I don’t understand why people believe rapacious corporations which only care about making money at the expense of everything else would also blow money on a shitload of meaningless layers of jobs?
Genuinely if Bullshit Jobs is true then every corporation is managing a piece of a welfare state that would make the New Deal look like a nickel kicked to a panhandler.
The thing is, it is true in a weak form, and very false in strong form. There is inevitably going to be inefficiency due to departmental divisions and budget issues, and there is inevitably going to be work that is categorized as mediocre.
Why is there this stupid job? Because no one wants to pay to do it better. Why is this unbearable bullshit allowed to endure? Because it hasn't caused anyone important financial problems yet and it makes the machine go.
One of the premises of BSJ is that people hire staff to puff up their egos and make themselves feel important… and I guess it feels like that is true for some jobs? Like, they are sort of supports for other people’s personal narratives?
there are lots of jobs that have little to do with making the machine go, as they basically track and record what the machine is doing for future reference. this is deemed socially necessary, and may perhaps be, but it is divorced from the functional operation of the firm.
Says someone who has never gone through a serious audit. Many of these things are critical corporate memory. And often the problems of today are rooted in these records.
A major part of "bullshit jobs" in bureaucracies are paperwork and auditing that are unnecessary 99% of the time, but, if you don't do them, the other 1% will steal more than all the "bullshit" paperwork costs.
Right, like keeping records that will almost always remain unaccessed and be destroyed after some amount of time without ever having been used, but you don’t know which ones you’ll need until you need them.
We have learned the hard way that if the audit isn't done, the paperwork doesn't get done, and if the paperwork wasn't even done, the regulation compliance wasn't done either.
The regulations were written in blood.
i feel like a lot of people don't understand that infrastructure, defined broadly as "the boring stuff you build and maintain to allow people to easily do the sexy stuff", is really important but hard to assign an roi to.
btw, corporations quite literally manage enormous chunks of the welfare state, providing employment insurance (i.e., they pay employees for not working), healthcare, and sundry club goods (gyms, cafes, etc.). are they good at it? no. but this is their de facto social function.
my work can be phenomenally inefficient. not because of me (I'm fast as fuck), because clients can't keep to their own schedules. sitting around waiting for feedback and being paid for it feels like a bullshit job, sometimes.
I think these people think most corporations are largely fake top to bottom — perhaps even including the actual production of the corporation, if it’s abstract or confusing to them — and that the majority of the hires are just to keep the fiction going or something
One of the most shocking things as someone who engages in local and tribal-level economic concerns is how many people are both totally ignorance of how the economy works and think, because of their ignorance, that the economy isn't real.
I've had to deal with things like this at several of the various jobs I tend to work throughout the year- one of them was a guy was booked to go rafting (I work for a rafting company sometimes) on a trip that didn't meet minimums.
Basically, a given rafting trip has to have so many people paying for it to cover all costs for that trip, which isn't just gas and guide pay and wear and tear but also shit like river access and having enough people for the trip to be safe.
Good question. Honestly, I don't think so.
I was once asked to manage a retired lieutenant colonel who was part of re-entry program. We got along great, but he got incredibly frustrated with the corp world. I put him in charge of relocating employees post-Sandy.
In the military one gets orders. They are generally not nuanced, vague, nor subject to the whims of the Shipping Manager. I've never worked very corporate corporate, but I've been corporate adjacent.
Often left scratching my head wondering, "What just went on here?"
I think government jobs do teach you some universal facts about working in a huge organization so it’s at least closer than small business employment anyway
That's absolutely true. And, there's a huge amount of anti-institutional bias that spans private and public. Totally fair to be skeptical, but both sides are in reflexive bias mode for their own reasons.
fwiw I've had multiple corporate jobs. i came out of it with too much knowledge on how those orgs/work don't work, the purpose of levels, that perf reviews are bullshit, and that fines for non-compliance are cheap cost of doing business. 😭
Yeah no surprise there, I had K’s employer in mind when I wrote “abstract and confusing to them” lol.
IIRC that guy has never worked outside academia, it’s such a cliche I’m doubting my memory on this though
I think the phenomenology of many entry level/low level white collar jobs is largely that my work makes no difference societally or even organizationally, so it must be bullshit. Also, the idea that my job wouldn't exist in a better society is compelling! So they must be bullshit! tldr: all vibes
I think part of the problem is the same thing as the old saying about advertising: half of your ad dollars are being wasted, but nobody knows which half
it, "separates the middle class from the poor class," which are all working class
the middle class gets punished by the parasite class when the poor class makes an advancement
and then the middle class clamps down like the parasite class told them so the parasites could keep exploiting them
