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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

One thing I note is that many people I know who work in food service believe their job is "bullshit", however in food service jobs it is usually directly obvious how somebody benefits from your work.

Those people don't like their work or the way they are treated and they seem to express that they personally find it meaningless.

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If I recall the original 'Bullshit jobs' post, even before it was a book, food service jobs (and hairdressing) were specifically mentioned as not bullshit jobs; and that distinction between liking the job vs it being bullshit was stated

yes, they are the example of the distinction between a shit job and a bullshit job. Furthermore they are the canonical example of the bullshit that every job has. As a teen Graeber worked in a kitchen. He and his team cleaned it one night. The boss told them to clean something that was already clean because he could not conceive of the job as being actually complete. I'm probably telling it shitty.

There's a ton of nuance in the article and book that isn't in the title. Same with Debt. People just read other people's takes on his work and get busy imputing. A bullshit job of their own design, if you will.

idk. i worked cleaning a lobby and found that my job could be replaced by customers being cleaner. you know, how 98% of humans are at their own home. Peanut shells on floor are not necessary(might even be more effort to hit the floor than your plate). They are going to walk past the garbage can on their way out, they could have carried the trash.

servers today are easily replaced by either tech (ordering system on table, or a bar style ordering system where you get up and order from 2 wait staff). And if we trusted humans(far fetched), a self serve system: pour you own beer, and add it to your tab.

If my task was something the customer could have easily done themselves (and often do for themselves the other 99$ of their life: cart return, bag groceries) I felt useless.

Like I'm walking behind a person littering and picking their trash up. They could just not litter, you know?

Yes - something to that effect is also discussed at length in the book

I think it was in the context of categorizing the kinds of bullshit jobs and the "cleaning" of useless, bullshit-produced littering was one of the examples

From these discussions I'm thinking the book is quite comprhensive on the topic. Several of the comments here are addressed there in one way or another

> the original 'Bullshit jobs' post, even before it was a book

Is here:

https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

> food service jobs (and hairdressing) were specifically mentioned as not bullshit jobs

I don't see that in the article; in fact the article mentions "all-night pizza delivery" as a bullshit job (or more precisely a job that only exists because so many other people are working bullshit jobs), which would at least suggest that other food service jobs might be categorized similarly by the author.

> and that distinction between liking the job vs it being bullshit was stated

I don't see this stated in the article. The article does state that the author found many people who believed their own jobs were pointless, and correlates this with those jobs being bullshit; but if anything that suggests that not liking one's job is not very distinct from the job being bullshit.

I can't check but trust you over my memory. It must have been in the book, then, that these points are made

I distincly recall a section on "Why hairdressers are not bullshit jobs", referring to a Hitchhikers Guide joke, and at least one bit about food services being "shit" jobs (but not bullshit jobs). I recall the latter because it was a point of argument with a friend when we read it.

Someone commented something similar below. When I have time I will check

So it's less that they have a bullshit job than they work in a bullshit economy, that treats people who do work as an extractive resource to be managed by the owner class.

This.

Every time I come across the concept of a "bullshit" job, I remind myself that it's a self-reported metric, and many people who think that their jobs are bullshit are just wrong.

No this is not true. You can easily point out many middle management positions that are basically bullshit jobs. One example I know of in my personal life: People that get promoted because they need to get paid more, because they have been working somewhere for some time, and you need incentives to keep your workers happy and thus you create a bullshit job.

Middle management is a perfect example of it, actually. A lot of time and effort is sometimes spent drafting reports and creating other data, but the person who's creating them never aggregates them from different sources and doesn't make any decisions based on this data, so to him, it looks completely useless and bullshit.

Benefiting others isn't the main metric of a job for the one doing the job. Benefiting himself is the only important metric all the others are accessories.

> isn't the main metric of a job

I'd appreciate it if you could make an argument for this opinion instead of merely stating it as fact.

How many people would do their job if they weren’t getting paid? I’m sure a few would, but for most people I’m sure the paycheck is why they are there.

That's not really relevant. Whether a job needs to be done, and who benefits, is orthogonal to what it pays.

> Benefiting others isn't the main metric of a job for the one doing the job.

“for the one doing the job”. We are talking about the importance to the employee here, not the importance to other people. It might have a great deal of importance to other people.

Again, how is that relevant? Are you familiar with the arguments made in Bullshit Jobs? What people get paid is not really part of the discussion.

Ultimately a job needs to be creating value for somebody, or it wont provide value for yourself for long.

That's ridiculous.

Business owners know well that their job is totally dependent upon doing something of value for others.

Employees know well that their job is totally dependent upon benefiting their bosses.

Ergo, everyone's job is (and is known to be) primarily measured by benefiting others.

The devil is in the details with regard to who those other beneficiaries are, but they are never solely oneself, else it ceases to be a job rather quickly.

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