https://aninjusticemag.com/why-is-capitalism-creating-an-economy-that-is-40-bullsh-t-jobs-125dd05ffe64

I work in a bullshit job. 95% of my tasks could and should be automated. I told my managers this. I wrote a proposal document. The initial reaction seemed positive but two years later there has been no move towards this other than a ‘living’ document in an obscure folder on MS Teams. Last updated a year and 9 months ago. By me.

We have, however, doubled the number of people doing the same job as me.

I think the ultimate proof that I do a bullshit job is that I’m posting this during work hours.

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.