There’s a non-trivial amount of desire for control on the part of petty despots who insist that cashiers can’t have stools or salespeople need to be straightening already-perfect shelves or whatever, too.
These people are everywhere. I had a job where we had to leave an engineer out in the open office area where we normally sat while everyone else on the team went to go have a meeting (a technical meeting or agile ceremony), because “otherwise it didn’t look like the developers were doing their jobs and nobody knows where they are.”
I do not miss that place.
Those people suck.
Oddly enough, most BS jobs seem to be people in offices, like me.
Working from home has made some things easier in that respect
Most of those jobs do seem to serve a purpose. I mean, corporate lawyers exist because corporations need them for a variety of things. Lobbyists may be creepy but they advocate. Programmers to fix bugs? What’s wrong with that? And by god, magazine journalists? That’s getting personal now! :) – not that those jobs exist in big numbers anymore.
Again, these are people that wrote to the author and argued their own job is without purpose. It’s not the author making the claim, but the people in the job.
And he calls corporate lawyers goon jobs. They exist because other companies have them. If the whole field didn’t exist, the world would not significantly differ.
Also, one of the interesting anecdote was a women who wrote for a magazine that didn’t exist. She was paid to write, but her work was was never used.
I don’t know many people who haven’t felt that way about their jobs at one time or another. Doesn’t make it so. Frankly, I think the assertion is off-target. Consider someone saying the following;
“I’m a receptionist and my job is entirely pointless.”
Is it? Really? Good receptionists are worth their weight in gold; managing schedules, making reservations and appointments, fielding calls and deflecting media, etc. while the person for whom they’re working for is able to focus on their specialization. Imagine that person was a brilliant scientist on the verge of curing cancer but has no organizational skills and is incredibly shy. Would that receptionist feel their job was pointless? Probably not, and therefore wouldn’t be included as a contributor in the book.
So I think it’s more likely the specific employer being complained about rather than the job function, itself.
If you want to disagree with the conclusion of the podcast, that’s fine. But I just thought it was an interesting episode and provided some interesting and compelling information on the state of work and how we got there.
There is a huge difference between a receptionist that answers multiple phones all day and a receptionist that just sits there, and answer 1 phone call a day. At that point, it’s a BS job.
Oh, sure. Not trying to shoot the messenger, either - just conversing because it is an interesting topic.
I do think a lot of ‘productivity’ is basically waste, and there are a lot of bullshit jobs.
Publications will commission an article and sometimes not use it for a variety of reasons. They either pay the standard fee agreed to or a kill fee. This is standard practice, but it doesn’t come about because they feel like paying a freelancer a fee for no reason. They chose not to use the article because it doesn’t fit the issue, etc.
People are getting paid for these jobs. If they are truly worthless, than someone somewhere up the line is an idiot. Saying corporate lawyers and lobbyists are useless is incredibly naive, for example. Hypothesizing a world where everyone “disarms” and stop using the defined “goons” role is foolish: the first party to arm up will immediate see an advantage and things will go from there. You’re talking about entire sectors of employment where folks are getting paid $500-$1000/hr, regularly. Money talks and frankly it’s more honest than a lot of things.
Are there inefficiencies and readily-available anecdotes of inefficiency? Of course. But speculating that entire sectors of paid jobs are useless is just academic bellybutton lint picking that has very little true practical reality.
Ex-SWoo
1758
I think the articles mixes jobs that literally serve no purpose (i.e people pretending to be busy to suck up a paycheck) and people who don’t find meaning in their work (i.e. Corp lawyers who hate what they do). Both might be “bullshit”, but the latter case generates ecnonomic value so there is a reason why it exists
Guap
1759
This is task based work and how we will all likely work in the future. As contractors. No work, no pay, but you can leave early.
Guess what that incentivizes?
I think the eight-hour workday is to blame.
I work 40 hours a week like most folks, and I have a set amount of duties to attend to. Depending on what else is going one, those tasks may take me between four and ten hours to complete.
On the “slow” days where I get everything on my “to-do” list done before lunch, I find myself looking around for nonsense to do in order to keep myself busy. Ideally, this stuff will be things that will pay dividends down the road, but the sad reality is that it’s mostly just “busy-work” that wastes my time. It would be far, far better if I could simply go home when I run out of meaningful things to do, but that’s not the world we live in.
The Hawaii example is great, but eventually someone is going to look at these routes and wonder if they can cut the number of trucks down and consolidate the routes since obviously it doesn’t take them the full work-day to complete the routes they have.
This is a bad argument for the value of any particular job. People make bad economic decisions all the time. Even smart people do. That someone pays for work doesn’t mean the work is actually meaningful or genuinely valuable. The land fills of the world are basically filled with shit someone got paid to make, or price, or market, or sell, or deliver, or haul away.
Timex
1762
The idea that the jobs are pointless is kind of silly on its face…
Companies don’t pay people for the hell of it.
Some of those jobs could theoretically be reduced by some other sort of improvement to overall process, but it’s naive to believe that it’s as simple as that.
Like, this one:
This is literally a joke we say at my office… when someone finds a bug, it’s like, “Man, why’d you write this bug?” or, “Oh, don’t worry, we don’t need to test it, I didn’t write any bugs.”
The idea that you don’t need folks to repair bugs, because you could just… write perfect code all the time? That’s idiotic.
Of course they do. Not a month goes by without some ‘great’ company or another announcing that, quite suddenly, they can do without a few thousand people they’ve been paying for years. And the managers expect bonuses for admitting it!
Sure, but if you hired better coders that make fewer mistakes, or hired better baggage people, or hired more maintenance workers, wouldn’t that cut down on a lot of the workers in the example.
I am curious about his claim that most peasants only worked 2 or 3 hours a day. I assume, as an anthropologist, he knows more about it then I do.
Anyway, I am going to see if the book is on sale somewhere, and get more out of it.
ShivaX
1765
Maybe on average? Once the sun set, you were done working and didn’t work again until it rose. Also if the weather was bad, you didn’t work. Add in seasons where you can’t grow anything… I could see the average being 2-3 hours a day.
And if there was world peace, we wouldn’t need the military or law enforcement, if people stopped committing crimes. Your comment is only relevant if we think that coders are sloppier specifically BECAUSE debugging folks exist; I haven’t seen an argument or support in that direction from what you’ve posted. Concluding that X job isn’t needed if only the problem that X job addresses didn’t occur in the first place is crazy.
Honestly, the discussion of this whole article is weird and naive, at least so far.
It’s not an article we are discussing, but the podcast. I assume you did listen to it, didn’t you?
I mean, I guess, if you read the book, that would be better.
