefit to those in power. This blog isn't even a defense of the structure: it gestures to our current setup as normal or natural and the results of rational action, without making any effort to justify it besides saying that if it didn't work, we wouldn't have it. That's shallow at best. It's an emic defense to an emic critique, but it's not operating at the same level that Graeber is working at. At the very end it hand-waves any phenomenon that doesn't seem rational in our economy as merely 'weird', and seems to cross it's arms and say "that's just how it is!". This finance guy's response is too narrowly emic in this way, a result of being too deeply embedded in something to actually critique it. He can't incorporate negative data into any analysis of the system he(and us) are in, because he won't allow himself to critique it. You could say it's a terrible, curiousity-killing blog. Read more David Graeber instead.

The episode has other very interesting concepts like "accountability sinks".

The author has a book[1] out about this as well.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-01/dan-davie...

[1] https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

There are surveys about both how much time workers actually 'work', and how much of that work they see as productive. They seem to suggest that a reasonable share of worker's time is not spent on actually doing anything:

https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/new-report-only-12-perc...

https://www.worklife.news/talent/hours-in-workday/

But also, Hobart's arm-chairing here seems to take the perspective of whether something is useful to the firm, rather than if something is useful overall. Medical billing apparently charges typically 4-10% of the value billed. Clearly for the medical billing firm, having workers knowledgeable about CPT codes etc is worth it, and medical providers find it more economical to hire such a firm than to keep their own billing specialists on staff -- but if we just moved to single-payer health care, the role could disappear entirely. It's a bullshit job because it's solving a problem that doesn't need to exist.

https://neolytix.com/what-is-the-going-rate-for-medical-bill...

Similarly, Hobart mentions tax lawyers more than once. And certainly companies that having good tax advice can save them a lot of money. But I think most experts agree that a drastically simpler tax code would be more efficient overall, both because of the reduced need for tax lawyers and accountants, and because all the weird (inefficient) tax-minimization strategies could disappear. Being useful to a firm does not mean the job is not bullshit.

> If you own a copy, consider reading it an act of meta-anthropology, exploring why a professional anthropologist could be so relentlessly, aggressively incurious about the lives and experiences of others.

Graeber solicited testimonies from people who felt that they have a bullshit job.

> public transportation workers can, indeed, shut some cities down if they decide not to work. But this is not a characteristic of the job, but of how employment is structured: if all the workers are declining to show up at once, the term is a "strike," and their employer can't just swap them for someone else. There are plenty of people who would do these jobs, at their current pay, if that were an option, so the ability to paralyze a city like this is a function of unions, not of the job itself

Unions are intended to protect workers. If their jobs are required to keep the city running, the city (and society at large) should do what's necessary to keep these employees happy. This has nothing to do with the "structure of employment" and everything to do with corporate greed.

> In a sense, the book is a work of pathological optimism about the capitalist system. Graeber estimates that roughly half of all work fits his fake job categorization, which implies that the economy's productive capacity is roughly twice the output we actually get. It would be a pretty big deal if this were true: we could have a lot more leisure, and a lot more stuff.

I'd argue that I'd be able to produce 50% more value in my own role if my employer gave me 50% of my time back. But instead it's spent on politics, baby-sitting and duck tape. It's not their fault (nor my own) but rather a consequence of the system we're in. And I see no issue with having someone actively critiquing it.

Or “Hollywood mogul” for a college dropout/failed actor https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/business/media/david-elli...

>There are people right now who are miserable at work because they'd much rather be hiking

Yeah, but not worth doing and not fun are very much not the same thing are they?

This article is absolute trash. The author sets out to deliberately mislead with the same straw man that always seems to crop up when somebody attacks bullshit jobs.

Most of the public sector jobs are worthless and people are literally paid to pretend to work. The same mentality seeps into the private sector as well, between morning coffee, lunch break and afternoon coffee then rushing home, people work a good 3-4 hours a day in an office. And that’s on a good day, add in a couple of meetings and that gets reduced to 2 hours. How is that not a BS job?

I think real bullshit jobs are, for example, how third-generation children of billionaires get CEO roles on fictional companies / non-profits only to receive insane compensation, while the board does all the work. Just look at any modern dynastic family in the US, ignoring even the famous names.

[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...

Those people don't like their work or the way they are treated and they seem to express that they personally find it meaningless.

The way it is often described to me, the ven diagram of what counts as a bullshit job and that person's lack of understanding / frustration with that job has so much coverage that I'm suspicious of any claim regarding it.

I've certainly worked with people whose job is BS, and seen organizational dysfunction create lost of useless jobs. They exist. But I've almost zero confidence in other people to identify them correctly at scale or identify the reasons. It feels like a very emotional subject.