[Closed] What is a bullshit job and do you work in one?

I would say I have a BS job and have done for the last 10 years or so. It does however pay very well and I actually enjoy it but I am under no pretence that the job is not really necessary, especially from a societal point of view where it offers nothing to the country other than a lot of tax money.

@BruceWee - are you Ed Sheeran?

I’m a joiner, can turn my hand to most things.
Started at a housing association as a cleaner 7years ago expecting to quickly move to a more suitable role but cronyism is rife.
We call ourselves ‘professional turd polishers’ as the properties I’m expected to clean are that neglected that cleaning them doesn’t make any difference, you can’t polish a turd.
Nobody checks our work, I literally spend approx 5hours a day reading books, surfing net, shopping, napping and occasionally go for a ride.

Sounds great? No, it’s chipping away at what soul I have left.

Jobs made me fat, lazy, complacent but pay, pension, benefits are all good.

Hate the job but scared of setting up my own business as I don’t think I have a proper days work in me anymore and I’m nearing 50 so I don’t w...... think I’ve just given up And accepted my fate ☹️

I work in a bullshit job. 95% of my tasks could and should be automated.

I did this when I was 30 - cut an 8 hour day down to 2.5 hours - told my boss...

... and he said I could do what I want with the extra 5.5hours as long as I was on site. I ended up re-training in IT on the side and the fact and way that I'd automated my old job got me my first job in IT.

Kinda.

Tech support. So on a good day that means £400 to watch netflix and read a book. With the added incentive that I built the system so if I do my job right once I can have an easy few months.

But if I wasn't there and things went wrong then the clients wasting ~£4k per kit, x5 kits. Put that way and I seem like a cheap insurance policy.

I do struggle with it though. The jobs are typically 2-3 months of 3-4 days a week with a long commute (so really it's a 5.5 day week). And by the end I'm miserable, quiet, withdrawn, and often spend my 2 days off just sleeping as I CBA to do anything.

I don't work in a bullshit job but my job has become surrounded by unbearable bullshit.

I ended up in a bullshit job, I could do it in probably 2 or 3 days, but the money was good. During lockdown I spent (wasted) ages watching films and reading. Enjoyed cheeky mid day cycling though.

However, it eats away at your soul, I realised I was not happy and felt depressed so I resigned in the Autumn with a view to spending a year out. Out of the blue, literally a few days after resigning, I got offered a job that was not a bullshit role.

I feel much better now. So, if you can, get out of any bullshit job to save your soul.

I had one of those, sent to a public admin client to join a large IT project that was run by a different contractor. We were supposed to be overseeing part of a team overseeing the (software) architecture. We were neither wanted nor needed, and they pretty much ignored us 🙂

After a few months of reading the newspaper I changed jobs. To a lot of people getting paid to read the paper might seem like a dream job, but it was soul-crushing and I hated it.

‘Social Media Influencer’. That is an utter bullshit job.
The people that do it are self-serving dicks and the people that are influenced are just dicks.

Well life is absurd it totality so don't worry too much.

I tend to find a lot of admin jobs a bit bull shitty. Its not that there isn't stuff to be done but lots of that "stuff" seems to be made
#1. Over complicated.
#2. Done in an inefficient manor.
#3. Added to by the people who do it as some form of justification of their job, department etc.

Considering admin is a cost to business and not revue producing I don't know why this allowed to get to bit!

Last company I worked at was awful. Layed off people on the shop floor that produced product but kept hiring admin staff. Many were just copying data from one spreadsheet to another. The director in charge though loved it as more people under him must mean more important. One women I know admitted that part of hr job was to forward email from one account to another. One-to-one relationship, not one to many!

‘Social Media Influencer’. That is an utter bullshit job.
The people that do it are self-serving dicks and the people that are influenced are just dicks.

I see where you're coming from but as bullshit job is described in the article, I would say that Social Media Influencer is the opposite of a bullshit job.

I doubt that there are many Influencers who wake up, go to their desk, and sit there killing time until 16:00.

Their relevance and effect on society might be bullshit but in terms of their day to day activities I would say it's one of the few jobs where 100% of their 'working' time is spent doing what they get paid for.

There's a lot of compliance / QA / policy / project management / continuous improvement roles out there that achieve nothing (some do contribute a lot), down to poor management often, mangers seem to think that once the role is filled, job done without realising the person in role still needs support, strategic guidance and for someone else just to give poop about what they do. Sadly these roles are often forgotten, un-appreciated and easy pickings when it come to redundancies. Shame really as these roles also have the potential to really make a difference.

IN addition I think people in general have a over inflated sense of importance of their job. Thinks that actually help people, build and fix things, make new things are import. Most others are not. You are in marketing for a multi million a year company selling jeans, business to business office services / events / bla bla bla. I don't care that you get paid 100k a year. Its still bullshit, its not important.

mmm.... whilst scrolling stw

Data its the new oil they say :0)

I kinda have a BS job. I work in the composite industry, so we make carbon parts for various applications, motorsport, aerospace and mostly high end road cars. I like my job, but ultimately, if we closed tomorrow, the world would keep spinning.

Nothing we do is stuff you cant live without, well unless your life depends on Formula 1 or you have a fancy pants McLaren on order!

In theory I have the exact opposite, a necessary, challenging and well regarded career as a mechanical engineer working in healthcare design.

It's still bullshit.

It seems like any job that is necessary, challenging and not easily recruited for brings with it its own baggage, ergo the same perception that doctors and other necessary skilled trades suffer from which is

A) there is an element of duty, you'll do the job no matter what because it needs done

B) It's 'secure', so you'll put up with all sorts of stress and nonsense for a comfortable but not spectacular salary, because no other ***** would want the job and you're basically unsackable.

The bullshit element is the amount of additional peer review and quality assurance which is expected, but which is founded upon incomplete or non-existent client briefs, and dated guidance documents, so e.g. I can be held accountable for deviating away from guidance which is quite obviously intended for medical equipment that no longer exists or procedures that no longer happen or ventilation plant which is several generations quieter, safer, more efficient etc.

Peer review and quality assurance should of course be a good thing, but I've yet to meet a project manager in the land that can build it into a program, or a client that's willing to pay for it, which means my boss can't afford to recruit for it, which means muggins here spends about 30% of his time developing a design, and 70% of his time defending that design from multiple experts in their field wondering why I've ignored guidance that was developed for hospitals back in the nineties...

Anyway, I guess the point of my little rant is that work generally is bullshit and that if you end up in some sort of role which on paper is noble and necessary and rewarding, you'll just get dicked over in some other way.

I kinda have a BS job. I work in the composite industry, so we make carbon parts for various applications, motorsport, aerospace and mostly high end road cars. I like my job, but ultimately, if we closed tomorrow, the world would keep spinning.

I don't think you can define a bullshit job by what you produce. I think the important thing is that in your job you produces things or doing your job allows things to be produced more efficiently.

In my case, my job could be done far more efficiently if 95% of the tasks were automated so I'm not allowing anything to be done more efficiently. Therefore it's a bullshit job.

If we limited non-bullshit jobs to things that are essential to living that would mean the only non-bullshit jobs would be fishing and farming.

We had a lad who worked in the NOC. We wanted him to come work with us but his boss wouldn't let him go as he was two valuable.

One of my colleagues went "hang on" and replaced his entire job function with a - admittedly rather large - Powershell script. In an afternoon.

Did one over summer laughing everyday thinking this could be automated for less that what I’m getting paid. Told them on my last day exactly how. They ignored it.

Inefficiency keeps people in employment / from starving so IMO it’s kind of good right now.

I’ve found working at a smart co that has killed every bit of inefficiency is not exactly what I’d call fun either.

Look forward to the day everyone is paid £100k UBI on the back of automation, people are legally only allowed to own 1 house and key workers etc are paid 200k…. Unfortunately I see a lot of pain before that becomes anywhere close to reality.

I'm the practice manager at a busy, understaffed  inner-city GP practice. Everything is my job, from staff management to wiping up after the pts, to managing the tax affairs of the docs to making sure that the business is financially secure...and now vaccinate against COVID.

I don't think I qualify

I tend to find a lot of admin jobs a bit bull shitty. Its not that there isn’t stuff to be done but lots of that “stuff” seems to be made
#1. Over complicated.
#2. Done in an inefficient manor.
#3. Added to by the people who do it as some form of justification of their job, department etc.

A lot of that can be laid at the door of companies who assume they never need to do any ongoing training or development of staff and just expect them to use the tools within the company. Same with processes, the default "we've always done it this way" is so easy to just blindly follow without any thought of "what if...?"

I had to largely teach myself Excel in a previous role - fortunately I had a reasonable grounding in it anyway but the extras I learned made my job SO much easier and freed up hours of time.

Same with processes, the default “we’ve always done it this way” is so easy to just blindly follow without any thought of “what if…?”

This is a hill I will die on. I've ranted about it so often that it comes up in meetings now, "as Alan would say..."

I work to make the government look good (don't laugh), so, er, yeah...

Yup. If I didn't do my job, it wouldn't really matter to anyone. It would make some other people's jobs slightly harder, but those jobs too are basically bullshit.

However it pays nicely, I work with decent people and for a decent company, so I'm happy that this is how I spend my time to save up enough money to retire.

My job is mainly making other people's bullshit less bullshitty, for public consumption.

I've read that piece before and think it makes a valid point, but I reckon there are a lot of marginal cases where the employee makes their role a BS job when it didn't have to be.

Recent examples from my experience: Agile manager & product development consultants more fond of drinking coffee and arranging calls than doing any work.

Is my job bullshit? No, but like a surprising number of people in the UK I work in 'Business Services' so we facilitate a lot of bullshit jobs, in fact when I consider who our main point of contact is with clients, a scary % of them have jobs that appear to only exist to create 'work' for themselves and others. In fact, if 'the truth' ever got out, and they all went, I'm not sure I'd need mine either.

As for BS jobs in general, this is the future. We NEED them, their value is it keep people off the streets not only because it gives them somewhere to go, but also a way to pay for somewhere to live.

The speed of evolution from a 'real' economy and a 'bullshit' one in lifetime has been staggering, 250 years or so of the 'modern capitalist economy' appears at least in the west to be showing signs of coming to an end. We're trialling Universal Basic Income in Wales soon, it's supposed to be the future, but I don't see it.

There's an idea that, in the future machines will become so efficient and automated, that Humans won't need to work anymore, we'll just be able to do what we want, when we want, and possibly just float around on hovering chaise longue like in WALLIE but I don't think it would work, Humans are too greedy and competitive, give someone all things at all times and they'll attempt to complete to get more somehow, also you'd have to some way convince the worlds 2755 Billionaires that all things at all times, but the same as everyone else, is 'fair', Humans are just clever Apes, we're still 'animals' with instincts, and a real world version of the Garden of Eden would make us very miserable indeed because it's doesn't allow us 2 of the 5 Hierarchy of Needs, esteem and self-actualisation.

The solution, is work for works sake, aka "the service industry", doing things for others, so they in turn can do things for someone else and on and on and on, eventually someone will do something for someone who grows food, makes clothes or builds houses, but even those these days are so far removed from basic needs, its debatable whether someone in Africa growing strawberries to be flown to the UK really is a 'basic need'.

Anyway, if anyone is unfamiliar here's the Hierarchy of needs.

It's easy to poke fun at Social Media influencers et al and say "bullshit" but with so much abundance in the developed world at least, it's not going up the pyramid that denotes how 'bullshit' your job is, it's how many degrees of separation YOUR job, not what the business or organisation your work for does, but how many degrees from YOUR job to a job that directly fulfils one of those needs is:

Agile manager & product development consultants more fond of drinking coffee and arranging calls than doing any work.

My current title is technical project manager, but I'm not really a PM, more an Agile coach/delivery manager.

Is my job BS, it could be, my actual output isn't clearly tangible, but if I do it right then the overall output of the teams I work with goes up AND adds value. If I don't it for the figures, then the output goes up but the value doesn't and if I suck at it, the output stays the same or worse goes down.

A lot of people might not view what I'm doing as necessary, but people who have worked me see there is a difference. I accept that everyone doing this may not understand what they are supposed to be doing and make things worse not better though.

I think that part of the problem is that the way companies are currently managed the incentive to maintain inefficiency is strong.

For example, let's say that you are the manager of a department with 100 people. You are told by your manager that you have to improve efficiency.

One of your employees comes to you and says, 'If we do x we can automate most of the processes and do what we currently do with only 10 people.'

As the head of a department, what incentive do you have to go from managing 100 people to managing 10. It would likely end up in you losing your job as well since why would a company continue to employ someone to manage a far smaller number of people.

It's much easier to make everyone take a pay cut or fire part of the workforce and make the remainder take up the slack.

And of course, there's the question of whether it is better for society to have 10 people doing actual work when you could have 100 doing bullshit jobs?

I would say that, in terms of society's collective mental health, it's actually bad to have 100 people doing bullshit jobs. Like many have said, it really feels like it's chipping away at your soul.

If you asked most people 'Would be happy moving rocks from one end of a quarry to the other and then moving them back again the next day and to continue doing that every day if you were well paid for it?' I think most would say no.

Sadly so many people now spend their days moving rocks back and forth without even realising it except for a weird empty feeling where their soul used to be.

The bullshit element is the amount of additional peer review and quality assurance which is expected, but which is founded upon incomplete or non-existent client briefs, and dated guidance documents, so e.g. I can be held accountable for deviating away from guidance which is quite obviously intended for medical equipment that no longer exists or procedures that no longer happen or ventilation plant which is several generations quieter, safer, more efficient etc.

Would that be the HTM/HBN docs by any chance...

Last company I worked at was awful. Layed off people on the shop floor that produced product but kept hiring admin staff.

I once worked for an organisation where I was 50/50 'shop floor' and 'admin'. I got to hear an office announcement that they'd be taking on more admin staff, yet making shop floor staff redundant. At a time when there weren't enough shop floor staff as it was, and it was in fact the admin staff making the whole thing less efficient and losing money (because most of them were lazy shysters who were doing bullshit jobs). I protested this, and resigned. Only later, did I find I was on the list of redundancies anyway. 😀 Fortunately I did get my redundancy payout, as the decision had already been made. That company ended up going to the wall because it couldn't meet demands, because not enough shop floor staff were involved doing the actual production.

To those enjoying their 'bullshit jobs'; I say enjoy it while you can, and make hay while the sun sines, because if all those kind of jobs end up being 'outsourced'/automated/made redundant, there will be mass unemployment. The bubble has to burst at some point; CV has meant several people we know are now struggling to find work as freelance whatevers, because many companies have realised they don't actually need them. These are people who enjoyed decent wages, have large outgoings. We are headed towards an economic crisis the like of which has never been seen, and we are less than ill prepared for it.

And what the hell is a 'project manager', actually?

Is my job BS, it could be, my actual output isn’t clearly tangible, but if I do it right then the overall output of the teams I work with goes up AND adds value. If I don’t it for the figures, then the output goes up but the value doesn’t and if I suck at it, the output stays the same or worse goes down.

In order to say if it's bullshit or not you have to take a step back and look at what your company is trying to achieve overall.

For example, our company has some really good programmers and operations people and is able to find solutions to really tricky problems.

However, instead of using these skills to make a great product they are forced to use them to maintain and add to a 'proof of concept' peice of software that should have been completely re-written prior to being made commercial.

Instead, the entire developement and operations teams spend their days putting out fires and trying to keep their heads above water in a rising sea of technical debt.

We also have an army of managers whose job it is to improve efficiency all the while refusing to accept that the software is not fit for purpose and the only real option is to re-write everything.

The group is really talented and works really hard but 95% of the work done is bullshit.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men...

I have what I like to think of as a non-bullshit job as a scientist - my research tries to uncover new chemical reactivity for synthesis. The day could indeed dawn when advances in AI renders my efforts to bullshit, and it might be closer than we think - take a step back and science (even the good stuff) is largely a series of incremental advances, small logical steps taken to build understanding. So true AI could turf me and my lab out onto the street from that point of view - just depends on whether you think that's 1, 10, or 100 years away.

Graeber's book is really good (and was very timely) but I don't think it should be taken too seriously - it's obv more of a witty polemic than reasoned analysis. Few people's jobs fit neatly into the five categories of bullshit.

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

someone who creates 'plans' of pointless work and when that pointless work will be ready. A good one helps people work better together (I know to people involved in manual trades this comes across as BS, but it can save a piece of work if done properly), agree how they are going to work together, exchange information, know what expectations are of then and reduce dependencies between them.

However, instead of using these skills to make a great product they are forced to use them to maintain and add to a ‘proof of concept’ peice of software that should have been completely re-written prior to being made commercial.

I care more about making people see the inefficiency of this. However, the position I have taken seems to care more about plans. So they have a short time to see that a plan is useless if it's a plan of the wrong work or I'm off as it's a BS job.

Contracts lawyer here, some days I am essentially just a slightly glorified typist

Would that be the HTM/HBN docs by any chance…

Add an 'S' in front and bingo.

The worst thing is that our client is now paying extra for a 'hospital' they basically don't need or want, because nobody has the time to understand the implications of the potential derogations so would rather just design them back in that take the time to document that e.g. the omission of an un-necessary gas outlet is acceptable.

Nobody has the time or the money to do the job right any more, the mental health of the designers seems to be the only tradeable currency...

Essentially, I automate business processes with some really quite unbelievably complex software that requires coding to make it plumb together. Except it doesn't really: we previously sold a product where 90% of the coding was replaced by some funky pointy-clicky-draggy-droppy wizards. You could get it set up with some cool features that the customer could then expand upon themselves, within about a fortnight.

But that doesn't sell professional services at £1500 a day, so we binned that for what we now sell. Which takes between a year and two years to get anywhere with and the customer will be forever chained to us for upgrades, migrations, additional integrations. We can't hire enough consultants to do the work.

Teacher in a college here. Whilst some of what I do is important for the students, management only care about attendance and silly tick box tasks. There's no interest from management about what the students actually learn. A typical example is this:

Management:
"One of your students only has 85% attendance"
Me:
"They have been suffering with an illness but still producing excellent work. They are one of the best students we have this year"
Management:
"They need to improve their attendance"
Me:
"They have on going hospital appointments. They are still producing the best work in the class"
Management:
"Make sure they don't miss anymore lessons"
Me:
"They have hospital appointments"
Management a month later:
"They have missed more lessons and will likely not be completing their work if not in college"
Me:
"They have produced all their work and have a job offer for next year. They are our best student this year"

My wife is finally following my advice with her job working for a power tripping boss, she is quitting in 2hr 23mins, to never go back.

Will hopefully, have a less stressed wife when I get home, they have made her life crap.

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

Really?

People can get sniffy about project managers, but just try delivering a digital product without an effective one.

My former team tried that, and it didn't go well.

People can get sniffy about project managers, but just try delivering a digital product without an effective one.

We don't use project managers. We're averaging a product update (update to existing software, not new software) every three years.

The best company I worked for made teams of developers and nominated one of the developers as a project manager. I honestly couldn't tell you how often updates and new software was delivered to companies because it seemed to be a steady stream.

My job isn't bullshit but as I work for a large multi-national the ratio of bullshit tasks to actual productive work is pretty poor.

While the core of what I do is important what actually makes me good at my job is that I've worked in it long enough to navigate my way through all the kafkaesque byzantine crap that you have to negotiate to get stuff done.

A lot of that can be laid at the door of companies who assume they never need to do any ongoing training or development of staff and just expect them to use the tools within the company. Same with processes, the default “we’ve always done it this way” is so easy to just blindly follow without any thought of “what if…?”

100% Agree. I don't blame the people doing the work. At my last place it was the directory in charge of this part of the business. Nice guy but likes keeping things as they were, making his life harder and harder, requiring more and more staff, to do less and less. I felt like he was so busy he didn't have the capacity to step back and go the the processes / technologies his teams where using, but at the same ime that was his fault as he didn't want to change anything.

someone who creates ‘plans’ of pointless work and when that pointless work will be ready

So, bullshit, then? 😀

It’s easy to poke fun at Social Media influencers et al and say “bullshit”

A friend's daughter has been working with a 'Social Media Influencer' to help with her business, which was hit badly by CV, not long after she'd started it up. Her business is now thriving, in a sector where many others have failed. I think it's easy for (especially older) people to not understand how the modern world works, but SMI's actually play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. How many times have we read a review, or watched a video on a particular product, before making a purchasing decision? I do it all the time. Hardly any larger/important purchase is made without consulting The Internet in some way, and it's SMI's who are creating the 'content' that helps inform my choices, and those of billions of others. So yes; on the outside it looks like bullshit, to the untrained eye, but the reality for many SMIs is that it's often down in their spare time from whatever mundane job they need to do in order to survive, and the vast majority make very little money, if any. And many work pretty hard at it; it can be a 60+ hour week for those who are committed to it. And the fact is that many SMI's do have genuine talent to communicate with others; certainly, the ones that get millions of hits don't do so without an innate ability to communicate. Anyone who can succeed in an incredibly competitive field, often without any formal training or preparation for such a 'career', has my respect, even if I don't like them or what they have to say or sell. Because it's mostly young people setting out with a laptop and little or no skills, training etc, and doing it by themselves. It's pretty brave, to put yourself out there to be exposed to all the potential criticism, abuse etc that many online figures are subjected to, daily. Good luck to them, I say. Haterz just be jell.

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

I used to work in a large engineering company where the project managers on the job I was on had no idea what any of it was about, so they would periodically come and ask what work you're going to, then every so often ask if you'd finished it yet. I never bothered really explaining what I was doing, there was no point. Sadly I never had the balls to make up tasks that would obviously be ridiculous to anyone with some technical knowledge.

Where I currently work, in preparation for staff returning to the office on a flexible basis, some of the managers in my department were looking through who's working on what and who needs a desk etc. They found that on one project there is a project manager who has been booking his time to the project for a year or so. No one knows who he is or has even heard of him; as far as anyone can tell he has had no involvement in the project. The project is ticking along just fine without the help of a project manager.

I had a brief flirtation with management a few years back and it was definitely a bullshit job. I went from being a software developer who built things that people actually used to spending all my time in meetings reporting to the bigger boss how things were going, and sending stupid emails to all and sundry to justify what we were doing and why we may not have made as much progress as the bosses and clients would have liked.

I used to complain to the boss that I felt like I wasn't really doing anything productive, and his response was not to worry about it because sitting in meetings 'is real work'. Needless to say I disagreed and this eventually led to us falling out as I clearly wasn't on board the management gravy train. I also refused to join in with the business speak bullshit bingo which also didn't go down well with my MBA qualified boss.

So I'm back to being an engineer again, which feels more useful and less bullshitty, but means I'm now at a career deadend whilst I watch others climb up the greasy pole and get paid much better for doing so.

@mjsmke

Teacher in a college here. Whilst some of what I do is important for the students, management only care about attendance and silly tick box tasks. There’s no interest from management about what the students actually learn. A typical example is this:

Management:
“One of your students only has 85% attendance”
Me:
“They have been suffering with an illness but still producing excellent work. They are one of the best students we have this year”
Management:
“They need to improve their attendance”
Me:
“They have on going hospital appointments. They are still producing the best work in the class”
Management:
“Make sure they don’t miss anymore lessons”
Me:
“They have hospital appointments”
Management a month later:
“They have missed more lessons and will likely not be completing their work if not in college”
Me:
“They have produced all their work and have a job offer for next year. They are our best student this year”

Have you heard of the McNamara Fallacy?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
I've heard it summed up before as "if you can't measure what's important, make what you can measure important"

People can get sniffy about project managers, but just try delivering a digital product without an effective one

Yeah... there are various levels of project manager on my current tail-spin of a project. The project's biggest problems stem in some degree from piss-poor project management, somebody to basically coordinate all the various contributors and stakeholders and review streams, so that just as we finish a big feedback and review process with one stakeholder, the next doesn't then come along and demand that we down tools in order to package all our information up for them to review and provide feedback on.

It's got to a point where we are trying to complete a design whilst incorporating three different streams of overlapping and at times conflicting review and comment, because none of the outside parties talk to one another, and nobody grasped the reins and tried to amalgamate all the review into one omni-review which would occur at the end of each design stage.

I don't envy the project managers, but it is very obvious when they are not there or are doing their job poorly.

So I’m back to being an engineer again, which feels more useful and less bullshitty, but means I’m now at a career deadend whilst I watch others climb up the greasy pole and get paid much better for doing so.

This is cultural thing IMO. My Dutch colleague has worked in teams back in the Netherlands where the manager got paid the same as everyone else - they were just a member of the team, who had slightly different skills. It meant there was no major incentive to angle for a management job, and the people who did, tended to be good at them.

I don’t envy the project managers, but it is very obvious when they are not there or are doing their job poorly.

Yeah I would hate to be a project manager - looks like loads of admin and being organised. But I do appreciate working with a good one: they make sure I have the stuff I need to do my job, without me having to go round and chase people.

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

A good PM is worth their weight in gold. Allows the team to get on with their individual tasks, keeps an eye on both the detail and the bigger picture, can work out when and how to re-prioritise resources, can motivate the team, is actively involved and understands what is going on...

A bad PM can wreck an entire project through a combination of inefficiency, ignorance, refusal to listen to the team actually doing the work, demanding unrealistic deadlines or outcomes.

If you want an idea of a bad PM, try watching most episodes of The Apprentice!

🙁 view from my office window doing my bullshit job

[img] [/img]

Project Manager here.

Reading this there has been a lot of 'close to the bone' comments, that's for sure!

I find most of my 'value added' (and enjoyment) on a project comes when things are going wrong and the act of turning it around, but that situation in the first place is definitely not what the company/management wants to happen, so we spend our working lives trying to actively avoid the situations where we truly thrive.

Ironic really.

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

Surprisingly, they manage a project, end to end.
Work out the budget, ensure budget is stuck to, ensure all the correct tasks are being done in the correct order, deal with issues, prioritise etc,. etc,.

Try doing a complex, large thing without one. While all the individuals doing things may be great they will have no oversight, control, prioritisation, inter-dependancies and so on across all the tasks done by others

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

Really?

People can get sniffy about project managers, but just try delivering a digital product without an effective one.

Call it what you want, but some form of management is needed on any project, or else it's just a bunch of people each doing what they think is best and hoping it comes together at the end. Try doing that with a big engineering or construction project. I did have to laugh that the first comment about PMs related to digital products!

This thread is a bit of an eye-opener really. It feels like there is something a bit wrong with 'the system' when we have so many people doing well-paid BS jobs, and at the same time a shortage of people in medical professions, teaching, social care, keeping the roads maintained, collecting the bins etc etc etc....

My current job isn't BS, but i fear it's got the "bullshitization of work" issue!

But... Alongside being a sexy local GP, I used to work at the CCG - purse string holders of local health economy.
THAT was a BS job..
I was paid a stupid amount for one day's work a week... I literally had to go hunting for work..
I'd attend meetings just because I HAD to be there.. my presence didn't change anything as decisions had been made.

I witnessed the most bullish of shittiness going on there... I would say that most people there, if told "you have XYZ jobs to do this week..do them, then go home..." would be out by midday tuesday. But..they HAD to work all week, so made the work last all week.

The pointlessness of SO MANY projects must have been demoralising!
It's like being a builder, building a wall, then having your boss knock it down saying it's not needed... Time. and. time. again..

I quit in the end. Despite the cushy hours (I often left early, and wasn't even missed) and high pay, I literally said to the team in my exit interview "some kid isn't getting cancer treatment 'cos you're paying me to look at facebook"..

I'm much happier..I'd rather have the time than the money...

DrP

I make poor quality car parts for cars nobody wants, or can afford to buy. I pour my heart and soul into making precision jigs and fixtures, or solve long running engineering problems, only to watch chimps with hammers smash them to bits minutes later, or have out-of-their-depth engineers refuse to act on said engineering fixes because, well, they didnt think of them and dont trust the m or understand them.
Occasionally you get the odd glimmer of pride in doing something in 20 mins which usually involves a full 8 hour strip down and rebuild cycle, but shit is usually your thanks. Thing is, there is literally nothing else better in the area any more, and its a bad feeling being too old to emigrate . Trust me, I have tried twice.
The feeling is very much that my skills and experience are becomi g, if not already are, obsolete, as we dont really make stuff in the UK any more, on a scale we used to. Yes there is a call for them abroad in the developing industrial nations, but Im too old to go now.

The problem with project management is there are a lot of bullshitters in the job.

There are however good project managers and when you work with one you realise what they can do and how they improve a project you can really see their value. The problem is many people never get to work with a good one.

when you work with one you realise what they can do and how they improve a project you can really see their value. The problem is many people never get to work with a good one.

Or, in my experience, good project management practice and intuition is stifled by process and unnecessary admin. I'd love to be able to just get on with it, but 90% of my time is spent doing reports/updates/documentation no-one reads or cares about just to appease the process.

My job, at times, feels very bullshit. But I work for a large financial organisation in IT Application Services. It's a very mature department, very process orientated, everything is understood. So a lot of the time I have a very light touch, approving checklists, speaking to people about not much at all, not doing a great deal. But when things do go wrong, all the "bullshit" about protecting people's livelihoods is true, even if it's easy to feel very distanced from that. i.e. if you can't log on to Internet banking and need to pay a bill urgently, how happy are you? That's when we're working our asses off to restore things knowing that people are affected. Tying up the corporate BS to reality can help you understand why you are actually there.

That said, in a previous more techy role I also PowerShell'd myself out of a role. Not that my role was dissolved, I just got to sit around reading for STW for more of the day.

view from my office window doing my bullshit job

😀 Are you a project manager?

"What is a bullshit job and do you work in one"

Thinking of going back to my previous job as Cow inseminator. where you get covered in all sorts of bodily function, from Bulls and Cows. A true Bullshit jobby.

I witnessed the most bullish of shittiness going on there… I would say that most people there, if told “you have XYZ jobs to do this week..do them, then go home…” would be out by midday tuesday. But..they HAD to work all week, so made the work last all week.

I know a few people with jobs like that.
In fact, I once had a one-day-a-week job like that (in a hospital doing some admin work for Occupational Health). Once I'd worked my way through the initial backlog, I'd also worked out all the tricks to shorten the process, learnt a few of the codes off the top of my head (so I didn't have to keep referring to the big book of codes each time) and by the time I got there on Friday, I could work through that week's accumulated forms in the space of about 4hrs no problem. But I had to stretch it out to 8hrs.

Played a lot of Minesweeper and Chess those days.

@DrP that is so familiar. I was “encouraged” to volunteer (arm twisted up my back by one of the bigger boys) for the governing body of the ccg at its inception. Promises of being able to make a difference, control the budget etc.
Quickly realised the function was just to slavishly follow nhs England directives and the single most important outcome was always a cost saving. Left after my 2 years was up.
Ccg’s now being replaced by a different but equally pointless layer of nhs bureaucracy. 🙄

I think what I do is useful as a consultant. Help people solve problems that they can't fix themselves.

Problem is I spend about half my time trying to find people with those problems and then convincing them I can help.

I like to think I'm a decent scientist and could put my skills to something more fulfilling. For the genuine benefit of more people.

My wife is a government IT project manager though so I might show her this!

@docrobster
I feel 'we' don't fit in in those environments though...
I used to be VERY vocal about my skilset:
"See a problem...data gather...come up with a plan/solution...implement plan.. review outcome of changes at a later date."
ALL IN TEN MINUTES. THEN..REPEAT MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY

I simply abhored the keeness for meeting after meeting after meeting... where NOTHING changed, NOTHING progressed...
The ruddy corporate fear of upsetting someone or something meant that the titanic carried on heading towards the iceberg ....!!!

Also, when there WAS a good idea raised, it was done in such a messed up fashion!!
I likened it to someone somewhere saying "let's build a house". And everyone agreeing on the fact we need a house.
Then the first job someone does is go out and buy all the windows. Ordered them ALL.
And then order 8 rolls of carpet.
Then you start making plans. And in fact you actually want hardwood floor - so you cancel the carpet, but you've paid for it and there's no refund.
And the plans require much bigger windows. So you bin the first windows, and order half the new windows.

Then realise building a house is costly, so scrap all the plans and have another meeting......

ARG

DrP

And what the hell is a ‘project manager’, actually?

Surprise surprise they manage projects.

The problem with project management is there are a lot of bullshitters in the job.

There are however good project managers and when you work with one you realise what they can do and how they improve a project you can really see their value. The problem is many people never get to work with a good one.

I think there's a subset of people in every profession who if they can't do their job, take a side step into project management where this won't be noticed. Those asside there some people who are actuallyn
good at it.

Or, in my experience, good project management practice and intuition is stifled by process and unnecessary admin. I’d love to be able to just get on with it, but 90% of my time is spent doing reports/updates/documentation no-one reads or cares about just to appease the process.

Depends on the size of the company. When you've only got a team of <10 then it probably is all documentation and gant charts.

When it gets to a team of 100+ then you end up with 10% or more of them as project engineers (with junior, vanilla, senior, principal, consultabt levels within those) reporting to the project manager. Then the manager is just left to the more executive decision making and client relationship stuff. It meant that:
A) the people at the top are really good as there's a whole department of people actually doing useful management stuff to promote from. Not just following the Dilbert principal and promoting an engineer to management.
B) the rubbish people get bored and go work in financial services.

That was back when I worked in engineering, not TV though.

I have had a fair few b.s. jobs in my life, worst thing is the people who I took over from convinced themselves they were meaningful.

One manager even used to joke when asked how many people worked for him, used to answer, about half.

He nailed it, the company was taken over and went from 2000 employees to 2. The acquiring company could probably have done the takeover and reduced their own headcount by half. So many people didn't do anything.

Project manager is a very real skill. I know this because as someone who trained as, and works well as a field engineer, I'm now expected to be a project manager. No help, no training, just get on with it. I'm not suited to it one little bit, it's not my skill set and there's zero interest from management in helping me add it to my skill set.

Clearly my employer doesn't know what a project manager is supposed to be either.

So, what wasn't a bullshit job 18 months ago, now very much is.

@P-Jay

FTFY

Brilliant, someone doctored the yellow warning sign, danger men at work.

It read, no danger of men at work.

It stayed around for ages. The managers all sat in offices and never walked about, the md had a private suite and never walked about.

The UK job market is a giant Ponzi scheme.
I've always found that when a manager goes on holiday everything runs like a Swiss watch, then they return and f*** everything right up because that's what they're good at.
I spent 40 years doing proper jobs, now I've retired i sit outside my local drinking a very satisfying ale called Proper job.
Can't imagine what Bullshit Job is gonna taste like?!

Bloody hell, you can slag of the police, civil servants, Nhs, bike shop workers et al but diss a project manager and you get a right shoeing. Peak STW used to be some sort of IT nerd now it’s P.Ms

The pm's were only on here as stw time is after their tea break.

I am a mountain bike journalist. Occasionally you lot make me feel that's not a bullshit job.

I've always considered working in some office to be a bit of a bullshit type job, though maybe bull is the wrong adjective, in that having never actually worked in an office, its really a bit of a mystery as to what so many people actually do day to day*
* I've often surmised that each individual office worker does a little bit of something then passes it on to the next worker who adds a little bit more, then to the next for a bit more and so on and so forth.
But either way thankfully I dont. All that sitting down being part of a team , not quite my bag.

Currently its big dangerous manly machinery, and before that big sharp butcher knives 😀

I've not done much work offshore but I spent 3 trips doing the rope access supervision of lifting point examiners. On a 14 day trip I'd spend 13.5 days counting waves, counting ships on the horizon, 0.1 day doing my job and 0.4 days waiting for the helicopter home.

I also spent 1.5years on a big red bridge just outside Edinburgh. The manager told me that he knew we didn't do much but not to get caught. I read a lot as the phone signal was crap.

Done the big dangerous manly machinery now mainly in an office.

I used to do failure analysis and write proceedures.

That was an interesting job*

Now I'm a project manager for fibre-optic flow measurement devices and sand control

Not sure what went wrong in life** other than the former were apparently no longer required. That is to say management atthat company decided we no longer needed to learn from our mistakes

I now seen to spend most of my days placating stakeholders /admin /logistics /billing /forecasting /stock control /ordering and very occasionally a thin sliver of pseudo engineering usually drawing on my old job experiance going through engineering drawings looking for potential issues/clashes....I've found a few clangers over the years - but that's not my job - but it's about the most interesting bit of the job and oddly while all the other work needs doing it's probably the most value I bring to the table in my role tbh. Other wise I'm just a glorified admin.

* Interesting in that no two days were the same and no two failures were identical and occasionally it was a war room appolo 13 how do we get out of this situation

** No longer want to go offshore

I'm a project manager. For a sort of government place.
Just in to do a single project (CRM migration). No team, just me.
Possibly bullshit, but the department I work in do some really important (investigation into some really horrific crimes) and their CRM is so bad they're losing touch with witnesses etc so I'll be helping with that?

Anyway, I'm in as a contractor. Will be my last ever office job as I'm taking the money and opening a brewery.

Not sure if my current job is bullshit or not. Similar to previous jobs, but they were all for charities. I feel it's a bit bullshit but does help people somewhere down the line?

Possibly bullshit, but the department I work in do some really important (investigation into some really horrific crimes) and their CRM is so bad they’re losing touch with witnesses etc so I’ll be helping with that?

Maybe it's an ancillary bullshit job?

By that I mean it's an important job but it only exists because there were so many people doing bullshit jobs that the system eventually collapsed under their weight and you have to get it working again.