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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

The number of people in this subthread who think true bullshit jobs don’t exist because they’re inefficient astonishes me. You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort.

Or senior executives for that matter.

In big companies, cash cows subsidize all manner of boondoggles. That’s why we have a term for cash cows.

Ever have a long term project cancelled, either for a good reason, or just because a new VP showed up and the project didn't have his brand on it? Did that cancelled project make the company money? Companies only do things that make money, right?

Never saw a high level goal in your company that was misguided? A roadmap for getting there that was misguided? Never seen a process (methodology, etc) that wasted a lot of time, but one important person swore by? I could go on.

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This is why I roll my eyes when I see people suggest that government is wasteful and should be run like a business. It's like they have never worked a job in their lives.

As someone whose done both they don’t compare. One is bad, one is even worse.

exactly. Reason is, businesses that engage in lots of inefficiencies get outcompeted, and if the inefficiencies/mistakes are egregious they go out of business. Government has the ultimate monopoly, where the only remedy available for most "shareholders" is to vote out the "CEO" and "directors" once every couple of years. In the private market, you can take your business to a competitor if you don't like how one company treats you. Or as a shareholder you can sell your shares in company A and buy company B instead. The only real remedy against government incompetence is to emigrate, and then you find yourself in a new one that also acts like it's the only game in town for it's citizens - because it is.

Maybe this would be true if there were thousands of competing businesses in a market. In this world of oligopolies businesses only have to be slightly more efficient than competitors to survive, and even then they can make up for the bullshit job related inefficiencies with different pricing models.

If you're waiting for elections to make your opinions about governance known you're leaving "money" on the table. And if you think you can do anything on that level with businesses you're fooling yourself, they don't care -- and you probably won't even know about the bullshit jobs they're propping up, anyway. If you don't believe me, why not email the CEO of Proctor and Gamble and see what he or she does?

Unfortunately, the notion of bullshit jobs extends beyond jobs that are simply low value within a company. Whole organizations within a company or entire companies can be considered bullshit.

Many of us on this site are most likely contributors to bullshit. How many of us work on something that is tracking and spying on people with the purpose of selling or using that data to manipulate them later?

> You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort.

Is being bad at a job make the job “bullshit”?

It does when you get to do that job indefinitely, and perhaps have a whole career of doing that job in different places. Lots of bad middle managers out there have whole careers being bad middle managers.

Nobody gets to keep waiting tables or cleaning bathrooms if they are bad at it.

Employees can be pretty terrible at their jobs and keep them if they can show up on time and sober. Schedule coverage is more important than almost anything else.

In this case it's the middle manager creating or propping up bullshit jobs to make themselves look more important.

It might. Suppose I was a policeman and my job was to reduce crime in the city. I spend my days cruising, talking to coworkers, doing paperwork, meetings, and sending emails. When there's some emergency near me I show up, but kind of wait in the back while other officers do anything.

I would be bad at my job, and if I kept doing it indefinitely, i.e. if I wasn't quickly fired, then there would be a discrepancy between my nominal job (reducing crime) and what I actually did (nothing).

Not talking about the manager’s job. Talking about their reports.

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