A great many jobs are not to be measured this way. You aren’t being paid like a factory worker to produce a certain amount of product an hour. Instead you are being paid like a fireman. Your job is not only to put out fires but to be ready to put out fires … which means a lot of sitting around the station doing very little. We don’t have time to train up new people whenever a fire breaks out, so we have to pay you even when nothing is currently burning.
A good description of that I have seen someone make is "I am paid on retainer".
That seems very true, but I think the issue comes in that we don't have a good sense of how to value that. So we see people overpaid for the time they work (retainers are not supposed to be 100% of your salary) and companies expect them to be there, pretending to work, the whole time. If we could work out a gig economy style system where people were paid a retainer to be available and then billed hourly or something, that might work a lot better for a great many jobs. Instead of the current state of hiring an onsite full time plumber in case the office toilet backs up, then demanding he also does some paperwork on the side to stay busy.
One problem with that might be the base line process and organizational knowledge one has to have to be effective which would prevent drop in work from being effective. At my company we tend to find that it takes months of in person work for new hires to understand our odd business model. 8 months in and there is a remote working director that still doesn't seem to get it, and after 6 months there is a remote financial controller who doesn't seem to either. Maybe they are just dumb, or lazy, or both, but I think remote work makes it much harder to understand what is going on. Not a big deal with a common business model, but a big issue when you have a niche industry.
I struggle to classify my job as a "bullshit job" as defined in this essay, but ultimately I voted yes in the poll. I am a senior software engineer who works an average of 2-4 hrs / day at a midsize company. My work, like all knowledge work, consists of moving pixels around on a screen. I generally like the people I work with, and the fact that I earn in the 95th percentile of my country's income distribution is a) an ego boost, and b) very hard to reconcile with the notion that my work is useless. Ultimately if what I did had no value, then why am I being paid so much to do it?
Since Graeber is a Marxist, he subscribes to the labor theory of value. He says so explicitly in his other book, Debt, repeatedly. I am a capitalist, and believe in a relative theory of labor. It follows that if someone wants to pay me a p95 salary to move pixels around on a screen, that means my work is more useful than 95% of jobs in my country.
Maybe I'm deluded, but that delusion is what allows me to pay my mortgage and feed my family, so I'm good.
I also get paid a bunch of money to do 10 hours of real work a week.
Is it bullshit? Well, it's certainly Red Queen Race. I definitely make my company a lot of money in those ten hours, but if I didn't then someone else at some other company would just get more of the pie. I'm good for my companies ROI, society maybe not.
I think a good example might be another professional poker which helped put me through college. I clearly "generated value" for myself through skill, but its hard to see how it does society any good.
The best case you could make is that maybe a competitive market in my industry produces better outcomes and zero sum red queen races are just an inevitable aspect of a competitive market. Somebodies going to end up doing it because the ROI is there for the company.
Working harder wouldn't do anyone any good. Not all ideas are good ideas and breathing life into marginal ideas is often useless or even counter productive. I focus only on the high ROI stuff and try not to pollute the zone with marginal ideas.
Graeber would not classify your job as a bullshit job, since you add value to the company. If you had some supervising box-ticker who periodically checked in with you and created spreadsheets to track what you were already doing, that would be the bullshit job.
"I interpret the findings as a social diease of affluence. The more affluent a country is, the more it is possible to engage in freeloading/parasitic behavior. All the examples above concern large organizations, which certainly makes freeloading easier."
Very true. A relatively small number of people carry the majority. I worked for a large corporation in STEM, and as I moved up in the company, I noticed that the number of goldbrickers was extraordinary. This certainly did not endear me to the system. I invested wisely and was able to retire at the age of fifty-six.
I can't help but think of DEI, many HR, college administration, many government and similar jobs as a jobs program/UBI for leftists. The selection effects are so strong in that direction that it seems like it must be an intentional move to build a dedicated voting base, although there are other explanations I can think of.
20% vs 30% doesn't seem like a huge difference to me, probably within the margin of error once you factor in sampling bias and the fact that what counts as bs wasn't defined very stringently. I reviewed Graeber's book for ACX https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review and estimated the numbers were about the same for the private vs public sector, but that they're growing faster in the private sector.
A great many jobs are not to be measured this way. You aren’t being paid like a factory worker to produce a certain amount of product an hour. Instead you are being paid like a fireman. Your job is not only to put out fires but to be ready to put out fires … which means a lot of sitting around the station doing very little. We don’t have time to train up new people whenever a fire breaks out, so we have to pay you even when nothing is currently burning.
A good description of that I have seen someone make is "I am paid on retainer".
That seems very true, but I think the issue comes in that we don't have a good sense of how to value that. So we see people overpaid for the time they work (retainers are not supposed to be 100% of your salary) and companies expect them to be there, pretending to work, the whole time. If we could work out a gig economy style system where people were paid a retainer to be available and then billed hourly or something, that might work a lot better for a great many jobs. Instead of the current state of hiring an onsite full time plumber in case the office toilet backs up, then demanding he also does some paperwork on the side to stay busy.
One problem with that might be the base line process and organizational knowledge one has to have to be effective which would prevent drop in work from being effective. At my company we tend to find that it takes months of in person work for new hires to understand our odd business model. 8 months in and there is a remote working director that still doesn't seem to get it, and after 6 months there is a remote financial controller who doesn't seem to either. Maybe they are just dumb, or lazy, or both, but I think remote work makes it much harder to understand what is going on. Not a big deal with a common business model, but a big issue when you have a niche industry.
> Your job is not only to put out fires but to be ready to put out fires
I use this same analogy all the time with my job. Very true.
I struggle to classify my job as a "bullshit job" as defined in this essay, but ultimately I voted yes in the poll. I am a senior software engineer who works an average of 2-4 hrs / day at a midsize company. My work, like all knowledge work, consists of moving pixels around on a screen. I generally like the people I work with, and the fact that I earn in the 95th percentile of my country's income distribution is a) an ego boost, and b) very hard to reconcile with the notion that my work is useless. Ultimately if what I did had no value, then why am I being paid so much to do it?
Since Graeber is a Marxist, he subscribes to the labor theory of value. He says so explicitly in his other book, Debt, repeatedly. I am a capitalist, and believe in a relative theory of labor. It follows that if someone wants to pay me a p95 salary to move pixels around on a screen, that means my work is more useful than 95% of jobs in my country.
Maybe I'm deluded, but that delusion is what allows me to pay my mortgage and feed my family, so I'm good.
I also get paid a bunch of money to do 10 hours of real work a week.
Is it bullshit? Well, it's certainly Red Queen Race. I definitely make my company a lot of money in those ten hours, but if I didn't then someone else at some other company would just get more of the pie. I'm good for my companies ROI, society maybe not.
I think a good example might be another professional poker which helped put me through college. I clearly "generated value" for myself through skill, but its hard to see how it does society any good.
The best case you could make is that maybe a competitive market in my industry produces better outcomes and zero sum red queen races are just an inevitable aspect of a competitive market. Somebodies going to end up doing it because the ROI is there for the company.
Working harder wouldn't do anyone any good. Not all ideas are good ideas and breathing life into marginal ideas is often useless or even counter productive. I focus only on the high ROI stuff and try not to pollute the zone with marginal ideas.
Graeber would not classify your job as a bullshit job, since you add value to the company. If you had some supervising box-ticker who periodically checked in with you and created spreadsheets to track what you were already doing, that would be the bullshit job.
"I interpret the findings as a social diease of affluence. The more affluent a country is, the more it is possible to engage in freeloading/parasitic behavior. All the examples above concern large organizations, which certainly makes freeloading easier."
Very true. A relatively small number of people carry the majority. I worked for a large corporation in STEM, and as I moved up in the company, I noticed that the number of goldbrickers was extraordinary. This certainly did not endear me to the system. I invested wisely and was able to retire at the age of fifty-six.
> What about the future, are we heading towards sneaky-backdoor universal basic income in the form of bullshit jobs?
Heading?
I can't help but think of DEI, many HR, college administration, many government and similar jobs as a jobs program/UBI for leftists. The selection effects are so strong in that direction that it seems like it must be an intentional move to build a dedicated voting base, although there are other explanations I can think of.
If anyone got serious about eliminating "bullshit jobs", the people saying their jobs are like that will protest the loudest at their elimination.
What about bullshit hustles and gigs? Legal (sometimes barely), useless, but they still make money—like churning bank bonuses.
The late Dave Graeber unfortunately. He would’ve been an important voice as present events unfold.
20% vs 30% doesn't seem like a huge difference to me, probably within the margin of error once you factor in sampling bias and the fact that what counts as bs wasn't defined very stringently. I reviewed Graeber's book for ACX https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-review and estimated the numbers were about the same for the private vs public sector, but that they're growing faster in the private sector.
You should really read Graeber's book before embarrassing yourself any further.