Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

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I would disagree with at least the first three as being bullshit.

1. If your receptionist or assistant is only making you feel important, you are wasting their salary. One example: In my job we have to maintain professional licenses in many different states. Assistants help with this paperwork, which is different for every state and requires hours of reading and making phone calls to decipher. Yes, the engineer who bills their time at $150/hr could be doing this, but it's more efficient to pay an assistant. That is one small example of many, many vital tasks.

2. "Goon" is maybe the second oldest profession. Usually we call it "soldier". At some point you may be in conflict with an adversary. It's helpful to have someone on your side who is good at whatever type of conflict that is. I don't know why "telemarketer" is in there, it's not like the others. That's sales, which is pretty vital to any business. Now, the entire business and the product that a particular business is selling might be bullshit, but the job of selling certainly isn't.

3. I think the author vastly overestimates how preventable problems are. Maybe someday we'll invent an airline system that is 100% perfect and never loses anyone's bag. That's not the reality right now, though. Shit happens. Having someone who is paid to deal with it is better than not having them.

The "Goon" argument isn't so much that they are necessary in real life, but that their existence as a whole does not provide a net positive for society. Goons exist because other people have Goons; they don't create wealth for the species as a whole.

The arguments in general are written from the perspective that the "perfect" society is one where everyone cooperates to build new technologies, create art, go to space, et cetera, and every job that does not contribute to that utopian ideal is considered a "bullshit job".

Not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing, but that's the argument's perspective as I see it. IMO its not surprising he is an academic, this view has a very ivory tower feel to it.

Agreed. Graeber brings up some valid points about how market systems which should make economies more efficient sometimes fail to do so due to elite's/manager's self-image enhancement practices. On the other hand, I think that Graeber is heavily biased due to the fact that he is an academic who probably has not had a job that required operational excellence

> Assistants help with this paperwork, which is different for every state and requires hours of reading and making phone calls to decipher.

Regardless of this, this still sounds like a market inefficiency. I have not read the book (but I certainly will now), but I'm going to guess the author's response would be that while the assistant's job is necessary for the engineer to remain productive, it is still a bullshit job. What's needed instead is an automated service that handles this for the engineer at far less of a cost or less bullshit paperwork from government.

I agree, these things are needed, but they don't exist. There have been great strides made in that area, but professional licensing predates the office computer. So, it's a legacy process that takes time to adapt.

There's also the issue of the quasi-sovereignty of states in the US. They are not going to want to give up power to manage their own affairs.

The author seems to think about things this Pollyanna, blue-sky way where we could just change everything magically to be more efficient, but back in the real world there are entrenched interests and institutional inertia that result in things happening a certain way. They don't change overnight. It's not bullshit to pay people to deal with the world as it is. It's really the only option you have if you want to get something done now, instead of in some hypothetical future where we've automated away every inefficiency.

Is there a better way to talk about jobs that only exist due to inefficiency? It seems important to know that they could be automated away.

If someone is convinced that it would be so easy to automate away X annoying job that someone has to do, I would encourage them not to talk about it, but to get busy doing the automation.

Best case, they were right and the task gets automated away, now we don't need to talk about it at all. More likely, they might find that it's actually not as easy to automate away as they initially thought.

Seconded. This "soldier" group is a little sensitive because they aren't primary producers in the sense of they redistribute or safeguard distribution of existing resources rather than create anything. That is a perfectly acceptable form of value add; clearly helping make and execute decisions around distribution is important.

The sensitivity is that if there are not enough resources then there is little to be gained by redistributing them (if there is not enough food, someone will starve even with the best executed and fairest system). That isn't an arguments against having the jobs, that is an argument that their ability to add value is context sensitive and they don't emerge until there is a bit of a surplus to play with.

I was coming to make these points, but you covered it very well.

I can think of offices that would implode without the receptionist/assistant/office manager that performs the "glue" functions and allows others to focus on their roles.

I would say telemarketer is not standard sales, its high pressure unwelcome sales tactics that are stressful and harmful to both sides in my opinion, but I wouldn't classify that as "Goon" but as "negative sales techniques"

He seems to vastly misunderstand the actual function and roles hes criticizing.

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