Strike! Magazine

Bullshit jobs are jobs that contribute not even an economic value: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ A good game developer provides entertainment at least. Contrasted to Twitter who under Dorsey&co shipped NFTs and 1 redesign in 10+ years. They had thousands of engineers sitting doing nothing. Imagine firing 90% of a school staff or 90% of a McDonalds staff. Not to say that moving forward with development constantly is worthwhile either. Zuckaberg spent billions on a Metaverse which is somehow objectively much worse and buggier than VRChat.

>Is it really common for software engineers to work under these conditions? It wasn't like this before fads like XP, Agile, Scrum etc. and micro-management became mainstream. Most of the current management done by PMs and their ilk can be easily categorized under "Bullshit Jobs" (https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs). The problem is that once somebody has codified their experience under a catchy title and started marketing it, people blindly follow it without understanding its context and applicability. Given that the barrier to entry to these sort of positions are so low (you can become a PM without any sort of domain knowledge!) people who might not cut it as Engineers seek these jobs to boost their pay, power and egos. PS: The above might come across as a little harsh but unfortunately is the reality for most Engineers.

Only in countries where they have been conditioned to think so (because it makes for better servants) And even there, not for the huge majority of the people not doing anything creative. http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ Not to mention, even for creative people who love their job, nobody stops you from working on things on your own free time (e.g. if you're a programmer you can do open source, build stuff you like as side projects, etc, the most "meaningful work" does not have to be your pointy-haired bosses mandated projects at work).

Curiosity, awe, love. My job however I see as hindering in most of that (Project/Product Management non-bullshit¹ job offers welcome). I love to learn, I like science, to analyze and to attempt to shape our information environment. This act of discovery is also great on a personal level, but that was a stronger factor when I was younger. Well and I love people (though I have sympathy for many, that doesn't mean I'm not selective on whom to spend my time with). Some hedonistic sprinkles on top are also welcome (music, travel, good food, a beer). If I could I would divide my time between exactly those things: 1/3 learning, 1/3 building, 1/3 people and all at a nice place with good food. ¹ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

A rewrite of this classic essay which has been discussed on HN many times: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Isaac Newton was neither shamed nor stigmatized into developing calculus. Most of that work was done during "idle" time, while his university was closed for the Plague. I daresay society's great achievements are not derived from shame and stigma. What real benefit does society derive from meaningless jobs [1]? We've tried shame and stigma. We should see whether society is better off when the thinkers and doers are free to use their time thinking and doing what they feel called to think and do. [0] http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/1 [1] http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Yeah. Articles on this topic always seem to miss the point. Freeing humans from labour ought to be great. Theres no reason for everyone to have a job, many jobs nowadays are just pointless busy work anyway(1). The real barrier here isnt technological, its social. We need to abandon some very deeply ingrained ideals about work that date back to the dawn of civilisation, namely that a man must work to be apportioned his daily food. (1)http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Most of the tech corporations I've worked with are "evil", or at best pointless. That's the current world I live in. With some notable exceptions, people doing actually meaningful work are crapped on. (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

Thought 1: I love hearing that good plumbers are getting paid well. There is such a need for reliable, professional just-solve-my-problem-with-service tradesmen in America. In a just economy, the makers and doers (like plumbers) are well paid and BS jobs (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/) are hard to find. Thought 2: You should start taking plumbing jobs, and after 6 months do a big writeup / post that tells the story ("How I raised my rates by leaving software development for plumbing"). I think a lot of people love to read about it. And possibly it could lead to more lucrative software work if that's what you are really looking for.

>I'd love to see virtually all crappy jobs today disappear, On that note, Graeber is fun to read on this topic http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ >I cannot imagine retarding technology just to preserve existing jobs being a winning strategy which makes the world better. Well… that depends on the distribution of income, doesn't it? If my choice is between Elysium and the world of today, I'd rather stay put thank you very much. The key criticism here is that there is a vast legal and cultural machinery in place that overwhelmingly benefits those who already have some form of wealth and that it is this class of people who disproportionately benefit - to the detriment of non capital holders. I'm willing to accept a techno utopia where _everyone_ benefits and not one in which all the efficiency gains automation has to give accrue to a lucky few.

"In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week." ... http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Bullshit Jobs, a 2018 book by David Graeber, discusses this phenomenon pretty extensively and calls for more research. His rudimentary theory is that people who aren't contributing to society know that they aren't, and it makes them miserable. People have an inherent desire to change the world around them, and most professional jobs are actually mostly nonsense. This results in professionals being depressed and feeling hopeless. There was one study the book cited, "Taxation and the Allocation of Talent", which was particularly interesting. As it's abstract says: "Estimates from the literature suggest that high-paying professions have negative externalities, whereas low-paying professions have positive externalities."[1] As a successful lawyer who quit that profession and became a software engineer, writer, and startup founder, all of this really resonates with me. The book is an outgrowth of a 2013 essay that got re-printed 100s of times and spurred some polling.[2] I recommend at least reading the essay. It has a lot of implications for economics, business management, and various other fields. [1]https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/693393 [2] "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Passion is overrated. No, worse than that. All that advice about "finding your passion", etc. for work, is corrosive. Oh, yes, there are people who love X, make a career out of it, and continue doing X for the rest of their life and are successful. While there are people who love X, trying to make a living doing X, only to find it's not a viable career. Only, their "passion" makes them continue to do X far longer than they should, causing them to burn out. There are all sorts of fields where the number of passionate people are far greater than the number of available jobs. Look at people who are passionate about dance, or sports, or horses, or art. Only a few of them can make a living from it. Yet everyone successful had to be passionate about it. Now, get this. There are also people who start doing Y because a job is available, and find that, after a while, they enjoy doing Y. Some even find they are passionate about the job. Others use the money from Y so they can do what they are really passionate about as a hobby. (And sometimes that hobby can, over time, become a career. I knew someone who was a manager of the grounds crew for the local cemetery, and a hobbyist woodworker. There was enough demand for he work that he now makes custom furniture for a living.) The worst case in this scenario is to find that they really don't like Y, but nothing says you have to do Y for the rest of your life, and at least you have the money saved up to support you while you switch…

Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is: How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ >Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really…

Ever since reading http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ I have been thinking about this. One problem with this is the definition of 'meaningful', it is not very concrete. But I think the phenomenon is true - more and more work feels like doing something unnecessary (bullshit). I don't agree with Graeber explanation why this happens - which is basically a grand conspiration by all business owners to give worthless work to people so that they don't revolt. I think it is the result of the growing complexity of our work - we encounter more and more rules that we suspect to be stupid. Many of the rules are stupid indeed - based on some random past events, but many are not - they are just covering some cases that we have never thought of. It is easier to assume that the rules are stupid than admit incompetence. But as the complexity grows less and less people understand the rules, the bad rules are not revised and it all goes in a vicious circle.

Unconditional basic income is unconditional, so it doesn't have the downside of conditional welfare: people are afraid to earn too much money because they'll lose their welfare income, and then they're in danger of losing that new revenue and they can't get back on welfare right away so they're up the creek without a paddle. So they cling to the safety of welfare. And this + minimum wage laws keep them from developing themselves and creating monetizable value that builds on itself year after year. And this is similar to the threat of losing your steady paycheck if you don't behave, as is evidenced in part by the great grandparent comment. There is a lot of dysfunctional politics and dynamics that comes from being in that sort of situation and environment, which pg's essay "why nerds are unpopular" describes at length. Incidentally, pg is also very anti FTE personally, likening it to eating roadkill. Look at it like this -- can you work on your own awesome project that will change the world? Not if your employer wouldnt be pleased. Maybe you'll sneak around like a kid does. If you work for a bank, can you take a position as a CFO at a startup? I have heard people say they can't do this, or that, because their employer wouldnt like it. I've seen tons of people sitting around and pretending to work, because their employer was covering the risk, but they are afraid of losing their job. It's a conditional paycheck that by definition demands your full time for whatever odd job…

To my knowledge however, I am unaware of any situation where an open allocation culture has been successfully retro-fitted to an existing corporate environment (if you know of one, I'd be interested). That is hard as hell, to be honest. Paradoxically, I think it requires a top-down commitment. Companies usually want to try this sort of thing incrementally. So they put their best people into an R&D group that has a fair amount of autonomy. However, over time what seems to happen is that it's resented and attacked, and eventually has to spend more time fighting political battles than innovating. At that point, it's often just as underperforming as the rest of the organization, the experiment is judged a failure, and that autonomy is taken away. It's the "fish frying" problem (http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/). I'm also skeptical in relation to how well an open allocation culture would work out once a company grows beyond a certain inflection point. I'm not well read enough on this matter to put a stake in the ground and define that exact inflection point. Gore-tex uses open allocation and is large (almost 10,000 employees, if I recall correctly). What I don't think OA can survive is too-rapid growth. I think it can scale to thousands of employees. I don't think it can tolerate personnel growth at the 100-150%/year levels that VCs want to see.

A perennial topic of discussion among creative people. Your issue with distractions is almost certainly a negative. Sometimes you've simply got to face those head-on. It's very, very difficult to handle both these and creative work. A sense of fatality about whatever's causing the distractions may help -- there's something to be said about Ashleigh Brilliant's "I feel much better now that I've given up hope". Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow is probably the canonical reference. Read it. He's also appeared in multiple interviews (I encountered him a couple of decades back during a long road trip through the back country, it was a wonderfully serendipitous discovery). I also listen to numerous interviews with authors, musicians, artists, and similar creative types, including occasionally scientific researchers. I'm finding these to be increasingly interesting with time. The task of getting yourself into a state to allow creativity or problem-solving to emerge is one shared with many others. As for my own observations: • Routine helps. Having a regular "beat" to my day provides structure. • Recognizing my own limits and rhythms is key. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, there are many forms of physical exercise and fitness practices. For many of them, a relatively brief training period (as few as 4 minutes, generally up to an hour or two, rarely more) provides optimal benefits. Rest and recovery are esssential. I'm finding similar patterns in mental tasks: …

It's utterly insane that people need to work more and longer as technology increases productivity. A truly dystopian economic system. In 1930 Keynes projected that by 2000 their grandchildren could work 15 hours per week¹. Now the projection is that we will work more and longer in the future. And what is this labor supposed to even do? How much of even current work really increases wellbeing? Graeber's thesis of bullshit jobs becomes increasingly more convincing: work isn't about production, it's about social control². [1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf [2] https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

See also David Graeber's "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs": https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

> 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.

Well, I certainly get 100% of my work done, on time and done to a high standard. But, I would say that my productive time is less than 50% of my work week. I'll do a 4 hour burst and get 90% of my weeks work done, and the rest of the week is touching up a few things and browsing HN/Reddit or whatever else. I remember reading a short article that introduced (to me) the idea that something like 30% of corporate jobs aren't required by any means. It's just "job creation", all fluff work that could be automated or simply isn't needed. As time goes on and I get more looks "behind the curtain" so to speak, the more inclined I am to believe this. I'll look around for the article and edit it in if I find it. It articulates the idea much better than I. -- Article for reference: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ Thanks wortelefant!

Indeed, and economists seem to be a bit puzzled by this [1]. [1] https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

This isn't a dystopian future, it's a dystopian present. Most of the work people do today doesn't really need to be done, but we force people to do it anyway for various reasons. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (there's also a pretty decent free ebook on the subject by the author)

I'm convinced that most of the long hours of corporate America can be explained as a form of signaling. This is just more evidence that there are a whole lot of bullshit jobs out there. [0] Anecdotally, when I worked as an investment banking analyst, there was hardly anything to do from 9-5, then 6-8 hours of work was dumped on my desk at 5pm. Half of that work was un-doing changes I made the day before because the VP on the team didn't like the updates the Associate wanted. Organizations are set up to be inefficient in order to signal how serious they are and what hard workers they have. [0] https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

There is a thing that I don't understand from the original article[1]: > The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them. Does the author really mean that if you don't work you still deserve something in return? That one kinda sounds like bullshit. Has that been expanded upon somewhere? Also, the author mentions that this was already attempted during the 60s and that it ended in a disaster but doesn't tell what that was. I am not from America, so I don't really know the history of the country during the 60s. What happened? [1] http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

The article[1] linked in the OP is an interesting read of its own. [1] http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

This seems to be the sterile academic description of the phenomenon of bullshit jobs[0]. [0]. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Link to the original Essay: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Numbers aren't the inherent problem, the problem is which numbers you use. GDP is among the worst choices for which numbers to evaluate. GDP growing is NOT a good thing per se. It does a mix of capturing how much productivity is being commercialized (if we all paid our neighbors to do our household chores, GDP would double or something instantly with zero productivity gain), how much pay is going to non-productive or even counterproductive work (see the phenomenon of bullshit jobs^1) and ignoring externalities (growth in fossil fuel extraction and consumption, for example is overall negative for society). It's not useful to even assume that GDP growth correlates with positive economic status in measures we actually want (i.e. measurements of overall long-term prosperity) ^1: https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs