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?
That’s fair! They may actually do a big chunk of the work that the “boss” is assigned. I guess it feels like these “superfluous” jobs may be more common in academia, where deans seem to proliferate
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.
If Procurement doesn't exist you have your widget makers and widget sellers doing procurement and they suck at it! Even if they didn't, it's a bad use of their time.
funny, I was thinking it's a realistic rather than idealized depiction. the sheer number of people whose job, or large part of the job, involves keeping track of activities rather than performing them is staggering. I have the receipts!
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.
