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Comment by np- | Hacker News Reader

> "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?"

But isn’t this basically every job that doesn’t directly support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just arbitrarily working to meet some other human’s desires?

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Meeting a desire is not a bullshit job, depending on the desire. One example in the book is a receptionist. Some places need receptionists to answer phones or receive packages, but one receptionist was hired at a firm that didn't need her to do any work - but a competing firm in the same building had one, so they wanted one too. Meeting your desire for nice hair, even a desire for a butler to pick up your laundry or whatever, is still meeting a need, but it's less superfluous than "I need you to sit there because someone else has someone who does something similar)

I'm not arguing that it's about meetings some other human's desires. Indeed, jobs that give real pleasure or sense of accomplishment to other people (actors, massage therapists, yoga teachers, personal trainers, artists, language coaches, yada yada) I find incredibly valuable.

I'm talking about when someone, specifically a gatekeeper, creates what is basically a little tedious maze for you to run, not for their own pleasure, not even for someone else's pleasure, but often just to justify their own job, usually in a "CYA" fashion.

I don't know of any arbitrary tasks set up by gatekeepers. I mean, people don't just sit around and think up stupid tasks for fun. These jobs usually arise something like this:

In order to process request X, we need pieces of information A, B, C, D. Users frequently send in incomplete information. So we have to hire someone to check that all the required information is provided and accurate.

Yeah, it's kind of bullshit because it wouldn't be needed if people just did the right thing, but people are people, and they don't. In some cases it can be replaced with a web form with proper validation, but sometimes the information is something you can't verify with Javascript (like checking for a valid driver's license or something), so you need a human. So it goes.

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