The rise of the pointless job | Hacker News Reader

The rise of the pointless job

theguardian.com

560 pointskawera472 comments

I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest.

As a result, the samurai class, especially Tokugawa's bannermen and "inner" families, sort of lost their purpose. There were no more wars to fight - not when peace lasted "as long as the waves roll" - and the strongest rebels they could expect were peasants who could not own swords.

Because they couldn't just revoke the lands Iyeyasu had distributed (without very good reason), and to give the samurai something to do, the Edo government expanded constantly, creating dozens of superfluous or sinecure bureaucratic roles, so that the second and third sons of samurai families wouldn't just sit around at home. I believe this pattern was repeated across the various daimyo han at each castle town. Further, the samurai household themselves created redundant job openings just to get more peasants out of unemployment. This was how every samurai ended up with six porters. Even as certain samurai families sunk into abject poverty in the 1800s, as the shogunate neared its end, this policy continued: your grandfather had increased the number of household retainers from five to six, to give someone's fourth son a job; and it had become hereditary, and now that fourth son's grandson was your sixth retainer, and you couldn't destroy the position even if you could barely afford to pay him.

When I hear politicians talking about "creating jobs", I think of the shogunate.

When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are "bullshit" in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can't help but remember this kind of arrangement when listening to "jobs guarantee" rhetoric from various politicians.)

Is visited the USA just once (in 2003), but there was an old man that took my bag off the end of the luggage belt at the airport and handed it to me. I could easily have picked it up myself, but he was there for those 30 centimeters of bag travel. I remember being amazed about it and remarking the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers.

I'm always a bit taken back when visiting the toilet at clubs and some restaurants when I'm in the UK as there's a gentleman sitting by the sink handing out towels and stuff. Very strange and utterly useless. Not sure if he's paid by the club or lives of tip, but it makes me really uncomfortable. I just want to take a piss and wash my hands, not have an awkward conversation with a towel handler.

I've never once seen this in my life (I typically have over 100k miles of airline travel per year) and have been traveling for work in the US since 2000. I don't understand how this scenario would play out, does he just grab a bag at random and hold it over his head? Read off the tag? Most people I know would be incensed if someone else were to grab their bag off the luggage belt.

You might be confusing this with curb side check in, which is a service airlines use as a convenience to customers checking bags (so they don't need to go to the ticket counter with heavy/numerous bags ).

In the US you often see people holding a sign saying "slow" next to construction or road work.

This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)

> the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers

What if you were older/disabled and had trouble lifting a medium-large suitcase?

Seems like not the most useless job in the world, especially since it helps keep things moving in the airport and reduces congestion by getting people their bags slightly faster.

I find the concept of having to have someone pump gas for you (by law) another strange example of a pointless job, I'm quite capable of pumping my own gas.

When several big planes clog US customs then there are no passengers to pick up bags from the luggage belt and it can fill in entirely.

So maybe this man is not needed all the time but definitely lack of somebody to unload the belt would cause problems.

I've seen this at airports that had seemingly small or poor quality luggage belts, and figured that their actual role was to help ensure the smooth running of things and stop the belt jamming up with too many bags.

Strange experience indeed. I do not think I have ever seen that in any of USA airports, large or small.

If this was in the unsecured area, that may not have been an employee, but a stranger trolling for tips.

In Japan, there are people whose job is to stand on the station holding a “shinkansen this way” sign.

In the US, many people get their living from holding a “anything helps, homeless vet” sign at the train station.

Coming back home from Tokyo is always a major shock.

Most gates are automatic now in Japan (with a conductor sometimes checking tickets on Shinkansen after gates).

When I was in the US there was a guy handing me a towel in the bathroom. That is an incredibly meaningless and superfluous job!

Towel guy is there to prevent fucking and drug use in bathrooms (without a bribe).

> When I was in the US there was a guy handing me a towel in the bathroom. That is an incredibly meaningless and superfluous job!

On the other hand, most Americans live their entire lives in the US without ever seeing such a guy. Are you mind-bogglingly rich?

I was also thinking exactly this during my couple of years in Japan - that having a huge amount of "bullshit jobs" is one way of keeping unemployment low in an increasingly automated economy where growth is stagnating.

In an economy where having a job (or somehow having attained large sums of money because of luck/previous endeavors) is necessary to not be an outcast, this is one way of mitigating this or at least pushing the larger problem forward. We would very likely have a huge crisis if all bullshit jobs were to disappear overnight.

An economy can not be increasingly automated and increasingly stagnant. It’s one or the other. In the USA the economy has been fairly stagnant since 1973 because the post war boom ended in 1973. The move to automation also collapsed in 1973. Please see productivity trends here:

https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

You can control what years are shown on that page. I sugggest you look at 1950 to 2018. Although the data is noisy, you can see it has declined. Also note that the era of occasional double digits advances ended decades ago. The 14% in 1956 and the 12% in 1971 have never repeated this side of 1973.

The economy is stagnant because the trend toward automation has died out. Although people in tech keep predicting a robot revolution, there is no evidence of it in the productivity numbers.

A Job's Guarantee is a real movement, and a reasonable idea for this reason. Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste - might as well have them doing SOMETHING. Even if it's not especially productive, the small positive affect is better than nothing.

No. Eight hours of soul-crushing boredom every day keeps people in such jobs from doing... anything they want. Like learning stuff that might help them contribute to society in other ways (in a more useful job, maybe).

> Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste

This is a stupid societal expectation that should be fought rather than supported in the way you say.

Why not just give people a UBI and be done with it?

This is the same feeling I have when visiting the us. Remember coming into a Starbucks staffed by 5 people but only one doing something. At an airport there was a bunch of people whose job was to make sure I had my passport open prior to going through security. And so on and so on. It might just be my cultural shock though when going there. When you go to a different country you sometimes pick up 'strangeness' and generalise it to the whole country...

Never noticed this, visited Japan a few times myself. Often I had mine checked at the gate and on the train. Are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?

I recently visited and totally noticed a lot of minders, caretakers and other seemingly unnecessary jobs, mostly carried out by retirement-age employees or retired volunteers[0]. It was weird but seemed to make sense from a societal perspective, quite heartwarming.

[0] https://haywirez.com/tokyo-hong-kong-2018/

I visited Japan recently and although I think the tickets were only actually checked by one person, there did seem to be an awful lot of superfluous staff associated with any sort of transport.

Could it be because you're a foreigner? I almost certainly got picked out on every ride on the Munich S-Bahn by a fare agent for a ticket-check because I was obviously not German.

Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.

It has been my impression, having spent a significant amount of time in Germany, that German ticket checkers aren't primarily trying to detect people who have made a mistake, but those who intentionally ride without paying.

Keep an eye out for people guiding traffic in Tokyo. It's much more than in Europe

They’ve fixed it, but Japan used to have a very high pedestrian death rate from being hit by cars.

This is very similar to the situation that caused the Swiss to become the mercenaries of Europe. If you were the second son, you weren't going to inherit the farm and thus in a resource-poor country like Switzerland of the Middle Ages, your best choice was to go abroad and find some feudal lord putting together an army. Thus you became a "freelance" and hopefully found riches. I've always thought Machiavelli's dislike of mercenaries was poorly placed, as after all they were simply following the economic incentives.

This is supposedly one of the ways the crescent got on the South Carolina state flag.

Under French heraldry, it indicates a third son (when they bothered to use cadency on their coats of arms). Since his chances of inheriting the family lands & fortune were low, many of them set out for Charleston to seek their fortune, following the southern branch of the Huguenots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Carolina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenots#North_America

Does this have anything to do with New Orleans as well?

> Machiavelli's dislike of mercenaries was poorly placed, as after all they were simply following the economic incentives.

That is part of the reason he did not like them, their loyalty was bought and the "prince" who used them did not have any other leverage. It is difficult to win and then govern with mercenaries as the protectors of the kingdom. A long standing mercenary army does not convey legitimacy, and when disbanded there are issues of proper resettlement and worry about a rival acquiring their service.

I think Machiavelli's was worried that the mercs would take over. Which is effectively happened in India princes and kings hiring foreign mercs from France and Britain.

Another example is the Janissaries in turkey.

Machiavelli wasn't just "worried"; he'd seen it be attempted (sometimes successfully). Facino Cane, Vitellozzo Vitelli, and famously Francesco Sforza. (Often this would happen on the death of the previous hereditary ruler, or through taking independent control of territories conquered in an employer's name.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facino_Cane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitellozzo_Vitelli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_I_Sforza

Janissaries were slave-warriors rather than mercenaries, though.

Slave-warriors in the name only though. They were literally one of the most powerful classes in the entirety of the empire for many centuries, after the dynasty and the dirigents themselves.

true though they did later on wield massive power

Primogeniture was pretty common in the middle ages in Europe. I've read arguments that it's a big reason why the Normans basically went out conquering England, the Mediterranean, etc.

Primogeniture doesn't really set in until the High Middle Ages, and even then, there was still a fair amount of splitting inheritance up among sons (that's why the Holy Roman Empire consisted of so many small states: some of the duchies were given to splitting up to give to second and third sons).

The Norse themselves still tended to follow partitioning laws, at least until the Scandinavian kingdoms started to coalesce. The repeated invasions of England between Ethelred the Unready and the final conquest of William the Bastard were not driven by second sons needing kingdoms for themselves, it was driven by England having the best tax base in the North Sea but high political stability, as well as the dying out of family lines.

Key point about the latter: when Edward the Confessor died without issue, the claims to the English throne were:

* Edward's brother-in-law and most powerful vassal, Harold Godwinson (son of the person who put Edward on the throne in the first place)

* William, the bastard son of Edward's maternal cousin. Bolstered by "when he was staying over when he was young, he totally promised me the throne when he died."

* Harald Hardrada, whose claim is "Cnut was King of England. He died, so his claim passed to Harthacnut. Harthacnut and Magnus made an agreement that, should one die without issue, the other would inherit his lands. Harthacnut died without issue, so Magnus should have been King of England. Magnus died without issue, so his claim winds its way back to me, his father's half-brother by way of mother."

Eh. They could become merchants or craftspersons too. The options weren't starve to death or kill for money.

It would have been unthinkable, in a lot of history, for a nobleman to become a merchant or a craftsman. Not just "people think you're weird," but like your family and friends would disown you and your potential customers would all think you're insane and you'd have no way to learn the job anyway because no commoner would dare take you as an apprentice. The modern Western world has no analog for how deep the noble/commoner divide was.

Third sons wouldn't starve to death in any case, but they would rattle around the family lands making a nuisance of themselves and borrowing money from Dad. Noble families got some income from their tenants' taxes, generally, but it wasn't always enough to maintain yourself in high style. In some times/places, noblemen could get involved in trade, but that would mean funding other people's endeavors, not becoming merchants themselves. And sometimes even that was restricted or frowned upon.

Different times, social customs and norms. Generally they would have been trained in combat and warfare and not as merchants or craftsmen, which at the time were considered lower in the class hierarchy then the 2nd son of a lord or knight.

In essence him being a crafts-person or merchant would have been looked down on by everyone.

This reminds me of an entry level Business Japanese class I took many years ago from Peter Firkola at the University of Hokkaido, except as applied to modern day Japan. My memory is a little fuzzy about the specifics, but the following is the main gist of it.

Basically the Japanese government funds a large number of "pointless" projects, such as freeways to nowhere, large sea-facing cement walls, or things like subsidizing construction companies and the like (this is why you'll see 6 people standing around a hole in the ground, 3 "bosses" doing absolutely nothing, 2 of them old men flagging traffic, 1 person doing the actual digging). This is how Japan manages to keep their unemployment rate low, and thus keep money moving through the economy - by making sure people are able to obtain a job, even if it's useless or redundant.

At the top of it all you have the massive Zaibatsu (big conglomerates) which fund the lower level companies under their umbrella which in turn pay these meager salaries and keep people employed, typically as some kind of tax write off and the side benefits of having all of these various companies at their disposal (concrete, construction, real estate, etc).

The bottom of the system is incredibly inefficient, but it helps make sure that a bare minimum quality of life is available for people willing to try to get any old job.

Interesting article which sums up big infrastructure projects and their long term drawbacks/benefits better than I can (2009) - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06japan.html

Isn't that just like benefits, but instead of writing application letters or re-educating yourself or something, you dig holes?

"The bottom of the system is incredibly inefficient, but it helps make sure that a bare minimum quality of life is available for people willing to try to get any old job." Efficiency should be measured against the goal of the system.

If the goal is to prevent the society from tearing itself apart then perhaps this is fairly efficient. If the goal is to ma

Large sea-facing cement walls suddenly make sense when there's a big wave in the harbour.

Tokugawa era had lasting peace partly because of these bullshit jobs. It was a way to build institutions that kept 300 regional daimyos and people who trained weapons in check.

Japanese developed clever formal court system (Sankin-kotai "alternate attendance") where half of the daimyos were kept hostage in the capital city at all times. Spend year in your own lands surrounded by your own men, one year as hostage in the capital that was under the control of the shogun. If daimio left the capital, his wife and heir were kept as hostages. All these daimios and their close families needed something to do to make their life meaningful. Same applied to their underlings.

King Louis XIV had similar system for the same reasons. Nobles had to keep hostage in his palace at Versailles and they needed things to do. The court system developed bullshit jobs for nobles, like helping him into the bed or taking part of the party. Everyone was given a role to play.

I'm reminded of the British royal court post "groom of the stool". The groom of the stool was literally the guy who wiped the King's ass. It was a highly coveted position, as you had private audience with the king during his most intimate moments.

Thanks, I forgot to mention sankin-kotai. It was also set up as a way to prevent the daimyos from amassing enough money to build up an army - they were supposed to spend lavishly along the entire route between their residences and Edo.

That's really interesting. I've drawn another more superficial Japan comparison: Japanese economic stagnation since the 1980s. I've been predicting for a while that we are headed for "planet Japan": perpetually low interest rates and not much actual growth.

What ended the era you describe? Contact with the outside world? I've also thought for a long time that space migration is the only real hope for the human race to avoid permanent stagnation and eventual decline.

The Meiji Restoration. It was somewhat of a result of the Japanese being contacted by the outside world and realizing that they were behind.

Also the "floating world" period up to that point, so it seems like life was at least decent for people before the outside influence.

> Contact with the outside world?

Perry (US) sailed a fleet into Tokyo Bay and threatened to destroy the city if the samurai government didn’t open trade with the US (1850s).

Fearing domination by western powers (cf. China) the Japanese reformed their society and economy based on western empires (1868) and within 40 years was able to soundly defeat Russia in a war (1905).

The Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–98) was largely caused by too many unemployed samurai warriors, who were largely out of jobs as peace spread in Japan. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, de facto ruler of Japan, needed to prevent disturbances by unemployed samurais and result was invasion of Korea. It's not the only reason, but a major one.

The scale of the war was massive. Japan alone brought a force of 158,800 in 1st invasion of 1592. In the 2nd invasion of 1597–98, Japan again brought similar number of troops.

For comparison in the Long Turkish War or Thirteen Years' War which was between 1593 to 1606, Ottoman Empire had 160,000–180,000 men.

Ming Dynasty sent 50,000 men to aid Korea, and some say this started the decline of Ming Dynasty.

One really great book I recommend for anyone wanting to learn about this war is

  "The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China
  August 12, 2014" by Samuel Hawley.

Some interesting tidbits from the book:

1. This war was the first time a large group of Christians (not Western but Japanese Christians) set foot in Korea. Of the 12 (?) forces commanded by different warlords, 2 or 3 had large number of Christians. And these were first Christians to set foot in Korea.

2. Chosun Dynasty court maintained the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty (also known as The True Record of the Joseon Dynasty), annual records of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea. They were kept from 1413 to 1865. The annals, or sillok, comprise 1,893 volumes and are thought to cover the longest continual period of a single dynasty in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritable_Records_of_the_Joseo...

Four copies of the records were kept in geographically separate area within Chosun. However during the Imjin War, 3 of the 4 were burned down by Japanese forces. The Imjin War book talks about how the last set of copy was being transported in numerous, lumbering carts pulled by ox to keep it out of marauding Japanese forces. The convoy was in a village when Japanese forces caught up. The convoy had not enough troops to resist. They then faked it to look like the village held more Korean troops than actual, by using extra flags and other camouflage. Japanese forces stayed away and this allowed the last backup of 4 backups to survive.

This tidgit was extra interesting to me for following: 1) Faking it till making it. 2) how 4 sets of backup was just barely enough.

The Japanese nearly invaded Korea again in 1873, funnily enough, for the same reason. Saigo Takamori saw it as an opportunity for the thousands of newly-unseated samurai to find honourable work (or death). When the government failed to take Toyotomi's lesson and refused, he revolted instead and found an end for the samurai at Shiroyama.

More recently isn't this how Saudi Arabia is currently run?

This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?

For a view of what this looked like on the ground, you should check out "Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai".

It's the autobiography of Katsu Kokichi (Musui is another name he was known by), a samurai born in the early 19th century to a very low-ranking family. It's a firsthand account of life at the very lowest fringe of Shogunate society at the very end of that system, and is quite entertaining because Katsu is a lazy good-for-nothing who can't even get one of those pointless bureaucracy jobs and survives by doing "lowly" merchant work. I think it would make a pretty funny TV show because the protagonist is such a hapless loser.

My major source for all this was Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan. It's a sweeping book - 600 pages, I think, and covers everything from 1300 to 2000 - but one of its main focuses is the end of the Sengoku period and the rise of the Tokugawa.

you could also read shogun by james clavell, which is a fictional novel based on tokugawa. i read his whole asian saga series because that first book was so good.

I think of FDR's Public Works department, which built my High School, and the Student Union at my undergraduate alma mater, UIUC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package.

However, the team that I go put into, is one of the slowest moving and least useful I've ever seen. I spent my first couple months trying to make things better, and be more productive - only to have my team-lead actively micromanage and stonewall me in order to bring my productivity down to a crawl. I tried talking to my manager about it, but they started blaming me personally every time I pointed out any ways of improving the way we do things.

Eventually, I stopped trying at all, did the best I could (~2 hours/day of productivity), and just zoned out the rest of the time. Apparently this has pleased my manager/team-lead, and everything has been smooth (boring) sailing ever since. It still boggles my mind that I'm getting paid $350k/year to essentially browse HN and post stuff like this all day.

Through my long career, I've notice virtually no correlation between my pay and the utility of my position. And indeed, I've had one or two jobs like yours. Sadly for my bank book, I can only stand being useless for relatively short stretches.

I still reminisce about my lowest paying job, my first. It was probably the most enjoyable and satisfying. It was also useful, though perhaps not at the top of that list.

It's annoying that so many useless jobs pay so much. But even worse that it's so hard to find a position where being useful is even a possibility.

My experience is similar. I look at it a lot like insurance policies. For instance, my company once had a service contract with a software company that cost about a million a year. One time I audited that service contract, and found that they'd used it exactly ONCE the entire. A million dollar phone call.

But they're not going to cancel the contract, because they want the support in case they need it.

There's an economic theory that job satisfaction is a kind of compensation. That is, you have to pay people more to do unsatisfying jobs.

> I still reminisce about my lowest paying job, my first. It was probably the most enjoyable and satisfying.

Weird. I share this experience. My first tech job was really great, I was constantly doing interesting things, actively making things better for everybody all the time, really like all my colleagues, it was part time, and I made a pittance.

That's a hell of a lot of $.

I was on $100K for doing a similar amount of depressingly simple or "easy" work, while being surrounded by people who felt or at least appeared stuck.

It seems like a dream but I also got really demotivated and my sharp skills quickly became stale and then one day I realised I didn't care enough to upskill again.

The job became more about appearance and saying the right things, showing your face in the right meetings, and claiming recognition for other people's work.

I've now shelved that career. The money wasn't worth the feeling of guilt or missing out. I think the hardest part was knowing I was getting paid double than people who worked 3X harder.

As I continue my (relatively young as a 20-something year old) web development career, I occasionally look back at my KFC job I had during uni and end of school with great fondness.

I honestly really enjoyed that job - it was fun working with great people doing a job of the right level of complexity and mental stimulation.

In my career, I'd say the correlation is an inverse proportion. The more useful / needed I was the less I was paid and the other way around... It's curious. I'll have to put some thought into why this might be.

I learned very early on that pay and employment largely depends on budgets.

On a Monday I quit my job and gave my two week notice.

The next day my wife was fired.

The day after that, my old boss offered me a raise if I would stick around.

I did both jobs simultaneously for six months.

In my entire life nothing has been more lucrative than this. I've tried investing in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Nothing has been more lucrative than double-dipping.

The thing that's so bizarre, is that it also seemed to make me a better employee. I wasn't trying to be a scofflaw, I just kinda fell into it (due to my wife being fired). I found that things I learned from Job One made me better at Job Two, and vice versa.

I think a big part of the reason that this is, is because a lot of tech jobs are basically "human insurance policies." For instance, my employer paid me because I'm an expert in an obscure software program. So there weeks when I was busy as hell, but there were also weeks when I was basically there in case something broke.

I founded a forum on Reddit dedicated to this, it's called WWPGD. (A tip of the hat to Peter Gibbons from 'Office Space')

It feels like you're missing a line somewhere in this - you talk about quitting your job, your wife getting fired, and your now-ex-boss offering you a raise to stick around, then start talking about "both jobs" without ever mentioning a new job.

FWIW, according to Warren Buffet, most people will easily make more money through their actual work / expertise, than they ever will through investing.

I'm assuming at least one job (or both) is remote-only? This would be a hilarious story if you somehow managed to hold two simultaneous 9-5 on-site jobs, in neighboring offices.

This story illustrates that what we're being paid often has little relation to what we're worth. And this relation is important for job satisfaction.

I think this would a lot more common if it wasn't seen as unethical to bill time in two places at once, as well as if companies were more open to hiring part-time. Why do you think your old supervisor was so open to this arrangement (not rhetorical, real question)?

Don't be so happy about it. I'm like you but 5 years in the future when it's time to look for a new job. At the beginning I was keeping my skills sharp, but after a while you become lazy. Especially when you see everyone around you not doing anything you sort of lose your motivation to do work.

So how do you get your skills back?

This exact thing happened to me, even though I wasn't paid as well. In order to match the pace of my team I only did work on Fridays. It was depressing how many problems it solved.

Save, don't spend, so don't get used to living on that salary. If you do, you risk getting trapped.

I've had several jobs which have had "cycles of inactivity". Basically periods where we are just doing busy work until a project gets signed off on or until client(s) commit to a new release, etc. I would use it to learn something new, take care of technical debt, automate something, or......relax

Sounds great! Are you guys hiring?

> only to have my team-lead actively micromanage and stonewall me in order to bring my productivity down to a crawl

When leading, my default is to give people space. Unfortunately, that means if someone needs micro-managing I'm typically not the right person. This is different than mentoring, which I enjoy (not sure if I'm any good at it though ;) ). And obviously, I'm always there for questions. What I don't understand is how leads/managers have the time micromanage people. If a person can't trust their team to do a good job, then they should not be leading a team.

> but they started blaming me personally every time I pointed out any ways of improving the way we do things.

Even if it was your fault, this is wrong. All problems are the leads problems. The lead should be asking him/herself why you went around them to the manager? The manager should be asking the lead the same question.

I'm so happy I don't work in a big company anymore.

Can we switch places? (Meager salary and doing the work of 4 people).

People like you are the ones making up for incompetent workers and fat cats up top. And the systems rolls on in equilibrium.

That's a hell of a lot of $.

I was on $100K for doing a similar amount of depressingly simple or "easy" work, while being surrounded by people who felt or at least appeared stuck.

It seems like a dream but I also got really demotivated and my sharp skills quickly became stale and then one day I realised I didn't care enough to upskill again.

The job became more about appearance and saying the right things, showing your face in the right meetings, and claiming recognition for other people's work.

I've now shelved that career. The money wasn't worth the feeling of guilt or missing out. I think the hardest part was knowing I was getting paid double than people who worked 3X harder.

You don't happen to work at a large bank do you? Many friends at banks say this is common place.

This is interesting and sad to me. Sad because it's at least one data point that refutes a theory I've had.

I've been on a job search for some time now in the same field which you're employed. I've had a number of interviews but I think things have stalled a few times when it's come to salary negotiation. I've been approaching things with the theory that the more I'm compensated the less likely I'd be in the situation you've described and the one I find myself currently in. So, I've been asking well above market rate in the hopes that if I find a taker I'd force the employer's hand in tasking me with non bullshit work.

Your story shoots that theory all to hell.

If you're looking for meaningful, interesting work on a high-functioning team, IMO the only way to be sure is to only apply to companies where you already know someone working there. Find someone you know who genuinely likes their job, and have them refer you to a position at their company. Anything else is just reading tea leaves.

Which city? I'm in the midwest and would need that comp to relocate to SF or NY ;( didn't think it would actually be viable. Actually, if you have some time for some questions, can you PM me?

You can get that comp as a senior engineer at any decent large company or any of the FANG companies.

I wouldn't be able to stand it. The only thing that combats the suck of going to an office every day is having something to do to make the time pass. I would go insane.

You could code up some software that animated money going into your bank account.

Instead of zoning out, why not work on a cool side-project?

The IP ownership can sometimes be a bit confusing.

Ethically slightly problematic to work on some side project, than in doing creative time wasting.

It makes sense sometimes. If you have a huge, complex organization, it might make sense to have predictable, synchronous cogs. It makes planning easier and less risky, and moving the entire system as a whole is easier if the individual parts don't vary too much.

you are my hero. i live vicariously through you. please keep up the good work.

Does your company have an effective monopoly or is part an oligopoly? Normally companies can run with gross inefficiencies because of lack of competition.

That sounds really boring and depressing.

You are living my nightmare

What seniority are you?

Nice username :)

The goon category is interesting in a future world where AI has replaced most jobs, because it can employ an unlimited number of people. (Goon jobs exist to counterbalance other goon jobs. Militaries are the canonical example.)

Most jobs -- teachers, auto workers, plumbers, farmers -- have a natural ceiling on employment related to demand, but goon jobs don't because when one side hires more goons, the other side has to also. Militaries have created millions of jobs this way.

Goon jobs are not just blue-collar. A growing category of goon that allows unlimited highly paid professional job creation is inter-governmental lawyers. For example, the CA government is suing the EPA about vehicle emissions limits. Both sides can justify a big budget for hiring lawyers. Metropolitan areas like the Bay Area provide lots of opportunities for cities to sue each other, transit authorities, and the state. I don't see any upper limit to the number of jobs this can create.

All this is only a bad thing if you care about efficiency. If you let go of that axiom, there are unlimited jobs to be created.

Advertising is a very typical arms race. If you're the only one advertising, a small cheap ad is very effective. If your competitor is advertising you have to spend just as much just to tread water. If you spend more, it forces your competitors to spend more too.

It's not surprising that the modern Silicon Valley economy is built on advertising.

To give an example of that - my friend runs a one-man internet shop, selling niche items. His monthly profit is around (an equivalent of) $1-2k, while his Google invoice is $7k$-10k. So, essentially most of the fruits of his labor go to Google. And, according to him, if he tried spending less on advertising, he'd just vanish from the face of the Internet and customers would buy at his competitors.

I've been thinking the exact same thing lately! There is also in there somewhere a nice paralel to proof of work.

Peddling buzzwords and tech fads has made some bigly rich.

I die inside.

But any suggestion of "mincome" or the like is met with such a harsh reaction... What, effectively, is the difference between goon-bloom and mincome? Is it just that one is too obviously a subsidy?

I talk to people about changing the world so work is optional, and people are really attached to the idea that everyone should work all the time. Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work. Or more conservatively, we could build a world where everyone has 8 weeks of vacation a year or could take 6 months off every few years.

I believe this is doable from a technical perspective and it’s the problem I’m trying to devote my life to. We ultimately need to build optional societies where people who choose to join can opt out of consumerism, a major driver of our need for endless work.

My vision is for systems of robotics that are totally open source (modifiable and royalty free) that can create the basic goods for survival. Then groups of people fund corporations with bylaws like a constitution that guarantee rights to shareholders. The machines provide for the people and excess goods are sold to a market to support growth of the community.

I think something like that in the future is one very useful aspect of a society where unnecessary work is over and regular people get to enjoy the benefits of modern productivity (instead of a small percentage of the population enjoying that while most people miss out).

But in general when I talk to people I find that the hardest idea for them to grasp is the idea that we could all work less and things wouldn’t collapse. We just need to alter the distribution of wealth so that everyone benefits.

> Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work.

i realize that the rest of your post details technological advancements that could create this condition (on an indefinite timeline), but you also seem to be saying that it is already possible today. i often see this sort of claim these days, and i always wonder why this is treated as self evident fact.

in 2015, the PPP adjusted GDP per capita over the entire planet was just under $16k [1]. this is only 125% of the US poverty line for a single person in the same year [2]. even if we could deliver this sum to every person in the world without losing production capacity and with no administrative cost, it hardly seems enough to provide what you mean by a "modest living" to everyone. much closer to mere subsistence in a developed nation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

[2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

> Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work.

I don't think this is true, because I think too large a fraction of the world's current productivity is supplied by people who would not produce if they didn't have to to earn a living.

> My vision is for systems of robotics that are totally open source (modifiable and royalty free) that can create the basic goods for survival.

This would fix the productivity problem, yes. But...

> Then groups of people fund corporations with bylaws like a constitution that guarantee rights to shareholders. The machines provide for the people and excess goods are sold to a market to support growth of the community.

This would throw away the whole thing. If there are open source machines that can create the basic goods for survival, the obvious thing to do is for every individual to just own one. There is no need for corporate ownership; in fact, corporate ownership undermines the whole thing, by giving some people an incentive to game the corporate system. If there is no such system, there's nothing to be gamed.

You might be interested in Marcin Jakubowski's work ...

https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

Because at least in the goon economy you can compete in a hierarchy and be differentiated by status. "I have made X number of lawsuits/wars/security details successful which is more than Billy who only has Y number of successful lawsuits/wars/security details and that's why I should get a bonus and he shouldn't." sounds better than "I have exactly the same amount of income as Billy, but I should have more than he does because I think I'm better than Billy."

Yes, there are other ways to differentiate yourself in a social hierarchy, but finding a new and novel way to live is a lot harder than continuing to live the same way humans have lived for centuries.

Hazing, austerity, and rigor. The military certainly cannot be accused of making soldiers more comfortable than taxpayers, and that’s what they really care about. Whether they’re deployed to economicically productive ends is more of an academic concern. On a gut level, the public needs to feel that they are not paid to be lazy, and the military delivers with overwhelming gusto.

Lawyers may similarly be accused of evil, but rarely laziness. There’s a general perception that they’ve passed through a crucible we wouldn’t survive (law school) and do work we couldn’t hack. Other bureaucrats, not so much.

Lawyers can be horribly lazy.

"let's just wait for a reaction, if we are lucky, nothings gonna come."

"Let's just threaten with outrageous claims instead of making an effort."

"We know the law is wrong but it's easier to roll with it than to fix it or find a way around it."

The protestant work ethic is still there - the notion that a difficult job is better for the person doing it than an easier job with the same pay.

Depending on the definition of "difficulty", and the type of person, I'm not sure they're wrong.

We're all engineers here. Can you honestly say you'd prefer a job that paid the same, but where you wouldn't have to use your mind?

Of course, it's been used to justify some serious horrors.

I honestly don't think it would be a bad thing if there were ten times as many lawyers, so that the cost of using the legal system became affordable to the vast majority of the people living under it.

Talking about America? Look at other countries for a better solution. :)

well... one way, you have goons, the other way, you have livers.

The problem with mincome is the hedonic treadmill.

the folk receiving mincome will grow dissatisfied with their lot and militate for raises. negative feedback is unpleasant but necessary.

>the folk receiving mincome will grow dissatisfied with their lot and militate for raises. negative feedback is unpleasant but necessary.

Close. What it does is reduces supply (fewer people working) while raising demand (people with more money in their pockets). This winds up causing inflation that erodes away the value of the minimum income. It's not even a hedonic treadmill, just an inflationary one.

A basic income guarantee can only ever work as temporary assistance or as a residualist stopgap for people on the fringes of society. If it's too widespread it ends up working against itself. A job guarantee increases supply (assuming you use the labor power productively) while keeping demand high, so that works against the inflation problem.

It's a tough balancing act though. You have to make sure the make-work is actually producing useful stuff or you'll have all the same problems as the basic income plus a bunch of random ditches dug. During Cultural Revolution in China cadres kind of engendered ecological catastrophes by creating bureaucratic agencies that would pointlessly clearcut forests for no reason. It's basically the paper-clip maximizing AI problem, only the intelligence isn't artificial.

Goons are often highly skilled and highly compensated. So that's one difference.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

-Warren Bennis

The analogy to the army isn’t a very good one. It’s not a zero sum situation. A country can only devote so much of its GDP to the army, so the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army. You don’t end up with 195 armies of equal size. The other thing that it misses is that the army is intentionally a vehicle for social mobility, and perhaps the most efficient one at that. The army is available to most people, where they can make a good career for themselves, or learn skills to take to the private sector, or move onto highly subsidized college. Dismissing it as bullshit is pretty narrow minded.

What? Zero sum doesn't mean that a stalemate is guaranteed. It means that one player's win is the other player's loss.

the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army

But that isn’t true. Look at the size of the North Korean army.

>All this is only a bad thing if you care about efficiency. If you let go of that axiom, there are unlimited jobs to be created.

Oh cool, we invented almost-basic income.

Most future goons will be robots too. For both practical and political reasons (dead soldiers are not so cool).

I think it's interesting this category is simply defined as "goon". This really has been the definition of our entire existence as a species. We have competitors and if they take our resources we attempt to kill them off.

Even today the military encompasses the largest industry in the world. All of the technology we use has been rooted in the Military. Engineering Departments everywhere are subsidized by the Military more than any other department because they know anything you engineer has the potential as a "goon" application.

I don't think "goon" is going away anytime soon, it's a core part of our evolution as a species.

cyber-xyz is the other new white-collar goon job

Author lost me on doorman. Doormen absolutely bring value and saying that doormen is bullshit job is the same as saying that waitress is a bullshit job - in the end customer is fully capable of bringing the food from the counter to his table on his own.

Doormen Can accept packages when you are not in your apt (leaving outside is not an option in NY)

  Can accept laundry delivery

  Provide security by screening people out at the entrance

  Virtually eliminate burglaries/theft

  Can provide key to housecleaner/installer/plumber/etc

  Keep parking spot in front of building available for short time use by residents (often semi-illegally)

  Can help brining up heavy suitcases/bags to the apartment

Doormen absolutely provide value and apts in buildings with doormen sells for more than equivalent apartments with only intercall.

Right. The real useless jobs are the 10 people working on animating hair for the next Assassin's Creed game or the CGI for the next Marvel film

It's only as useless, as, say, the crew on a film, or even a highly-paid footballer. If these people didn't do their tiny part, the entertainment industry wouldn't rake in as much cash.

Heh. Careful--you may discover that there are jobs far more useless than that.

You are so right. I've been saying my whole life that if animators would just make their characters bald, the manhours we would recoup as a species would be truly transformative.

Those aren't bullshit either... Who else is going to animate the hair? If there's a robot that can do the job, great, but it has to get done somehow.

There are probably more like 50 people working on animating the hair. But yeah, your point is well taken.

> Author lost me on doorman. Doormen absolutely bring value and saying that doormen is bullshit job is the same as saying that waitress is a bullshit job - in the end customer is fully capable of bringing the food from the counter to his table on his own.

Waitress is a bullshit job though, just like a butler. In a truly egalitarian society a job like that wouldn't exist. It's an artificial construct that can be pretty annoying especially when you're waiting for your check for half an hour. :)

There are plenty of bullshit jobs in the software industry.

Many things designers and graphics developers do is goon-ish. Design is mostly an arms race. Employees of big companies create new design languages and at some point the rest has to adapt or be left behind. Of course, marketing is 99% bullshit anyway, and that's where a good deal of the design goes.

I doubt games are more fun now than 10 years ago because graphics has gotten better. If anything, games from 10 years ago have gotten worse because we're used to more complex graphics.

Almost everybody here is a duct-taper. 95% of our time is spent dealing with technical debt. We're using decades old technology that was never designed to solve the problems we face now. Take the twitter password problem on the front page: This would've never happened had we just adopted a more sane approach to authentication. When you wait for hours on your windows updates, think of the poor souls who know that none of this is necessary but can't entangle the mess that makes this necessary (apparently). And think of the poor souls in testing who can't report the real bug that is a broken code architecture which makes automated or more fine-grained tests impossible.

It's a bit much to say design is goonish and an arms race. I'd argue the reason that Apple is the most valuable company in the world is mostly due to their design expertise.

You can make the same argument about software between companies being an arms race that competitors adapt to to or get left behind (see cloud, mobile, voice, etc.).

Design can create efficiency. There is far more nuance about 'design' than your clear bias towards it states.

Graeber has been pushing this for some time now - it is an interesting observation. In this particular article he does not even try to explain why this happens - but in other places he made silly theories about capitalist employers doing that on purpose to keep people from revolting - while omitting the simplest explanation - that it is the result of complexity of our organizations. People don't understand their jobs. Sometimes it means they do something useful but they don't understand why it is needed, other times they really do something useless - but nobody really knows which is which or what part of a job is useful.

Then there are company power plays which are counterproductive to the whole - but they are meaningful for the people who commandeer them.

And the biggest problem is that there is a positive feedback in that - after a few failures to rationalize the organizations people give up. The harder the organizations are to be understood the less people work on making them more rational.

I work a very productive job with direct outputs. But my job still doesn't advance humanity forward. My company provides a solution for problems caused by other entities, but it isn't a solution to some fundamental problem. Some days I feel as if the job is pointless because, in the end, I'm just a duct taper, even if I'm duct taping for an entity that is outside of my organization.

If you take the concepts in this argument and expand it beyond just companies (which the author started to do when mentioning armed forces counted as goons), I think we would see a society that is already filled with useless jobs.

When I look at a downtown with tall buildings I always think about what the fuck people are doing in those buildings. I get the sense that more and more people are hired to simply report on a team. That report goes up one level and its part of another team report (just representing more people). Then that report goes up... and it continues for as many levels of bureaucracy that the company decided was necessary.

Most of this falls directly in the category of "not my problem" that is eating everyone's soul. Because more and more people subscribing to "not my problem" we are creating perfect systems that need bureaucracy. The opposite structure is more people doing the hands-on-work (that is reported on) and more of those people being involved directly in decisions and are stakeholders on firing. Everyone has a sense of how much work is being done and who the slackers are so there is no more a need for upward reporting and downward decisions.

Now the argument being made is that AI is replacing jobs so you could say - well this upward reporting job is all that we have left! So I say boo-fuck to that. We don't have spaceships going into space on a daily basis, we don't recycle 100% of what can be recycled, we don't have clean freeways, we don't have technology that perfects our pollution, we don't have AI.... so there are A FUCK TON amount of work to be done, but no one wants to do it because of our "not my problem" attitude.

Heck if what we're facing is a training problem, then heck, I see a hell of a lot of jobs right there!

A lot of people have pointless jobs, but it seems even more people have jobs that are actively contributing to the wanton destruction of our entire world. I suspect these are both symptoms of our elevation of capital to the status of universal good. This will only get worse as long as we continue to espouse the default view that people who "don't have a job" are useless moochers and people who have high paying jobs are valuable contributors to society.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

--Jeff Hammerbacher

The best minds of previous generations were fighting wars or leading battles. I personally do not think either of those activities is specifically better or worse.

I do.

Wars. Wars are worse.

They still are.

Virtually all jobs in Western societies are bullshit jobs (as defined in the article). But you've alluded to the real reason such BS jobs exist -- to give people something to do and keep them occupied so they don't go out and fight wars. Sport fulfills the same purpose. Better people work in a cube all day and practise baseball after work than sit around on the UBI until they form some political party, take over the government, and go to war against another country for their plutonium mines.

In some developing countries, there's an unofficial social contract that the wealthy should employ as many people as possible, even if they need to make pointless jobs. A company I worked for had a remote office in India that employed people to hand out paper towels in the bathrooms.

This is also common in higher-end nightclubs and bars in the U.S., although these aren't full-time jobs and the attendants work mostly for tips.

My brother does this. He makes about $300 per weekend, which supplements his income working in a call center. The real reason he's there is to stop people from trashing the bathroom and using drugs in the club.

Or just strip clubs in general. I was in the most ghetto strip club I've ever heard about (unpainted cinder block walls), but they had an attendant.

I’m a little curious as to why this comment, of all comments, has attracted downvotes. Is there something about the comparison between these two types of bathroom attendant positions I’m overlooking? Genuinely curious

noblesse oblige - which can mean many things - but it often includes this.

Creativity helps a lot here

This is true, I've seen this over the years in several corporate jobs, typically in large companies. Teams are overstaffed, and each person ends up not having much to do.

Managers keep the team size high because it's not their money to spend, and they prefer being a team lead of 5 persons instead of 2, looks better on the CV.

People spend their day in their desktop trying to invent things to do, looking busy, surfing the web discretely, waiting for the clock to hit 6 oclock.

Then something "urgent" comes around that needs to be done for tomorrow, and you stay in the office until 9 to finish it. The software gets delivered, but its not deployed until 3 months down the line, and the users hardly use the application at all.

That reminds me of the forgotten employee, which is very awesome, and slightly relevant.

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

I remember reading that years ago.

One day, I'd like that to be me.

Edwardian-era mansions employed whole teams of butlers whose sole job was replacing candles.

Not everyone is in a position to make a discernible impact on society. 20% of society will always drive 80% of progress. Think hard how you want the remaining 80% to support their families.

Replacing candles was not a pointless job until electrification and incandescent bulbs achieved widespread adoption.

The Edwardian reign was just at the tail end of candle-based lighting. By 1914, most of the households that could afford it would have already installed at least one electric light. The Great War would have devastated the available supply of footmen, and made those still around prohibitively expensive, so I'd expect that any servant-employing house would have given up their candle-men entirely by 1918. They would be electrified afterward, with the hand-carried lighting moving to oil lamps, and any lamp-refill duties moved to less expensive female servants.

After that, those teams of footmen could be replaced by just one footman, or part-time handyman, to replace burnt-out bulbs. We still have people whose job includes responsibility for replacing malfunctioning lighting, including fluorescent tubes and ballasts. But we no longer have people whose sole responsibility is lighting, except perhaps in the very largest buildings, or those with special lighting needs, such as museums.

It wasn't busy work, but the majority of those jobs definitely don't exist any more.

Pretty simple, return to a 90% top tax rate and give the proceeds out as Basic Income. This shit situation we are in is not sustainable, we have levels of inequality in the US not seen since the roaring 20s and we all know how that ended.

Even 100% tax rate is not enough to pay for a meaningful UBI, even in the US. You will have to take major budget cuts somewhere.

Suppose we tax Forbes 500 at 100% level and the companies too. That would provide about 2 billion USD a year. Divided by population it will be less than $2k a person yearly.

Suppose you tax top 10%, I'd expect that to double this number. Still way not enough. And we're not even close to military budget.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro has a vivid portrayal of this. The people doing it took it very seriously indeed.

Probably more like Victorian era.

Kind of lost me when they gave military jobs as an example. By this logic, it is "pointless" for organisms to have immune systems, since if other organisms didn't cause infection it wouldn't be necessary. Maybe, but that's not the way the world is (or was, or likely will be anytime soon). It's a definition of "pointless" so remote from the real world as to seem...pointless.

Here is an article which argues that we should stop using militaristic terms for the immune system, that the immune system is not an army of killers, and that it's job is not to kill enemies, because talking like this brings harm in the world, by legitimizing violence.

I'm scratching my head at this.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-guard-against-military-...

I don't know. Most developed countries militaries exist more to respond to aggravations from other countries than to actively stir up conflict. If a country decides not to have a military than it's at the mercy of a country that does to play nice. I'm sure it's true though that once you have a military you're more inclined to use it, but militaries do serve a useful purpose.

I wonder if the author would also consider police pointless. Crime and warfare are both in a very real sense "outside the law" and in consequence outside the markets governed by it.

People in this thread that are praising job-creation as a social good miss the point. Jobs are not good on their own if they produce nothing.

If you are unable to distribute wealth through other means and a job is absolutely necessary, then find some useful work for the person to do. There is ALWAYS more work to do There are never enough bridges, roads, doctors, books, movies, research, etc. etc. If your society cannot find useful things for people to do, that is a failing of your method of societal organization.

The bottleneck is not the amount of work that ought to be done but the difficulty of training people to be able to do it.

I had a very similar experience once when I worked for the government. I wanted my small desk pointed a different direction, so I rotated it.

A few hours later my supervisor and a union rep showed up fuming. They have people for moving things, why was I trying to take their jobs?!

On the other hand a company that I worked for some years back had published a summary of recent accidents in the monthly newsletter[1]

A significant number were for office workers who had tried to change light bulbs or similar by standing on desks or office-chairs and then fallen off.

[1] - Yes, company newsletter could be seen as a bullshit job

Not sure if true or false to demonize unions, but I've heard stories about the horror of trade shows at union facilities where booth staff were literally not allowed to plug items into power strips within their booths - it required a service request and probably a charge.

I've experienced that at a trade show too. That convention center did it as a means of charging crazy money for electricity. Internet was very expensive too.

Trade shows are a racket facilities-wise but worth it as publicity/B2B opportunities.

This is another argument in favor of universal income. Bullshit jobs is one of consequences of progress, low cost goods, food and comfort. With increasing automation it’s going to be get incrementally harder to find bullshit jobs for people. until society understands that not everyone can and have to be employed.

Do-nothing jobs may be a problem, but do they outnumber jobs that exist to support, sustain and inflict a system that is not user-friendly? For example:

How big is the 'security' industry (include 'national security')?

What percent of the workers at the health clinic you visit are there to control, limit, and ration the access to medical care?

Isn't the entire legal system there to sustain the power of the powerful?

Isn't the educational establishment designed to support a hierarchical society in which the highly-educated are few, highly-paid and comfortable, and the rest are not?

1) Very big, because it includes the whole military intelligence complex in your definition.

2) About 20 hired specifically for this purpose. Admins, doctor and nurse managers, a few receptionists, a few ministers.

3) Not all, not even most of it. Plenty of civil, criminal and driving cases. These are very common. The patent and copyright lawyers are the minority...

4) Not in principle. In practice there are such pathologies, especially in countries without good public higher education. In principle the education system is to supply a source of educated and intelligent workers for complex jobs, including lower levels for less demanding ones. The trouble begins when rich and powerful segregate themselves into educational sinecures.

The opposite is true. At some point in the past, elevator operators served a useful function, since elevators were hard to operate. Today, even the existence of automation (i.e. accessible elevator UI) has not completely driven the elevator operator extinct, but has transmuted his job into bullshit. Same goes for gas pump improvements (I suppose we can thank New Jersey and until recently Oregon). The entire "Flunkies" category seems to exist only because of the existence of automation.

Whats the opposite? He said progress beget bullshit jobs, you just stated the same thing.

Why until recently for Oregon?

UBI will lead to societal degeneration. Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket; people would lose direction and the small amount of meaning they had.

I call UBI gay-space-communism because it suggests that all human beings are capable of handling themselves outside of employment and daily routine. They are not. The market creates this drive in people, and if you remove it, people will degenerate fast.

Opioids, UBI, and free-love for everyone. Yikes.

If goods and services skyrocketed, then those on UBI would start offering goods and services (aka working). I don't think it would degenerate at all.

Why would you lose direction and meaning? That's such a cultural thing to say, to think your job is your direction and meaning.

> Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket

Base the UBI on multiple economic indicators such as the prices of essential services and goods, add more money to the money supply as needed.

> Opioids, UBI, and free-love for everyone. Yikes.

So a lot of people live a simple life on the basic income and hang out getting stoned and screwing. Oh no!

What's your hobby? What would you be doing if you didn't have to work for a living? Would you spend all your time getting stoned and doing the social maneuvering necessary to get laid on a regular basis? Or would you do something else with your time? Work on that programming project that's been on the back burner while you paid the bills, draw comics, join a comedy troupe, brew mead, figure out a way to automate something that drives you crazy, pick up the guitar you put down in favor of a sensible day job and start making music again... or whatever.

Personally, when I had a few years free from needing to work for someone else, I mostly spent them drawing a weird sci-fi comic using the skills I'd developed while training for the animation industry.

(The usual phrase, by the way, is "fully automated gay luxury space communism".)

> UBI will lead to societal degeneration

No, it won't.

> Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket

If you do a constant-value UBI and set the value too high, yes, that would happen in a positive feedback loop, but that's why UBI should be tied to a revenue stream with a value set by splitting the revenue stream with a reserve cushion to build a fund to allow preserving benefits in short-term revenue decline.

> people would lose direction

I don't see a credible argument for that replacing status quo means-tested social support with UBI would cause this, and indeed much of the motivation for UBI is to remove adverse incentives in present benefit programs that manifestly do produce this effect.

> I call UBI gay-space-communism

Which is dumb, because it has nothing to do with homosexuality or outer space or, as it retains private property, Communism.

> suggests that all human beings are capable of handling themselves outside of employment and daily routine.

No, it doesn't, not that that would justify your ludicrous label even if that was true.

What is it about freedom that is so terrifying for you?

A rewrite of this classic essay which has been discussed on HN many times: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

This rewrite seems to be advertising his new book on the topic. Good summer reading.

Yes, and he has expanded it into a full book. It comes out later this month.

Universities are filled with this kind of pointlessness. The result is a massive amount of friction between those on the "edge" of the university doing useful work in research, teaching, building things, and the people in the "core" who routinely fire and re-hire whole departments and replace perfectly functional buildings in order to justify their paycheck.

It's not that the beaucracy running a University isn't needed (it definitely is), but it has got out of control and is consuming valuable resources better used elsewhere.

This is the same in industry: At a company that was supposed to be financially struggling, the CEO did:

1) Lay off software engineers are (the best ones, he had no clue).

2) Increase the head count in the HR department.

3) The increased head count in the HR department proceeded to move from one billing or HR platform to the next because they needed activity.

4) Hire "diverse" new (cheap) software engineers with no clue.

I think professional unions with all their flaws are needed not primarily to bargain for higher incomes, but to stop this social welfare program for the bureaucracy.

Well, from an evolutionary perspective there are successful fish who evolved suction cups on the top of their heads so they could both save their energy swimming and also eat the food scraps of the shark they are attached to.

Some would argue that this metaphor better describes finance industry professionals though.

Keynes was a little more direct: "The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up."

The frustrating thing is though: we have plenty of real demand

Social work, infrastructure repairs, mental health services.

But all the effort coalesces around BIG Corp. and Douche Co. needs first

Somehow we’re convinced that Bezos and Koch’s are more important than our neighbors

Some looney economists will tell you it’s proven in physics these people are just better

Ignoring the history of violent imperialism and collusion, and oppression that prevented and neutered whole swaths of people from catching up or getting ahead

My take is humans are ignorant animals who are emotionally captured by novelty and special interests keep peddling it to stoke that dopamine buzz

Then when you read in open access government documents they’ve been studying exactly that since WW1, and handing that research to unis who turned it into journalism, advertising, marketing, and management courses, you don’t go “oh deep state!” You go holy shit are we dumb. This is right in front of our faces, no conspiracy theory needed. Documented in official record, in plain view, how government has been dictating what we work on in the land of the free

The first topic that got me onto this pattern: was doing a research paper on thorium reactors since they were all buzzwordy a few years ago

In the 50s they were THE leading effort for energy

That all stopped when a Naval officer realized submarines could be equipped with quieter nuclear engines and weapons and be parked on the coast of whenever undetected

Thorium research was archived and we got to build unstable, by comparison, reactors as a result

And then you see it’s like that all over the historical record from the era

And you realize Bezos and Koch’s aren’t special. They were lucky to be alive now in a heavily curated system with a plain paper trail

I might be missing a lot of what you're saying, but say I worked for FAAMG - they just pay a lot more than what my neighbor could pay me. Even if repairing the neighbors deck or planting new trees in their yard or whatever might be "better" for society than submitting code for review on some feature. I guess I'm trying to understand what you're getting at because I think a lot of people don't believe Bezos or Koch are special, but they can simply pay them more.

All demand is "real demand." Someone wants something and is willing to pay you. That's real.

Except I like what Bezos does for me. He gets my capital because I get something in return. I'd much rather my money go to one of Bezos services than it be taken from me by the government to pay someone to fill holes. And filling holes doesn't create jobs, it sucks capital from places that do. Bezos on the other hand created whole new industries.

> Social work, infrastructure repairs, mental health services.

But not everyone is suited for that work, much less qualified to perform those services, and perhaps most importantly, not everyone WANTS to.

Raise the salaries for those professions and more might, and of course with a UBI people are less incentivized by earnings to get into a specific job.

However, digging a hole in the ground and then filling it up is horribly, soul crushingly demotivating.

Even if someone is working in a job that de facto amounts to doing just that, it should be covered up so that this fact isn't obvious and that a person can reasonably choose to ignore the truth and convince themselves that their job has some real value. Which is actually done, all kinds of internal propaganda, glorious mission statements, etc.

> However, digging a hole in the ground and then filling it up is horribly, soul crushingly demotivating.

Ah you see, this is why you have one person doing the digging, and another doing the filling! This way, each man goes home satisfied.

> digging a hole in the ground and then filling it up is horribly, soul crushingly demotivating.

Europe can start reconstructing all the ruins of castles, monasteries and cathedrals; for example Napoleon destroyed quite a lot of them and most didn't recover. Or just tear down all the ugly buildings built between 50s-70s when architects were out of whack like some German cities are doing right now (Frankfurt) and replace them with some 3D printed aesthetically pleasing ones. Should be a plenty of work and those jobs could be opposite of soul crushing.

We've got a lot of holes that need to be dug anyway. The state of infrastructure in the US is pretty deplorable in some places. You could keep a few million people busy rebuilding roads and bridges that are crumbling away - more if you leaned on manpower instead of machinery.

I'd like to see something like a reincarnation of the CCC. There's so much relatively unskilled labor out there that goes undone.

> However, digging a hole in the ground and then filling it up is horribly, soul crushingly demotivating.

Further, being forced to spend time doing that makes it much harder to gain skills for, or search for, another job.

Make-work non-training jobs (though ideally real beneficial work that just has market value less than what is paid by government for it rather than obvious waste of effort) may be a same policy solution to short-term private sector dislocation where demand for work with basically-similar skill profile has dropped but is expected to rebound, but beyond that it is fairly obvious counterproductive and a trap that impedes the ability of a labor force to adapt to new needs compared to conventional means-tested welfare, which itself is not very good at that (which is one of the motivations for UBI.)

> soul crushingly demotivating

Probably a motivator to get a better / real job? I certainly prefer that over UBI

Keynes said that the government paying people to dig holes and fill them up was sufficient to escape a liquidity trap. He didn't actually advocate nonproductive work.

There's tons of actual productive work that could be done though. Cleaning trash from streets and parks, filling potholes, fixing sidewalks, pulling weeds, painting over graffiti. These things would would make everyone's days a little nicer.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employme...

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is."

Actually that is pretty much what we do, all the oil, coal, ore, etc dug up and turned into products that eventually end up in landfill.

We’d be better off if these same people ran hand operated gas distillers and then buried co2.

Sounds like GDPR!

It is much more intellectually challenging to address the inefficiencies in the economic system by devising a global model with regard to the available resources, manpower and population needs. Call it a planned economy if you will. People should vote what the system must produce, while considering the pollution and exhaustion of finite resources.

The current capitalist system is all about the individual self interest of each playing agent (company). That probably worked in the past in loosely-populated areas with lots of resources, but doesn't look like it is the way for the future.

We are in a planned economy. Just not directly government planned. There are very few industries in the US that consist of free economic agents.

I’d hazard to guess that most postwar US economic activity was indirectly fueled by government policy, and it has shifted in some ways to large cartels.

People already vote for what the system must produce with their money, that's the basis of capitalist supply & demand. How can you force people to consider pollution and exhaustion of finite resources? People as a whole suck at considering things, that's why we make all kinds of institutions to work around it like representative democracy and legal systems.

Once upon a time there was a thing to be done. Huge meetings were held, and goals were set for how much of the thing should be done per month. Metrics were set up to track how much of the thing had happened. Over a hundred people were invited to these meetings, and countless man-hours were spent on defining goals. Many more hours were spent on measuring progress toward those goals. Group emails were sent, vaguely confused words were spoken, and spreadsheets sprang forth from the void.

None of this affected the people whose job was to actually do the thing. They did as much of the thing as could be done in the time they had. The goals came from the void and the metrics went into the void, and no echo was heard.

... And "once upon a time" means, in this case, "a few months ago at a big company where I work." The really funny thing, though, is that most of these jobs make local sense. The managers who went to the meetings and so on? They were sheltering their people from all this so that things could get done. Even the people who set all this in motion were probably well-meaning, since they wanted the thing to be done and took actions that they perhaps thought might plausibly lead toward this. I can't hate any of the people involved -- and yet the end result of it all is complete waste; utter horrifying destruction of irreplaceable time and energy. It would be better to light large piles of cash on fire, because it would be much cheaper and at least then we'd be able to stare at the flames.

How do you prevent this sort of situation?

Is this an argument against the need for managers? Google tried that, and it failed.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2013/07/17/googl...

Yes? No? Abort, retry, fail? I mentioned jobs making local sense. And it's true! If any single one of these jobs were to go away, things would get worse. The system would leave its local optimum, and many problems would ensue. And I want to get out of that Nash equilibrium -- but how?

Goons are only pointless, if you look at them from a idealistic all-humanity-together approach.

And even though they tell us often they are there because of the other goons... they are usually there to dominate(or exploite) the others. Which gives the own side a massive advantage. Even though it mostly happens today in a much more subtle way than the open conquering, stealing and blundering, of the past, it is mostly the same principle. There are nice exceptions, though, like the swiss etc. but big armys today are still there to enforce various interests, for a long time mostly only as a potential threat, but more and more in active engagement. And even though I appreciate honesty, I am a bit concerned, that they more and more drop the facade.

(Still, the german president had to resign a few years ago because he said that the german military is also there to protect german economic interests outside of germany, and he did not mean fighting pirates. But it is still highly illegal here (in theory), to make war for any other reasons than to defend, so he had to go, even though the public outcry was completley hypocrite)

Honest question: how much of our work is not absolutely necessary?

It's easy to write a piece of software once and share it with everybody.

The product you are working on - what unique value is giving to humanity?

(I mean beyond "it pays the bills" and "it uses $popular_thing_of_the_year")

I believe we reached a level of productivity where - in rich countries - we are all keeping each other busy with loads of unnecessary work.

Only farming is absolutely necessary. Farming is down to about 2% in the US. You could cut that in half if people stopped ordering avocado toast and just ate oats. So, probably 99%.

You might want to adjust the figure to account for clothing/minimal construction work for shelter - both are definitely fundamental in most parts of the US. One might also wish to add in a minimally functional healthcare system to ensure a reasonably high average life expectancy.

Nevertheless, the point is still extremely valid; I would estimate around 95%.

Update: As in general it is easy to draw overly pessimistic conclusions from this (I have been affected by this myself), it may be of use to point out that positive answers do exist for this issue. One of my personal favorites is the powerful, short book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.

What about plumbing or sanitation? Construction of shelter? Medical care? Firefighting? If those things aren't "necessary", it seems difficult to argue that farming itself even is necessary.

Some (not all) of these jobs provide slack to an organization. A human is effectively paid a retainer, or given an excuse to on premise and engaged, so that they have the knowledge, context, and social capital to deal with unusual or unforeseeable situations when they arise.

Giving someone a job that causes them to feel useless or disengaged, in order to maintain their readiness, is bad management. The existence of a job whose value can't be summarized on a process chart is not.

The article was entertaining enough satire, but in the end had me wishing for an alternate version that categorized the forces that create and sustain jobs. It pretended to this, but by starting from the assumption that corporations and managers are idiots or ill-intentioned, it sacrificed insight for populism.

I recommend _Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency_, Tom DeMarco, 2002.

This is by David Graeber of "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" fame: https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080

Perhaps I'm reading to much into the title - but seems like pointless jobs have been around a very long time. What is the "rise" really referring to here?

Pointless jobs abound in both the public and private sectors, but I think these articles resonate because so many white collar workers are largely occupied with projects that will be cancelled before they're finished or whose end product will eventually be ignored by the people who are intended to use it. Most companies just aren't managed very well...

The problem is clearly not just about completely pointless jobs. Among jobs that actually have a purpose, we find many that are: required to deal with the problems generated by bad practices/inefficiency (the article mentions duct-tapers. Commenters here also mention how in computer science we deal with a lot of technical debt, even when many times we know there's no way out unless we rewrite from scratch), or even worse, generated by the own inefficiencies and 'stupidity loops' in a system (see a good deal of bureaucracy, supervision and reporting taks, goons, etc.)

Of course we can't remove inefficiency completely, but these are big problems with big consequences. I'm really saddened by it: I regularly see a lot of comments from people that seem to be very capable but end up doing dull jobs, for dumb bosses, wasting their potential when they could be adding so much more value to our societies (and also be happier with it). And I don't intend to blame anyone here, it's not like we have much better choices in many cases. Sometimes you even think we would be able to achieve more with less man-hours if we didn't spend so many of them on nonsense.

The need for jobs for everyone has also been discussed. UBI as an alternative, etc. To me it's clear the number of jobs we need/will need in the future will fall. And that's a good thing (we can produce more with less resources), but it also has very negative consequences, due to the way our economic system works and our need for money. But there's also a social problem. The concept of work is so valued that society rarely stops to reflect about the positive consequences of needing less work. And without this, it's really hard to build towards that society with less jobs or less work hours sanely. The difference between "work" and "paid work" is very important, and I feel we don't talk enough about it either. Work is important for humans, even necessary. But we can't keep repeating nice quotes that are actually referring to "work" and applying them to "paid work" to evangelize the concept.

The whole situation is very frustrating. I'm quite young, and I think about it pretty often. I don't really like the perspective for most jobs I could do. What can I do? What can we do? Ignore the rest of the world and just try to find the best place for yourself? Try to live with less? Get in politics, start a business? I find it really hard to ignore so much waste of potential and useless pain.

Staggeringly ignorant.

It's a mostly free system. Why is someone paying someone to do these "pointless" jobs".

Hint: the answer is this that is bullshit. Surprisingly, companies like nothing more than accumulating money. Paying people to do nothing gets in the way of this goal and so generally it doesn't happen.

This doesn't mean everyone personally feels their job has value and it doesn't mean there aren't pointless jobs in a large corporate environment but as a systemic thing, valueless jobs aren't exactly our most pressing concern.

Not every value providing task in the world induces the person doing it to instantaneosly reach nirvana because it is so wonderfully fulfilling. Many jobs are mundane. It doesn't mean they are valueless. Why would someone be paying them to do it otherwise?

As companies get bigger and they monopolize industries, they can afford to be extremely inefficient without any negative repercussions.

It makes the system fundamentally unfair. Money is supposed to be a representation of the debt that society owes an individual for contributions that the individual has made to society but its not like that - It doesn't matter how useless you are to society, you can still make a lot of money. In fact, it's easier to make money if you are useless to society; smart people let other people create value and they spend all their energy on coming up with strategies to capture the value created by others.

> “I work in a college dormitory during the summer. I have worked at this job for three years, and at this point it is still unclear to me what my actual duties are. Primarily, it seems that my job consists of physically occupying space at the front desk. While engaged in this, I am free to ‘pursue my own projects’, which I take to mean mainly creating rubber band balls out of rubber bands I find in the cabinets.

A doorman's job is not bullshit. The job acts as a deterrent for people who shouldn't be inside that dorm. There have been cases where students get raped by a stranger inside their own dorm room.

Going by this example, blog writers reports should also be added the list. Their sole existence is to get clicks to articles talking about stuff that we all know about but there is nothing we can act on in an effective way.

For an amusing take on this please read "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" by David Graeber https://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs

It was good enough to warrant a response from the Economist https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-...

How about building and app that is never used, never sees the light of day, and it's construction never serves as an example of what to do or not to do to anyone?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woK2FcqJVuE

I worked with a guy whose job was about 50% copying and pasting data from source A to B or going through an Excel sheet and doing the same thing for each entry.

Eventually he automated it in a hacky way with VBA that worked most of the time. He spent a lot of time watching YouTube paylists while the VBA scripts ran submitting web forms etc. It seemed like a pretty sweet gig.

This is universal income disguised as a real job?

The point of a job is to allow you to put your own time beyond your own use and use it to serve others.

This simple 'proof of burn' of your finite life is what gives the money exchange value.

If you want others to give up their time to produce a surplus for you then you need to do the same. Otherwise they'll just take the productivity themselves and have Friday off.

The Lynx one is brilliant.

Yes, I laughed and expected it to be mentioned here more than just the one comment.

Reminds me of codereddit: http://codereddit.com/?sub=todayilearned

As a aread this with that:

https://longreads.com/2018/04/26/is-your-job-lynchian-or-is-...

discusses it with in context of Ask A Manager and What Color is Your Parachute

Want to see pointless job? go into a nice department store in Tokyo to buy a shirt (if, say, United Airlines lost all your good clothes on the way over-- just as a hypothetical).

the sheer number of people involved in greeting, seating and feting you is stunning.

then there's the five levels of distribution to get any kind of product to market...

This is why we proposed this at our company:

https://qbix.com/blog/2016/11/17/properly-valuing-contributi...

When you stop solving interesting problems crusty old man reality sets in. If you agree to stagnate in a pointless job you a part of the problem until you change your perspective. Are you waiting for Linda Carter to save you?!

If there's a chance of that, I'm good.

my favorite flunky job is the one where an executive tells the flunky to print emails out on paper and put them into a big stack so the executive can ignore them later

These are the types of jobs that are useful for anyone just starting to build something. You may not need a seed investor if you have the right pointless job

> tasks that could easily be automated

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me automation was easy I would be richer than Jeff Bezos.

>> if no one had an army, armies would not be needed.

Lol, the US has an army because they need to attack other countries!

Bullshit jobs is what the antiquated capitalist system gives us in return for the increased efficiency in other human activities. You automate the production of essential goods and services with increasingly less people needed to support it, but you still need to employ everyone, so you invent jobs just for the sake of them.

The system should be designed to reward us with more spare time, not to make us busier with ever more mundane tasks.

They had full emplyoment in the German Democratic Republic.

As far as I know you HAD TO work.

But.

The state HAD TO give you work.

Hilarity ensued.

A job for one week was to move plastic roof boards from an automated saw on a pallet. They would save lots of money if they‘d place a robot there. In fact, the hole factory could have been automated.

I would think carefully about this. Elon Musk thought the same thing with Model 3 production, and then said “humans are underrated” and that they bought into automation too much, leading to production delays.

https://gizmodo.com/overrated-human-elon-musk-says-humans-ar...

I saw a similar thing at a Mars chocolate factory in the 1990s: a lone worker with a conveyor belt of chocolate bars to one side, and a robot opening up boxes to the other. The worker was grabbing handfuls of chocolate bars and filling up the box that had been presented to him. When full, the box would head of down another conveyor belt and be automatically stacked on a palette ready for shipping.

Long-since automated I suspect, but at that point in time I presume that the human was cheaper and more reliable than the equivalent robot.

Aside: the equivalent job on the M&Ms production line _was_ being done by a robot, and required the packets of M&Ms to be neatly lined up in their boxes.

> I should add that there is really only one class of people who not only deny their jobs are pointless, but also express outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. These are – predictably enough – business owners and others in charge of hiring and firing.

A manager's job can certainly be pointless, and often is; but how could the owner's possibly be? An owner who has hired managers who operate a profitable business with minimal supervision is just a success. The managers can be perfectly happy with this situation, if they prefer a stable salary to the risky residual claim. I'm not sure the author quite believes in capitalism here.

A great example would be the author of this article.

Cold callers are the same as recruiters.

It's called an "occupation" for a reason. There's no requirement of merit or value to qualify as one, just occupy the people.

Pointless jobs are much wider than this. Most jobs I can get are to perform a useful role in a useless pursuit.

Capitalism is supposed to be all about efficient resource allocation. However having the smartest people of a generation work on putting little text ads next to your search results and stock market chicanery is highly inefficient.

There is so much real work to be done. We shouldn't be wasting our time with fruitless pursuits in order to literally not die.

entertaining read, not sure I understand the bit about business owners.

I'm sorry, but this is completely ridiculous and flies in the face of economics and capitalism, and deserves to be called out. Remember that David Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist.

Pointless jobs exist because of inefficiences. Someone higher up couldn't be bothered to automate it, and there isn't enough oversight of the budget. An entrenched interest (like a no-longer-needed union regulation) is too hard to fight. Etc.

But capitalism is the most marvelous machine for removing inefficiencies, and therefore removing pointless jobs. Why? Because the owner/capitalist will make more money when they're removed/automated. It's easy to say McDonald's cashiers have pointless jobs, and they're being replaced with kiosks. Or taxi drivers with driverless cars. The same way the original human "computers" were replaced by calculating machines. The process isn't perfect and certainly isn't instant, but it happens and is relentless.

Pointless jobs decrease over time. And trying to claim that they're rising, as Graeber does, is simply disingenuous and dishonest.

You are not allowed to speak positively of capitalism here. It is a messy system, far inferior to the more modern technocratic ways we should be following.

Yes, and the fact that capitalism created the conditions that allow people like the ones who pontificate on HN about the messiness of capitalism to exist at all should go completely unmentioned.

TLDR: serving in the military is a bullshit job for "goons". The Guardian really is a parody of itself sometimes.

Incorrect. They're saying that the military is a "goon" type of job, in that it involves aggression, and you have to do it because others will plow over you otherwise. It has nothing to do with the character of soldiers. This same underlying logic also applies to corporate lawyers and advertisers.

Right, and therein lies the Guardian's stereotypical grad student reasoning: militaries only exist because of humanity's lack of enlightenment, and military service is therefore a job that "lacks positive value" and is "essentially manipulative and aggressive".

Even if you subscribe to the standard litany of lefty anti-person-in-uniform grudges, the notion that militaries around the world exist primarily to guard against other militaries is misguided. A much bigger motivating factor for the existence of large standing armies is the general desire of illiberal regimes, be they on the right or on the left, to keep the young male population (ie the backbone of a potential revolution) occupied on a daily basis.

Pretty sure there's a ton of pointless job in capitalism

Almost related. Perhaps outdated. I worked in television for 10 years as a broadcast engineer. In a large city this is a union job.

I was given the task of testing and repairing some equipment that had been in a back room for a while. I was the new kid so I didn't know the routines of the day but one of my duties was to operate the camera for a five-minute newscast in the afternoon. This only entailed rolling the camera into place, pointing at the news person, focus and I was done till the newscast was over.

I was poking around the equipment in the backroom when one of the scruffy old men quickly came into the room. "Hey, you're supposed to be on the set for that newscast!", he said. I must have lost track of time cause I didn't know it was so late. I rushed to the news set, got everything ready, put on my headphones and looked around to see no one else was there and it was still an hour before the news was to be broadcast.

Thinking the old man was the one who got the time wrong, I went back to my other work, thinking I could get a few things done but, minutes later, the same old man came in to chew me out. "Do you know how long it took us to get your job into our union contract?! If management looked through the window and saw no one out here, we'd be in big trouble. You get out there now!!"

So I went back on the set, now understanding that I was required to stand there for 53 minutes, headset on, waiting for work to begin.

In the US, I think it largely stems from our individualistic natures. Our fierce independence comes at a cost to the greater community; we often don't interact, and in the worst case outright loathe, our neighbors. People would rather bitch on NextDoor about a loud party down the block instead of confronting them directly about it. We solve disputes not by working it out with the other party, but with subpoenas. Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum. Many well-meaning government initiatives aimed to benefit the greater good are met with intense suspicion (your NIMBYs). Companies don't see offering jobs as enriching communities, but rather bestowing saintly privileges that those plebians better be thankful for. They're decked with such ridiculous liability clauses that the case of the carpenter in the story is not an exception, but the norm.

That was somewhat of a rant, and I don't really have any kind of solution to all of it. America is several thousand tragedies of the commons, from a neighbor-to-neighbor level all the way up to the federal government.

I have to say I don't understand many things about your comment, so I'd be glad if you were to clear them for me.

1) You blame your "individualistic natures" for the appearance of pointless jobs. Now, I haven't lived in the US, but that seems odd to me. I live in Romania, a society that is profoundly focused on the community, and the abundance of pointless jobs, particularly in the communistic years (communism being a profoundly anti-individualistic ideology) was absolutely staggering.

It just seems to me pretty self-evident that, as you move the focus from the individual, and his own happiness, he will find less motivation to do a meaningful job, and be contempt with a pointless, but simpler job.

I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me.

2) "Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum."

I'm afraid I just don't follow here. Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector?

3) You claim, quite rightly, that companies are not concerned with the public good, just with their survival and/or success, and consider jobs given out as "saintly privileges".

Firstly, all of the modern advances of mankind, from the industrial revolution, to the ridiculously cheap products provided by Rockefeller, Edison, and the like, to the supercomputers almost every human in the civilized world carries with him in his pocket, were made, not in the interest of "the greater community", but in those people/companies' self-interest.

Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive? The one that says "I am owed this job by my company"? Or the one that says, "My job is nothing but a privilege given onto me by the company, and I must prove every day that I deserve it?"

In any case, I'd be really grateful if you could explain these points to me. Thanks in advance!!

>I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me.

Americans, as the saying does, live to work. Many tie their individual worth to the jobs they do. We invest a lot of ourselves into our jobs (those we care about anyway), and oftentimes the output doesn't equal the input.

>Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector?

You greatly overestimate the average person's drive to better themselves. Plenty are fine to get something that pays the bills and that's it.

>Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive?

You're going between 2 extremes that I didn't mention. My comment about companies offering jobs comes from the understanding of how positions (mainly in the white collar industry) used to be in the 50s/60s/70s vs. today. People that worked at the IBMs/RANDs/GMs/etc. of yester-decade worked there for decades. They were loyal to that company, almost to a fault. When they retired, they were given an expensive Omega with their name engraved in the back. Some even got pensions. Note this was also largely in the context of the pre-globalization age. Nowadays companies have no problem axing whole divisions to meet their bottom lines. They will go overseas. They have no problem leaving an area they've been at for decades. All the while, baby boomers continue to wonder out loud why their kids don't have the same earnings potential as they did. Not saying any of this is good or bad, it just is.

These types of jobs are extremely common in Luxembourg (a small country in EU). The workers stay because they are highly paid.

Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs?

Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.

Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?

That they are educated has nothing to do with whether they are right or their points are useful broadly. It's a dramatic story from someone who themselves thinks they are more useful than they are.

A little tongue-in-cheek call out of the irony isn't necessarily an attack.

Bullshit jobs are an interesting phenomenon and I enjoyed the article. I also chuckled at the parent comment.

It doesn't have to be taken very seriously.

You’ve employed some sort of inverse ad hominem here. Credentials don’t mean we should take someone seriously. Their words should stand for themselves.

Wouldn't independent thought be more useful than proppping up some idea based on the credentials of the person who holds it?

Even if the content of the article is entirely frivolous, isn't the existence of the discussion here proof that it has at the very least provided some entertainment?

And isn't discussing a potentially enormous societal inefficiency worth doing?

The article is quite provocative and could easily become a movement that eliminates thousands of jobs. Not at all pointless.

Calling for the elimination of the army and corporate lawyers is sophomoric, but probably deliberately so.

At first I found some humour in the irony, but the more I think about it the article isn't really pointless. The point of it is to point out the bullshit and get people talking about that. Not only does the article have a point, but it succeeds in its purpose quite well, we are, after all, talking about pointless jobs when we weren't really thinking about them much before.

Yet another guardian piece that seems like it was written by an edgy teenager.

In this case the edgy teenager in question wrote the generally well-received 'Debt: The First 5000 Years.'

There were certainly plenty of hits of edgy-teenageriness in that book.

>generally well-received

>muh popular opinion

The fact that the writer happened to write something that lots of people enjoyed neither contributes to nor detracts from the fact that this article is full of willfully contrarian edge, befitting a teenager.

There are a whole lot of pointless jobs in government -- they only exist because of excessive authoritarian regulations.

Also most of charities. They sell feel good and employ bachelors of arts.

We need a B Ark: http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_Sh...

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