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Let me join the chorus of voices enthusiastically agreeing with you about how jobs are already bullshit. I've never been quite sure whether this maximally cynical view is true, but it sure feels true. One white-collar worker has 10x more power to, well, do stuff than 100 years ago, but somehow we keep finding things for them to do. And so Elon can fire 80% of Twitter staff, and "somehow" Twitter continues to function normally.
With that said, I worry that this is a metastable state. Witness how thoroughly the zeitgeist of work changed after COVID - all of a sudden, in my (bullshit white-collar) industry, it's just the norm to WFH and maybe grudgingly come in to the office for a few hours 3 days a week. Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.
If AI makes it more and more obvious that office work is now mostly just adult daycare, that lowers the transition energy even more. And we might just be waiting for another sudden societal shock to get us over that hump, and transition to a world where 95% of people are unemployed and this is considered normal. We're heading into uncharted waters.
When working from home, I find I'm more productive because I know I can block out my time the way I like, so there's no panic rush to try and get it all done in hour A to hour B. If I'm not busy (because there are times when there just isn't that much 'real' work to be done), I can go off and do housework or do personal things online, then the next batch of real work comes in via email or whatever and I work on that. There isn't the rush over "I have to get this done by X o'clock, because I have to be out of here by clocking off time, because I have to be home on time to make sure I don't miss the delivery" or whatever, so I can be more thorough.
In the office, if the 'real work' isn't enough to fill up the day, then I do waste time online or pretending to be busy or procrastinating so putting off work because I want to fill up those empty hours. The difference is that at home, I'll go and put on a load of laundry. At work, I'll have some tabs open and a spreadsheet and pretend to be 'working'.
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Hmmm these are reasonable points. But as someone else pointed out, part of the fact that we're in this state is that the government has strong incentives to keep the unemployment rate down.
Then again government dysfunction is increasing too!
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I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
There are bullshit jobs, but only in fat companies.
E.g. I know of a bank that has a whole dozen person 'enterprise architecture ' department that's supposed to manage their IT architecture.
They manage, instead, an erroneous, mostly fictional model of the actual IT architecture.
"Bullshit jobs" strikes me as a massive motte and bailey.
There definitely are bullshit jobs. But a very common case of a "bullshit" job is one where the employee does work that's actually essential to a company or to societyy, but doesn't directly produce tangible things, so it feels like his job is useless.
"To a company" does a lot of legwork here. Jobs that are essential to companies but only for the companies to compete for the market and squeeze each other out, with nearly zero sum for society, are the classic example of a bullshit job.
Sounds like you're just talking about rivalrous or zero sum work, which certainly exists but I don't think is usually what people mean when they invoke bullshit jobs. Usually people are trying to bring to mind people digging holes and filling them back in again, not competition.
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Doesn't squeezing each other out mean that they are becoming leaner and more efficient so giving the same products/services at lower cost to society? Can you give me some examples of the sort of jobs you are talking about? I am not sure I understand.
I specified advertizing because advertizing is explicitly not about leaning down the production to make the products cheaper, but rather at capturing more buyers. For a buyer, it does not matter whether they buy product A or product B if the products are identical but one captures 90% of attentionspace. For companies, it means an order of magnitude in revenue.
Advertising helps the people learn about what kinds of products and services are available. Outright lying is banned, so it may be a net good.
That's only the motte of advertising's value. I am not under the impression that if there was 10, or hell even 100 times less advertising in our world, people would struggle to find information about new products and services.
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I once worked for a massive multinational company where I interacted relatively frequently with the enterprise architects. They were getting shit for their models being inaccurate, which they were, but this wasn't because they were creating erronous models but because the it architecture changed by the time they managed finish a model. When you have thousands of people constantly updating something, and not documenting what they're doing, it's hard to create an accurate up to date model.
You can of course create a high level model but that isn't very useful. What they realised had to be done was automating at least part of the model generation but since that couldn't get any budget for that (in part because they were behind on model creation!) they were stuck with manually updating their models and people not using their work.
Were their jobs bullshit? They were needed at the company but they things were structured in a way where they were unable to produce much value.
This isn't a truly massive company, it's a national one with maybe <50 in-house developers. There's a 35 year old system that's barely documented because management is, as always clueless and doesn't care about pushing it or even allocating workforce for it.
Short of cheap competent AGI agents, with the workforce is retiring, the entire company is inevitably headed to a systemic crash which will create a gigantic PR problem because it's the sort of business that needs to be reliably up at all times and has ~100,000s of customers. So far they haven't really had one longer than a few hours.
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If you find your work meaningful and seeing that it is not bullshit, well good for you. I've also been mostly lucky in that aspect that I've done very little bullshit through the years. But I've ended up recently in "Bullshit Jobs" territory by doing stuff is that essentially specializing to tech that is designed for scaling to millions of concurrent users and applying it for B2B that is going to see tops of a couple of thousands users if they capture the majority of the market. There is very little wrong with the tech in itself, and it is useful... but the thing that I'm using it for is not benefiting the business, improving the world or making me happy because it is being misapplied. I quit my last job for the very reason, thought I was out of it and all of a sudden I got transferred back to doing the same thing at the new place.
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