I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things:
1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress;
2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations;
3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.
As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse.
It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.
It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures.
These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training required, no hiring of expensive people who already know the skill. As the Book of Procedures enables you to rinse and repeat the process with every new hire, you are no longer invested in keeping 'talent' within the organisation; good people leave once they realise that the job is 70% procedure vs. 30% actual work... No matter, there's always The Book, let's hire another grunt from the employment queue.
However, because you are filling up your organisation with unskilled workers, errors become more common place. To reduce the error rate, you introduce some extra checks and balances to ensure that the job is being done correctly. These extra procedures go in to The Book. The ratio is now 90% procedure vs. 10% actual work.
People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work' following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of trouble.
Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up, and incidents are down. Creating The Book of Procedures is now considered a valuable skill in it's own right, so the people who care about climbing the managerial pole devote large chunks of their time adding yet more processes to the The Book, and thus the cycle continues, until several roles in the company are nothing but endless procedure creating/tracking without any actual product output.
There's still the problem of a high attrition rate amongst the middle tier staff, but hey, there's always more fish in the sea right?
I think you're right, but I have a somewhat less dire view on this.
I think that large companies optimize for a fundamentally different outcome than smaller companies, like startups. Large companies became large by applying a successful business model, something that startups are still lacking. If you have a working business model and stable cashflow, any change is potentially dangerous and can take down the company. So in contrast to whatever the marketing material says, rigidity and inability to change is actually an asset for large companies. This means the more inflexibility is added to the organization (e.g. by imposing a Book of Procedures that can never be abolished, employing people with no real power to change anything, or self-selecting a staff which is, put blatantly, incompetent to change), the longer the organization keeps existing. Until the market changes fundamentally, that is.
There are lots of products that are essentially exactly the same as they were years ago, which is great — change is often a bad thing for consumer products and tools. Typically the only value that innovative managers have in these companies is making the product incrementally cheaper and shittier. The value is that it makes room for quality competitors.
One problem with this model is that competition exists. It requires to adjust the business model, or give away (a part of) the market.
This sometimes produces waves of change (seen as painful and haphazard by the old staff), when new ways to run the company are invented to keep up with the competition. Then, with new stability, a new calcification phase comes, etc.
It is funny that one can seen this "inflexibility asset" in many, many organizations, from various industries and areas. People running those really do not like changes..
It's not that penguins have cold blood in their feet because otherwise they could get stuck on ice. It's that all penguins that had warm blood in their feet have died.
Are you saying that as a company grows larger its business model becomes MORE precarious such that they can no longer afford experimentation or optimization of any kind?
One possible view is that a company grows to the point where it goes from being a recipient of investment, to a source of investment. Also, the managers get too far removed from innovation, to directly engage in or direct it.
I work for a F500. The top brass of the company sincerely want us to move into new areas. So they just buy companies that are already innovating.
People recognize the problem of big companies trying to innovate. One solution is to create isolated innovation teams that function more like smaller companies. I work in one of those teams.
Let's not forget, that's essentially how much of the IT industry as we know it got started: companies like Western Electric, AT&T and Xerox hired people specifically to innovate.
Oversimplifying, this is analogous to simulated annealing optimization algorithm that initially tries various solutions - startup mode, and later converges to a (perhaps local) optimum - large company.
> People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work' following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of trouble.
That’s actually an intermediate step. The interesting side effect of “the book” is that any sufficiently advanced organization will and does recognize the codification or procedure as a chance for automation and increased efficiency. The dangerous thing that might occur here is that “the book” became “the system” in the late 90’s when IT invaded every organization. “The system” got an upgrade here or there - but more or less cargo-cult’d the manual process. More dangerously - “the system” works, and got extended to integrate with another “system.” Changing either one would require substantial work, and the individual that wrote the original “book” has long since left the organization, leaving behind a process frozen in time.
I believe it was Charles Stross who had a character say "We would like to have Albert Einstein working in the patent office, but it still needs to function if we hire Mr. Bean".
I feel like even this is being optimistic about the prospects of the book. The idea of The Book is appealing, until someone tries to actually write the stupid thing. Anyone who has ever tried to write any sort of unskilled user facing documentation realizes the cost and training it takes to produce a high quality manual, which naturally the company won't want to pay for, so now you have a half-assed barely legible "Book" that's full of confusion and madness which spirals closer to pure noise with every new "clarification" - pretty soon people aren't doing activities because it's procedure from the book, they are doing activities that are the equivalent of signal noise because no one knows what the book is even trying to say. "No, no, to get a raise first you have to fill out form 2123b, and THEN you sacrifice the goat."
I'm reminded of procedures in the [US] defense industry. A "good step" in a given procedure would be absolutely clear in mind-numbing detail. "Pretend you're writing for a sailor" may be half a joke but it is also very real; sometimes word does get back to you about how something was unclear and a piece of equipment got buggered [or whatever], you look at the section in question, and all you can think is "How can you fuck this up?" but yes a pair of sailors in the Pacific did and now you have to make Sesame Street even easier to understand.
No offense to any of our sailors intended, and this is also true for civilians. You won't necessarily have The Expert or The Author right there during execution, for example.
Also on top of that: sometimes the procedures really are hosed [first draft going live, change the test at the last minute, whatever] and deliberation has to be made until you can rewrite the step for clarity//accuracy//reality and move along. Bring lots of red pens, bring more than you need because you'll burn through all of them.
Not necessarily it being insulting, with Navy sailors, there is a very real chance that when they are needing to read that manual, they are under attack, and thus don't have the time or ability to think through what the step is actually trying to say. Making it extremely clear means that even when being fired on, the correct thing can be done.
If I may be fair to myself, the incident in question was during peacetime in the middle of nowhere and was completely routine. Yes that monotony and similar can be a Great Evil, but still... all of my wow.
This is what frustrated me after reading the "E-myth" book. Apparently, the recipe for successful business is to enshrine everything in superdetailed Book of Procedures, and have employees follow its content like they were programmable automatons. Now maybe this works, but eliminating human agency like this doesn't sit well with me for some reason.
The main reason why organizations evolve to a bureaucratic mess is human agency, in particular the fact that each individual has personal interests and is motivated to achieve their personal goals. Bureaucracy is designed to restrict personal initiatives that favour the individual worker at the expense of the organization. For example, in Greece public sector workers abuse their position by expecting grafts to do their job, and they deny service to those who don't pay by giving a higher priority to everyone else. Thus, rules are put in place to restrict how prioritization is handled by public sector workers to mitigate this problem. Yet, now public sector workers are bounded to a rigid set of rules which dictates how and when a process should be processed.
Exactly this. The procedures are put in place to prevent abuse of the system by the individual. The problem is that they rarely have the intended effect. First, frequently the policies are put in place to prevent an abuse which performed by an individual at some point. As time goes on, not only do conditions in the world / org change but the people who were part of the org when the abuse happened leave. This creates a situation where people can't remember why a rule exists, but follow it blindly just because it exists, even if in current circumstances it hampers the organization.
Second, inevitably there will be a series of edge cases which any rule is poorly suited to address. These edge cases require a thoughtful application of regulatory authority, which itself requires a thorough understanding of the current context and the purpose of the rule. This thoughtfulness requires intelligence or deep domain expertise, which is often not found in the regulators because if they had these things then they wouldn't be in boring regulatory jobs like HR to begin with. Evaluation of edge cases also requires work, and it's far easier for someone to simply say no than it is to actually investigate the request.
Third, everyone knows that some employees are more valuable to the organization than others and should be allowed to bend or break simple rules as long as permission is sought. However, this will inevitably invite a bullshit lawsuit and so companies have a huge incentive to codify policies and be rigid about them.
> As time goes on, not only do conditions in the world / org change but the people who were part of the org when the abuse happened leave. This creates a situation where people can't remember why a rule exists, but follow it blindly just because it exists, even if in current circumstances it hampers the organization.
Not only that, organizations measure different things differently even from the start. If someone is socializing at work and this wastes 15% of their time, but a procedure to prevent them from socializing at work wastes 40% of their time, everyone is actually better off to just allow employees to socialize (or what have you). But "employees slacking off" is an unsanctioned thing to be reduced whereas "employees following procedure" is an officially sanctioned thing to be increased, so the fact that the procedure is more costly than the "abuse" never enters the decision process.
Interesting. The same happens in Italy; however this hyper-regulation doesn't actually ensure that jobs are performed well and ethically; rather it has the effect of removing personal agency and accountability, while those who seek personal profit still find a way to circumvent the rules.
This sort of bureaucracy is like bicycle training wheels. They hinder those who know how to do the job and want to do it well, they are a major inconvenience, but they stop some riders from falling down. Yet, some people who want to crash the bike do eventually find a way to render them useless.
A while back I took flying lessons. They have a procedure and checklists for most things. This is decidedly a good thing. Checklists are great for reducing errors and should be used in more situations.
Of course there is also a question of whether these procedures can be updated. And whether you can improvise in an emergency. You need more training for that. But this doesn't mean checklists are bad.
Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity.
Totally not against checklists, especially in aviation. It's just something is rubbing me with the recipe for business involving such degree of micromanagement.
> Another example: when cooking a new dish, if you start with a recipe you'll probably get up to speed faster than just winging it. This doesn't mean there's no creativity.
Fair, but a recipe is about as far from a checklist as you can get while still retaining bullet points. The degrees of freedom in typical recipes are so large you could drive a train through (it's probably unintended - people writing down recipes having zero experience with precise communication). I'm not a very experienced cook, so ambiguous recipes are a pet peeve of mine.
Former chef here, the variance in balances of different chemical constituents can be so massive between two pieces of fruit picked from the same tree that precise recipes would be useless without requiring each reader to have access to a mass spectrometer (and any clue as to what its readout means). This is largely where the "art" in culinary arts comes in. While you could teach someone to read a mass spectrometer to determine the exact chemical result that a given mixture of different ingredients applied to a specified heat curve, it's more likely that they'll just have to learn how to approximate it via taste, smell, and sight.
Good baking books will actually get a lot closer to having specifics in them. They can do this however because a lot of the ingredients that are used in baking are rated based off of various levels of one or more of the chemicals that will significantly affect the result of your baked product (ash level, acidity, sugar content).
This raises an interesting question, relevant for more than cooking: In a process with variable "inputs" , is there a method(probably statistical) to create a recipe that will work,even with this variability, while minimizing the expertise needed ?
"Time Tested" recipes have already done this work - they've performed the process over a long period of time with a wide variety of small input changes/variable ingredients.
For example, the Toll House Cookie recipe has been executed how many millions of times with predictably good results.
I’ll answer for him. It’s a terrible, stressful, dangerous job, with insane hours & criminal working conditions, that pays peanuts. Might just be my opinion.
I have never deviated from a recipe in twenty years except for being out of ingredients. And I only have one recipe that I can remember without referring to the printout. Checklists have entirely replaced the need for knowing how to cook and I'm glad.
Procedures are to tell machines what to do. As long as you treat people as machines, you'll be revising the Book of Procedures.
Policies are to tell humans what the priorities are so they can use their brains to solve new problems. As long as you have new problems, write policy to guide people.
In both cases, you need good feedback in order to improve. People frequently distrust the feedback mechanisms in the Book of Procedures, because they have experience that says that those books have cycle times exceeding any reasonable amount of patience.
A company is a shared endeavor--for those that own shares in it. But for most companies, most people that execute the work are not shareholders; they're just employees. The interests of employees are simply not the same as the interests of shareholders, so any company that has employees will have to deal with that. The larger the company, the more they will have to deal with it.
Indeed, that book starts really well, in that it states an existing problem: the sole owner overwhelmed by their business, and losing their sense of purpose and happiness. But as it goes on the solution it suggests is disappointing. It may make sense for company owners to delegates and run their operation like a machine. But it is a recipe for frustration for the actual workers—who then may find themselves in the same situation the author's entrepreneur example starts with...
I'm not sure the E-myth is really targeted at the kinds of tech businesses HN readers are after.
If you view it in the context of small-scale food/retail/manufacturing it fits really well. It doesn't fit well for creative efforts, but I'm not sure that invalidates the book either.
That's an uncharitable interpretation of what The E-Myth had to say. His point is that you need to make the business run in a way that is independent of you being there. It doesn't mean removing agency from your employees: that is a very bad thing. It means creating enough procedures that people aren't left floundering around waiting to be told how to do something.
I don’t want the cook at In and Out applying their “human agency” to a product I expect to be consistent. I wouldn’t want some minimum wage high school kid deciding on the fly what food safety guidelines are important or not.
It’s ok to have non-scalable businesses; but E-myth isn’t about that kind of business.
> people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back
There are no people in black suits patting themselves on the back. They have bullshit jobs by The Book too. It's The Book all the way to the CEO, who just performs procedures from Another Book to appease the anonymous crowd of stakeholders.
And your favourite *coin will make it even easier for there to be even more ruthless anonymous crowd of stakeholders, yay, progress. I don't even care what's your company named or of it hurts their employees or makes weapons, my blockchain AI owns a stake and I demand the next quarter profits to raise.
No malice. Just ignorance and inability to escape incentives everywhere.
>>Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up, and incidents are down.
That's the key to win in this game.
You define the rules, and the conditions that qualify as success. Once you've done that you make the remainder of the story opaque.
One more thing is to talk in vague terms of percentages and averages. Most people won't understand a word of what you are saying and will still look a good story.
"A surprisingly common part of my life: a patient asks me for a doctor’s note for back pain or something. Usually it’s a situation like their work chair hurts their back, and their work won’t let them bring in their own chair unless they have a doctor’s note saying they have back pain, and they have no doctor except me, and their insurance wants them to embark on a three month odyssey of phone calls and waiting lists for them to get one."
The problem here is that the patient doesn't have a general practitioner (GP, I will call it your/my "doctor" in the rest of the post) or that apparently there's huge wait lists. If I call my doctor, I can get an appointment within 2 work days or roughly half a week. And everyone in my country (The Netherlands) is insured for such visits. In fact, if I want to see a psychologist or physiotherapist or psychiatrist I first need to see my doctor for a reference, for my insurance. That's how it works here. Your doctor is your entry level. So, why not go to your doctor if you have a health issue? Here you would, but apparently in the country this person is from (I suppose USA) that's nigh impossible.
Also, employees have medical privacy here. Yes, a doctor could write such a letter, but ultimately the patient has privacy. Many doctors here flat out refuse such written statements, saying it isn't necessary. Though that might be on a case by case scenario.
On the other hand, I do understand the employer's PoV as well. If person X wants something special, then person A, B, and C also want that something special and before you know it you have half of your employees with -say- all kind of odd food allergies. Although it seems in this case the employee brings their own chair; here that'd be unheard, the employer would arrange a chair for the employee which suits their special needs. So, I disagree that this is a bullshit procedure but I am unsure how to solve the issue in a way where privacy is guaranteed, and then I say: take the loss of privacy in this case for granted and get the written sign.
This is hauntingly similar to my corporate experience. A procedure book seems helpful when it's standardizing general cases, although when it becomes only an end for safety rather than a beginning for further innovation, the dead weight builds up.
> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
There is no purely rational way to redistribute wealth (or, really, no rational way to actually do anything). Rationality is a tool that allows you to choose the path of action that best fits your goals/values. It does not prescribe any values. What we (as a society) do right now to redistribute wealth may very well be "the rational way" relative to some set of values.
So what you're actually saying is: Society hasn't found a way to redistribute wealth that fits your value system.
The efficient frontier is large, but a lot of the things we do are just dead-weight losses. There are cases of incompatible values where we have to make trade-offs, sure, but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system.
> but there are also cases where we're being irrational under any value system
I think the set of possible value systems is much larger than you appreciate. For example, nuclear war is perfectly rational when your value system is "KILL ALL HUMANS".
Some people believe that it is possible to derive values.
But even if you don't, it is still very possible that the way most things are done is inconsistent with most peoples values. Simply because using rationality to go from values to policies is computationally hard and can give counter-intuitive results.
the way we redistribute wealth right now is through busy work. this is incredibly irrational. once we recognize that, we can start thinking about alternatives in earnest.
I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would.
I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.
One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A.
Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and further to formation of more companies supporting those games. Consider the advertising industry, the poster child of wasteful negative-sum games: in saturated markets, it supports competition for fixed customer pool. To that end, it employs countless of creatives designing new texts, posters, videos, etc. It then employs printing shops and distribution centers to place all that material in the real world. All that effort, man-hours and fuel is wasted - in an attempt for one side to get more market to themselves, only for the other to cancel it out. If all parties agreed not to do this, everyone would be better off. But they can't, and so instead a whole industry of bullshit jobs is created.
Those are, I believe, the two main sources of bullshit jobs - internal closed loops, and negative-sum games.
(EDIT: in a sense, those two are actually facets of the same phenomenon.)
I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.
Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down.
But if you zoom out a bit, so your domain of analysis is "The Health Care System", you find that these so-called competing bureaucracies are a large organ whose function is to make it difficult to accurately assign costs to services. As long as those prices are hard to know, they are impossible to optimize, and so the prices stay exorbitant.
That is absolutely a great example of bullshit jobs. It gets even worse when each side outsources this function to other companies. If they outsourced to the same company, then maybe some genuine efficiencies could be realized.
When single payer healthcare comes up, free marketeers ask, "Do you want an unelected bureaucrat to decide if you get healthcare?" They must have never been in the situation where someone at the insurance company my employer picked - an unelected bureaucrat with a profit incentive - has denied coverage.
> The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.
Our company once was in the same office building as another company that specialized in billing for health care.
They would look at the services provided by a doctor's office, and figure out ways to code the procedures performed so that it would maximize the payout from the insurance.
Doctors liked it because it was easy to sign up and just increase their revenue without doing any additional work.
That's one of the reasons why insurers are moving away from the fee-for-service model toward value-based care. So those bullshit jobs at least will eventually disappear.
If the advertising competition you mention didn't exist, for example competitors closing shop and not playing the zero sum game, then you'd have a monopoly company, which would also be bad.
So in that case, it's good to play the zero sum game since it's a redistribution of income.
Of course, it's wasted labour, and so what you really want is for the government to step in and extract more in taxes and simply hand over the money as welfare or invest in more fruitful pursuits such as scientific research, rather than redistribution of income coming from zero sum games.
I'm not saying the competition shouldn't exist - just that we should put brakes on some of the negative-sum games it causes, once the market is saturated and things turn into a fight for a fixed pie. As you say, at this point it's all wasted labour, and it can eat pretty much all your profits.
I tried to refrain from mentioning government regulation here, but the brakes need to be put on everyone simultaneously - deciding to just stop all advertising expense for yourself is a competitive suicide.
I get what you're saying, but I wanted to point out that lower profits can be better for society if due to competition. Every dollar a company earns in profit is a little more of efficiency that could be eked out of the business
I think we need to be cautious here, though. A perfect market would bring perfect efficiency, but perfect efficiency is a disaster for humans who depend on the market to live. Happiness and quality of life today happen in places where market is not efficient yet.
To live in a world where markets can be perfectly efficient and everyone happy because we stop staking the lives of people to their worth as determined by the market.
Burger King stops advertising on Tv and loses even more market share to McDonalds. McDonalds then spends less on advertising because it realizes it doesn't need to because Burger Kind gave up. You're left with a "monopoly", McDonalds whose shareholders/top management make even more money, rather than it being redistributed to employees of Burger King.
That's why such change needs to be enforced simultaneously and externally.
As an example, I recall reading that tobacco companies were actually very happy about regulations limiting the marketing of tobacco products - by themselves, those regulations didn't change anything about their market share (the market was already saturated), but everyone got to stop spending so much on advertising.
I don't think Marlboro cared about newcomers, a big company can usually buy out the small one if it gets dangerous. Consumers usually don't even notice.
Unrestricted advertising is basically Red Queen's race; capping it levels the playing field, so it's better for newcomers as well.
McDonalds would only have that dominance thanks to years of advertising. If the mass advertising game never existed, those companies would have to have grown through their own merits instead of advertising dollars, and BK might have a chance (opinions of their food nonwithstanding). I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.
> I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.
That's not what I meant. What I meant is that neither BK nor McD can risk cutting advertising efforts, because if either one does, the other automatically starts winning market share. They can't agree to it together, because the first party to defect from the agreement will win (not to mention a third party could swoop in and (excuse the pun) eat their lunch).
This is a prisoner's dilemma situation, and as we all know, the optimal solution for prisoner's dilemma is to have a mob boss proclaim that he'll kill any prisoner that rats others out to authorities. Similarly, either there's a way to punish defectors, or McD and BK will forever be stuck in the loop of ever growing advertising expenses.
Removing advertising would definitely benefit both BK and McD, as both could be able to stop spending money on advertising just to protect their market share.
Antelope eat grass and breed. If they eat faster than the grass can regrow, they starve and die, and their bodies become grass.
Death through starvation is unpleasant. Suppose they could agree to breed less, as to not expand beyond carrying capacity of the place they live in. They would lead a happier life.
Point being, some feedback-driven systems are good, and some are bad.
Why is the supposition that fewer lives is good controversial? What do we owe the unborn and non existent? Surely in any moral framework, if one could prove that additional organisms in an environment degrade the quality of life for all organisms, then it would be a moral decision (in principle) to reduce by attrition the number of new organisms? I am not arguing for population control as the mechanisms to achieve it are themselves morally dubious, but surely in principle we can agree that there is no moral imperative to grow a population, or alternatively that is not immoral to advocate for preventing population growth where it would reduce quality of life and lead to environmental degradation?
A moral framework is inherently subjective, so it should be no surprise that the rights of the unborn are considered more important in some than others.
Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan. Buddhists likewise consider all life as sacred, in that an animal may previously/subsequently be a human soul. Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.
> Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan
"Be fruitful and multiply" is Genesis 1:28.
Onan is, per Jermone and canonical discussions, about spilling seed unnecessarily, but is more about not raping your sister-in-law and betraying dead family than it is about having many children. Nothing in there about the sacredness of babies or anything.
Onan's brother died and by tradition Onan entered into a Levirate marriage with his dead brother's wife, Tamar, to continue the brother's line. If Onan fathered a child by Tamar the child would inherit all of the dead brother's possessions and rights; if there were no sons Onan would inherit everything. So Onan pulls out, meaning he gets to bang the widow, and still gets to keep everything -- which is pretty sleazy.
God isn't really a fan of this, and punishes him accordingly.
> Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.
It doesn't, because what I've essentially explained in my example. Too much population, and you collapse the environment, and human race suffers and then dies. I hope even smart atheist progressives would realize that meaningful ways to preserve human race are things like building a Mars colony, or ensuring the Earth's ecosystem does not collapse (such collapse would likely lead to great wars, possibly nuclear).
I would argue that a strictly rationalist or at least secular morality should be applied given the sheer religious or spiritual diversity of the global population.
And regarding your latter point,it is as you say simplistic - much like the proverbial bacterium on an agar plate, our growth imperative will destroy our future if we overrun the bounds of our environment. I think we will see the issue become more important as the consequences of overpopulation (with respect to resource consumption and carrying capacity) begin to bite.
Science cannot speak to general morality, as an abstract set of axiomatically good values, because it tends to tell us that those are completely arbitrary.
But science also teaches us that humans have a set of common, shared values, and while they may be arbitrary in general, they're not arbitrary to us. And they're shared, because humans are not isolated minds, each coming to existence ex nihilo, but in fact are connected through the process of reproduction. All of us have brain architecture we've inherited from a common ancestor.
This is how science can point us where to look for some practical morality.
I agree with the first loop. I think there are very few markets where the 2nd loop actually exists.
1. There is constant innovation, even in the most established areas people are always trying new things.
2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.
> 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.
That's motte-and-bailey defense of advertising. Yes, it also serves to help people discover off-the-shelf solutions to their problems. But that's not its primary function, nor it's where most money is being made. The discovery part is easy - in fact, most of the times it's best done in pull fashion ("I have a problem, let me look for solutions") instead of push ("here is a solution for the problem you didn't know you had"). Most of advertising is about misleading people to make suboptimal choices - choosing the product whose vendor is best at advertising, instead of the one best suited for the need - and about fighting for a fixed-size pie of customers in a given market.
What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition' and it's healthy considering the alternative dynamic of monopoly.
All corporate systems could be described as various intertwining loops (that intertwine with other corporate loops), it's really a matter of efficiency of those individuals and loops as a system.
Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..
> What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition'
The broken windows fallacy doesn't suddenly become net-positive when renamed. Perhaps humans are not capable of improving interaction outcomes any further than we've gotten and humanity has reached peak efficiency re: transaction costs and firm-size, but I have a hard time believing that.
> Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..
That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop. It doesn't justify the bullshit, it is an object lesson in how it works.
If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.
"That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop."
No, it's not. It's not always clear what is illegal, what is not, what is infringement, what is not.
Rather than having a totalitarian authority create, divide and control IP etc. we have adversarial law and companies can file suit and work it out in court.
When there isn't overt corruption in the system, it works reasonably well.
That we're even having this conversation over the internet in 2018 is evidence that it's not 'negative sum'.
> If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.
The internet was developed by Darpa so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. Competition did not produce the internet, and the telecommunications industry, which came about after as a commercialization project, has serious issues which make this an even harder argument to make.
Competition definitely created the telecommunications industry and by the way most of the electric grid as well.
'The internet' as we know it was not created by DARPA.
DARPA created some protocols - of which there were many, private and public.
It just so happens that a certain version of it got a critical mass - it didn't have to be that way. And a lot of private interests were involved, particularly private universities.
The network over which the internet was overlaid is entirely commercial - and of course most of the variation of it has been commercial, or non-governmental type NGOs, i.e consortiums.
Nobody is going to argue that some projects, particularly long-term/pure R&D, or projects that literally require a scale that's out of reach of even the largest private entities, are not going to require some kind of collective participation.
But the argument that competition is kafkaesque or inherently problematic because of entities competing for the same turf is short sighted.
I'm not criticizing competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary because this is how we solve resource allocation problems - we're too dumb to do it directly, so we use market dynamics to implicitly compute it for us.
I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games. Like where companies are competing for a fixed-size market - any marginal effort to win more of the market will be cancelled out by equivalent effort of the other party. The end result is the same, only both companies just wasted money fighting.
I don't think it would be. I think if everyone stopped advertising unit sales would crash.
Coke vs Pepsi is much less of a thing than the constant reinforcement that you would really, really enjoy one or the other right now. The constant reinforcement drives absolute sales, not just relative market share.
I think the problem is more that a lot of heavily advertised products are incredibly harmful to personal and environmental health. Sugar is unbelievably toxic over the longer term (weight gain, diabetes, etc) but the canonisation of the profit motive means that market morality rewards the creation and promotion of these toxic effects.
You could argue that if people want to poison themselves they should be allowed to. But even ignoring the direct social costs of the medical care required to clean up the effects of Type II diabetes and heart disease, the argument is patchily applied.
Some poisons (sugar, alcohol, tobacco) get a pass, while others (psychedelic drugs) don't. A few like cocaine remain in limbo, with nominal disapproval but tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - covert political support.
It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.
> It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive. There might not be a perfect solution for this problem, but we don't seem interested in having a discussion about any solution to it.
Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well). Because most people will calculate someone's worth by having a job, not by judging its impact on society (at least, most of the time).
> Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well).
More than that, we also have very peculiar standards between jobs. I like to pick on marketing/advertising, because I'm absolutely baffled by it. Somehow the profession that often dabbles in lying, scamming and generally making other people's lives worse off (by dragging them towards suboptimal choices) became a respectable occupation, even though if a typical salesman applied their skills to their friends and family, he'd eventually end up punched in the face. It's not even an issue of impact on society at large - we've legitimized, and even glorified, acting maliciously towards random strangers.
Also: the mortgage industry as arms dealers in a bidding war -- and the proceeds of the bidding war don't even go to the counterparties of the contract being sold!
People marvel at how successful the greedy optimization algorithm of our economy is at finding local optima, but when you take a step back the emperor has no clothes. Sigh.
Credit cards definitely provide value, the anti-every-using-credit crowd seems to not understand how they work. If my pet ever needs thousands of dollars of emergency vet care, I can now pay for that using my credit, and then spread my payment of that bill over a longer period.
"Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc."
Rubbish.
Soda taste great, I love it. Don't tell me what is 'good or bad for me' - I can figure that out.
'Processed Foods' feed the world. They're not fundamentally unhealthy, can can absolutely be part of a decent diet.
Credit Cards - are an amazing financial innovation. Consumer credit is a really big deal that helps grease the wheels. Wherever there is no good consumer credit system - the economy is crap.
Car Dealerships and Salespeople - they definitely serve a function and it's why they are among the highest paid. Most people still like to test cars. The car industry relies on the model of dealerships and Tesla riding without is just like a new airline entrant just running only the profitable routes, and not carrying the longer tail ones. Also society has changed a little bit so admittedly the model could adapt.
All of those thinks you mentioned could be improved, and can be risky, but without them we'd be much worse off.
They can be limited, though. Think of market economy as internal combustion engine. Burning fuel is inevitable - because that's how the engine works. But that doesn't imply you have to set your gas tank on fire.
It has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they’re the problem (though middle or senior management might accidentally lay off a bad manager or two on rare occasions, but again never lay off themselves). Also I’ve seen in larger companies, no division head wants to get a smaller headcount unless they’re a new person specifically brought in to be a wrecking ball.
Similarly, “the market” is a convenient fiction, a shorthand that occasionally exhibits describable collective behavior but ultimately is also composed of people. There is creative destruction but it takes place over decades, far too long for any individual activity to be pointed to and say that ruined the company except in the most extreme cases.
It's that businesses go out of business -- see Nokia, Blackberry, etc.
Public organizations can't be easily replaced by a competitor -- I think being replaced by a competitor is more of an occurrence than fixing it from the inside.
One, that has been pointed out already, is that companies are not hive minds. Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Bullshit jobs are a wealth (and status) redistribution mechanism that works almost as a force of nature under the current state of affairs.
The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. Of course society cannot work like this, and democracies force politicians to align themselves with the interest of the general public -- to some small degree perhaps, but enough here to create enough pressure for such jobs to keep existing.
> Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share.
Sure, but there's competition there. If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
> The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become.
We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done. Remember that eliminating bullshit jobs wouldn't lower productivity (by definition), so redirecting that effort into productive work would massively boost overall productivity and be good for everyone. Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.
> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
If you can implement it. Building a large company, or redoing management structure in such, is a very long process requiring buy-in from many people. People, whose personal interests may oppose your goal of eliminating inefficiencies.
My guess is that most "low-hanging fruits" in management styles already got picked, and what remains are the cases where it's actually very hard to build (and maintain) a bullshit-free system.
> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.
Not if some significant chunk of those jobs are bullshit. Just because a job is bullshit, doesn't mean it won't make you - and your employer - money.
This is a different topic, but the view that if it makes money, it's good is a pretty antisocial and inhumane view - because markets themselves aren't humane, and often optimize for some pretty bad things.
> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
On the contrary, what is not stable is your more "efficient" situation, because it is only preferable from the perspective of the employer, and the managers/employees are also free agents. Ok, so you cut all the bullshit and create your efficient paradise. This will only make your managers look good. But you are making life uncomfortable for them by denying them status and future salary negotiation leverage. So they will use their current aura of success to look for a more comfortable place. Unless you pay them more to compensate, but then there goes your "efficiency". For a situation to be stable it has to be in the best interest of all the parties. Otherwise an upstart can explore that dissatisfaction to compete with you -- for example by snatching your star employees.
> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.
Making this claim in the context of this discussion is bizarre. It's like you are talking past the very thing being discussed.
> Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.
People are not fungible insects. There is plenty of productive work to be done, but unfortunately the majority of the people do not have the skills to do them. The very point of what is discussed here is that technology replaces the least qualified jobs first. I'm pretty sure that skill sophistication follows a power law. The more qualified a job is, the exponentially less people can do it. The more qualified a job is, the longer it will take for it to be replaced by AI. Nobody has a magic wand that makes full-grown adults useful again.
You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?
> You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?
This is going extremely well, actually. There are more software engineers than ever in the world, and these software engineers are getting paid more than ever.
These efforts have been wildly successful, and this consistent progress just keeps marching on, even today (as more as more people choose to become successful engineers.).
You might counter by saying something like "but we taught a million people to code and only 100K of them became software engineer!".
And this is the wrong line of thinking because getting 100% of them to become software engineers was never the goal.
It was never the goal in the same way that teaching people to read and write never had the goal of causing 100% of literate people to become fiction writers, and yet we all agree that reading and writing is a good thing to teach people.
> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.
Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer.
IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations.
The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over.
Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful.
Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.
Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts.
I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor!
Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.
The way I typically understand this is by Dunbar’s number: that 150 or so persons who are “real” in any given person’s head. Any org larger than ~75 has this type of multipolar dynamic where different sub-units are pulling different ways.
It’s held together by the myth of money and/or organizational purpose, which is actually less immediately “real” than any one of those sub unit in-group people.
It’s not that explicit, but it is certainly innate: large orgs all suffer the same way.
True it takes a long time for formerly great organizations to die. I think a lot of the problems with this type of analysis are time scales and costs of switching. IBM is probably not the best solution for anything if you're starting something new; but if you already have something it's probably good enough and it would cost too much to change right now.
So IBM can limp along until new organizations develop products that are sufficiently cheaper or better that it makes switching the logical move. Or the companies tied to IBM eventually fail and replaced by more nimble organizations.
Large companies like to mimic each other. They're perpetually asking consultants to give the inside scoop on how the competition works, not to beat them, but to copy. They're afraid of being worse, not trying to be better.
"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would."
No, not in a lot of industries.
Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient.
For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified.
Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later.
Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves.
Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat.
Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams.
Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit.
The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue.
I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch.
I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.
I think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.
I had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.
I worked initially as in-house for a doctor's office trying to break into medical software while running his solo practice. So I figured a little "spit and glue" is par for course. It's essentially a mom and pop.
Then I became a contractor and the first time I ran across a multi-million dollar company doing serious business off of a shoddy Access database that sometimes corrupted the data and needed to be reverted to a previous backup, I was legitimately horrified.
I thought it was a fluke. Then another. And another. Even hospitals and national chains. And I realized that none of us know what we're doing, so don't worry about it. The worst that could happen isn't actually so bad.
An angle that appears to be underexplored, is what happens if you let males compete for sustainability. We might be underestimating the effect of classical (or perhaps even biological) provider roles of males, i.e. the amassment of resources to attract a mate. If we could transform this in competition in sustainability, then it might make a huge difference. Current approaches to sustainability might exactly fail because they do not take such possibly hardwired mechanisms account. E.g. a male who foregoes meat and excessive life style appears to have it harder [0], not easier in his romantic life.
I agree. If the women in my generation viewed sustainability and a low ecological footprint as attractive, all I'd do is work on global warming and poverty rather than study algorithms to make money.
Other cultural pressures can overcome people's strong desires to please/attract mates, so I'm not sure that's the only way. Cars and clothes as status are a themselves a consequence of culture. If culture moved away from that to something else then it would just be that other thing that mates selected for. But your general point is well taken.
I forwent meat and most of my excessive lifestyle after I got married--but before I had my children--and I don't think I could possibly be happier (in areas that I perceive to be so related). Under your theory maybe you just need to let boys be boys until they snag a mate and then, via cultural pressures and norms, convert them to sustainability.
Though I think I would have been fine if I stopped eating meat etc before I shacked up, but maybe I just have a high opinion of myself, which is itself a main reason why my wife said she was attracted to me in the first place...
Personally, I'd be surprised if meat eating and peacocking and resource hoarding and excessiveness really makes a difference if a man lacks other redeeming qualities, but I honestly have NFC.
Maybe my social circles are different, but I have noticed that there are way more women than men at vegan events. (even in the Bay Area). There are some stats I've seen, but I don't have them handy.
So I think not eating meat could improve romantic odds!
You have a bleak perspective on things. As human beings we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food, and we ha e never had as much disposable income as now to be able to enjoy more things out of work.
And your view can be easily reverted. We have never had as many interesting jobs as now. And centuries before us you had to do what your parents did and you had a miserable life anyway. Lets stop with the Lost Eden false nostalgia.
In some times in history, folks worked more. In other times, less. Some folks still work a lot, even though they'd rather just work 35-40 hours a week.
Sometimes folks had more holidays and vacation time in the past as well. Not everywhere has a culture of paid vacation time (or medical leave at all).
Sure, there are interesting jobs, but only a small portion of folks have those sorts of jobs. Lots of folks work in retail, though. Many more jobs are much more interesting from the outside, but at the end of the day, they are still a job. Even when you like what you do.
Lots of folks have to do what pleases their parents. This varies by country: In the US, a parent can refuse to offer up their tax information to a child getting ready to graduate high school, basically keeping them from going to college until 24 or something. They get the chance to revoke it once a year. Some folks pull their children out of school in 8th grade. School schedules sometimes need parental permission.
There are lots of areas in the world where women can't really do the same stuff as men.
I do think the world is better overall than it was in the past, but glossing over these things isn't helpful at all because then folks more easily ignore these things.
I am not glossing over things. Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago or even way before in time. We are just acting as spoiled brats.
Very active, very interesting times: lots of scientific breakthrough, development of recent theories, lots of experimentations, while a great part of science is still, and for the last time in history, rather accessible. Travel to the whole world is possible, if you can afford it, while exploration is still possible and a few discoveries are to be made.
Railway transportation everywhere in the most remote places, like mine. 3 times as many people and 10 times as many shops as now in such places. Not everyone packed in gigantic conurbations with abandoned places elsewhere.
Education, hygiene, medicine already pretty developed (not as much as now, and not as well spread, but much closer to now than to the middle ages).
Technical knowledge and devices available (or very soon to be) to ease hardest works.
Great times if you were wealthy. Shitty times if you were a miner, or one of many factory workers, or a peasant in the wrong place. Quite okay times otherwise.
In 1924 the son of the president of USA died because he played tennis without socks: "On 30 June 1924, Coolidge’s two sons, John and Calvin Jr., set out to play tennis on the White House tennis court. 16-year-old Calvin Jr., in a hurry to get out on the court, donned tennis shoes but no socks. Young Calvin’s sockless exertions raised a blister on one of his toes, which soon became infected. The modern antibiotics that would quickly clear up such an infection today did not exist in 1924, and by the time White House physicians were summoned to treat Calvin Jr., it was too late: he died of pathogenic blood poisoning a week later."
I know plenty of people who would rather live as we did back in the 1950s than as we live today. I happen to disagree, but there is a growing pervasive sense that society (at least the US) peaked decades ago, and our best days are solidly behind us.
This "original affluent society" hypothesis is much-promoted but much of it just isn't true.
Lee's numbers explicitly counted only the initial foraging of the mongongo nuts, i.e. none of the food processing, firewood gathering or tool maintenance. After adjusting for these, the average !Kung work week is at least 50 hours and probably more. See:
I don't understand the base of this debunk. Nowadays, food 'collecting', food processing, DIY (taking care of tools) are not counted into working time but come extra and are taken from 'free' time. And they amount to 1, perhaps 2, working day equivalent per week.
Sure: "40 hours a week" for moderns is also an underestimate.* But the figure everyone goes around repeating about hunter-gatherers is a more dramatic underestimate. The accurate !Kung estimate is 48-56 hours spent on these things: so we seem to be about the same, but with massively improved quality, cost, and nutrition for us.
The debunking applies to the claim that they had more leisure than us. Lee says: "work week... of 2.4 days per adult... [the bushmen] appeared to enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies."
There is no way to say this without sounding smug, but I'm reminded of talking with new roommates in San Jose about 10 years ago
* them: "we all split the tv bill, it's $45 a person"
* me: (gasping at a $220 per month tv bill) I actually don't watch tv
* them: (in disbelief) but what do you do after work???
Nowadays this would probably be less weird since we have more streaming options but this whole idea that time is an expanse to be filled as trivially as possible is concerning. What do you do with your unfree time? Is it more purposeful than what you do with time you have at your disposal?
Sort of tangential, but I have a similar thought whenever someone says they don't want to have kids because they don't want to "give up their freedom." No one bats an eye at the idea of spending 60 hours a week between work and commuting. A lot of young people don't even particularly care that much where they work, as long as the pay is ok, as opposed to say, starting their own business and making less money but having far fewer demands on their time.
Obviously people have got to make a living and it's not my place to say when people should have kids, but I don't think a lot of people have a very clear idea of what freedom means.
I just had a kid, and I understand this idea completely. I like being a parent but among other things, it means that major life decisions are MUCH more constrained.
Want to live somewhere else? Hope the schools are decent.
Want to live in the city? Hope you can afford a bigger flat.
Want to go on a holiday? Hope you're ok with a pissed off kid (and neighbours) on a flight, or lots of time spent entertaining them on a train, etc. Also your choice of destination will be different.
It works for bigger decisions too. It's harder to take huge risks (start a company, etc) when a kid is counting on you.
Also, we've considered changing country someday and now it feels like there's this weird deadline where it's not so bad if she's 2,3, or 4 when we do it but hugely disruptive if she's 10 or 12. We wouldn't have had those concerns before.
And time. My god, it's so time consuming. All of my side coding projects, including ones I've thought might turn in to a business, have ground to an utter and complete halt. As well they should - she's more important, but it's still frustrating. Life is pretty much {"bare necessities to keep a career going", "child care", "nowhere near enough sleep"} - though I hear this gets easier as they get older.
"It gets easier" is a lie that the longer-serving parents tell the fresh meat, so they have some hope to cling to whenever they start to go crazy. Maybe it gets easier after they get a stable job and move out; I'll let you know after my anecdata results come in.
Sure, you eventually stop changing diapers, but that chore gets replaced by something else. And that one by something else, over and over. You're a debugger and fixer for a general-purpose natural intelligence project, and you have to strike a balance between two goals: it won't get destroyed by the world, and it won't destroy the world.
Yeah definitely, I didn't mean to be flippant about the amount of time it takes to raise a child, I have 3 myself, just that people don't hesitate to give up a similar amount of time to a job they don't care about, so I don't think it's really about freedom, it's really about priorities.
My wife and I own our own business so we're both home with the kids. For my own "freedom", working from home has been far more positive than having kids has been negative, but boy, I really hated working in an office so I may just be weird.
We're also considering homeschooling, so we don't have as many of the concerns about location, which would definitely be stressful.
I could be wrong but I believe homeschooling reduces the ability of the children to experience social situations which have an impact later on with their development
This was a major concern for us, but the more I think about it, the less concerned I get.
What I remember from school is a lot of social status competitions that weren't great for self esteem or regular adult life. I was generally popular and considered a nice guy in school and I still cringe at the way I behaved as a young adult. Part of that is just growing up, but a large part of it is that learning how to be very social in high school makes you kind of a jackass by normal adult standards.
Over my life I've also met a lot of homeschooled kids who seem "weird" compared to their peers because they act more like adults than children. The half dozen or so homeschooled kids I knew both as kids and adults have all become well adjusted adults, including the "weirdest" ones. I can remember as a kid thinking to myself how weird they were, and now I'm embarrassed for having been so judgmental as they turned out just fine.
And nothing I hear from friends or relatives with kids in school makes me feel like the kids are missing much by being at home. The same people who suggest that homeschooling hinders social development have practically monthly stories about bullying and conflicts with teachers and social cliques and it sounds like a lot of stress to subject a 6 year old to.
I agree completely that it's important that kids learn social skills but I think it's plausible that public school doesn't provide a better environment for that than home.
In any case, this is becoming less of a problem as the internet enables us to find lots of opportunities for kids to get together with other homeschoolers for sports, hikes, clubs, etc.
Mostly I just think that there are certain places where it's socially acceptable to give up all your time, like to a career. But if you're a smart young person, you're considered to be giving up your future (at least by your peers) if you have kids too young, and I think whether that's true depends a ton on the person in question. I'm of the perspective that a lot of people trade their 20s for a paycheck and weekends getting drunk when they might be happier doing... whatever else, but it's socially acceptable to work and party away your twenties.
Everyone has different priorities for what they want out of life. My wife and I were really profoundly unhappy with the whole 9-5 employee thing, so we started doing web design on the side and eventually started earning enough to quit our jobs and we've sinced moved on to other things that we find more fulfilling than web design.
I mostly take care of the kids, supporting my wife in business when she needs it. I used to be a lawyer, and I can tell that when I tell people I'm basically a stay at home dad that they think I'm not achieving my potential.
But I know how being a lawyer made me feel and I know how dadding makes me feel and even though I still have a lot I want to accomplish from a business perspective, this is by far the best use of my time right now.
That is, I'd much rather do this than work 40 hours a week in order to pay for childcare and have some extra spending money. I'm trying to soak up parenthood while the kids are small and need me constantly and try to let them be independent so that I can reclaim my time as they get older and hopefully in 6-10 years, I'll be back to focusing on interesting business stuff without having to worry about starting a family.
And once again, I'm not suggesting that everyone would be happiest taking care of their children. My wife is much happier running the business.
We've just gotten a ton of mileage out of questioning assumptions about what makes a good life and ruthlessly pushing our life toward what we feel works best for us at the expense of social convention and so far it's worked really well.
We've ended up with a whole life that is really, really weird to a lot of people.
We work together from home (a lot of people like the office and that's cool, but not us) and spend basically all of our time with each other (a lot of couples tell us that they couldn't spend that much time together, but not us) and the kids and we're confident in our abilities to educate our kids in a way that hopefully achieves a better outcome than public schools (lots of people are sure that public school is better than homeschool, but we think technology offers some really cool opportunities). Our kids are still quite young but so far we're doing well, we'll see. We're also not opposed to shifting gears and putting the kids in school if we all think that would achieve better outcomes, or shifting gears in anything to move closer to what we want.
A lot of our friends are getting really embedded into their companies about now, and while the security seems enviable sometimes, it's a lot more important to us to be able to live where we want, and even when work is crazy, it's on our terms, and we think we're going to have a lot more control over our lives in our 40s and 50s than our friends who consider themselves "more free" than us right now.
Time will tell who ends up being right, but it's quite interesting and enjoyable right now!
Thanks for the detailed response! My wife and I are contemplating some large life changes and also feel like the way we've set up society is not actually the best way to live. How much of your work exists to make your boss' boss' boss, and your landlord, wealthier? Why can't I work half as much for half as much money? I never want to buy anything but the odd vacation anyway.
Though I do agree with the general point of your premise - spending 60 hours a week working+commuting sounds horrible (I've worked to keep commutes under 15 minutes by bike, walk, or transit). Unfortunately it's non-optional for most people.
This actually brings to mind one of the issues of such a full world - there's not many places you can go to check out of the 9-5 and live off the land. I'm sure sustenance farming is really hard, but I'm not sure it's worse for the soul than spending 2000+ hours a year at a bullshit job.
As a single guy, if I want to get drunk, play my guitar, and/or watch It's Always Sunny, I can do that. Whenever the fancy strikes me. If I want to go drive two states over just to ruminate. I can do that. If I just want to take a nap. I can do that.
The claims on my time are small. A child changes all of that.
What do people do when they go camping or hiking? What do people do when they go to the beach? What do people do when they go to a park? What do people do when they have dinner with their family and friends?
If you can't sit still and enjoy yourself just being, you will be in constant pain, and any break in that pain is only momentary relief. Most people pile distractions on top of distractions to shield themselves from their misery.
With regards to "what was there for them to do?", the GP responded with the most authentically human things. Just like money can't buy happiness, technology can't buy you fulfillment and meaning, even if both can make you more comfortable.
The idea that free time should be filled with entertainment rather than intellectual activities and social engagement is surprisingly modern.
Even only 50 years ago, in many cultures, people were spending more time reading, writing songs and playing instruments, engaging in politics, doing home DiY, gardening, improvisational theater.
Can you give example of such cultures? My impression was always that it was contrary to what you wrote. For example, tourism (taking a train to a neigboring city just for fun) was invented in XIX century England to show common folks that there's something other than drinking that they can fill their free time with.
I think the key difference is time spent making vs consuming. I don't know what the ideal ratio is between the two but think we've veered to too much consumption. The replacement of pc's with phones worries me for this reason.
History proves otherwise. In many cultures, including ancient Greece, China and the roman empire, scholars described that artificially creating employment to prevent social unrest was not uncommon.
sure, but is the revolt prevented by keeping them busy or by giving them an (albeit bullshit) means of keeping food on their tables? i'm not a historian, but most of the revolts i've learned about were immediately preceded by severe scarcities of essential items.
I think there is a simpler explanation, that has nothing to do with technology, productivity, or society: big companies are naturally inefficient internally (due to complexity) but as a whole are best optimized for capturing and retaining markets/regulators.
A company doing X has as its main goal not being good at doing X, but making profit.
This is the essence, and reason why companies need a hierarchy of managers: the owners are at the top, their instructions (make us profit) are delegated down, then profit goes back up. The people in charge are not there because they are experts at doing X. They are there because they are experts at making sure profits go to the top.
All bullsh*t jobs and most inefficiencies can be traced back to people not caring enough about doing X. Because that is not what the company is about, its about making profit.
This is a tricky one, because society also shares that burden in providing jobs just as politicians do.
Society could provides these jobs in positions some might consider "pointless" or "bullshit": using gas station attendants instead of self-serve pumps, for example, or giving local mentally disabled folks a job sweeping floors and cleaning trays at McDonald's, or giving local homeless jobs hawking newspapers instead of self-serve vending machines.
The difference with these positions is that the person is performing real, if only a little, service to other people.
Some bullshit or pointless jobs can still give someone meaning. I think it's important to find a way to keep the population busy, even if it calls for society hiring tons more gas-pumpers or walmart-greeters
There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this.
If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it.
Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are small and profitable (or that they are solo entrepreneurs), then all companies can be like that. You need to look at the "real world".
Modern civilization requires very, very large organizations that are very complex. Keeping these organizations running is not all sunshine and lollipops. There are a lot of boring, but necessary jobs. See large airlines, mining companies, electrical utilities,... etc. THe modern world is big, complicated and has lots of tedious tasks that ensure your airplane (for which you got a cheap ticket) is built safely, takes off, landes, has fuel, and whose passenger tickets are priced at an insanely cheap level.
As a straightforward example, just look at the complexity of producing and distributing fossil fuels. Read Vaclav Smil.
Are there boring jobs that may one day be automated, yes. But the thing with automation is that it will not eliminate jobs, because we will just buy more stuff - this is exactly what has happened since the Industrial revolution.
I think you're letting your desire, your "belief" in a market economy, dictate your interpretations. Belief is a key term here: if it were observation, we wouldn't need to believe; we would point out how the theory functions in _this_ case just like we can demonstrate the function of an internal combustion engine. Nobody talks about "believing" in PV=NRT. :)
I have a suggestion: Every time you start talking, to yourself or others, about what a market economy does by definition, add to your statement the concept of perfect information. That's a cornerstone of market theory. So if we just stipulate the theoretical function of a market economy is everything you believe, we are left with concrete implementations which will vary from that perfection by the degree to which information is imperfect.
How do you measure that imperfection? That's a doozy. But if someone managing a $1T company has information imperfect by a percent... wouldn't that leave room for $10B of bullshit? Even if every actor in the company was operating in good faith?
How completely do you think your nearest C-level executive understands the function of their organization? 99%? 80%?
So... I think "By definition bullshit jobs would be removed" is treating economics with a precision that would make physics blush, and is usually only attempted by philosophers.
The adverts on TV are a clear indicator that bullshit jobs exist, they are simply not necessary.
Further, much of modern society is not necessary. Fast food is stuff you could make at home, but you're too busy at your advertising job. And so bullshit jobs beget more bullshit jobs.
What's happening in western countries is that trade deficits - the slow bleeding of wealth - are happening while much of the upper middle class engages in bullshit jobs and the lower classes engage in burger flipping to each other and the upper middle class.
Not much productive activity is actually going, less than 20% of the population is engaged in manufacturing, resource extraction, counstruction, and farming, and the rest is bleeding out the accumulated wealth from the past (mainly by countries like China wanting to buy our pieces of paper - dollars - and giving us our plastic and electronic toys).
The real problem is the free market economy is short sighted. Private investors can only think short term because they simply refuse to risk money on very large but high payoff ventures.
The government needs to step in and spend, spend, spend on large ventures like space travel, medical science, robotics for bullshit job insanity to end.
> The government needs to step in and spend, spend, spend on large ventures like space travel, medical science, robotics for bullshit job insanity to end.
Isn't it hilarious that the governments are the largest purveyors of bullshit jobs and resource extraction?
There is a Danish book that adresses the issue, but they pick a different term, opting to call it pseudo work instead. The title of the book is: Pseudoarbejde.
It's not that the jobs are bullshit, or just plain boring, it that they don't need to be done, at all. One of the authors originally didn't believe in the idea, arguing that the jobs where valuable, because someone actually wanted to pay others to do them.
They have en example of a company that figured that if work fills the time allocated to it, then just allocate less time. They saved a ton of time reducing meeting to default 20 minutes. There where several other steps of cause, but they now have a four day work week.
There's also an example from a Danish hospital, where a doctor is required to check if a patient has fallen within the last 14 days, because the hospital had issues where patients had fallen and no one notice. The kicker is that the doctor only does screening for breast cancer, there's no point in asking if an woman who is only in for a screen if she's fallen on the way to the hospital.
A private company wanted a professional done yearly report, every year, requiring around three months of work in total. They wanted it, because everyone has one. It's 50 to 75 pages, which no one else had time to read, so they have another person to read it and cut it done to 10 pages.
So no, it may not be bullshit jobs, they are highly paid jobs, performed by highly educated people. It's just that it's not contributing to the end product of an organisation.
Similar to the old saying "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - the market is not instantly efficient, just over time.
There will always be work that has become bullshit that the market hasn't gotten around to killing yet. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or can't exist for a long time. Some even last lifetimes!
None of this means we can't do a better job helping the market remove the bullshit work, though.
Jobs are paid for based on the value they provide to the person paying for the job, not based on the value they create.
A job which takes value from other people and destroys some of it in the process will get paid for just as readily as a job that creates value ex nihilo as long as the person paying for the job ends up with the same amount of value.
That's a fascinating article. I must admit that I've never really thought about the "shorting real estate" angle when discussing real estate bubbles, and it's a very interesting insight into why we keep getting them.
>If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed.
That's the theory, but we all know that theoretical capitalism and what we have today are very different beasts. Bullshit jobs are not literally companies paying people to do nothing, but more systemic problems.
My local shop wants to sell a banana to me. The intrinsic complexity of this task is: A small group of people who grow bananas. A large group of people who manage global shipping. A small group of people to sell the banana to me.
However, let's inject some bullshit: My local shop and a shop slightly further away both want to sell bananas. Therefore they advertise. Let's add two large groups of people making graphics for the side of busses, posters for walls, animation for web advertising, filming television adverts, maintaining 'woke' social media accounts, et cetera. We now involve more groups of people for the busses to sell this advertising space, television networks to manage ad time, et cetera. We now have more people advertising the banana than selling it, but no more human beings are buying bananas, because there's a fixed size market for it. _Those_ are bullshit jobs, because they achieve nothing but keeping the market in the same steady state it would otherwise have been in, except with vast resource expenditure. No one company can stop advertising, though, because then their competitor's resource expenditure would actually become meaningful.
The advertisers are hired to increase demand for and sell more bananas. If banana demand is actually fixed and the advertisers don't work out (are bullshit jobs), the banana company is not going to keep using the advertisers and cut out the bullshit jobs.
No no no, the point is that the jobs aren't useless _locally_, in that my most local store cannot fire their advertising department, but they are still useless _globally_, in that the sheer scale of resources poured into creating the advertisements to compete with other stores is zero-sum.
$1 of banana advertising does not generate >$1 of banana purchasing _overall_, though it may _take_ >$1 of banana purchasing from a different store. No meaningful value was created for society.
There's a degree to which advertising is educating consumers as to where they can get bananas. The cost required to fulfil that is significantly lower than the actual cost of the advertising industry, because the advertising industry effectively generates other jobs in the advertising industry to compete with itself, as our competing banana establishments both pour more and more of their money into advertisement, because if they don't they lose sales to their competitors. Because more advertising is needed, more advertisers are needed - but the market isn't expanding, or rather, it isn't expanding even a fraction as quickly as the advertising industry.
So we end up in this absurd position where we spend _so many resources_ advertising bananas, when we could spend a tiny fraction and get the same result - no, a _better_ result. Estimates suggest that 40%+ of all bananas are simply wasted, because they don't fit the aesthetically pleasing, advertisable profile of an "expected" banana. Because competition is so tight, and so many resources are put not into the intrinstic complexity of selling bananas, but into the "bullshit" systems surrounding it, we have a waste _floor_ of 40%, even before considering the direct cost of the advertising industry supporting bananas.
And that's bananas. That's one fruit. The whole market is like this, to varying degrees, where entire industries only exist to support other industries, which only exist to deal with the problems they cause. It's bullshit - not in the sense that any one company can just fire all the worthless people, because obviously it's more complicated than that, but in the sense that we have vast chunks of human productivity going into tasks which do not benefit _anybody_. We are burning our finite resources out advertising bananas while at the same time facing down the impending crisis of climate change and asking ourselves where we could possibly make the efficiency improvements necessary to save our species.
I don't know either - but let's start with the bananas.
It's a theoretical model of how markets work, but substituting the people for omniscient spherical cows because real people make the modelling too difficult to be useful.
> 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress
I would disagree, but this depends entirely on how you define "actual work". Is building and maintaining Facebook actual work? Is composing and playing new music actual work? If we had automated every mechanical task so 100% of human effort every day was spent creating art, would you consider that 100% employment, or 100% unemployment?
I don't think there's one correct answer here. We've never in the past had to use terms like "work" and "employment" in the context of a world where nobody had to work, so it's ambiguous.
There's some kinds of jobs (like creating art) which seem literally bottomless. There's other kinds of jobs (like inventing technology) that create new kinds of work. We may well run out of manual labor, but I don't see us ever running out of work.
> 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
Agreed -- or rather, "wealth" is another one of those words which starts to lose its clear definition in a post-scarcity, post-labor world. It was a good abstraction for a couple thousand years, but no abstraction can survive indefinite growth of both technology and scale.
But there are lots of people who work at Facebook who don't actually build the site, or test it, or do something that is important to delivering the website to customers.
>) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress;
I don't think that's actually true. Here's a quick list I threw together on another post:
>Replication crisis? Aging infrastructure? Global warming? Cancer research? Environmental destruction? Food scarcity? Documentation and bug hunting in software? Taking care of frameworks? Early childhood education? Heck, even beyond all the problems on Earth, there are plenty of people who want to work on things like sending people to Mars.
But as people pointed out, those things need collective action and political will. Our current mentality is that we should have minimal collective action, and the vast majority of our resources should go towards what can bring us the largest personal profit returns, no matter the impact on humanity in general. I think we're seeing some of the limits to that approach.
No we're upset that we can't cut out the trite and petty bs and be free to make ourselves happy while not worrying about predators, scarcity and violence.
I find these arguments in defense of the existing system to to be the actually trite thing because it reveals an inability to truly look at the system at large and ask what outcomes we want and instead mounts a defense of it as is.
Hey I'm all for social change when it comes to repressed/marginalized people and even wealth redistribution, but I just don't think we can escape BS as discussed in TFA.
>3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
I'm all in favour of us having a life of leisure or fun jobs (actor, ski explorer etc) and everyone having a basic income from the state. Sadly though the AI robots are not here and getting someone to fix your plumbing is still a pain, plus many other jobs. Maybe in the future we can go that way.
Plumbing and other trades like it are the opposite of bullshit jobs, though. They require specific training and skill. They have tangible results that clearly improve the world (even if they're reactionary and small-scale, i.e., fixing a broken sink drain).
Yeah, don't dump on the trades. When you get down to the real nitty-gritty, most jobs are technically bullshit. If everything were reduced to rubble and ash tomorrow, CxOs, lawyers, programmers, HR, police, teachers, entertainers, salesmen, advertisers, and countless others become useless occupations.
Even doctors lose some of their cachet.
Farmers, carpenters, engineers, plumbers, electricians, etc all become way more valuable as they can actually rebuild the bits of society that are important to everyone.
I don't think 'would be useful in a post-apocalyptic wasteland' is the usual definition (or a very good one) of a non-bullshit job. It's more about how much genuine value the job creates in the real world today.
AI is not a binary event. Technological progress gradually removes the need for labor. Consider simple unsexy things such as automatic cashiers at supermarkets, McDonald's, etc. How many jobs have they made redundant? And do you know that "computer" used to be a profession? Do you know that the majority of blue collar work in 2018 will be made redundant by self-driving vehicles? And so on.
You say I am overestimating technological progress. Ok, then explain to me why work hours are increasing. They should at the very least be staying the same right?
1) TLDR: We don't have a mission beyond population management. Long version: The population is too large to have any consensus about what humanity should be doing. We can never be on the same page at this point. We're constantly just struggling to manage growing populations. 2% of the population is capable of actually thinking through and carrying out any possible reason of existing beyond putting new technology in front of people. While new technology does in fact help humanity, our application of it is totally misplaced - it goes into military or just entertaining people.. Until a massive number of people are dedicated to extra-planetary research, we're wasting time on a doomed planet.
2) We have had a general movement from - people helping others to everyone is out for themselves. This changes the social contract from grand parents moving in with their children to everyone better get their 15 kinds of insurance in order early. If someone lost a house and the neighborhood pooled together to re-build them a house, and there was no need to "buy in" to that, then we would be both richer, and more comfortable with each other.
3) People have become mean. Streets are filled with angry drivers. People only seem to care about their friends for what they can be provided with. If shit hit the fan, most of those people would kill you to steal your food.
4) All of this leads to the house of cards. All these bullshit jobs are supported through various special conditions humanity has set up (insurance companies, banking industry, food industry, military industry) - which means that the bullshit jobs are paid for in the slight tweaks we keep making to our collective society to be more and more a dog-eat-dog world.
It's sad that most people probably don't understand any of this. The only fix would be for humanity to have a mission beyond our individual mission to keep supporting the current structure.
I have $3, you have $1. Is it fair that I give you $1 so we both have $2? Is that rational?
Now let's say that you work 3 hours a day and I work 1 hour. Now what's fair? You're working three times longer than me, but I had three times as much money to start with. Would fair actually be if I gave you $2 instead? That way our cash is on par with our hourly work. Does that seem rational?
Ok, but what if we had the same job. Build a widget. And due to being good at widget building, I only needed an hour to build my widget while you needed three. Now, the output of our work is the same. Should you be rewarded for simply taking longer? I could build three widgets in the time it took you to build one. Well, if we're paying by output, then shouldn't we go back to a 50/50 split of the money?
But what if widgets make a profit of $1 for each sold? And we each worked three hours building and selling widgets. And you made one and I made three and the all sold. I was more productive. Is it rational for me to split the money with you 50/50 because you don't have the same?
Now. What if I sell widget polish. And you make widgets. You buy polish from me. So now, if we split the money, I sell you a bottle of polish for $1. Now the money is unequal again, so we equal the money. Effectively, I'm just giving you free polish. That's rational? Fair?
> Now. What if I sell widget polish. And you make widgets. You buy polish from me. So now, if we split the money, I sell you a bottle of polish for $1. Now the money is unequal again, so we equal the money. Effectively, I'm just giving you free polish. That's rational? Fair?
By the same rationale you can just pick up a free widget, so it seems both rational and fair.
Only if I need/want widgets. Which isn't included in the hypothetical. Because the point is to highlight what happens when I sell you something and makes the distribution unequal again.
If I come out the same whether or not I sell polish, why should I sell polish? Rationally, I shouldn't.
That's also a good reason we should be very careful about using words like rational and fair. There's a lot of perspective hiding in both. And at the very least, fair does not have an easy definition for all situations.
> If I come out the same whether or not I sell polish, why should I sell polish? Rationally, I shouldn't.
Because you like polished widgets, I'd imagine? Or maybe a fascist government forces you to make widget polish, I don't know. I do know you can't have it both ways, if your hypothetical economy is not consistent then it is a useless example.
You're investing way more into the hypothetical than exists.
I wasn't asking what imagined scenarios would force me to sell polish. If you want that, then aliens for all I care.
The entire point is to ask what happens when the results of my actions are nil. Rationally, if two courses of action have the same result, I should take the course that costs me the least.
I mean, here I am describing a situation and you're saying "Yeah, but what if the situation were different". Then the situation would be different and not the one I'm describing.
It's ok not to have an answer to any of the scenarios. To not know. I don't either. I don't know if there is a good answer to a "fair and rational distribution of wealth". The point is to make you question your own perception of the situation and realize that the answers you believe you have may have issues of their own.
I guess, like you, I don't know that I have any answers. What I reject is you describing a made up situation that is unfair then simply noting that it is not fair. That may be true, but it tells me nothing, causes me to have no new interesting questions, and is unrealistic to boot.
What about actually putting tax money to good use by offering free health care and education like Scandinavian countries?
Would be a good start.
From there the concept could easily be expanded. Reward those who work hard at specific things but let the rest of the population enjoy the benefits as well. Give them (free or cheap) access to your widgets. And ensure that you don't end up owning a monopoly taking most of everyone's money and giving nothing back.
If something is good and fair, sure let's do it, but we've skipped some essential work here. You've declared certain things as good and fair, you haven't actually proven these things are either.
What are the benefits that we should give those who work hard? What are the rewards? It's all fine and good to say "we will reward them". But if that reward is nothing but a sense of pride and accomplishment, I'm going to feel hoodwinked.
And you talk about "taking most of everyone's money and giving nothing back" but aren't you really talking about double dipping here? I'm giving you the widget. The thing you've given me money for. That's the exchange. You're basically saying the person who makes widgets needs to work for something else. But you don't say why. Or what that something else is.
That's what I'm talking about. We need that groundwork in order to actually start a conversation about redistribution. We are talking about literally taking stuff from people. Stuff they're under the impression that they've earned. There are two ways to do that. By convincing them to just give it up. Or by using force. Now, of course, there are those out there who have accumulated fortunes through rather nefarious practices. And it is a perfectly reasonable argument to say that those who have used fraud, deception, and various forms of coercion to build their wealth should have that wealth taken from them by force. It's not theirs. It needs to be returned to those who it does belong to. But we have to establish what are legitimate means of accumulating wealth and what aren't legitimate means. There are obvious cases, but there are also very contentious cases.
It's close. My point is that we need a clear definition of what's fair to start from. And it has to be a definition that is satisfactory to most people.
Interesting. If you have 51% of the people declaring that 49% percent of the people should start with nothing, and that they (by right of popular demand) should get the 49%'s stuff, as a starting point, then, ... that's a clear definition, I guess. And it's satisfactory to most people, I guess. I still feel vaguely unnerved.
While 51% can be defined as "most", "most" doesn't necessarily mean "at least 51%". I was being rather vagueish, because requiring 100% acceptance is likely to be impossible. For instance, I really doubt that the white supremacist movement is going to find any situation where members of other ethnicities get as much or more than any of their members to be "equitable" according to their values. But just because they won't accept a solution that everyone else does doesn't mean we should throw it away. They're being unreasonable.
Not to mention, you're just describing a bullying situation. If you present that scenario to most people, they'll say that it isn't fair. Because they don't know if they'll be on the 51 or 49. I mean, even some of the 51% could say that it's not fair to the 49% to just lose their stuff by popular vote. Which would mean doubly that most people wouldn't find that definition fair.
And of course, the problem is that there's enough variance in "fair" that you probably can't get more that 5 or 10 people to agree on what's fair in all aspects. Which is why I kind of tune out when people just harp on "fair" without being specific. "Fair" is a weasel word. "Not getting shot by the cops during a routine traffic stop" is a clear complaint. That I can work with.
Well, yeah: not having the agents of the monopoly on preemptive violence that the state has reserved to itself getting too trigger-happy is something that I think all us plebes can agree upon.
When you are talking about normalizing starting conditions (up-thread), you are talking about ad-hoc/post-hoc redistribution of assets. Presumably assets that have been earned at an earlier time based on providing customers products or services that they wanted to buy at a price they were willing to pay, at a margin above their cost to the producer, allowing the wealth to accumulate. Like Steve Jobs creating a company that sells iPhones generating wealth.
Now - Steve Job's offspring will start at a better position in life than my children will. They didn't earn it - but my children didn't either. I find myself vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that I/we could form a group of 51% or 55% or 65% or even 80% that would vote to expropriate from them their property, so that I/we could distribute those spoils amongst ourselves. Is the current state 'fair'? Almost certainly not! But legitimized piracy by democratic consent? Where would it end?
I mean, we could form that group anyway. Viva la revolution and all that.
And it's good that you're uncomfortable with it. It's an uncomfortable thing.
I am not talking about the redistribution of wealth per se. I'm talking about the footwork needed to get to the place where we can even begin talking about it. I'm acknowledging that it's difficult. That it needs some hard answers to wicked problems. Something a lot of people ignore in their "eat the rich" rhetoric.
And I'm not really advocating for any sort of change. I'm just saying if you want this, you need that first. If you want "a fair and rational distribution of wealth", you are first going to have to explain what that means to you, why it is fair, why it is rational, why it even needs to be done, and do it in a way that convinces me.
And to the point of fortune of birth, we're all affected by the circumstances of our birth. We're not all created equal in all aspects. Is that fair? Don't know, but it is how the world is. Some people are born taller, prettier, smarter, richer. When you get down to it, there is a large degree of our existence we didn't "earn" by the metric we judge inherited wealth.
You've triggered a thought related to something I've been thinking about for a while (and almost certain to be followed by one or more questions) that I would like to run by you.
But I don't want to compose it on a mobile device, nor at work, so it will be a day or so before I follow it up here.
Ok ... I'm pretty sure I'm going to express this badly - but I'll try...
A long long time ago, humans got humanized in places where small numbers of them grouped together and cooperated/traded/shared with each other for day-to-day life.
There might be a (for example) wandering minstrel, who might spend a week or four in each of 20-or-so places. Each of those 20-or-so places (and their surrounding area) might have 150-people-or-so, who would chip in to cover the minstrel's room-and-board-and-drink. It wasn't a rich living (for sure), but one could (in theory) get by). Let's call it 10~30 multi-talented bard/actor/repair-man for every ~3000 inhabitants.
To the degree that people were literate/educated or Western Europeans, they might swap bible stories and memorize the 10 commandments. Amongst which would be admonitions against greed, envy and lust. (The Buddhist would similarly admonish against intoxicants - except they weren't incredibly dedicated to banning stuff...)
So ... fast forward a while. We've got winner take all markets. Let's talk music/film, not sports (but the math can be considered similar): Instead of having maybe 1 itenerate per thousand people, we've 1 superstar per 5~10M people. Woah! Now it's big money, so we've got back-up staff, support, stages, studios, advertising, promos, sponsorship - but it went from (say) $100/month to $10M/month.
Now back to the sins of lust/greed/envy: I believe that we (humans) were not built to envy our neighbor's goods at that scale. There was no Bill Gates. There was not even a David Rockefeller!
So you get a guy (or girl) who is willing to provide a product (or service) to national or global markets, that people want, at a price that they are willing to pay, at a cost-to-produce dramatically less than that price (on a per-unit basis). You have the recipe for a kajillionairre, by that person simply making the world a better price by providing more/better stuff for less. (Or in the Steve Jobs case: by making a religion out of a pocket computer).
But! As wealthy as we all become, with our jobs and income, and housing and clean water and indoor plumbing and always-on-electricity and wireless internet and 24-7 entertainment and a global library at our fingertips and an every improving environment (on most metrics - you would have to track data and not watch the news to learn this), many of us, with our hold Monkey-DNA encoded greed/envy/competitiveness, are jealous of the "Captains of Industry" that have made our lives to much better. And we want to take their money ("The 1%!") and distribute it to a bunch of morons that (from what I can tell) are trust-fund babies that can't hold down a job. (Or even find a place to defecate that is not a police car - given how some of the denizens of OWS behaved).
So! (It took a while to get here). Do you believe that income and wealth equality could be, should be, a first-order goal, given that our current system has generated so much wealth? Why would we want to tear down something that is working for all of us, for the purpose of instituting an abstract noun that no one seems to be able to define? For my part, I'd rather be an increasingly wealthy part of the 99% and am grateful to the 1% for dragging us along with them...
As Dr Ford from WestWorld said something like 'Human are very predictable and run in tight loops' while explaining there is not much difference between man and machine.
As I reflect on my life it does seem very predictable outside work. At office it is still a bit interesting due to all sort of random issues crop up in a work day.
In regards to your second point, I often wonder what it would be like today had Reagan not started the trend of not enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. We are in a situation where we may end up having to break up AT&T, for instance, twice in a 40 year period.
Our current society is definitely not rational, which I inferred as the point. Our economic system is a good 80% complete nonsense, where we're essentially playing a very complicated and meaningless game with ourselves, except one with meaningful consequences for real people.
You're making me so happy, because the most frustrating thing for me is that, with how tied up in personal and cultural identity and self-worth it all is, few people are willing to admit or recognize this.
Economy, at its core, is a network of transaction predicated on value.
Value, at its core, is nothing more than a perception.
>>There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations;
One of the real reasons why languages like Lisp and Perl had a short life in MegaCorps is they were anti-dote to large people hierarchies. You can disproportionate work with small teams.
Execs and VPs openly boast in company all hands about their 'team sizes' and numbers almost as the biggest accomplishment of their lives.
No one is going to buy any technology or methodology which shrinks their head count.
If this was true, wouldn't everybody be programming in assembly? E.g. developing a website in assembly would keep more people occupied than HTML/JS/CSS.
If one were being cynical and thinking that optimising for (maximum) headcount is a major driver here, one might want to avoid technologies with substantial barriers to entry, since that might clear the market of qualified people and make further recruitment very hard. The "ideal" technology would be one where almost anyone can pick it up quickly and at least look like they're being vaguely productive, but where even a 0.01-%ile expert will struggle to achieve really exceptional things.
this reasoning doesn't work. most jobs aren't created by politicians anything like directly, and companies have direct incentive to not be wasteful in their spending. I'm of the opinion that it's just a failing of management, which is hard.
'Rational' can only come about once one has chosen a goal to achieve or a social group to adhere to, because ANY set of logically developed statements must derive from axioms, logic itself included. You just happen to believe that (If I read your point "1)" correctly) that there is a limited amount of work to be done in any society.
One could just as easily state that a 'rational' society should celebrate: a stable number of jobs (if one is anti-technologically inclined, or if one happens to believe that society is harmed by rapid change); or a growing number of jobs (the rapid change view + population growth, or a belief that more jobs mean people have found more problems to be solved).
But one could also move away from the direct 'jobs' concern and argue that a 'rational' society would be better at finding ways to address the need humans have for being valuable to their society (often expressed here in the US in terms of having a job) and ensuring that people have enough capital to live on a year-to-year basis, whether by changing the expression of those needs and giving a universal basic income or by finding better jobs or perhaps even by going with a strongly progressive income tax and actually supporting small businesses.
Many of the examples I have provided have been argued in the past at some point or another (and my short list is by NO means complete), and one could certainly talk about whether empirical evidence seems to support or contradict each of these points (though note that there are likely multiple interpretations of the data!), but ultimately our society is made of people and articles such as this suggest that we have built a society that systematically fails to support the values of its members. So maybe we should start talking about those values and quit going on rants about 'oh, everyone else is irrational'.
It is not just social status but also real financial constraints for survival that lead to wage slavery.
IMO poverty and austerity and military and wars imposed or tolerated because of greed and lack of empathy and foolish voters are the main reasons for needless misery.
The kind words for John McCain were shocking and disgusting.
> As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous.
It's actually the opposite that is the case. As technology progresses you will see more and more and more speculative waste because the entire market becomes more efficient at producing speculative waste.
Another name for "speculative waste" by the way is "Capitalism." Before you worry about "bullshit job" you might want to consider the thousands of businesses that fail everyday, the books and movies and cartoons and the mountains of media that is produced that will never be read or consumed, the endless containers of products -- everything from Squirrel Girl teeshirts to satellite networks to cryptocurrencies -- that get made and then quickly discarded.
All of it is speculative waste and all of it is absolutely necessary for a free market to function.
The concept of "bullshit jobs" is stupid but it's the "common sense" stupidity that is really just a lack of imagination. In a global economy filled with billions of independent actors the vast majority of economic activity will be variously inefficient, useless and often down right harmful. This speculative waste will expand to consume all of the speculative capital available. The vast majority of this economic activity will only be minimally profitable and much of it will generate no returns whatsoever. But every once in a while you get a "10 bagger", an investment that yields order of magnitude returns, and this changes everything.
The author should be concerned not that most people are engaged in ultimately pointless economic activity but that, perhaps like himself, so many in the West are profoundly underemployed.
Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff.
Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development. ... Three of the university's eight vice presidents will have their offices at Stanford Redwood City.[2]
If you actually go to the source behind that figure (http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/) and scroll down, you'll find that it actually doesn't refer to the number of administrators--far from it--but rather just the total number of non-academic (i.e., not faculty) staff. Indeed, that figure includes service and maintenance staff, clerical workers, and employees of SLAC, in addition to "managerial and professional" staff, which includes research technicians, of which there are surely hundreds in the SOM alone, librarians, biostatisticians, accountants, lawyers, engineers, grants specialists, programmers, and yes, of course, administrators, among many other titles, but it's just downright wrong to say that Stanford has 12,508 administrators.
At my university the graduate students (in the engineering college, at least) were frequently research assistants. In that case you would probably be counted as an employee of the university.
That data point could change the student-employee ratio from 1:1 to 2:1
I am a research support programmer at the University of Michigan. My job is to help research labs solve programming problems that they can't handle internally. I write interactive Psych experiments, create data processing scripts based on a professors notes, assist with computer controls for new research hardware, ... If I were at Stanford I would fall into that "Admin Staff" bucket. Am I an example of wasteful growth in university administration? Maybe, but I would like to think that despite contributing to the "Admin" headcount you despise I am doing valuable work facilitating scientific research.
Universities have two roles: Teaching and Research. You are welcome to your own thoughts about whether or not they should be grouped together the way they are, but that is the current situation, and it turns out that Stanford is a big research university.
> That sounds like an interesting and varied role.
It is, and it doesn't get as much formal recognition in the research world. Some folks are trying to change this [0], but unfortunately for the moment research software engineers often end up more of a happy accident than a deliberate decision on the part of labs. Part of this is due to weirdness in how funding is allocated for research positions at universities- instead of research programmers being funded through operating expenses like a secretary, administrator or many (but not all) librarians, most lab positions are dependent upon soft money (i.e., grants) that could potentially evaporate unexpectedly. I had a friend at ${BAY_AREA_UNIVERSITY} who almost had this happen to him recently, but fortunately his PI got another grant so he didn't need to get furloughed/laid off. When I was living in Ithaca, I noticed a similar trend of non-faculty taking sabbaticals due to funding issues and then returning 6 months to a year or so later in a different department [1]. That sort of instability in employment is part of what scared me into moving to a major metropolitan area- I still work for a university, but I know I have options (although I'm currently not funded by soft money- last job was though).
I love my job. Most of the projects are medium sized ones with 100-200 hours of programming involved, so I get to see a good variety. Splitting my time between C, Java Script, MATLAB, Python, Swift, PHP and R means that I am probably not an expert in any of them, but I we have a solid team of general purpose programmers who can handle almost anything the labs send our way.
My only complaint would be that the pay is a little on the low side. Otherwise the work and the work environment are both excellent.
This is not true, at least for schools like Stanford.
They offer free tuition if your family income is under 125K, free room and board if under 65K. They also claim 77% of students graduate with no debt[0]
But what part of that 77% represent the students receiving free tuition based on the 125k family income? I would think that 77% is also lumping students who a) have a free ride from scholarships, academic and/or sports. b) have the financial means to pay their way through.
WTF. My alma mater (Dresden University of Technology) has 6000 academic staff and 2500 administrative staff for 35000 students, which sort of matches the expectation that I had before checking.
How much does a university do outside of giving classes to students? Don't they also operate a huge research endeavour, patent administration, and operate numerous businesses all at once?
universities duplicate many services offered by businesses (and even the government, to an extent) in the surrounding area. i certainly found this convenient as a student, but i always found it a bit silly. wouldn't it be more efficient to just offer an expansive shuttle service to take the students to important places? you could even give stipends to the poorest students. institutions tend to be pretty wasteful when they implement a ton of different out of band stuff in house.
What kind of services are extraneous? The problem is that once a campus gets big enough (a few thousand people or more at a residential university), it is the neighborhood, so you have to either provide the community services, or outsource to vendors to provide services on campus. And handing out monopolies to vendors is a bad idea.
Your librarians are administrative staff. Your research assistants are administrative staff. The people who do inventory are administrative staff. The people who do purchases are administrative staff. The people who work in the cafeteria are administrative staff. The people who install, maintain, and fix the computers used by all of the people in the list above are administrative staff. The people who fix a broken door are administrative staff. The people who are managing student housing are administrative staff. On-site campus security that busts freshmen parties are administrative staff.
Pretty much everyone who is drawing a salary, and is not a lecturing professor is administrative staff. If your university consists of a dozen lecture halls, and a storage closet, you don't need any administrative staff. The more facilities and services you have, the more administrative staff you will have. Stanford probably has a lot more facilities then your university did.
If you just want to lecture to people, education can be incredibly cheap. If you want to lecture to people, and have them use expensive lab equipment, and have them live on campus, and have hundreds of people, with teams of assistants doing research... It's going to be expensive.
I used to work for a public school district and it too was extremely top-heavy with administrators. I worked in a building dedicated to administrators with not a single teacher or student.
FWIW that can be reasonable depending on the size of the district. Ours has ~4k+ non-admin employees and 15+ physical plants. That's:
* a large enough headcount that you need an HR department,
* a large enough overall budget that you need a CFO and accountants,
* a large enough physical plant that you need (sizable) facilities and transportation departments (with storage space),
* a large enough IT plant that you need dedicated staff,
* a large enough student body that you need a legal/compliance group (open records requests, mandatory state/fed data collection and reporting, etc.),
* a large enough teaching staff that you need nodes whose primary function is coordinating significant curriculum changes across grade levels and schools,
* a large enough community that a full-time community relations person is cheaper than bringing in a PR firm whenever necessary (every dollar that schools spend or borrow comes from a democratic process that schools have to engage with seriously in all but the most affluent communities),
* and several other functions.
For a place with 4k people, that's dozens and dozens of admins. There are basically two options: build a wing onto a school, or build a stand-alone building. Most districts go the stand-alone route because 1) districts can often get cheap/free land anyways, and 2) it's a good idea to leave that physical space for schools to grow in case population increases.
FWIW I did the "look up all my past employer's [X type of admin] to engineer/sales/marketing ratios and compare to the school district" thing. I couldn't find anything out a whack. But the resulting raw numbers definitely mean the district needs dedicated space for admin folks.
This is why I am highly skeptical every time there's a bill/referendum/whatever to increase the education budget. It's not that I don't care about children and their education; it's that I doubt much of that money will get anywhere near where it needs to go.
Also, pay attention to what the bill/referendum is for. Any competent district will have a website explaining to the public what the funds are going to be used for.
In particular, be careful about voting against bond issues that are placed on the ballot within one or two years of the maturation date for a similarly sized bond. Because those are basically a continuation of the status quo, and voting them down can mean costly deferred maintenance and/or dumb financial trade-offs.
Real example: firing a whole bunch of people this year to pay for asbestos removal in cash money (because the bond issue wasn't passed and this NEEDS to be done in order to use the building), and then re-hiring a bunch of people the next year. Because the bond issue failed and the bond issue is literally the only legal way to amortize the cost of the asbestos removal. So, I guess no amortization, we pay upfront and fire a bunch folks for a year in order to afford it. (BTW, we all know from the software industry what happens when you lay off a bunch of people -- you lose your best folks and it becomes difficult to recruit good people).
Think of it like this: school districts in many states literally can't amortize their capital costs without coming to you with a ballot initiative. By voting "no" carte blanc, you're basically saying "I carte blanc disapprove of my local school district using amortization". Which is pretty unreasonable.
Rightfully so. The school district I worked at was incredibly wasteful both staff and resource wise. Seniority, lack of being able to dismiss bad teachers and a slew of other nuecenses makes education a prime target for huge waste of tax dollars. When I confirmed just how little most administrators did for the benefit of the kids, it was difficult not to feel guilty for wasting public tax money. Knowing what I do know, I will never look the same way at the education system.
Me too. A public school district I worked at had an entire building to administration. Every person had their own office except HR people. The running joke among a few of us was that we don't have a clue why most of their jobs existed. On that note - it was also the time I read about wasted time at work. The article stated that most people work only 1-2 hours per day and the rest is just filler time with very little productivity. I started tracking my working time to see if it were true and sure enough, most of the day I did nothing other than sit around pretending to be busy. I then made it my mission to observe administrative staff (I worked in IT so I was able to do this) and confirmed that most of them did nothing as well. It was many years later when I started freelancing and billing by the hour that I realized just how few hours people work. I'd work 6 hours a day as a freelancer and I'd be totally exhausted and often thought about the easy days in IT. I think most people greatly overestimate their jobs importance.
Programmers are not researchers; lab techs are not researchers; many other people who do work for the academics are not 'academic staff' (and can't be paid as such). It's not hard to imagine what that sort of structure leads to.
I was a "research assistant" for several years and my senior colleagues were "staff scientists". I think you'll need some evidence to support the claim that research assistants are being considered administrators because I really doubt that.
Most universities only distinguish between "academic" positions and "staff" positions.
At most universities, "Academic" positions are something rather specific: usually only the faculty proper, Ph.D.-holding researchers, and maybe a few other student-facing roles (e.g., librarians).
Here is my quick two-part litmus test that's probably pretty accurate for most universities. Assuming you don't know for certain that you are in the "academic" or "staff" bucket, consider these two questions:
0. Are you a Ph.D. student with some funny title like "research assistant"? You are a student. You are not "staff". You are not "academic". You are a student.
1. Do you hold a Ph.D. AND listed as a co-PI on grants? If yes, you're most likely in an "academic" role. If not, you're most likely in a "staff" role (unless you're working with someone who has a shitload of clout).
What happens often in reporting is that "academic" and "staff" numbers are reported, and we assume "staff = administrative".
See the Stanford numbers, for example. Notice how there's no category for "non-administrative non-academic staff". You're either a member of the "academic" group or you're an "other", and the "other" group is not broken out into "administrative" and "not administrative".
Hopefully, this helps. It's all rather confusing and political and, in many cases, institution-specific :)
shrug I was just responding to the GP with 10 'academic staff' and 70 'administrative staff'. It's not like every professor has 7 secretaries there. Every university divides things differently. I was just pointing out that the 10/70 is not what it looks like at first, or rather, what some people here seen to think. (at least, I think - I'm not GP, maybe they actually do have 7 secretaries each).
"If that is true, then your researchers are effectively managers here. The real workers are lab techs, programmers etc."
Well yeah. Professors are like business unit leaders/managers, acquiring funding for research and setting the main outline of what to do. Then the others (usually, although not always, designated 'administrative staff', or grad students/post docs) execute the work. I'm not sure I would call them 'real workers', that implies that others (i.e., managers) don't do 'real work'. I mean I understand what you say - you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.
>>you mean 'real work' as 'producing something', but 'creating the circumstances in which others can produce something' is also work.
The thing is its always easy to see who 'produces something'. When you start talking about 'creating the circumstances', you trigger of a chain of helpers, who help helpers, who ... and so on. Until you arrive at a point where there is a whole hierarchy of people sitting just to approve things, keep records and pass memos.
Well yeah, sure. That's how it works when scaling any organization. I'm not sure what I'm arguing here; I know for a fact that most universities have too much admin staff, but it's not like they all sit around all day writing reports to each other (at least not most of them). Students nowadays expect a mental health program, housing- and career advisers, clubs and events, they want to see the school in the newspapers, they want to be offered international exchanges and internships. All very understandable, but someone needs to make all that happen. Couple that with the fact that universities cannot be 'efficient' in the sense that they get as much done as possible for as little money as possible (because that's just not in the DNA of universities), and you get the current situation.
It’s not about “who’s doing the real work” it’s a question of what type of work you are doing. A facilities administrator (fancy title for handyman) will have a much more hands-on part in bringing in new research equipment and setting it up. But it’s still the research staff who ordered it and will plan the experiments that get published in nature.
That depends on how you define 'admins', doesn't it. When you have two classes, 'academic' and 'admin', and only professors are 'academic' - well then everybody else is 'admin'. It may sound weird and yes it's outside of the normal usage of 'admin', but in universities it's not uncommon to have this sort of division. It's driven by two things: first the historical context where you had lots of 'academics' who were all professors and had actual secretaries, and very few 'overhead' people like those managing buildings and activities etc (whereas now that's very different, because of the different role of universities); and secondly by the recent trend of keeping the number of 'academics' low because they can't be fired and are expensive. But you still need to hire people, and if they're not 'academics', they're 'admins', even if they don't do what is in common usage seen as 'administrative work'.
I'm always extremely skeptical of this. Fundraising departments tend to claim responsibility for all but the very largest donations when in reality a lot of that money would've come to the school no matter what.
Will a computer fix a broken door? Wash out glassware? Cook 5,000 meals every lunch hour? Knock on a dorm door, when there's a 3 am party going on? Trim the hedges? Roll the AV projector out to the lecture hall that needs it? Ticket someone for parking without a permit? Wash the windows?
Or would you prefer tenured professors doing all that work, instead of teaching, or research?
Well, I think custodians fix broken doors, kitchen staff clean the dishwasher and cook meals, RAs (who are normally students as well) knock on the doors, landscapers trim the hedges, and AV techs roll out the projectors.
If that's what "administrators" means, then fair enough - but my understanding of the title "administrator" is people who organize the curriculum, schedule staff, students and classrooms, maintain the website, conduct student intake, that kind of thing. And those are the jobs that I would expect to be streamlined via computers.
How far western civilisation has fallen to end up with employing people in middle level, secure (if inefficient) jobs!
Excuse my flippancy, I've worked in universities before and they are horrendously inefficient - however, quite often in the cities where a big university is there's very few other large employers (where I was the joke at house parties was asking whether someone you'd never met worked for the university or the hospital), where should these employees go?
Either the university goes through a back-breaking transformation project and streamlines everything at once, or it scales up the bits it's not focusing on with people power, and improves bite-sized chunks here and there.
The growth in services offered by universities, and student expectations that those services are just there means they have to be fulfilled in some way. People always bemoan things like enrolment officers or admins to manage the janitorial staff, or PhD support officers, print room servicing technicians etc..., but when you see the numbers who make use of those services, you'll see what a mammoth task it is to automate each little bit to make the requirement to have someone do it go away.
I'm sure the HN audience can identify 1000 ways to make a university more efficient and take away these "bullshit" jobs, and I would love to see someone tackle it and make it work (whilst ensuring there are other jobs these people can be, well, paid for), but it's nowhere near as simple as "SaaS ALL THE THINGS".
The link between doing useful work and being paid for it is broken in these cases, just noone openly admits it. So why not make it explicit and stop requiring people to pretend to work to get paid?
That we should! Let's hear some concrete implementation ideas as to how we can make it work without just making swathes of people redundant without something else in place (and that can't be swept away by party politics 4 years down the line).
There's lots of smart people on HN, but the default reaction to everything is "automate! efficiency! the market!" and then "something, something, UBI!".
A secure bullshit job that puts food on the table and scratch in your bank account is better than all of the alternatives proposed to now. Not saying it can't be solved, and would love to work getting there too, but it's a hard problem where the solution needs to be sustainable outside of flaky social security.
Well, the obvious solution is to not do it all at once, and instead do it over time.
The US is currently at record low unemployment rates, for the last couple decades, so if we start doing these things now, then unemployment will go up by only a couple percent.
And over time those unemployed people will get different jobs. As that's what happens today when people lose their job.
It's more a wealth transfer mechanism from younger people to take out loans to fund these inefficiences. And those loans are gauranteed against a person's lifetime earnings since they cannot be removed via bankruptcy.
Remove the financial incentives for inefficient work and you will get 10,000 ways to make universities more efficient.
Nobody is owed employment. Nobody is owed financial stability. If they have real, useful skills, get a job somewhere else, if not, they can go back to school. It will have just gotten a little bit cheaper.
How nice, to leave students massively in debt so that the university can run a private welfare state for its paper pushers. All while the taxpayer is picking up a good portion of the tab.
The crux of my argument isn't that it's ideal or even acceptable, but these staff provide services for the university and in the majority of cases, directly to the students - the university would struggle to fulfil the demands placed on it without 1) radical transformation of hundreds of services (and being a part of wider community, ensuring that community is still sustainable), 2) employing more people.
Which cohort foots the bill for the cost of the radical transformation projects? The severance packages, the business process mapping, the specification creation, the tender process, the development of hundreds of interlinking system integrations, training, maintenance, licensing costs etc...
Splitting wasteful salaries across thousands of students over a number of years and trying to improve piece by piece and not cause a local issue (whilst increasing people power temporarily in other areas where needed which aren't be focused on) is the only viable solution we have at the moment.
Believe me, I'd 100% love to hear solutions to this problem that take all the moving pieces into account to solve it, and it'd have been great not being saddled with £00,000s of student debt too!
But, us techies can sit on HN and bemoan the inefficiency of little pieces of people-powered work and how it should all be automated! efficient! etc... till we're blue in the face. But without building a university, healthcare system, multi-national conglomerate... from scratch, we can't just retrofit our napkin systems and processes without causing a shittonne of unthought impacts.
It has nothing to do with automation. You could just eliminate half of the administrative workforce at these universities overnight and the important parts would keep running just fine.
For example, my university had a very extensive dining system, all within a block of town, which was full of restaurants. The dining halls were more expensive than the restaurants. But everyone had to buy a super-expensive meal plan, to prop up this ridiculous side-business of the university.
Really? Not being condescending, but have you worked internally at a university?
You'd probably be right up to about 80%. Then all of the edge cases come in and it falls down, having a real impact on students. If you want to operate a university on the Pareto Principle, then fair enough, but there's a whole lot that goes on that requires tweaks and human consideration which breaks fundamental systems, usually when students need them the most.
I’m curious why you think my university needed to force students into a meal plan and have a massive workforce to run the dining halls, when the private sector could feed students better food for less.
Or why did the university need a whole administrative department to cater to the “needs” of every kind of minority you can think of (one department per kind of minority)?
Its not just the universities. Its all big people structures. After a while the whole point of management is to take care of themselves until the eventual decline of the structure due to inefficiency and corruption.
12.5K people managing 2.5K. Having an real worker to manager ratio of 1:5 is not inefficient, its trying really hard to be self destructive.
I think you're looking at the numbers incorrectly - the vast majority of the admin staff aren't managing the academic staff, they're providing other/different services, as well as supporting the academic staff.
EDIT: I'd also like to make the point that I'm not advocating for this level of human resource, but that I've seen it from the inside and know how much of a complicated issue it is to be solved to the extent that throwaway comments on a forum about "waste" and "inefficiency" contribute exactly FA, and could lead to animosity toward those roles and the people in them making a go of it (as bored as they might be).
Hmm. In my experience as a former PhD student at a major research university, university bureaucracy only hindered my job at every opportunity. You even needed multiple levels of approval for a research proposal. You had to send it in weeks before the proposal was due for the actual funding agency. These are for highly technical proposals that the admin drones won't understand at all anyway. I hear at other universities they have people that actually help you get funding, but not at mine.
That's just one of many, many examples. My department had a 10 admin staff and about 30 professors. Those admin staff mainly worked to deal with the rest of the bureaucracy (who outnumbered faculty 3-1 university wide). Our admins were great. They knew all of the magic incantations and forms to get out of all sorts of artificial impediments.
And I'm not even going to go into the 57% overhead, and the additional overhead to pay "tuition" when I was not taking classes and only doing work to benefit the university (I realize this is standard practice, but that doesn't mean it makes sense).
Those people aren't students or faculty, so unless there's another category, they are Administration.
Administration sounds silly, but remember that in the business world, we don't have Administration, we have General and Administrative. There's a lot of stuff in General. Schools apparently call that Admin for some reason.
> The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty.
That's usually the start of a decline. When Mercedes bought Chrysler and wanted to become the next GE in the 80s they built a new huge administrative facility far away from production and moved management there. That was the start of a long decline of the company until they got rid of Chrysler and closed the administrative facility.
It's a very bad design if management gets physically separated from the actual purpose of an institution. They get detached from the actual work and live in their own reality.
This is what happens when a human organization becomes too successful: it generates more money than it knows what to do with and the parasites do take notice.
That's nonsense, and taking one look at basically any fund manager will tell you otherwise. Just to give the most outrageous counterexample, the sovereign wealth fund of Norway employs 550 people and manages $1 trillion in assets, including 1.3% of all global stocks.
Given the content of the link nikanj provided, it makes more sense to interpret “Takes a lot of people to manage that much money,” not literally, but rather as meaning “Takes a lot of people to run an organization that big.”
From the link:
In 2017–18, Stanford is a $6.3 billion enterprise. This figure represents the university’s consolidated budget for operations, a compilation of all annual operating and restricted budgets that support teaching, scholarship and research, including the budgets of all schools and administrative areas and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It does not include the $1 billion capital budget and excludes the budget for Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
"It's well-known that Berkshire Hathaway keeps a small headquarters with these 25 staffers, who manage some of the most important affairs of this $329 billion company."
I don't think you need that many people to manage $6.3 billions.
Also, I worked at a hedge fund managing $12 billions and we were ~150 (but this is a completely different job than what staffers at Stanford or Berkshire Hathaway are doing)
I work for a research institution not as big as Stanford, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done to provide education, from the office staff needed to generate reports for regulators and accrediting bodies, to the marketing staff, to IT staff, to financial aid admissions and other officers, to security, to the janitors .... People don't realize how much work and man power it takes to put one professor in the classroom, or to keep the hospital open that is tied to the institution.
Also, many institutions have a vast portfolio of real estate. This takes more man power to manage that a similarly valued portfolio of financial instruments traded on wall street.
They have 16,600 employees, with $5.1 trillion under management. They only have 400 funds, which typically would have just one or two fund managers. That's a ratio of 20:1 admin staff to fund managers, assuming two fund managers per fund.
I think they put it there to realize Stanford mission is not to educate future businessman and women, scholars etc. Their main business is making hard core cash. Which obviously should not be a mission of educational platform. And thats why you need so many helpers running around.
Frankly its truly disgusting that they will make their students invent stuff that they patent and sale, and also kae them pay tuition for that. And of course Stanford is not an exception; MIT makes even bigger buck!
If american healthcare system is not a total rip off and fraud to you, then look no further than american educational system.
Yet somehow Stanford is quite reputable and desired university, so they know how to use the money they have to be one of best in educating/research. So you can't assume they are wasteful, otherwise other units should outcompete them, right? Unless system is very rigid... I don't know - I'm not from US
I wonder if this is also a result of simple career progression.
How do people go up the ladder if there's already people at the top? With people living longer, more women working, etc the organization has to create more positions at the top or lose talent?
Cost disease isn't really a disease, it's a side effect of increased productivity. As productivity increases (and comsumption increases), costs increase because labor costs can't decrease as fast as technology costs.
Medical care quality has vastly improved. The problem is that there is infinite demand for medical care. People think disease and dying are massive failures of medicine now. In the recent to ancient past, surviving and being healthy was a miracle.
K-12 education cost per capita has tripled in the past 50 years. Sounds bad?
GDP per capita has grown to 6X. If education costs as
a fraction of income is shrinking by half is a disease, I don't want the cure.
Didn't you just say that education cost now 1/2 of what it used to. Education is mostly human effort(can't be easily automated - although visualisation, CAD tools and internet helps), so it means there is less incentive now for people to educate younger generations because they can make better money doing something else if I understand correctly. What I'm trying to say is that without mesurable education metrics you can't judge if reduction of costs is good or bad.
IMO it's bad - I would prefer teaching but I can make 10x doing CRUD apps :/
Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office.
For 4 months now.
Let that sink in.
What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means that I might have access to privelaged insider information,which means I can't sit with the public teams. But there isn't any seat in the private rooms. So I'm sitting in the cafeteria, reading books, playing on the PlayStation, etc etc.
I ask my manager every single day when I'm going to get a new spot. It's usually 'next week for sure' or 'friday for sure'. Hasn't happened yet. During the first month, I stayed for 8 hours each day, doing nothing. I've gradually stopped giving a fuck anymore and am looking for other jobs now, even though this is a pretty sweet gig.
I've advocated this for a long time, not something people are receptive to though. I've been in GPs position, I've done little or nothing for YEARS at various development jobs, I do some high visiblity things, but otherwise coast. It's bizarre, but i always get glowing reviews. I've spent years averaging 5 hours of work a week. It's easy in software if you're good at it.
The logical conclusion is maximize your earning moonlighting an additional job. It's hard though; to land one, and work two jobs concurrently. IF they're both remote helps a lot.
Can you deliver pizza's at night? Why can't you do another dev job? Sure there's risk, but the calculus is: $100k a year or $200k a year? Retire in 30 years or 10? I've had lot's of jobs that didn't even make me sign a non compete.
In places like CA, you'd probably be fine to offer services to a company that's completely unrelated to your nominal employer, as long as you don't use privileged information from your "main" job.
That being said, have a friendly chat with your own lawyer before doing this.
People are willing to pay big money to set aside time to learn a new, marketable skill. You currently have the opportunity to be paid while doing the same.
Yes, that's what I started to do. Unfortunately a lot of time was wasted cause it was always, just one more day, just this week, just till that other guy transfers to a new team, I kept thinking I'd finally get to work but just kept getting pushed back.
Having been in this situation it’s so incredibly difficult. Especially if it happens early career you don’t know what you don’t know. It ends up becoming tedious for people with work ethic which is like to consider myself having. Your soul wants to be productive and you know you aren’t. Maybe it’s an ego thing. Or just procrastination. I think you are right. Just that it’s hard to do.
That was a hilarious read! Know more stories like it? I only got reliable Internet access in 2008 (kid in a third world country) and I've always been interested in the dot-com bubble days.
I've been getting paid for free for the past four months.
I had a similar thing happen to me once.
I was hired to perform a certain mission-critical task that had to be performed at a particular time two days a week. It's was a significant task involving about a hundred people that had to be done every day of the year, including holidays.
When I was hired, I was supposed to do that task on weekends and then three days during the work week help out the people who had to do the task on those days.
Everything went fine for about three months. Then one of the full-time helpers complained to their union that I was doing a helper job three days a week. In the union's view, I was taking away a helper job, which wasn't really true. I was a bonus helper. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a new three-day-a-week helper position.
The union got all huffy and the result was that I had to come to work, suit and all, and I sat at a computer and got paid six figures to look at LOLcats three days a week.
This went on for five years until I left for another company.
Amazingly, that was the least problematic staffing situation at that company.
Same thing happened with me at my old software development job. Company went through a merger but I left before it completed. I stayed for nine months, working from home, but with no work to do.
I did freelancing but eventually got very depressed. Quit my job, left my apartment and moved back with my parents.
Bear in mind that this makes you an pretty expendable employee, if management decides they need to get rid of people, you are a prime candidate.
One of my past employers was a consulting firm that would have people "on the bench" for weeks to months at a time between clients. When the time comes to get leaner, those who have been "on the bench" the longest are the ideal ones to get rid of, because they're the ones who will hurt the least to let go (specifically because there's leftover responsibilities that need to be assigned elsewhere or silo'd knowledge that may be lost).
Bear in mind that this makes you an pretty expendable employee
Reality suggests the opposite. They're having OP hang around doing nothing for fear of being without them at some unknown point. If they're an expendable employee, what is management waiting for? They're literally throwing money down a hole.
Yes, this is true. The wierdest part is that my new team lead fucking fought tooth and nail to get me pulled from my previous team. The old lead told him I was needed till at least the newest batch of dev work had been done but the new lead went to the department manager and got me reassigned. And I have no place to sit, even. Makes me wonder if I've been caught in the middle of some kind of management power play.
I just would like to add a bit of a warning to anybody reading parent's comment and thinking it's the life-it really isn't what it's cracked up to be.
After like a year of doing nothing, like around the 9th month mark, it starts to take a toll. Since my manager was constantly telling me there's not much I need to do other than explain lines of code and what they do in business terms. Often I would prepare something because I'm so fucking bored and then it would be brushed off as "cool but yeah no need".
The reason is that it feels too much like unemployment. Checking reddit, HN, github, eating company snack and getting fat, starts to develop impulsive gambling/day trading....
basically I was spending money to escape the fact how bored I was...it's really fucked up....I'm not sure what the dynamics are but honestly, it sure beats doing manual labor.
the lack of product market fit was painfully obvious by the volume of opportunities we were getting.
Yes, definitely. If I made it sound like I was having the time of my life, I'm sorry. If you're just starting out in your career, four months of experience is too valuable to pass by. Besides, you'll get bored of all the shit pretty quickly. You'll have nobody to talk to because everyone will have work, and all the websites you can visit will start getting boring and repetitive after a while. And when the time comes that you have to get to work, you'll be out of touch.
I honestly think that free time in office isn't free at all, it's fucking suffocating. You can't work, but you can't have fun either, i.e, have a beer and watch a movie, play videogames (the games on the company playstation are at least a decade old) , hang out with your girlfriend, go for an actual vacation. It's like you're stuck in limbo. You can't do anything productive or fun.
- I think it depends on how people are wired (if you have something personal you deeply want to do, you can avoid the useless negative factor into a "i have free funding for my project"). I used to be like that.
- I really wonder how much work = having the satisfaction to feel needed and help someone by your skills/knowledge/care.
This may be an unpopular opinion but I don't believe BS jobs are prevalent in the private sector. Of course, bureaucracy exists, but that is hardly a new thing. There are outliers, but this is far from the pandemic presented here.
Some of the arguments I keep hearing:
1/ I don't understand why X exists and therefore X must be a BS job. In the parent article, we read a premise that "someone invented a procedure", but the author jumps into conclusion without really understanding why are employees not allowed to bring whatever chair they wish to the office. Then he jumps to another conclusion, that nobody really cares because his psychiatrist note is usually accepted. As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day.
2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.
3/ "There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations." True and totally unrelated. What is the argument?
4/ "Managers like to have large teams." True, and economic forces push against that. This does not explain the apparent pandemic of BS jobs (that I don't see anywhere).
etc.
If you won't mind, I will try some anecdotal evidence and jumping to conclusions myself:
5/ I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would be great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible for compliance is not doing a BS job.
6/ Automation and technology saved us from slaving in the fields and sweatshops. Driving a truck full of confectionery across the US is pretty much a BS job if you ask me. Same as "Shirley, make me 5 copies of this contract before the lunch" - on a typewriter.
7/ BS jobs pandemics is nothing else but a variation of the "Grass was greener when I was young". Developed countries (maybe with the exception of the US) have safer environments than ever, more disposable income than ever and people live longer than ever.
> As a manager, if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored, and to prevent all his colleagues from wanting a special chair the next day.
And I would wonder whether you think of your employees as little children, or are you just giving into the false economy of being cheap on equipment. The latter seems common, and I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair.
Also note that in this article, the employee needed a note to bring their own chair to work, so it's essentially free for the employer anyway.
> 5/ I have not seen many - if any - BS jobs in my IT career. Sure, it would be great to reduce state regulation but the guy in my company responsible for compliance is not doing a BS job.
I guess we have strongly different perspectives, because to me, most of the jobs I've seen in this industry are bullshit, in the sense that the world would be a better place if those jobs (often: companies) didn't exist in the first place.
> I've personally been in companies that could easily double the productivity of their developers at the one-time per-developer cost of one developer salary, by buying a decent computer, extra monitor, a pair of headphones and a good chair.
This is completely pervasive myth in places like HN.
I founded a startup. For the first three months we hadn't signed a lease for real office space, so there were no monitors, crappy chairs, and old laptops.
Three months later we had all the things.
Productivity did not improve. It absolutely did not double. (It is a bit insane to even claim that it could.)
Those things do not improve productivity in any meaningful way. At worst they are just status symbols. At best they are just signalling. "My company values me and I know that because I have two monitors". Their actual impact on productivity is minimal, despite the thousands of HN posts claiming otherwise.
And I counter that with my personal experience because I've been at this job long enough that I notice things that are really, really distracting me from doing my job. Like:
- sitting in a hot, airless room will drop my productivity to much less than half; I'll be spending most of the day angry and trying to fight sleepiness
- a computer that can barely run a browser and an IDE at the same time will operate slower than I think, and will introduce distractions and annoyance every time I have to wait 15 seconds for the page to reload
- having just one display is bearable (I'm used to it), but having two significantly cuts down on switching between programs, removing those small delays add up over the day (incidentally, adding a third display is marginal for me; I find myself not using it very much - I usually dock IMs and project logs there)
Few years ago I actually had all three issues simultaneously at the same company. I complained until they were resolved, and only then I started to feel that it's me who's the limiting factor in my productivity. As it should be.
Quality of shoes don't exactly matter when you are running away from fire. Unfortunately that's how the start up analogy works.
Quality of shoes matter if you work at a garage or car wash, or may be even if you are a professional fire fighter.
Its one thing to say 'My firefighters came out fine in the building fire wearing bad shoes.' totally a different thing to say 'Bad shoes need to be provided to firefighters.'
I've often chosen to stay later at work or to go to the office at weekends to be able to work on my two monitors and desktop pc rather than try to get work done on my laptop at home.
For certain tasks my laptop feels like a huge hindrance in productivity.
Part of the big problem with IT isn't just limited to BS jobs, its also BS titles.
Most managers could simply be called supervisors. And it would work just fine. The problem is once you start calling them supervisors, you have to pad a senior title every time you have to promote them, so you go like senior supervisor, senior senior supervisor ... etc. So they invent titles like manager, senior manager, general manager, director, senior director, AVP, VP, SVP, Exec ....
There is also an overall dressing of 'leadership'. If you attend most of these company wide meetings, they are full of these words. 'We are trusting our leadership to do X', 'We congratulate our leadership for doing Y'. Making it look like highly laborious mental work involving a test of human spirit.
They also have to establish the master-slave relationship inconveniencing you every step along the way to show you who the real boss is.
Your comment reminds of the total surprise hierarchies of supervisors and managers had in Indian public sector companies post the 92 reforms when they discovered their jobs were not needed, or even needed to exist.
Apparently managers(of managers of managers...) suddenly came to terms with the fact that the only thing they were doing is passing memos and approving leave requests. Generally a small additional meta responsibility existed which required them to make an entry into some register(Issuing a tool to a shop worker etc).
They also realized approving leaves, passing around memos and filling tables wasn't exactly a skill set anybody was looking to hire when they were fired. Most of them were in 40s, unprepared for retirement and angry there wasn't a market for their sort of entitlement.
Additional reading:
Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.
After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.
"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."
> if my subordinate asks for a special chair, I will ask him to get a doctor's note, to see if he is serious or just bored
Sounds like a bullshit task then.
> 2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.
What's the mechanism that would cause this to happen? A manager could notice that they don't need as many people on their team - but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team?
> but what incentive does that manager have to reduce the size of their own team?
What incentive does a manager have to increase the size? What incentive does he have to improve performance in general? Managers don’t exist in a vacuum, and just because you as an employee don’t see them talking to other managers, executives or owners, it doesn’t mean they are just kings of their own domain.
> What incentive does a manager have to increase the size?
Personal satisfaction, looking more important, all the usual human motivations.
> What incentive does he have to improve performance in general?
The manager's own manager will likely notice increased output and reward it. Under normal circumstances an empire-building manager is kept in check by the need to justify their headcount in terms of their output (both of which are visible to their managers). It's only technological productivity increases (which are invisible to higher management, because they take effect in the technical details of the work) that gives managers cover to continue to employ people who have become redundant, or even add further redundant people (because the team is more productive): the overall team productivity (in terms of output/headcount) is going up, and so from the outside it looks like the team is simply performing well, when in fact the manager has siphoned off the fruits of technological advances.
If you dig into the bullshit jobs myth you will find it is all based on a survey from 2015. People were asked a yes no question, whether their own job made a "meaningful contribution to the world", 50% said yes and 37% said no.
I think the real bullshit is all the blog posts about economics without presenting hard data or being peer reviewed.
> 2/ "There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress." If this was true, there would be unemployment, not BS jobs.
I think this could be the main point of contention from where a lot of things flow.
It all depends on how we define 'actual work', but I think we can all agree that to do the same things as we did a century ago we need less effort and time.
We need less time to build a bridge, less time and human energy to wash our clothes etc. From there, where did that time go ? Some of it wen to help our survival, but the rest of it could arguably fall into 'BS' jobs.
We didn't get massively unemployed when we got better machines, we just found out other uses of our time that were seen as low priority before, but become good enough to be seen as 'work' afterwards. What was once considered a BS job becomes a standard job, the bar just gets lowered.
To get back to the point, I believe less works doesn't lead to unemployment, just new 'jobs'.
People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"?
Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement?
I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you), but whether something is sustainable and makes sense on a larger, super-human scale (organization, society, species) is tough to determine by any single actor. It's typically left to be played out and then (hopefully) analyzed and learned from.
Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. If a drone-like society turns out to be the most efficient in this sense, full of silly rituals which nevertheless make it more cohesive / stable / whatever, then that's where we're headed. Even though it currently doesn't seem that way, with individualism, science and articulation scoring some spectacular victories.
>Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels.
I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons.
>term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
>Although common resource systems have been known to collapse due to overuse (such as in over-fishing)...
I am familiar with both; what's the connection in particular?
That patterns organize along least-energy principles and propagate by extracting resources from surrounding energy gradients is almost a tautology. I'm genuinely curious what you're disagreeing with.
I disagree that people and societies organize by efficiency and how well they reduce energy across time. In fact the two almost contradict each other. People organize based on individual/egotistical "efficiency", and not the efficiency of the system/society.
Thanks. Then we're in disagreement :-) For me, people are a part of the whole system, following the same rules as everything else in the universe. No special exceptions, no "get out of jail free" card.
(by the way, it's reducing energy gradients—differences between here and there, doing work—not energy itself)
Except that we know from history that people invent superstitions and act upon those superstitions. Look at all the effort that was wasted telling people to turn off cell phones in flights. Once electronic devices became ubiquitous and there was push-back from passengers, they finally had to admit that if the electronic interference of a handheld device was enough to interfere with onboard instrumentation, natural atmospheric electricity would have rendered flight impossible. The security theater at airports is still ongoing and equally superstitious.
In the case of the OP, the author is pointing out that there is no authoritative test that actual medical doctors can do, so the doctor is not adding any authority to the check. The business is incorrectly ascribing authority to a doctor to form the basis for a prohibition. There is enough information there to pass judgment.
I still have a hint that the larger and super-human scales that you refer to also lack a meaningful architecture in them. They don’t have something in them that would make a thinking sentient being like us(or me) find joy in participating.
That bettering of efficiency in super-human collections of stuff seems just like any other organization-it just strives for survival aka efficiency in a boring meaningless way.
I wouldn't single out "sentient beings" as any kind of exception, just because we're aware of that "homunculus between our ears" whispering to us at all times.
Our self-awareness and knack for introspection through language, as special and precious as it seems, may be just another way to optimize more efficiently. It allows us to anticipate and avoid local minima (famine, extinction, loss of knowledge, ossification aka boredom aka overfitting) across larger spans of time, in a rather cool and unique way. It makes us see farther, walk straighter with fewer detours, tap into juicier gradients, appreciate art and novelty.
But it doesn't take us outside the entropy race, outside the laws of nature. "Boring and meaningless" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. How would you even conceptualize "boring" or "meaningless", for a structure that breathes and reacts in human generations instead of seconds? What is "bullshit" to a cell or an atom that lacks such linguistic sophistication? If you want a truly universal objective metric, a stable direction for "up" and "down", it's hard not to go with long-term maximization of entropy.
What makes you say that? Yes, it is a goal. In fact, it appears to be THE goal, whether our human perspective likes it or not.
Societies follow the same optimization principles as everything else. If the topics of self-organization, similarity across scales and sustainability interest you, check out Geoffrey West's work at https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/geoffrey-west (among a lot of others).
There's a fascinating related example of what you describe: cassava [1]. Proper preparation of this staple food involves multiple steps over multiple days. Few of the steps serve an obvious purpose, yet omitting any of them has deadly long-term consequences. What appear to be "superstitions" or "rituals" to the individual performing them are anything but.
> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time
You'd probably like the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. He makes a strong case that societies evolve very differently from cells/species.
Edit: Thought I'd provide an example. Suppose there is a herd of animals hunted by a predator. Imagine it was possible for a single member of the herd (maybe the oldest/weakest) to sacrifice itself and save the rest of the herd from taking additional casualties. From the perspective of the herd, it's the best option for longterm survival, "reducing energy gradients", as you say. However, that would not happen. You generally don't see animals purposely sacrificing themselves for the good of the larger group. There are some exceptions (e.g. bees) but Dawkins very convincingly argues it's not for the good of the group.
This smells of false dichotomy. Does a suicide terrorist choose to die for his individual "good" (sic), or for his ideology = the "group good"?
In reality, an "individual" and his social context are inseparable. You and your environment are one, the separation is entirely linguistic, devised by that talking homunculus between your ears. "Individual" and "society" are just words that suppress some nuances of physical reality in favour of a more actionable world representation; a useful skill that evolved over time, not a fundamental property of the universe. Physically speaking, there's no such thing as a gene, animal or society: they're useful language abstractions, simplified models of the world that exist in your brain and that we learned to encode/decode across brains.
You don't even need suicide terrorists to illustrate this non-separation. Why do individuals (genes, animals, societies, whatever) die at all? Wouldn't you choose to live forever, instead of dying on the altar of "reproduction and evolution"? Who gives a shit about evolution, at their own level of survival?
And yet, as far as we know, all individuals go out of business, across all levels of complexity. Death is a strange "unselfish choice" they all make, if you accept this artificial separation. It's precisely your "a single member of the herd (maybe the oldest/weakest) to sacrifice itself and save the rest of the herd from taking additional casualties"!
It's the same principle in action. From the universal perspective, the "herd" is a net decrease in free energy, and something's gotta give for the show to go on. They must all obey the laws of thermodynamics. In order to increase entropy over ever larger spans of space and time, local pockets of orderliness have evolved that we call life (matter, culture, whatever). These pockets trade a local temporary decrease in entropy for a long-term global increase, cf Maxwell's demon. A global net acceleration, rather than an exception.
All I can say is read the book and decide for yourself. You seem interested in these kind of questions about life and energy in the universe and personally the book blew my mind. Btw, he does talk about suicide terrorists in the book and how it relates to his thesis.
The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've got real problems on their hands. But every now and again a No bullshitters should pop up and say stop this local incident of BS. It just does not happen. I'm one of those that tries to make senior management aware of total time and energy sinks in the corporation. Often it just doesn't click and I move on. Why don't cultures change (fast) enough?
I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.
The problem is that teams in large organizations are not run by the company owners themselves anymore, instead they are run by a middle manager whose job is to run the team.
The middle manager has no incentive to cut down too much on the team size, as that would risk his career, perceived social status, and even directly its job.
If a team of 10 all of the sudden becomes a team of 3, maybe there is no need for the middle manager anymore.
Also it does not look well on the CV to be a manager of a team of 3 instead of 10 people, so its not good for the manager career to cut down the team too much.
If the team size gets reduced a lot, the manager will be asked to do non-managerial tasks again, which would effectively mean a demotion.
> I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.
Better yet: there are companies where a team needs to have at least N people in order for it to be assigned a manager. Otherwise it gets a "team leader" and several of those get assigned to a single manager.
N varies with the job, too. It can be as low as 5-6 in software development or engineering, and as high as 30-40 in administrative departments or poorly-automated production floors.
So if you cut the bullshit jobs, you also cut yours. No one does that.
How good it looks on the CV is also a factor, indeed, and often it's a barrier of entry, too. When hiring managers, many companies, including the ones that you'd think would know better, routinely demand a minimum team size, regardless of team performance. You can manage a team of 200 and run all projects into the ground and still get hired -- and yet get disappointed looks if you managed a team of 20, no matter how well it performed.
Managers offering to get their team trimmed because of lack of stuff to do is seen as a failure.
On one side the manager will be blamed for not being attached enough to its team, not being 'greedy' enough in general. On the other side the whole team will be blamed for not having come up with novel ideas and new expansion paths.
And as you say, even if the Level N manager is fine with that, it will look bad on the N+1 manager to not have a growing trend, and so-on.
> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment.
Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.
It's not really impossible but it's not always worth the costs.
It's common for really large companies to use internal billing. So the IT department for example might charge other departments for their services and have to show it's a profit center. The problem with this of course is that it's also a monopoly, so this hardly incentivises better behaviour. In a situation where other departments can go outside the firm to get what they need, this is almost like outsourcing or divesting that department and it can act as a check on really bad cost:benefit ratios internally.
'But': I've not once met a manager that was thinking about his budget first and foremost. Budget thinking is always implicit and couched in other objectives of a firm. So there must be some mechanism that fails holding said manager accountable for attaining the business goals he gets his budget for. So should I then look at the controllers for failing to control? I'm really at a loss (professionally) why some managers get away with no results and growing budgets and project portfolios, even within a culture that values delivery.
Such incompetent manager (let's call him manager A) is in turn a part of his manager (one level above, let's call him B) "empire". B admitting that A's department is incompetent and is actually not doing much, and thus could really be disbanded, is not in B's interest, as it would shrink the size of his empire.
Everyone up the chain of command is wasting someone else's money. Ultimately it's stockholder money, but the stockholders are actually giant retirement funds, and the fund managers who use the voting powers don't actually have their own money in the fund.
Wasting that money does bring the status of having a bigger organization, more direct reports, etc. Saving the money brings the questionable honor of being the manager whose team shrunk by 25% in a year.
The only corporations where efficiency still is key, are the ones where the owner-CEO is still able to keep an eye on the whole operation.
But that does not explain real life differences between companies in the same sector and with the same type of ownership. In my sector I've seen good and bad cultures at work. The difference is astute. So there must be aspects of culture (and change) that are attainable by stock-owned companies, but only attained by some.
At my university which is also a heavily endowed top ten, and it's hard to not imagine that they were intentionally aiming to waste money. In my opinion the purpose of this was to justify increasing costs which internally is then seen as a measurement of growth. You would regularly see buildings, fully functional and usable buildings, being completely demolished and replaced with new buildings to no end. The only real changes would be snazzier looking architecture and some nicer desks because, ya know, you have to tear down a building to stick in some nicer desks.
What I think people forget when we speak of monolithic institutions, be they institutions of learning, corporations, or even governments is that they aren't really monoliths. They're just made up of lots of individuals who are mostly just interested in themselves. So who is the person whose motivation is to reduce costs? Go look at the regularly flaunted bios and list of achievements of presidents of any major university. You're not going to find reducing costs anywhere in there. Instead you'll just find a whole slew of different ways they managed to find to spend even more money.
Here [1] is the president of Stanford's bio. Lo and behold, among his amazing achievements include 'Dr. Tessier-Lavigne worked with faculty, students, staff and trustees to develop and execute a ... a $500 million / 2 acre campus expansion project in the heart of Manhattan that broke ground in 2015.' Literally managing to spend half a billion dollars of other peoples money for a 2 acre expansion is, in and of itself, regarded as a noteworthy achievement.
There's the old saying "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half".
But in practice, the reality is probably far more that most of the jobs do add value to the company, it's just relatively difficult to quantify (the related "as we're not an IT company, we should just outsource this department" mentality has never worked out very well...). Or taking the ludicrous Graeber definition of a "bullshit job", just because the employees would rather be poet musicians than credit controllers doesn't necessarily mean the world actually needs more street poetry of dubious merit and less timely payments.
And the given example of advising someone they can't bring their own furniture in without a good reason is a "bullshit task" which takes far less time than the alternative "bullshit task" of evaluating whether doing so might cause conflict, clutter or insurance liability issues, and auditing who owns which piece of furniture.
I think it's ultimately about risk. Once it's able to make a profit, a huge, inefficient organization will probably continue to make the same sort of profit in the same sort of way. A smaller organization is more likely to do very well or very poorly, but investors don't want that. They're being paid to get 5% a year, not 200% some years and -50% other years.
IMO this would be one of the biggest benefits of UBI -- money coming from actual people instead of risk-averse institutional investors.
A manager foresaw a problem. Right or wrong, that manager didn't have the time or inclination to do a grad-level research project on back pain diagnosis and foolproof verification systems. Instead, they delegate to people who are trained in medicine and make a process by which someone else receives and stores the doctor's note.
This solves the perceived "cowboy" chair problem where everyone brings a custom chair and ends up tearing up the carpet or whatever. Pretty much nobody wants to risk their job by outright forging a note. So few people risk the higher levels of cheating-- like the psychiatrist example-- that the manager can just assume those people have back pain. And, in the event that one of these assumptions are broken by a bad faith actor, someone can go back and read some or all of the doctors' notes.
I would think the bar for "bullshit job" is the 2nd and 3rd boss Peter has in Office Space who parrot the criticism that the first boss gave him. Unless you invoke magic those jobs have no value whatsoever.
In other words, bullshit jobs should be the ones that add no value but cannot be removed because the structure of the organization suppresses the tools necessary to officially measure the employee as ineffective. It's like the king's idiot son-- everyone just has to pretend he isn't an idiot.
Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?".
In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove it, and then it's too late.
If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...
> In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove it, and then it's too late.
The term for this, in case anyone is curious, is Chesterton's Fence.
> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
> If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...
Not called unit tests but we have something similar here in Norway:
- 5 or more weeks of mandatory holidays. (both you and your boss get trouble if you don't use it.)
- maternity/paternity leave (more than a year combined IIRC, and while it won't land an individual in hot water legally, -everyone including your boss expects you to take advantage of it. Oh and it might land the company in hot water if they prevent anyone from using it which might explain why even the company often actively encourage it.)
It works mostly the same:
- like unit tests it verifies that the organization works, including edge cases like "what if half the company is away for two weeks at the same time". (The last point is encouraged by design it seems by specifying that at least two of the weeks should be in the summer.)
- like unit tests it might seem like a giant waste but turns out to be useful in the long run.
Ah, I really appreciate that you've made that connection. Given the current state of politics in the US, I'm afraid if I ever bring it up it'll be perceived as a gimmicky talking point for expanding socialist policies, but literally every engineer (or someone who's tinkered with something) knows that removing components from a system is an effective method for testing its robustness. Even more so, the worst time to figure out that your system is not robust is the exact moment when you need it to be robust.
Honestly I think one of the best ways to find this out is to have people regularly take annual leave, you get a chance to see what they were doing from a different angle when they are not there. Making people take this leave is a really good way to fight presenteeism as well.
sure, you can build a rube goldberg machine, and removing any of the parts might break it. this still doesn't mean the machine is efficient or makes much sense. adding a piece you usually also create interdependencies, which lead to adding even more pieces later. it's not about something breaking, it's about something being already broken in its current state, and priorities (I understand your point, just adding this as a thought)
>>if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?
The thing is those people who designed the systems designed it to make their jobs relevant in it.
Which is why most companies fail to turn around. You can't use the management to fire the management. They are always going to come up some cause for the problem, which excludes them.
Reminds me of a story I read here a while ago - about someone in military being overwhelmed with required reports, who eventually decided they'll stop submitting all reports for a while, and wait until complaints come, in order to determine which reports actually serve a purpose.
It seems, for lack of unit tests, real-life almost never removes code from bureaucracies, and achieves efficiency only by replacing the whole organization.
By the way, I think this is why communism failed. I don't think their error was for companies to be state-owned. The problem was that, in the pursuit of efficiency, they merged all companies in a sector into one combine, thus making it impossible to replace (today we would say "too big to fail").
Maybe the communist/socialist bloc would've been more successful if they had retained multiple state-owned corporations in each sector and allowed for competition between them.
Disclaimer: I was born in 1989, so everything I know about communist/socialist economy, I know from books or from talking to my parents.
You might like to read Red Plenty. The problem isn't the size of the companies as such, it's the notion of planning the economy.
If you allow multiple corporations but oblige them to follow the same plans, that does nothing to address the problem. If you allow the corporations to compete in a market economy then, well, you have a market economy.
The creation of bullshit jobs probably comes from a combination of 3 things:
- the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc.
- the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager of 10 persons and not 4, so it will keep hiring to fill all positions regardeless of true need - its his social status and his career, and not his money
- the huge amount of automation introduced in the last few decades, making many jobs unnecessary.
There have always been bullshit jobs, just not that many as today.
Agreed. On automation, another to look at it is corporate companies literally print money without doing anything. Once upon a time when the company was starting out everyone had a real job. The retail chain with over 3000 shops only cares if the POS is up and stock is in the store. It doesn't matter how ineffient other business units are.
Regarding the doctor's note thing, isn't it just to present a hurdle that the majority of people wouldn't jump over unless they actually needed to? So as to prevent people arbitrarily demanding an unlimited variety of conveniences that they don't really need?
Another example: if somebody asks you to do a random task (which is essential, very important, top priority), then a tiny amount of push back - e.g. sending an email asking for clarification of what is needed and why - often makes the task suddenly become unnecessary.
The broader principle is that if a request for expenditure of time/effort/money has minimal cost or risk to the requester, they are incentivized to request unlimited expenditure if it has any potential to benefit to them.
Maybe, but then I'd argue this story proves the hurdle is way too big, if it ends up people asking psychiatrists for back pain diagnosis. Instead, why not ask them to explain the need for the chair, in writing, to the HR or procurement department? But then I guess outsourcing the decision - and all the related social risks - to doctors is safer.
I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.'
Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ?
We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.
Pizza delivery is not a bull-shit job. He mentions people doing this lousy job only because people are forced to hold bull-shit jobs so they can eat and then don't have time to cook for themselves. He expanded this article into a book after doing some research. His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.
A more nuanced approach might work there. Some people are up at night because their projects keep them engaged, and delivering pizza to those people is not a bullshit job. What Graeber alludes to is when people have pizza delivered because they need to work their own bullshit job and thus do not have time to cook.
In other words: If there were less bullshit jobs, there would be less pizza delivery. Hence, to a certain extent, pizza delivery is also a bullshit job.
I'm not sure I subscribe to this reasoning, but I think this is a more honest representation of Graeber's argument.
“Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
“The attentive reader may have noticed one remaining ambiguity. The definition is mainly subjective.”
Then goes on to explain that many cases are obvious: like if an office worker's spending 80% of her time making cat memes. But even in more complicated cases, you're likeliest to know best. (Not managers. The higher up you are, the more people have reasons to hide things from you.) After a couple years at the same company, normally people will learn enough of the company's secrets.
>>So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ?
To some extent yes.
But that covers start-to-end aspects of such jobs. For example, Courier is a highly productive work in the process of delivering iPhone to your door step.
Every job demands involvement of some kind of meta-coordination. Think of it like an operating system. The OS needs to manage things, and is a very important piece of software. But if it starts consuming most of the computer resources at some point in time you are doing a lot of things that don't have to be done.
Some jobs are that way.
In the Pizza job context. Something like 'Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector' would fit in the definition of a BS job.
From the definition given in another comment: 'a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence'
The 'Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector' might think his job is safety related and take that very serious. So then its not a BS job at all. Others might think his daily checkups (just making this up) are over the top and BS, but he himself thinks is neccessary.
Seems to me it comes down to the extend you think your job can be winged. For example a marketing research job. Because you feel your reports are not read by your superiors, you just make up stuff and think its BS. But you could also write very good reports, go up a higher level, ask your boss for better work, etc. The BS is mainly in your mind.
I am still not convinced there is a good definition for BSJ (BS jobs).
> Seems to me it comes down to the extend you think your job can be winged. For example a marketing research job. Because you feel your reports are not read by your superiors, you just make up stuff and think its BS. But you could also write very good reports, go up a higher level, ask your boss for better work, etc. The BS is mainly in your mind.
So a litmus test: what's the delta of impact on company performance between you making a lousy, half-assed job and working your ass off to deliver best results? If the answer is "not much", then your job is most likely pointless. The person spending 80% of the time making cat memes is an obvious bullshit-job holder, but so is the "Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector" iff his inspections don't have a meaningful impact on health&safety.
(Then there's also an aspect of how people in general are qualified to do a job. Take my favourite pick, social media marketer/analyst - unless you are a good statistician and are working with decent data, your job is most likely pointless regardless of your efforts, by the virtue of you not understanding what you're doing, and taking inferences from random noise. But if you actually know what you're doing, you can probably make your customers a lot of money.)
A car inspector might think his job is safety related. Then the inspector who inspects the car inspector could start thinking the same. Then you arrive at a senior manager who is the boss of the inspector who inspects the car inspector.
| senior manager who manages inspector who inspects car inspector
| inspector who inspects car inspector
| car inspector
| pizza delivery guy
As the hierarchy expands people keep moving away from the real producer. And at some point have nothing to do with the producer.
Now you could say the senior manager might think his job is valid. Well guess what, if you get paid well, and paid well as you go up, doing as little job as nothing, you aren't exactly going to complain about it.
I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward:
1. Wu appears in work with a chair
2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X
3. X asks Wu to remove the chair
4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code
5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it
It might be an interesting experiment to automatically attach an expiry date to new rules, and if nobody (or too few) stakeholders vote for keeping them, they automatically go out of scope.
This sort of happens by default in private industry, in that companies usually only exist for 50 years or so and are continuously being replaced with other organizations that haven't yet become sclerotic. This process is probably less efficient than just having rules expire would be.
They also hire contractors for external validation. Their internal team knows they should do X, but they won't get buy-in from management until an external contractor comes in and tells the company needs to do X.
In big companies it's often easier to get decision to pay six-figure to external consultants than to not even pay four-figure to employees for the same job but sometimes to even accept the job which is already done by employees just for salary.
Honestly in some regards step 5 might be much more successful than what most people do. Most people go to their manager and complain about Wu. Then the manager does nothing. Then they complain at the bar to their friends how their manager AND Wu suck.
(Wouldn't exclude myself from that loser group, although I don't like to go to bars.)
Why does working a Bullshit Job have to be about ritual or tribal identity or anything else, when the most important thing in that person's life is putting food on the table? Even if a job is bullshit, there isn't enough of a social safety net in most/all of the world to provide for one's needs without taking a job. For an employee with no financial cushion and trying to avoid homelessness/starvation, what the job does or its contribution to society is secondary to the income it provides that allows that person their basic necessities.
Similarly, if those basic needs were met a la Universal Basic Income or a Star Trek society, there'd probably be less bullshit jobs of people doing something, ANYTHING, just to earn enough to live and provide for their family.
I don't think requiring a doctor's note is necessarily bullshit. Special chairs are more expensive so it's a shallow cut to prevent everyone wanting one just because it's available. If they are more comfortable and the two people sitting next to you have one, wouldn't you want one too?
Now obviously there is potential for fraud and so there is some bs as the author notes. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater I can see a reason the company would have this process.
Reminds me of a distant previous job where I requested a 24" LCD for monitoring and doing other tasks, the response was why I need such a large LCD while everybody in company just have 17"? Though it's no written in paper but generally you can't be different than all other employees unless you have a very strong reference. And this case it's doctor's note.
I use monitors as a surprisingly good heuristic for measuring the values of an organization.
If you make your rockstar ninja unabomber programmers stare at a single 24" screen all day, you're basically paying for Wayne Gretzky and then skimping on skates.
...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a bullshit society: our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect of having the productivity of the people that actually choose (and are able to!) to be productive being lowered by being surrounded by slackers etc..
Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and you can't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible! You might end up with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun" or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark tendencies.
"Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.
I have been unemployed for the most of my life, and i now have a 9to5 job. I think I hate jobs. I love working with code and projects, but it's very difficult or impossible to find a job, even in programming, that has some kind of meaning, good sense, or is stimulating.
Jobs feel like you're playing the role of a robot. It has no soul. It just shows how society has become so mechanized and lifeless and dead boring.
It's not all jobs, but I really feel alien to the society of labor. I might be unable to adapt and do work I don't like, but at least this article is agreeing that I'm not 100% of the problem.
On the other hand, creating a project by one self and making it happen seems hard, but it really shouldn't. My view is that society doesn't really like struggling artists.
Reminds me of an internship I did at a large organization, where the computer I was assigned to was partially unusable (even after formatting it would hang and freeze all the time), but procedures stated that I couldn't change it because it wasn't 3 years old. Procedures also stated that I wasn't allowed to bring my own computer to my workplace, so I ended up spending a lot of time sitting there drinking coffee and reading books, instead of actually doing the work I was supposed to.
You first-worlders are damn lucky. In my country, it is considered a good day when you get paid half the money you were promised for doing some hardcore high-skill job. Which is still like 10 times lower than what you would get in the first-world, living-costs adjusted.
Real elephant in the room is the resource flow from the colonies to the first-world and the Western financial institutions that enable it. That's probably the thing allowing you to bore yourself to death with bullshit jobs.
No one likes talking about it though.
"Why do we have every resource and service available but half the population has to do bullshit jobs? Probably because of technology - yes, that must be it."
Well, I think Dr. Alexander is doing a great job. I mean, he is protecting the mental health of his patients by using the authority he has been given and I think that is what his job is about.
Nevertheless, he might do even better if he would recommend to his patients someone who is better qualified to help them with treating the origin of their physical problems (while still providing them with the letter they require).
As I understand it the majority of back pain cases have unknown/undiagnosable causes (and the only "treatment" is either more or less exercise and painkillers),so unless there is an actual physical deformity a psychiatrist is as qualified as anyone to diagnose it.
Isn't copying content from the article just a bullshit comment???
Joking aside, your comment made me read the article. I agree with it almost entirely, except I don't believe there needs to be a conscious decision to invent bullshit jobs for them to appear everywhere. I believe people are capable of hiring other people for bullshit jobs and not questioning why they do it without some kind of conspiracy.
This is not a top-down problem, but a bottom-up problem. People want to feel meaningful, so they make up stories of why their job is important, why this or that task needs to get done right now, etc. The only things that are really urgent is when you are a focus point of a political game between two managers. Then you really need to struggle, work overtime, etc. Otherwise usually nobody cares about your existence and you can do whatever you want, as long as you do it in the office building.
Bullshit jobs are created just like the comments on this article demonstrate.
The proper response is "This is bullshit, let's fight it". Yet, it's not of personal importance, and really, how many fights can you fight, so somebody somewhere comes up with a way to circumvent the system. Others help refine the step for that - because you know it's bullshit, and circumventing bullshit feels satisfying.
From there, this will no doubt spread, and be further refined. The ultimate outcome is a content free form that allows everybody to take no personal risk, and simply trades the actual decision making for signing a form that you know will never harm you.
And voila, there will, at some point, be a specialization where you just see large volumes of people, and sign their slip. The insurance will press to make it lower skill and less expensive. Since no actual skill is needed, it won't stop at being delegated to nurses. Sooner or later, it's a minimum wage job. At this point, companies will start bringing it in-house - why would you want people taking half a day off for signing a bogus form? And after a while, there's huge demand for this - each company needs it - but really, they're not needed fulltime. And so there will be an agency that has these people travel to your office.
At this point, backpain form signer certainly is a new job. And the decisions at every step of the way were entirely rational.
I want to end this with a rousing call to fight bullshit where you see it, but realistically, it would be an all day job. So we'd get bullshit fighters. Who probably at some point just sign forms.
> It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? investors? I don’t know.
Direct supervisors? I don't think someone inventing or enforcing a procedure like this is trying to satisfy investors. They're mostly concerned with their own job security and chances of promotion. I propose that a big chunk of the economy is made of such chains of people trying to please their direct bosses.
Those bullshit jobs which pull the great bulk of humanity together to pay the mortgage and buy groceries and degrees and Beanie Babies and cocaine... They are the substrate from which real progress grows.
In addition to all of the other valid observations, I think some of the impetus to create these bullshit jobs is to maintain a certain level of employment we wouldn't have otherwise only because thr alternative jobs wouldn't be excepted.
I.e., take all your excess administrators and TSA employees and offer them jobs that are in demand but unwanted like construction or something. I doubt they'd take them.
People want office jobs, so we find ways to make office jobs.
It would be ok to replace "Mr Smith tells me he has chronic back pain" with "Mr Smith has chronic back pain", if the former is enough evidence to make that diagnosis. If he was diagnosing Mr Smith with cancer, or depression, the doctor's note wouldn't include a scan of the tumour or a transcript of the interview: the doctor should abstract those away and just present the conclusion.
True, but the presumption in the case of cancer is that:
a) The doctor in question is qualified to diagnose cancer.
b) The doctor has made that diagnosis, in the medical sense.
In this case, Scott is a psychiatrist, who is unqualified to diagnose back pain or recommend any course of treatment on the matter. He believes his client when they say that they are in pain, but that belief is a personal, not professional, opinion.
He's a medical doctor. He's qualified to diagnose back pain and recommend (professionally, not just personally) the patient tries using his own chair. As I understand it the AMA would be OK with this, while they wouldn't be OK with, say, me (not a medical professional) writing the same letter and presenting it as a professional diagnosis.
He knows the limits of his abilities and wouldn't recommend the patient take 2 weeks off work, undergo back surgery or prescribe opiates. If any of those were in the discussion, he'd tell his patient he really does need to see a specialist.
I think that the point is that it isn't enough evidence to make a diagnosis. The article expands on why it is inappropriate for a psychiatrist to make a recommendation related to back pain. He's not just "the doctor", he's a specialist with a license to practice a limited set of medicine.
What should a psychiatrist write on a doctor's note if his patient claims to suffer from cancer, no other evidence given than the claim itself? Now, depression, that's something a psychiatrist can legitimately diagnose.
Because the main symptom of back pain is the patient reporting "My back hurts". If the patient instead reported "I have this lump in my testicles that wasn't there last week", I'd certainly think it's likely he might have cancer, and some good medical advice would be "go and ask a GP about that".
Back pain is a symptom in itself. Maybe a disk has been shifted, or it's caused by a kidney infection. Maybe it's just muscle pain or sciatica related. Hell, for all we know, the back pain is caused by the chair in question. Without proper examination you can't rule these things out and make a professional recommendation as to what to do about it other than "go see an expert or general practitioner".
By phrasing the recommendation the way he did he made sure that it is understood that a) he is treating the patient for an unrelated issue, b) he isn't in a position to diagnose back related problems and c) he never examined the patient's back problems.
This is especially true for pain diagnosis which is inherently subjective and if possible relies on self evaluation (even though some methods exist to complement or replace self evaluation with external observation).
> In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?
There are lots of reasons for bullshit tasks, I found. And let's call it tasks, not jobs. Because a job is something regular that pays a monthly income, and there ARE certainly complete bullshit jobs!
One reason, as mentioned here, is process. Everything needs a process, so that it's clear (or rather that it's unclear, but more about that later) who's responsible, what needs to be done, and that there is an objective checklist to show that something is done when it's done. It sounds stupid but it makes complex things work. In a relatively big company for this chair topic a number of separate, independent units, who might not even know each others existence, need to cooperate on a task that is split in organisational, financial and temporal terms. That is hard. But with a process it's possible to get finished at some point.
The second thing is that each company that is still alive had a time of growth and a time when they where stuck. When you are stuck, you can't just fire everybody. And you can't allow people to just browse Facebook all day. So what do you do? You create bullshit tasks. That keeps the juice flowing. And if an interesting, profitable opportunitiy comes up you still have people, orgs, etc setup so you can start approaching it. It also makes sense, to some degree.
The third one I can immediately think about might come as shock to some people. We grow up with the believe that things are equal and supposed to be fair. Truth is, the world sucks and is an unfair place. Therefore power hierarchies really exist, even in the seemingly most open places. Even at the cool company you heard about and really want to work at. And what do people do who achieved some powers in these virtual pyramids? They create obstructions for the people below them so they can't follow them upstairs and maybe even take their seat. Bullshit processes, bullshit tasks, and bullshit jobs help greatly with that. This might look inefficient, but in fact might actually be the most efficient system in existence. Because it works. It worked in the stone age, in the medieval times, in modern dictatorships, and also (sadly) in modern democracies. Like the invisible hand that governs the resource allocation in free markets, power structures are always there and make things work. Maybe not like you want it, but you are also not at the top of the pyramid, right?
Alright, that's what I can think off. They do valuable things, just that the value is not obvious to you nor is the value shared with you. That's why it looks like bullshit.
There is a thing that I don't understand from the original article[1]:
> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Does the author really mean that if you don't work you still deserve something in return? That one kinda sounds like bullshit. Has that been expanded upon somewhere?
Also, the author mentions that this was already attempted during the 60s and that it ended in a disaster but doesn't tell what that was. I am not from America, so I don't really know the history of the country during the 60s. What happened?
If you buy in to Yuval Noah Harari's narrative than the limiting factor has been and is flexible cooperation within group, at scale. It is what out highly developed sences of politics and religion are for. Its what money is for, caste systems, popes, grand admirals, corporations and premium fashion brands.
In any case... a lot of traditional "bullshit jobs" are about. Middle management. Lawyering, reporting, coordinating, administrating, bureaucratic procedure management....etc.
Maybe we should think of these as extremely inefficient ways of solving that neverending "problem" of flexible cooperation in large groups. Even though the low hanging fruit is gone and the marginal efforts are extremely inefficient... throwing resources at bottleneck is ... to be expected.
Just a thought. Not sure that I'm convinced myself. I think it might explain the chair rule though.
I felt that the note could be understood as mildly passive aggressive. Maybe adding something like “I have no reason not to believe him/her” would remove any interpretation that you're writing this note out of obligation but do not believe the patient.
Good post btw; I have no input on ethics and would be stumped as well.
Language is so tricky. Adding that extra sentence would make the note more passive aggressive, at least to my ear.
Suppose you were looking for a Python programmer, and I sent you these two notes:
(1) Joe asked me to put him in touch with you. Joe tells me he has a lot of experience with Python. Here's his email address.
(2) Joe asked me to put him in touch with you. Joe tells me he has a lot of experience with Python, and I have no reason not to believe him. Here's his email address.
The second one would leave me far more skeptical about the recommendation.
But he does want to help the patient, does he not? But to write something else would be to take the burden of proof into his hands. "Obligation" also makes it sound like he's forced to do it, it's more like without further tests which would inconvenience the patient, he can't be sure the patient is reporting the truth (even with the patient in front of him, he wouldn't be able to objectively observe pain, and he can only ask and believe the answer).
But the note fixes the stupid problem of "The rules say no special chairs without a doctor's note"...
I think the "burden of proof" part is exactly what's holding him up. As a skeptic, and an analytically minded person, and perhaps even as a blogger - he's uncomfortable writing "Mr Smith has chronic back pain" without a little more concrete evidence.
I'm arguing that as a doctor he shouldn't require more evidence in this case. It's fine to write "Mr Smith has chronic back pain and I recommend he can use his own chair" and be right only 80% of the time, and introduce a process whereby sneaky chair-seeking miscreants can reliably get a doctor's note even if they don't have back pain. It's fine because the consequences of being wrong are extremely low. In practice doctors should be, and often are, OK with making diagnoses of much more serious conditions that are only 80% or 90% or 99% likely to be correct, even when some other test could reduce the uncertainty further. If he's waiting to be 100% certain a patient has bipolar disorder or anorexia before prescribing any treatment, he's doing them a disservice.
The level of certainty required should be in line with the severity of the condition being diagnosed, and of the recommended treatment. And when writing a note to an employer, it's correct to say "Mr Smith has cancer" or just "Mr Smith has a medical condition", not "I'm 94% sure Mr Smith has cancer, perhaps the next scan will be more conclusive".
Proceedures are like a web of safety nets. Companies want to avoid risk, so they focus on making the nets tighter and tighter. Eventually, the nets are so densely woven that the possibility of injury for any tightrope walker dancing on the line becomes nil. You can see while this is only for the best interests of the circus as a whole (they can’t afford to replace tightrope walkers all the time) and for the tightrope walker himself (he won’t get injured) it saps his vocation of any risk, excitement, and thrill, and effectively eradicates everything that made the circus a circus and exciting place to be in the first place.
Such is the field of pencil-pushing work today—except the massive corporations have captive audiences, so in spite of the incredibly flaccid shows they put on, the crowd can’t help but pay for a ticket anyway.
As some mentioned before bullshit jobs exist because the corporate world still thinks in terms of hours instead of production. People have zero incentive to reduce or automate their work, something that every solo freelancer is struggling to do daily if he wants to survive.
Since they need to fill their hours quota somehow they create meetings and procedures and more job functions that are needed in order to be in line with those new procedures.
The bigger the corporate the bigger the time and money waste. Meeting become global team meetings that costs tons of money, jobs that can be easily automated become complete departments and so on.
Only in a corporate culture where the only thing measured and compesnated is output - there you will see almost zero bullshit.
There's a well-known reason for these requirements: they are an attrition tactic. It erects barriers to obtaining insurance benefits. Many give up, reducing the costs to the insurance company. It happens with WAY more than chairs, and is fundamentally unethical.
Let me take the opposing view (not just for fun’s sake): I think one reason why BS jobs exist is to keep everybody busy. if there were no bullshit jobs, what would we do with all the people? Maybe we end up
with many more people unemployed, maybe watching TV all day?
I'd rather see those people using their time hiking mountains, watching tv shows, doing arts... than go spend their day at a useless job that will make them feel unhappy because of the lack of accomplishment.
Would some people watch TV all day? Sure. However, there are tons of people that are trapped at a desk for 8 hours a day browsing the internet and watching Youtube videos anyway. I don't see all that much of a difference outside of freedom. "Busy" in this context just essentially means must keep their butt in their seat for 8 hours. Giving people freedom with their time allows people to write books, make music, paint pictures, learn skills, create products, etc.
Is it all positives? Probably not. I could see issues with people isolating themselves with no requirement to go into an office. But personally, I don't think unemployment is worse than bullshit jobs. Being busy is not a good metric to go by. If I carry buckets of water back from the river all day, I'm busy. But that's incredibly stupid to do if I have running water.
Welcome in bureaucraty world! This patient needed a medical note so that his employer authorizes him to bring his own chair. This medical note is completely fancy and does not contain any assesment about health. For bureaucratic procedure, it is perfect.
I’ve been at offices that require notes like this. (The company paid for special chairs) The reason listed was “we want to introduce some friction - enough that we are not using VC money to buy special equipment for everyone”
I did something a few months ago and pulled something in my back. Went to the doctor when the pain hadn't gone after a few days and it was exactly as described. He made me do a few movements until i triggered it, then told me i had lumbago, take some painkillers. I got home and googled lumbago, which basically told me I had back pain.
(As a side note I had some kratom, which worked wonderfully for this, better than the ibuprofen I was prescribed. Fortunately my pain went away after a few days, but I see that the DEA wants to ban kratom in the US. That would be pretty bad for many who use it for chronic pain).
My understanding of the kratom situation is that the worst danger is how it's all too easy for it to become habitual. I absolutely do not think it ought to be banned (nor any psychoactive plant for that matter), but interested parties should be forewarned.
Many advocates may only use it occasionally and/or in consistently low doses, but there are plenty of accounts out there of users ramping up dosage and then having a really hard time getting off it. Withdrawals from heavy use read a lot like similar accounts of kicking a Vicodin habit.
Agreed, I subscribe to some kratom subreddits and some people do seem a bit irresponsible with their use. And after two or three weeks of daily use I could see it getting addictive. Though it wasn't hard to cut back on at all, but I wasn't using particularly high amounts.
"Nothing we do in this large department of ours is really very important, and there’s never any rush. On the other hand, it is important that we let people know we do a great deal of it."
What allows a firm to stay competitive if there are many apparently wasteful tasks being done? Should that firm not be superseded by competitors offering better efficiency (reflected in prices) or consumer benefit?
An industry that accommodates a lot of bullshit work is an industry with high transaction costs. The author hints at that at the end of the article, but leaves it an open question.
A test of a bullshit job (or procedure) is whether we could get rid of it. Could we get rid of the doctor's note requirement, or of the compliance officers in the company insisting on one?
In a start-up or small company, yes. Bring your own chair to work day! In a larger company where people don't know each other or there are many employees on low pay or short contracts, not so much. They'd be worried about people stealing the furniture, or bringing in furniture that was not fire safe and then getting sued.
If stealing office furniture is an actual concern and ongoing problem that company has some incredibly fundamental problems. Personally i would just bring the damn chair in and play dumb.
I know if you have worked only in software companies where everyone is paid six figure salaries then you will think that stealing stores and company property must be incredibly rare and deviant behaviour, but at most companies this is a very real concern of management and something that happens regularly.
The explanation for BS jobs is that the economy is not nearly as "efficient" as we hope that it may be. Incumbents at the top, stay at the top, regardless of how inefficient they may become. A number of forces including government and regulation, and barriers to entry confound to reinforce the position of mega incumbents that simply stay at the top forever.
On the plus side, I'm hopeful that the rise of BS jobs will increase work life balance.
In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?
and
It seems to be an issue of people spending time and money to create and satisfy procedures that degenerate into rituals, so that they can look all procedural and responsible in front of – courts? regulators? bosses? investors?
People aren't exactly that stupid. Its really more on the lines of malice.
I remember in my first job, it was a big IT services company in Bangalore, India. Our manager created some project initiatives to align corporate initiatives on the lines of 'Promoting Green Technologies'. Two or three people in the evening/night would stay behind and check if people's desktops were on. Mostly people just locked the computers and went home. This was necessary because many people kept IDE's and many other work related stuff running, coming back morning and redoing all that for an hour or two was a waste of time.
But these bunch of three would go around and see if someone's desktop was still powered on. They could then turn off the switch(hard turn off) on the wall socket. Next day people would come and then be mightily surprised finding all their unsaved work, or work state itself wiped out.
After a lot of fights and arguments. They decided they would just send reports instead of turning it off. The reports would then act as way of shaming people for 'wasting energy'. They eventually even got around to automating it.
Months later we saw, It was nothing about promoting green technologies or saving the earth or anything. The three people who were doing it were the manager's pet, and he wanted to promote them. He thought having a line item on 'corporate goal achievement' on their promotion packets would further their cause well. Then we saw those three get promoted over the real people were actually building stuff and delivering things.
Generally when these things happen in a company you need to think on the opposite lines of Heinlein's Razor. Some one somewhere has hiring quotas and budgets, some one is getting promoted, or getting a bonus or getting paid well for bringing up these stupid policies and jobs.
Things exist because there is an incentive for them to exist.
I was listening to Feynman's lectures on Quantum Mechanics this morning, and he was talking about the lattice structure of materials and how different lattice structures permeate EM waves and stuff. You've got this repeating atomic structure. Each of them is carbon, or hydrogen or iron or whatever. I suppose in essence you could say on their own each of these is "bullshit" but it's the repeating lattice structure that gives a material it's properties. This reductionist view of "bullshit" jobs is kind of silly - some jobs are unfulfilling, or seemingly pointless but you can only really evaluate them in the overall structure and productivity of the organisation. It's the emergent lattice that counts, not the individual elements.
In the case of this article, author is looking at a single aspect of a larger organisation, and like the blind men and the elephant [0] can only guess at the reasons.
There could well be good reasons for these processes and procedures. Could be to do with management accountability, or insurance (more likely). The fact that in isolation it seems "silly" is notwithstanding that there might a reason in a larger organisational context. Kind of like a traffic light hardwired to red because at scale, operationally it just makes more sense to do it that way [1] (this article is a bad example because it doesn't go into the explanation as to "why" - operationally, which when I actually heard it seemed quite reasonable - can't find it now).
The way I look at management is like this - a LED produces light by way of spontaneous emission, which is all well and good, but to produce a LASER you need all these photons to be emitted in phase which requires a whole heap of extra bullshit circuitry to create to produce stimulated emission. There is a curve of cost/efficiency where you can go "oh well why am I spending all this money when all I want is light" - but if you don't do all this extra "inefficient" stuff, well then you can't have optical communication, CDs or a fancy lightshow.
Don't get me wrong, there are inefficient organisations that produce little, or even do damage, but IMHO by looking at individual jobs we're looking in the wrong place.
Since this is an entrepreneurial crowd here on HN, if this is such an issue than why not create meaningful jobs! Use your creativity and help spread entrepreneurship and create products and services that people love, enjoy or makes someone else's life easier! Or better yet do some research and find cheap energy or new treatments for diseases!
This is wonderfully concise and spot-on. With respect to the American health care system, it's painfully accurate. An unbelievable amount of economic activity in the US health care system ultimately boils down to a whole lot of ceremony in order to fit a square peg into a medical billing code sized hole.
Bullshit jobs are the new "I closed my Facebook account" articles these days. Everybody talks about it and tries to say it's a symptom of our society going wrong.
I personally prefer bullshit than dangerous jobs. And technology allowed us to switch from the latter to the former. That's good news to me!
I worked in an organization with lots of processes. I was in an office with no windows, a bit of a hole or maybe even oubliette. You couldn’t tell time of day, weather, etc but it was better than a cubicle.
My door opened to a 10 foot hallway with and about 5 feet down there was a large window. It was a weird L-shape and no one else’s office or cube or anything was in the hallway to nowhere. So it was kind of nice that no one walked by and it was off the beaten path.
The window in the hallway was closed with blinds. But if I opened them it was possible to get some ambient light effects so while I couldn’t see out it from inside my office, I could tell if it was day or night. So it was better.
A few weeks went by and the blinds were closed one day. That’s weird, no one comes by here. I asked some nearby coworkers if they knew who closed and why and they didn’t know. No one knew. The entire floor is probably the size of a football field and has 100 offices around the edge with 200 cubes and conference rooms and stuff in the middle. My team is probably 10 people and there’s lots of other groups.
No one I knew knew and didn’t really care. I maybe spent 2-3 minutes because I was surprised that anyone walked by here, much less cared. I opened the blinds and when about my business.
About a week later, the blinds were closed again. Weird, but again I checked and no one I knew cared. I opened them again.
3 days later, they were closed. Repeat a few times and now I was opening them every day and someone else was closing them. Weird and funny.
This went on for a few days and the blinds would close in the middle of the day. I spend about 3-6 hours out of my office doing different stuff so I come and go. So I would now open them whenever I noticed them back down during the day.
Finally, I’m in my office and I hear the metallic zip sound of blinds closing. I stick my head of of my office and say hello to someone from a different floor and group, I’ll call her Betty.
I ask Betty what’s up and she tells me that she’s closing the blinds. I ask why and she says because they are supposed to be closed. I explain why I like them open and that there’s no one else who sees this window and she again says the blinds must be down.
Interesting. I love arbitrary rules as a big board game fan. I ask about why, and she says that no building things can be changed without a business justification as required by OSHA, fire marshalls, and emergency coordinators.
I tell her that I think this wouldn’t apply to something as minor as a window blind, but assured me it’s for everything.
I try a different tack and propose that the natural state is open, and that she is actually the one who needs a justification to close. But she’s too smart for that, she produces an inventory of the building that she makes each January that clearly shows the blinds closed for the past few years.
She is not joking or being ironic. She’s serious.
So I ask how business justifications are evaluated and she says that they are submitted to her and she evaluates them. There’s no template or format and no one has ever submitted one in the 10 years she was in this role.
Wow, ok. I go ahead and tell her I’ll write one and ask how to submit them.
This is funny to me, so later that evening, I spend a few minutes and write up a justification email. It’s pretty bullshit and basically says “Window blinds open makes me happier, and thus more productive. Closed blinds reduce productivity and thus reduce organization impact. Yadda Yadda Yadda.”
It’s maybe two paragraphs. She replies that my justification is insufficient and blinds will stay closed.
This is now less funny. So I look her up in the company director. She is a random workgroup’s Secretary and is a contractor who has been in the building forever. She has contracted for three different organization, but has always sat there. She schedules appointments and orders staples and stuff for about 20 of the hundreds of people in the building. She’s on a different floor than me. There’s five floors. Her group is entirely on a different floor.
This is bizarre. With this knowledge, I resubmit a revised justification. She denies it again. I respond copying her contracting monitor or whatever you call the person who organizes the contract, pointing out this bizarre process. The contracting person is confused and responds that this is not in any contract, they don’t give a shit, and question why this is done.
Then there’s silence for via email for a few days. The contracting person responds that the blinds will stay open. I never hear from Betty again.
I moved out of that office about 5 years ago. The blinds stayed open while I was there.
About a year or two ago, I was in that building and I walked by my old area to talk to some former co-workers and noticed the blinds were down.
I gave a quick recap and the current occupant didn’t care and hadn’t noticed. But they did say that Betty was still there.
I think people get really invested in a process they think is important, but is only important to them. A co-worker called this “building imaginary castles in the sky.”
It was really cool to them, but meaningless to any observer. Sometimes it’s useful in the long run for something else, but hard to tell immediately.
There’s confusion that gets compounded and you have real stuff wrapped around it. It seems like it may be bullshit.
For all the talk about bullshit jobs, I don’t recall seeing a single example of one that made me think “yep, that job is clearly creating no value for anyone”.
Dog washer is mentioned. Sure it’s a luxury, but bullshit? There are clearly people willing to pay for that service.
The OP asks a key question: "In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?"
Anyone wondering this should skim the book, which squarely addresses this concern: "This is always represented as exactly what would never happen under capitalism. The last thing a private firm, competing with other private firms, would do is to hire people it doesn’t actually need. If anything, the usual complaint about capitalism is that it’s too efficient, with private workplaces endlessly hounding employees with constant speed-ups, quotas, and surveillance."
Makes me think of every 1st tier support interaction I’ve ever had where a person can’t answer a single question and just refers you to online resources you’ve already read and couldn’t find the answer to.
You need a note to bring in a chair? At all the startups I have worked for - as long as it isn’t illegal you can bring it in. At zynga they moved my desk to install a keg. (Edit 2008 zynga)
Regarding the back pain from sitting to much: IKEA has an electrical standing desk called BEKANT for a little more than 500 EUR. This was life changing for me.
"why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable".
The short answer: they might not be doing anything valuable, but that doesn't mean they aren't valuable.
I'm not a sociologist, so this is 'anecdotal', but I have consulted in and worked with a large number of companies during my professional 'career.
First key insight I gained is that [b]the larger the company, the greater the distance between personal action and institutional success[/b].
In a very small business, your own actions directly influence and visibly contribute to the success or failure of the company. As the company gets larger, your own actions or even complete lack their-off will for the vast majority of employees not visibly influence the needle.
In absence of this tight coupling between personal actions and company outcomes, the majority of people will be optimizing decisions in terms of the outcome for [i]themselves[/i], something their direct actions most certainly influence, rather than for some nebulous and intangible 'for the benefit of the enterprise'.
As large companies invariably have a multi-layered hierarchical structure, the lack of objective measurement in company contribution will not counterbalance the 'career-optimizing' forces, and so the average 'me'-focused person will tend to 'out-compete' a more holistic 'company-minded' individual when it comes to climbing the hierarchy.
Optimizing for personal gain does not align with company efficiency unless by accident. It often even contradicts it as 'small but efficient' solutions are the exception as their creation might benefit the one person that can claim the credit for it at some point and rise to the next level, yet burn that bridge for everyone 'coming behind' as they now are just heading a small division instead of shepherding over a large number of warm bodies and the size of the spending-budget they 'control', the universal career success measure for management.
Second key insight: [b]companies are legal entities, but don't [i]realy[/i] exist as a conscious entity.[/b]
Let me explain what I mean. As an external consultant, you never work for company X, you work for person A, the person that hires you. Same (but different), as an employee, you don't realy work for company Y, you work for the benefit of persons B and C, people that got you onto their team to improve their situation.
Combined, both of these insights lead to the realization that a vast number of people do not work because they create by their work actions, their 'job', a focused benefit to 'the company', the 'customers/clients' or 'society at large', all of which are typical personal 'value' related vectors.
They work because they are foot-soldiers that provide 'value' in the managerial hierarchy wars, which is something most people will not recognize as 'value' but as 'bullshit'.
A third key realization(I promise, I'll keep it at that), and the one that answers [b]'but why are these inefficient behemoths not put to rest by highly efficient competitors[/b], is that a lot of people tend to misinterpret Darwinian dynamics, a common popular conceptual model in thinking about 'markets' and 'efficiencies'.
Popular interpretation that of the 'survival of the fittest'. They imagine animals (enterprises and businesses in this context), to be in an eternal struggle (red in tooth and claw), resulting in the leanest and meanest, the most efficient providing the best 'fit', rising to the top. The invisible hand of the market will create optimal, highly efficient companies in each sector. Unfortunately this model and the interpretation there-off are deceiving. Rather than selecting for the best, a Darwinian dynamic 'just' selects for a sufficient fit to a niche, and only works by weeding out the bottom, those that fail to find a place in any niche at all. In 'static' systems running for a sufficiently long time, promoting the top or weeding out the bottom can lead to the same outcome. In 'dynamic' systems, where 'niches' change over time, both mechanisms can have very different outcomes. Theoretically speaking, top selection tends to efficient but 'over-fitted' solutions, bottom removal does not favor efficiency but resilience, doing 'good-enough' to survive under very many circumstances.
Companies that truly 'solve' a problem (something that is definitely on the 'value' scale when people think about 'is my job meaningful'), either eliminate the very basis of their existence by eradicating the 'problem' they solve. It's hard to think of such things or companies, because both they and their reason for 'existence' have disappeared. A more stable solution in terms of company (and thus job) existence must have an ongoing number of cases to 'solve', ideally (in terms of stability) by having the 'solution' create it's own demand for more 'solution', a dependency. People think we as a society weed these out, because they are culturally immediately conditioned to think of 'heroin' or 'illegal substances' as the example of the archetype of of the dependency inducing concept. Thing is that our whole socio-economic market system is based on creating and sustaining ongoing dependency.So once again, people seeing that the company they work for doesn't solve but even plays a role in creating the problems it pretends to solve, again find their job 'meaningless' at best.
This is the comment i came here for. SlateStars previous 'meditations on moloch' considered the idea of complex capitalist systems, and a relentless trend towards efficiency and Survival of participants within the system that eventually snuffs out art, freedom, and results in dire consequences for both the participants and the wider environment.
This interpretation is similar to the one put forward here by Graeber, and as you point out, similarly overestimates the effectiveness of the feedback mechanisms that drive 'fit' or 'fitness' and especially overestimates the willingness or incentive of participants, including corporations as well as workers, to adapt beyond a point where survival, at least for a time, is achieved.
I entirely agree that bullshit jobs exist, and in significant number as a result of a number of factors, but i often suspect that a 'hypercapitalist' system, with greater resource allocation efficiency and price or other signalling, would just be a miserable gig-driven dystopia.
At least with a bullshit job you can condition yourself to relax and enjoy the ride...
Meta-analysis shows antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy. No significant difference between the studies with and those without a placebo condition.
Does psychotherapy work? An umbrella review of meta‐analyses of randomized controlled trials finds only 7% of studies provided convincing evidence that psychotherapy is effective. These pertained to cognitive behavioural therapy (n = 6), meditation therapy (n = 1), cognitive remediation (n = 1), counselling (n = 1) and mixed types of psychotherapies (n = 7).
Trauma and victimhood have also been way overstated, overlooking that most people recover from traumatic experiences; that duration and and frequency of trauma are uncorrelated with subsequent disorder.
AFAICT none of the links you give offer any support for the claim that "psychiatry is bullshit".
Several, if anything, support the exact opposite (e.g "antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy" -- 'psychiatrist' is not a synonym of 'psychotherapist', a psychiatrist is a medical doctor specialising in mental illness, so is licensed to prescribe antidepressants). Most of the others are just not relevant to the claim ("Young children emerge from single potentially traumatic events psychologically unharmed" -- how exactly is that supposed to be evidence that psychiatry is bullshit? By some kind of hidden implication that just because thing X does not cause mental illness, therefore mental illnesses don't exist?)
Yes, I predominately mean psychotherapy. The links I've listed mostly just provide hints of excessive psychologizing and quackery, but it is indeed awkward when >90% of psychotherapy methods do not perform better than placebo. There seems to be quackery in the medical side of psychiatry as well, but to a lesser extent.
I actually hold the view that we no longer live in a capitalistic society per se, but a neofeudal one. A lot of modern companies, especially the really big ones, seem to be less interested in competing in the open market and more interested in rent extraction.
So for example, with regards to startups growing rapidly on VC funding:
What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise, and thus create a lot of bullshit jobs.
Having gone to the Internet for advice (and I don't mean just Googling symptoms and taking a guess, I mean those actual pay for medical advice sites), I have a handle on what your GP is for - they provide some sort of accountability and responsibility.
Once, at my wits end with a problem with my child I went to one such site even though I knew it was a bad idea - it's basically a stackoverflow but staffed by real doctors (apparently) and you pay per answer. It's not terribly expensive, but literally any advice you have will be totally vague and contain the instruction to "see your GP". No reputable professional would put their nuts on the line for a remote diagnosis.
1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.
This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of boredom and meaninglessness. I would argue that part of the stalemate is caused by politics and social norms. Even though there is not much actual work to be done, people still tend to tie their self-worth and social status to employment. This leads them to demand jobs from politicians, and the politicians find a way to provide them. "Jobs" is usually one of the main topics in any modern election. A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation.
As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous. Unfortunately, I bet we will get out of this stalemate in a rather nasty way: through resource depletion and environmental collapse.
It depresses me that our species hasn't been fundamentally able to elevate itself above basic monkey-like biological programs and do better than this.