If bullshit jobs are *really* bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?
Businesses are in it for the money, employees tend to be one of the larger expenses, so maintaining some bullshit positions that would cost them money doesn’t make fiscal sense, so what’s up?
The same reason the military gets soldiers to fill sandbags and other soldiers to empty the same sandbags. Because the system only has to be good enough not to fail.
I think a lot of bullshit jobs exist because as a society we have decided that everyone absolutely has to work at a job in order to live. There isn’t enough work to be done for every single person to contribute so we have to invent work so we can pay people so they can make money to live in society.
If some day we manage to implement a universal basic income then I think this will eliminate a lot of the problem.
I'd have to disagree with this. Why would all companies just unilaterally agree to waste money so people can make a living. If that were the drive, they'd also pay thriving wages, etc.
Because it’s a lot deeper than simple profit. How many jobs have you been at where someone is abysmal but no one wants to fire them because no one wants to have been in the position of doing that to another person and removing their livelihood
Why would all companies just unilaterally agree to waste money so people can make a living
The motivations of the company are often very different to the motivations of senior staff within the company.
Mid-level manager is obsessed with building his empire within the company. The bigger their division, the happier they are.
Mid-level manager creates bullshit jobs and justifies them up the chain. "Our team is vital to the company and my staff is swamped. I need to increase my headcount".
That's fine. That's my point though. The intentions are entirely different. I don't think any company is actively worried about ensuring people are employed. The end result of a bunch of other motivations may be the same, but my statement is about the why.
I don’t think it is intentional. I think it is more like a phenomenon. I think entire companies can potentially be bullshit. It’s not like the people working there aren’t making the company money so nobody is deciding to hire people for no reason. It’s just that these people and businesses are mostly working bullshit jobs. So much of the economy is based on doing nearly pointless work so it enables further pointless work.
Really it depends on your exact definition of pointless. If our only goal is to survive then we can probably succeed at that with 5-10% of the work that is being done now. Everyone else isn’t doing something that is directly contributing to humanities survival. That seems a little extreme as I personally believe that things like entertainment, art and making life more comfortable are all meaningful to society. There could be some definition of pointless that a majority agrees on that implies that 25-50% of jobs are not doing much of anything.
Oracle was almost entirely bullshit when my friend worked there in the mid-90s.
You can coast off a high-margin business into pure BS for a while before it catches up. Particularly with an egomaniac CEO who is checked out at the moment.
It mostly revolves around the belief that a successful company needs a certain set of moving parts. Workers. Management. HR. Accountant. Etc. Usually it’s not necessarily a bad premise, but often they just hire to fill these rolls first, rather on need and the right time.
So you get a bunch of people mostly sitting around with unclear or obtuse duties because the same people need to justify their job. That cyclical pattern basically becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and can even take down established companies if they don’t keep up with the markets they are in.
My guess is that it’s because it takes significant resources for management to identify which jobs are bs. But layoffs are not uncommon, and that’s a form of a business no longer justifying the expense of some jobs.
A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).
Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).
Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.
A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.
Do not assume that most people in a corporate management structure work towards company profit. Having people under you makes you powerful and helps your career.
As a career-hunter, I convince corporate leadership that I can re-architect their dying and mismanaged software if I get a team of 20 cheap outsourced devs and four years. It will be everything the old system was plus several new and innovative ways to capture the market. This is not remotely possible, but I manage to convince corpo that it is.
Everyone under me are doing bullshit work that will accomplish nothing, but we have SCRUM and promotions and time tracking and all the toys in the box to distract everyone.
After four years, I have lead a department of 20 people successfully for four years, which gives me momentum to move up the ladder.
Or maybe the thing is killed in mere two years, and I can fail upwards. I dared to dream and I managed a deparment for two years and am the right person to do New Thing X.
100% this. My company is going through a reorg and I now have to work for 10 new managers who know absolutely nothing about the company or the business. Their track record of failing at some other similar competitor and being ousted got them in the door here.
No one understands the job of the other guy. Managers’ job is litteraly to fill the spreadsheets so everything looks fine. Reality of the job or the times you need don’t matter. Upper in the hierarchy they are completely blind to what happens in their company.
The best companies are the ones where the information trickle up the best. It’s still trickling, but it’s enough that at least the people who do some work can do it decently well when they do work.
Other commenters have covered the organizational inefficiencies that allow bullshit jobs to exist pretty well. I'd like to also point out that larger organizations have more of these inefficiencies (part of what is known as "diseconomies of scale", the counterpart to the more well-known term "economies of scale"). Our capitalist society actively subsidizes larger organizations, both literally and figuratively, resulting in more bullshit jobs and more economically wasteful behavior in general.
A non-capitalist free market society (such as a mutualist one) would have significantly smaller and more efficient organizations across the board. One can't eliminate organizational efficiency entirely, but we currently have a lot of room for improvement.
To me, it looks like there are different levels of bullshit jobs.
There are jobs that are entirely bullshit. Like the military sandbags example: guys filling bags, other guys emptying the same bags. This is a waste of time, money, and resources, AND contributes nothing to society. Jobs like this should not exist, and CAN only exist in an environment (like the military) where essentially nobody actually involved in the process has any profit motive, or any incentive whatsoever to make the process efficient or good.
There are jobs that are bullshit to society, and this is where a lot of corpo jobs fall. They contribute nothing to society, they are meaningless to the person doing them, but somehow, some way, they contribute something to the purpose of making money for other people. And under capitalism, making money for someone other than yourself is the reason literally any job exists. If your job does not contribute to the almighty SHAREHOLDER, your job will not exist.
So if it feels like your job is bullshit, look for who you're making money for, or who you're protecting from losing a few pennies of profit. That's who your job matters to. Not you, personally. The people who decided your job should exist don't give a single fuck about you as a human being and never will, ever. But your job matters to them because your job getting done means they make more money than if it didn't, and that's all they do care about.
Despite how people act, we are fundamentally flawed and generally imperfect.
Whether we're talking about daily life or global industry, mistakes are often made, plans go awry, and processes are almost never perfectly efficient or optimized. Even the most highly engineered, well oiled machine has inefficiencies.
Businesses are just the same and they actually waste a fuck ton of money every day, but all of that (plus a healthy profit margin) is ultimately factored in to the prices that we pay for goods and services. In other words, many people have bullshit jobs that don't actually improve services optimization or production, and that wasted effort is actually paid for by all of us, the consumers.
On top of that there's another variant of bullshit job that's actually useful to the economy or society in some way, but might be inherently unfulfilling or unsatisfying on a personal human level. (For example, something like corporate data entry jobs come to mind. Potentially useful to someone, and better than being homeless, but maybe not a very meaningful way to live in the long term.)
A long line of passing down responsibility to someone else, all the way from the very tippy top executives. they hire someone to oversee operations. Those people hire people to oversee different parts of operations, all those people hire people to oversee parts of operations. Paperwork gets assigned, reports are shuffled around, meetings meetings meetings.
None of it at all relevant to making dog toys to sell, even though all of them are much higher ranked than the people that make dog toys at Dog Toy Inc.
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