If bullshit jobs are really bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ALostInquirer@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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?

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freamon@endlesstalk.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I always took the term ‘bullshit jobs’ to refer to jobs that produce something that society doesn’t really require, and typically only exists because they need someone to deal with the output of someone else’s bullshit job.

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- ParkingPsychology@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Society isn't really good at knowing what it requires. And sometimes it's better to be cautious. Also capitalism breaks down in certain markets, one of which is the "job market".
  
  Any market that involves a lot of players and little oversight will get manipulated like crazy, including the job market. Employers try to counter that, but in the end the people that are best at getting hired for a job get that job, not the people that are best at doing that job. How could it not be?
  
  And that includes the jobs of the people that do the hiring. So it's a market that's rife with inefficiencies.
  
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  - hglman@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It breaks down a lot because most things arent markets.
    
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Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- Eklypss@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- bob_wiley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    (I am not actually doing this. I was using a hypothetical writing style.)
    
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neptune@dmv.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Read the book by Graeber. It’s pretty easy to find a pdf copy online.

There’s a lot of different reasons and it varies depending on the type of bullshit job, the industry, the country, etc.

Here’s a good example. It might make sense to re-train or fire members of a low performing team. But instead you hire more people to basically just redo the poorly done work. It would make economic sense, initially to fire them and replace them with less people and less rework, but morale, pensions or other factors may make firing them unpalatable.

Risk aversion. If you have a team of twenty people who only put in half days of work, well now you can easily absorb double workload when the business needs to.

Maybe a VP has a big ego and demands to hire a big new team. Most people think it’s a waste, but no one wants to tel the VP “no”. Afraid the industry veteran will quit or work. So they get their team of questionable value and it makes everyone feel good that this powerful person now leads more people/teams.

The short answer is the market is never fully efficient. I mean, it can’t be. Not even serious capitalists would expect it to be.

Seriously, read the book. It’s not super long.

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- ALostInquirer@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thanks for the suggestion & info, I didn’t remember there being a book titled as such as I wrote the question, lol
  
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- pjhenry1216@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Read the book by Graeber. It’s pretty easy to find a pdf copy online.
  
  Which book?
  
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  - WillRegex@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bullshit Jobs. Graeber’s the one who coined the term.
    
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satanmat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ll also add that managers don’t think like normal people…

IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.

But Sales. Well that’s all profit. So we should give them all the money.

Even if we closed sales most people who want our stuff will still buy it from us, but nothing will get done without IT…

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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- dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.
  
  This was the “Doom talk” I had to have with my boss repeatedly when I was in a pure IT position. As in, he would bitch about, “Every time I come into your office you’re just sitting here playing Doom.” (It was not, for the record. At the time, it was Half Life 2 or, more occasionally, Unreal Tournament 2K4. But to your common-or-garden PHB, all first person shooters look alike.)
  
  I had to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that your IT guy sitting around playing “Doom” is the ideal scenario during business hours. Why? Because if I am sitting here doing this, that means none of the millions of dollars of mission critical IT infrastructure that your building full of engineers relies upon every second to perform work for billable hours is on fire. If any of said infrastructure catches fire, I am here, on site, to put it out. Not on call. Not four hours away. Right here, right now. Then I go back to playing “Doom.”
  
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- bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  And your competitors would love you for closing your Sales department.
  
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JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Being bullshit does not mean unprofitable. Most of the financial sector is socially useless, a complete waste of talent as well as effort. But it pays well.

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Xariphon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
if you go by david graeber’s bullshit jobs, some of these are some sort of status symbol, some are made up to diffuse responsibility, there were more that i don’t remember. at any rate bullshit job is labeled as such by a worker

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- skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  
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Icaria@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- pjhenry1216@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Pons_Aelius@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    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".
    
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  - scoutFDT@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Because the alternative is a bunch of hungry people with pitchforks and a large amount of free time.
    
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Little8Lost@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Managers dont want to be fired so they claim that they are important. At least that is what i got, dont know if it is really true

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cacheson@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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Nollij@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Can you clarify what, specifically, you mean by bullshit jobs?

For instance, I’ve seen some recent discussions about (mostly IT) jobs where you can do nothing almost all the time. These exist because every once in a while, they are REALLY important. There’s also a lot of mystery about what’s involved, usually from automation changing the workload.

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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Also non-technical people need to understand that automation makes life easier, but you still need someone who knows how to do it manually to fix the automation in case it breaks or needs updating. That person will do mostly nothing most of the time, but if you didn’t had him full time he would be extremely expensive to hire on demand on a rush, since he could ask whatever price he wanted and you would have to pay it.
  
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  - ParkingPsychology@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It's not just that the person would be expensive. Systems like that require system specific knowledge. So it's possible that it would take an outsider 3 months of study to get to the point where they can fix an issue properly in 5 minutes.
    
    You can't make a baby in 1 month with 9 mothers. Some tasks just have an upfront cost and SOME IT automation jobs are like that.
    
    And yes, you can try and do bodge job after bodge job "just to keep it going". And that works for some time. But eventually the small mistakes end up causing large outages. And then you need someone that can piece together how the small issues cause big outages.
    
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  - meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Superiors not understanding what the job entails helps. Superior says do task A. Old guy not too computer savvy takes a long time to do task A. Of guy retires and a new young girl gets the role. Superior says do task A. New young girl does it in a few minutes and has extra time. I’ve run into that a lot.
    
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- ALostInquirer@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  So, what comes to mind when I write bullshit jobs are jobs simply for the sake of jobs, like to say that a business is in fact hiring for some unclear reason, or because of some cultural inertia that insists people must be working so they just make up jobs.
  
  A more realistic form would be the weird busywork kind of jobs that seemingly could be automated but just…Aren’t…For some reason, but these may be more like what you describe where it’s not exactly bullshit yet it can feel very close to it at times.
  
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  - meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sometimes those jobs that can be automated are already. At a previous job a coworker had been asked to prep a weekly report. When he took it on, this would take him half a day. I wanted to work on some excel macro skills so I worked with him to figure out what was needed. Wrote an ugly ass macro that worked for what was needed. I told him in no uncertain terms he should not tell anyone about the time savings. He should use it as he sees fit.
    
    Same job different person. HR business partner called me into her office. Had an excel file open. Ultimately what they were asking was for a simple formatting issue. I’m talking like merge and center or using the format painter. A couple times. It took her longer to explain what she needed than it took to “fix” it. She exclaimed that it probably would have taken her hours to figure that out… there were also salaries on the spreadsheet…
    
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  - Nollij@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Jobs that exist exclusively for the sake of jobs really only exist in places of government (or caused by government). Otherwise, as you mentioned, the profit motive would kick in.
    
    But what you’re mainly describing here is something different - it’s jobs that exist because someone (possibly many people) are bad at their job. Those unclear job openings? Often, it’s because Bob is leaving, and we need someone to replace him. But no one really knows what Bob does, or how to find another Bob, or even what would happen if they didn’t have a Bob. Or a PHB gets lofty ideas about what Bob’s replacement should do better, with no connection to reality. Or HR interferes with what the engineers say they actually need, and how to screen for that.
    
    The people that can literally be replaced by an Excel macro? Their work is valuable, and often something the business needs. It was probably done on paper a long time ago. At some point it got moved onto a computer, and a process was developed. This person has probably been doing it reliably for 20 years. No one wants to mess with it. Or a really big one, the corporate bureaucracy has stopped everyone that’s tried to make it better.
    
    I can attest that I’ve repeatedly been put on bullshit busywork projects because of managers that were completely detached from reality. Sure, they may sound cool, but it’s immediately obvious to anyone else that it will never actually be used. Or they themselves want to check a box on their own review with higher managers to say they accomplished something, even if they really didn’t.
    
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  - thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I’ll say this, as an engineer who’s worked closely with the brass tacks, a lot of the time when new directors or c level people are brought in, they want to own a space. There was a solution existing prior to them, because the company already existed before they joined. But no one wants to be the guy who supports the previous ideas (maintenance on an engine isn’t as sexy as designing it) because the idea doesn’t have their branding. They want to be seen as bold/innovative, etc. So they make some calls and they find a solution that promises everything they have and more. If the new solution is a success, their position is cemented, they are now a stakeholder in the company. Sales guy is going to sell his ass off, maybe the workforce has to be repurposed (need more expertise in new fields), etc. All this creates unnecessary work for people with real jobs just because a boss wants it. In the end, the new director/c level can say, “wow, this was great, look at how our metrics have improved, all thanks to me!” Despite the fact that they weren’t given all the features they were promised, or they didn’t hire/train specialized engineers to truly own the new solution. Or maybe the solution isn’t very effective. A lot of the time it’s mostly politics. People are trying to get headlines just like politicians so they can keep climbing the ladder.
    
    The way you’re describing “bullshit” jobs doesn’t exist, there are no jobs that are inherently, always bullshit. There’s just bullshit work, and a lot of people who’s job it is to do bullshit work
    
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kool_newt@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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bouh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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eran_morad@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
no one cares if they’re collecting a fat paycheck. source: i am embedded in such bullshit.

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Nemo@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Think of a rushing river. Huge volumes of water roll through, but you still have swirling eddies and stagnant pools at the edges.

It’s the same thing. Positions get overlooked. A business practice gets outmoded but not phased out right away. Miscommunication or misalignment between departments leaves goals unclear. Perverse incentives encourage inefficient behavior.

When I worked for the census, we were running behind on inputting paper forms to the database. Because we were behind, we were ordered to hire more clerks, and did. But the bottleneck was the database; we were only allowed two connections at a time. To ensure maximum efficiency, only the two or three most experienced clerks were allowed to input to the database, and the rest of us did triage on the paper forms. I carved out a role for myself (as the roughly sixth most senior clerk) as the guy who trained new hires how to pre-process the forms. And I was always busy, because we were always hiring, because we were ordered to, because we were further and further behind, because of the database bottleneck that adding more staff did nothing to address. I came away with six extra weeks of government pay and two letters of recommendation, and I haven’t worked an office job since.

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- thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What do you do now, if you don’t mind my asking?
  
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donuts@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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, but maybe not a very meaningful way to live in the long term.)

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rebelappliance@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There are no bullshit jobs. There’s no such thing as unskilled labor. These are propaganda pieces to suppress wages of the most vulnerable of society.

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- Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Those two things are not at all similar. The idea of bullshit jobs is not a propaganda thing like unskilled labor. The guy that wrote this book Bullshit Jobs would probably find that what most people think of as unskilled labor are some of the most not bullshit and most important jobs there are.
  
  Although the guy has a lot of debatable ideas that I don’t fully agree with. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  
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- NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Facebook paid an HR professional six figures for over a year to not do any actual work. Good for her and all but it does sound like her job wasn’t much of a job.
  
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  - pjhenry1216@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    So, she did do something, just not her specific job duty because she got fired after 6 months for a TikTok video. She was doing a bunch of training and was told to learn how things are done at Meta. At a large company, I would not expect a new hire to do much of anything for the first few months as they learned the ropes of how things worked. The more forward facing, theonger I'd expect. Hiring people? That's forward facing. You're choosing who to spend money on. Developers? Customers see the application. I wouldn't let them touch anything significant for a bit. I'm sure it applies to other areas as well.
    
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- Metaright@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think you misunderstand the original author's point.
  
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- Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Bullshit jobs are another issue, it’s well paid jobs, sometimes very well paid but whithout an objective way to quantify what they do. Think about the manager who organizes workshop on improving communication between team in a company or the person who does long post on Yammer to praise the company for their green transition as from today there is charging stations on the parking and directors will be given a Tesla rather than a Mercedes and other executive will be given an e-bike rather than a train card.
  
  The don’t really feel like they do something complex (or linked to there training) but just use common sense to do basic tasks. Unfortunately, these are still necessary in a large structure
  
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- ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  TFW you’re so anti-capitalist that your integer overflows and you become pro-capitalist again.
  
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Kinglink@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There’s probably bullshit jobs.

But there’s probably a lot that you think are “Bullshit jobs” and really you mean “I don’t see what they do” I thought “Scrum master” was a joke of a title for someone to do fuck all. Then I had to take over for my scrum master for 2 weeks. Holy shit, that was the most eye opening experience. He’s in 6 hours of meetings a day, talking to management, designing future work, working on requirements, dealing with the minutia, assisting everyone on and off the team, and basically keeping the 6 of us on the team from dealing with what we would call “Annoying pointless shit” which is actually really important for other people.

My scrum master talks about “Seeing the bigger picture” and I get it now. But the thing is it’d also be really easy for someone to think he has a “Bullshit job”

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atlasraven31@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There may be a financial reason, but it feels like bullshit.

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blazera@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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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meldroc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The Lumberghs in charge haven’t gotten around to bringing in the Bobs, and Lumbergh’s too chickenshit to do the job himself, so…

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Stinkywinks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Because people work at this companies. These people have friends and families.

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If bullshit jobs are *really* bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?

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If bullshit jobs are really bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?