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Comment by MillenialMan | Hacker News Reader

The trick "bullshit jobs" uses is to switch between two definitions of bullshit. One definition is "useless, of no benefit to the employer," and the other is "revolving around selling bullshit" (which is absolutely beneficial to the employer).

The first definition is sort of ridiculous (no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless), but when challenged it reverts to the second definition, which is trivially obvious (of course most companies are trying to hawk crap).

Read the comments on this post - most of the arguments are just people switching between the two definitions.

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>no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless

On the contrary, companies do this frequently. Sometimes it's simply because the job is not "clearly useless" in the eyes of the management, even if it's obvious to other people.

More often, the usefulness of the job to the organization itself, or to people inside it, has become disconnected from its actual usefulness. For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.

This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate. Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them. Beurocracy is inefficient, but it's rarely completely wrong. It's very easy to tell when an employee is contributing nothing, even for a monolith.

What I think actually happens is that companies hire more people for a particular role than they need, because load balancing is difficult, or they have a structure that extracts productivity from the workforce in a way that's inefficient. But that's not the same as outright non-productivity. Those people are not useless - they're still productive, they just provide suboptimal (and maybe negative) return on investment.

> For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.

I don't think it works like that. They may invest the excess staffing budget in a productive worker they otherwise wouldn't have hired, but that's not the same as hiring someone who provides no benefit. The return that employee brings may even be negative but it's very, very unlikely to be -100%.

> > For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.

> I don't think it works like that.

I'll split the middle. Sometimes it works like that, but not nearly as often as proponents of the narrative say it does.

> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them.

Some companies, maybe. I've known enough companies that tolerated and in some cases enjoyed fat, to understand as a rule what you're claiming doesn't hold. Including lots of fat shaped like management layers. Other forms of fat include "we don't want to fire these people, so let's give them symbolic work until they retire", "these are all friends of people in upper management, so don't fire them even though nobody knows what they actually do", "these people were hired as a PR stunt and now they really don't have much to do", "we have to go through the motions of doing this project, even though everyone knows it's doomed, it's just for show anyway", and many, many more.

Companies can be very, very inefficient and still work.

>This strikes me as a narrative that's much easier to state and nod along to, than to demonstrate

No, it's very easy to demonstrate. The staff themselves will tell you. In fact, the article we are discussing begins by citing two surveys which show huge numbers of employees (tens of millions if the survey is accurate) believe they are not doing useful work or are not contributing meaningfully to the world.

I think those employees are:

A) Switching between the two definitions (is their job useless to their employer, or "the world"?)

B) Usually wrong - the company knows why they were hired much better than they do (and the company guards this information, because it is strongly in the company's interest for an employee to have a poor understanding of their monetary value. For most positions, the company doesn't want you to know the point of your job.)

Put it in perspective. Does the average cleaner think the floors need to be vacuumed daily? No, of course not. They probably think it's overkill, but they do it because that's their job. Is the company stupid for scheduling vacuuming once a day? No. They know exactly how clean they want their floors to be.

"Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22032908

And that's a bullshit definition - because everyone reads it as "a job that is bullshit", not "a job that the worker believes is not 100% necessary".

The whole thing is wordplay. I don't respect the methodology, and it's one of the reasons I don't trust his conclusions.

> Companies are ruthless about cutting fat. They have departments dedicated to isolating unnecessary employees and firing them.

That depends on the company. How about the 'growth engines' whose primary goal is to be acquired? I don't think these claims work in a world where the axiom 'the goal of a company is to make more money than it spends' is broken.

That's an interesting case and I think those jobs are likely to be legitimately bullshit.

Exactly. User story: As a manager I want to make decisions but maintain a layer of isolation from consequences.

Being the fall guy is a bullshit job but having fall guys to sacrifice is imensely useful.

You have people who's entire role, not just part of it, is to be a fall guy? They do nothing but pretend to work and act as a scapegoat when you fail?

Or do you have people who are still productive, but you keep around as insurance?

> no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless

The only way somebody can say this is if they haven't actually worked for any real company.

Companies are the most rational and levelheaded of God's creations, and so could never engage in any activity so at odds with their raison d'etre, like wasting budget on useless endeavors. Why, with all the well-trained MBAs filling out the bureaucrat ranks these days, I'm sure business has never been more efficient!

I was careful with my words. "Completely useless" is not the same as "a net loss".

(no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless)

A bit naive to think that companies are 100% efficient and don’t make mistakes. Companies aren’t robots, they’re a collection of people, people make mistakes.

I’ve seen executives in the past identify an issue and hire someone to solve that problem, executive didn’t understand the problem, person left the company position wasn’t filled again.

I think they make mistakes, and as with your example, those mistakes tend to get fixed. Net negative jobs are the exception, not the rule, and completely useless jobs are the vast exception.

> no company is going to assign budget to something that's clearly useless

That would be true only if leadership was 100% omniscient and knowledgeable in all topics. The problem is that ultimately only leadership and shareholders are incentivized by company profits.

People on a salary care more about their personal salary and benefits, and while those should theoretically correlate with company profits, the feedback loop is extremely long and can be affected by external factors, potentially concealing inefficiencies, ultimately allowing people on a flat salary to prioritize their personal gains at the detriment of the company's gains.

And the above still assumes good faith and mere lack of skill. When you include fraud or mis-selling into the mix (such as big consulting companies charging insane sums for unkept promises then outsourcing the actual work to incompetent people) the problem becomes so much bigger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

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