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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Most office work is fake email jobs. 10x'ing the productivity of fake is still fake. I do think that AI is going to roar on the margins. But the average office working is doing very little productive in the first place.

A lot of AI is helping write emails on the front end, and then summarizing them on the backend. Nothing of value is being added.

Most office work is fake email jobs.

This is a ridiculous statement. If you think so, you should post your short positions.

Or, you should start up competing white collar companies and undercut all the companies you think have massive amounts of fake email job deadweight. As you'd have a much leaner cost structure.

I'm surprised that this is controversial. I didn't think it was a hot take. Even at my first internship (at a large tech company), during the general onboarding, I was introduced to the concept of the Pareto principle, used to explain that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the employees.

If you think so, you should post your short positions.

Shorts on who?

I'm in much more agreement with "80% of work is done by 20% of employees" (although I think it's a larger share than 20%)

I disagreed strongly with "most office work is fake email jobs"

"Many employees don't work at full capacity" =/= "many employees have fake jobs"

The shorts would be against whatever companies you think are wasting large sums of money paying people to do nothing, as presumably they're very liable to be disrupted by companies with more competitive cost structures

That doesn't follow. There are colossal differences between:

  1. Suspecting that there are many large companies with massive amounts of fake email job deadweight
  2. Being able to reliably identify companies with more (or less) fake email job deadweight
  3. Being able to reliably generate above market returns using the information gleaned from 2)

Where 2) would be quite difficult for professional investors, much less regular individual investors. And even conditional on if one somehow were able to pull off 2), modern financial theory would suggest 3) is still highly unlikely. Since if you could pull off 2), so could others, and thus there leaves no opportunity for arbitrage.

Note that it’s unclear what the directionality of such an investment thesis should be. With or without arbitrage, one could argue that high-bullshit-email-job companies should have higher expected returns, since the market would perceive them as riskier in being more vulnerable to disruption.

The shorts would be against whatever companies you think are wasting large sums of money paying people to do nothing

All mid-large companies do this, there's none to short, as it's built in.

as presumably they're very liable to be disrupted by companies with more competitive cost structures

No because it's not a solved problem, it's a scaling and coordination problem. You can't easily pick out which jobs are fake. and which parts of which jobs. It's baked into the growth curve.Smaller companies generally are scrappier, and often cheaper as a result, which is how they compete. As they grow, they become less able to run a tight ship.

I don't find the statement so ridiculous, unfortunately. As @ThomasdelVasto and I posted before, the corporate market may be in an irrational but metastable state. Far too much of white-collar work is just "adult daycare", and society has been built around the idea that this is how you keep people occupied. It's possible that, at some point, the whole edifice will collapse. But hey, I don't have a bird's-eye view and I could be wrong. Let's hope so!

Pinging @fmac but what specific jobs are you referring to? I can't say I've ever worked with anyone whose job I would describe as a "fake email job".

I wouldn't discount the entire title, but a bad PM fits the "fake email job"-shaped hole so well that it might as well be made for it.

Some managers, sales reps, and HR workers come to mind (note that I'm not saying there's no need for those roles, but I get the impression there are far too many people in them). Heck, even many coders, despite having a real thing they make, are just skating by and not making a difference to anyone's life. I would possibly include myself in that. And I'm working for a successful company - I'm sure it's a dozen times worse in, say, the government, where even the distant hand of the market can't reach you.

I'm also open to the argument that 95% of jobs are useless but it's humanly impossible to know exactly which those are, so you need to keep everyone employed. I'm not arguing from omniscience here, just from my instincts after decades of code monkeying.

After reading more of your thoughts I'm actually much more in agreement with them than how I interpreted them initially

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