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I'm always amazed at how often this refrain comes up, with different explanations every time. For some reason, he idea of bullshit jobs is one has immense staying power.
Whenever it does come up, I often wonder how one would separate the useless, lazy, stupid jobs from the essential ones. When I was younger I held a similar view, but over time I realized that the single strongest predictor for whether I thought a job was bullshit or not was how little I knew about its actual day to day work.
As a simple example, take project managers. A bad one is terrible, and is probably one of those things that a lot of people woud say is neither "intellectual" nor "useful". I had that opinion once upon a time. Eventually, I worked on a project with a good project manager and realized that they actually do an insane amount of work and provide a significant force multiplier for the rest of the people involved. It felt fantastic to just... work on the problem.
That's one of my biggest concerns about the current LLM frenzy. It's largely being driven by a small, cloistered group of people who really buy into the "bullshit jobs" premise, and spend more time saying "well couldn't you Just X" instead of figuring out why things are the way they are. Systems evolve into specific shapes for a reason. Tribal knowledge is real.
I feel like we're going to be forcefully reminded of those facts if we keep it up.
It has lots of staying power ‘cause it’s an efficient motte and bailey.
Motte: the stereotypical email-shuffler. Office Space. Sinecures for the trust-fund kid. Wal-mart greeters.
Bailey: anything I don’t like or respect. Fundraising? Bullshit. Compliance? Nobody cares about that stuff. Management? Fuck those guys in particular.
Apply the usual incentives of group psychology, and bam, everyone’s getting Gell-Mann Amnesia.
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I mean this is kinda the point. A lot of these roles if you get the right person into the right situation they can definitely actually manifest a lot of value, but there's also a lot of jerking off and people dissapearing into huge bureaucratic machines. I also believe that 'bullshit jobs' and 'the current state of the economy evolved for a reason' aren't really mutually exclusive. My expectation is that in 20 years time there'll be a broad reshuffle of the deck but whatever percentage is largely superfluous today will also still be there in slightly different job titles.
Tend to agree.
Also, part of the issue is that a job can very much look like bullshit right up until some extremely important necessity arises.
Some amount of 'busywork' is there so that someone can stay occupied while they're being paid to be present in case that [event] occurs, which can be at almost any time, and the work has to be easy and unimportant enough that they can set it aside to attend to the event without something else catching on fire.
Rough example, the security guard at the bank might sit around watching videos on his phone for most of a year, but he is expected to jump to it if a guy with a ski mask appears.
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"Bullshit jobs" is, as far as I can see, one half large organizations being too slow to adjust course when jobs need to change, and one half wishful thinking by utopians who desperately want wage labor to be bullshit so they can make the case for some form of luxury communism.
It’s a useful way of describing work that has been regulated into existence. For example, the EU passes legislation that requires some hugely complex and time consuming climate reporting for every company with an annual revenue of more than €10m. 100,000 companies now have to hire someone to be their ‘climate reporting officer’. The US healthcare system’s extensive regulation and lifetimes of case law about who pays and when and what insurance covers and what the hospitals have to provide etc etc create tens of thousands of jobs on both sides of the billing equation (the healthcare providers and the insurers) that don’t exist, or certainly don’t exist in the same sense, in single payer systems. Walmart wants to open in a town in Kentucky. The town offers large tax breaks in exchange for hiring 200 local people. A big Walmart in 2026 only needs 120 people to operate, though, but the tax breaks are worth more than that payroll. Numerous jobs as greeters and shelf stickers and security guards are created unnecessarily. A government contractor is tasked by a new government with proving that what it does at $500m a year in state billing is justified. It hires McKinsey for $20m to write a report, because nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey (including the minister who gets the report).
Individually these are examples of bloat, bureaucracy, overregulation, unintended consequences, inefficiency, corruption, graft, credentialism, whatever. But collectively, all of these are examples of bullshit jobs.
If the bureaucracy is being imposed from within the corporation, it's one thing, but it's totally different if it's a necessary response to legislation. At that point it's less about the job itself being bullshit and more about disagreement with the underlying policy. If the job performs the function of complying with the law, it's a fairly large value add compared with the penalties that would be imposed if the work weren't done. To give an example of a regulation that can come across as bullshit to some people, the EPA requires erosion and sedimentation (E&S) permits for construction projects that involve disturbing a certain amount of earth. Depending on the size and location of the project, you may need to apply for a permit, not need anything, or need to have an E&S plan on site but not need prior approval. This third category can come across as bullshit to some people, because it involves paying an engineer thousands of dollars to publish a report that no one is going to read, especially if the conclusion is that no special precautions involving erosion need to be taken.
You could just as soon not get a plan and no one would be the wiser. Except if runoff from the jobsite ends up washing onto your neighbor's property and he asks to see the plan and you don't have one. If you end up getting sued over excessive runoff causing damage, not having a plan to deal with erosion is a pretty big matzo ball to have hanging over the litigation. Sure, the government could eliminate E&S requirements entirely, but that only means that when a problem happens you get to spend several years litigating it. The tradeoff is that you minimize erosion problems on all projects from the beginning, and if you do get sued it's nice to be able to say that you had an E&S plan.
The problem I have with the bullshit jobs theory in general is that somebody who isn't familiar with a business presumes that they know how to run it better and knows what work contributes value and what doesn't. This is the fundamental issue I have with AI gurus saying that LLMs are going to take your job. Really? Because chances are they have no idea what you actually do, let alone what value it provides the company. They think of everything in terms of outputs and assume that being able to generate the output is the beginning and end of the value the employee provides to the company. It's a prime example of Rory Sutherland's Doorman Fallacy: A consultant to a hotel company sees the doorman's job as opening the door, and he tells the hotel that they can save a ton of money by replacing the doorman with an automatic system. But the doorman does more than open the door. He calls cabs, he deals with package deliveries, he provides a certain amount of security, he gives the hotel a degree of prestige, etc. Since it's impossible to quantify how much business you're getting as a result of these little services, it's easy to fall into the trap where you believe that automating away the doorman is an automatic windfall, especially when nobody is ever going to say in a customer survey that the existence of a doorman played any role in selecting the hotel.
I’m more amenable to the idea that some jobs are bullshit. It happens mostly by inertia— we’ve always done it this way, we’ve always had a person to do X thing, so we still need that person doing that thing. Yes you can have value added — people doing a service oriented thing often make the experience of purchasing something a bit nicer. A food-o-mat existed in the 1950s, you simply punk in money and the food would be put behind a little door and it all worked sort of like a giant vending machine. Heck we still have actual vending machines, and you could easily create a food selling business that worked almost entirely by stocking vending machines. But you don’t lose the waitress because there’s simply something pleasant about buying something from a person who makes the experience pleasant. That would require at least some premium to the service. A consumer would have to want to pay more for a person to do that. And for customer facing roles, sure. But the same cannot be said for backend types of work. There’s no reason to pay extra to have a secretary type up your messages and emails. There’s no benefit to having a human make a spreadsheet. No one cares whether their balance sheet was created by a human. So those jobs are more at risk because they don’t get any better because the job was done by a human who made the experience nicer.
I agree, but I don't think that's what Graeber was referring to; hell, I started reading the book before deciding that the whole idea was dogshit and he didn't mention anything like that when describing his categories of bullshit jobs. All that did was show that he has no idea what adds value for a company. For instance, one of his canonical examples was companies that have receptionists even though they only get a couple calls a day. He then shows his hand by saying that the only reason they do that is so they can put on airs for the few customers they actually have. But that can be a source of prestige, and if it ends up being a bad use of money, that's a business decision for the company to make. I"m in law, and it's typical for most firms to only post a general phone number for the company and route all calls through the secretary (though they do other important work as well). I mostly have corporate clients who schedule Zoom calls on the rare occasions they want to speak, so I don't get many normal phone calls. But I do get some, and when I do the secretaries always act suspicious and reluctant when they ask me if I can put them through, as though it would be a huge imposition for me to have to talk to some rando.
Imagine you're running a small law firm that does probate work. It's just you and a secretary who also helps out with the business end of things. You'd like to take all your calls personally, but sometimes you're meeting with a client or at the courthouse and won't be available, and your secretary may be in client meetings with you or running other errands. You may only get two calls a day, but if they're from prospective clients each one could be worth thousands of dollars. You can automate this system and use voicemail or some kind of electronic scheduling service, but when confronted with this, most people will just hang up and call someone else. The receptionist can at least answer basic questions about what the firm does and if you're only tied up for another 20 minutes might be able to get that client in your office that same day.
Graeber seems to think that it's all part of a status game, as if it were all a bunch of greedy capitalists trying to impress each other with how much money they spend. But if you're a client who was actually able to get me on the phone and you show up at the office to a waiting room that's still empty after five minutes because the attorney is either with another client or just doing work, how is that going to affect your impression of the firm? People don't usually show up to law offices for fun reasons, and even something as simple as having someone to tell you to have a seat and the lawyer will be out in a few minutes and would you like some coffee in the meantime adds a lot of value. I'm not saying that it would necessarily make sense for our solo practitioner to do this, just that if a solo told me that he did I wouldn't think it was that unusual.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that Graeber's entire explanation for the phenomenon is bullshit itself. I could sympathize with him more if his theory was that bullshit jobs exist because of legacy practices that haven't been updated, or that some people are bad at business, or that executives are so far removed from the operations of their company that they don't know where value is being created, or that there's excessive regulation. To the contrary, he argues that it's all part of a capitalist system that requires the attorney to chain a young woman to a desk for 8 hours a day in exchange for barely enough money to survive because the system demands control.
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this is exactly it and the part of bullshit jobs people miss. Bullshit jobs exist almost entirely because of regulation - the job may seem useful, but it is only useful because regulation requires it/makes it worth paying for.
Is being a police officer a bullshit job? Professional law enforcement is an occupation that only exists because of legislation creating it.
Graeber would say yes, though that's because he thinks any kind of security work is BS; he also thinks actuaries and corporate attorneys and executive assistants are all bullshit jobs. Conversely, he'd probably think food safety inspector was a real job. This is because "bullshit job" is an incoherent concept that people slap on jobs they think shouldn't exist. They have a variety of reasons why they might think a job shouldn't exist, but they're almost always normative claims about what things are worth doing.
I should've written more than a sentence - most of the time people see something that looks like a bullshit desk job that doesn't actually create value (or are in a job they feel like doesn't create value), that job needs to exist due to regulation, and often is positive sum due to regulation.
I am very well compensated to do a job that creates lots of monetary value for my employer and others, but it only exists due to Government regulation, and arguably, a world where I spent my time teaching kids or doing some kind of research would be better.
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Note that sometimes the "regulation" isn't from the government, but a parent organization.
For example, sometimes managers assign employees useless tasks to take credit for managing a higher number of employees, since that's the metric they get promoted on. Or to spend their yearly budget so next year's isn't reduced. Or because one of their employees is their boss's incompetent grandson.
When companies become large enough, they become pseudo-governments. A large, poorly-managed organization creates bullshit, regardless of whether it’s public or private.
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Maybe we’ve just had different life trajectories, but I think this is because most people have had one of those jobs.
The original thesis labelled a bullshit job as one where the person self-reports that “the world would be the same or better if I didn’t come in to work” and I think huge numbers of people can relate to sitting down at their desk and doing something that really just doesn’t need to be done but that they are being told to do anyway.
Yeah. I'm fortunate enough to have FIREd due to hitting a SAAS startup home run but even the company I was part of has now roughly 10x'd headcount from when we hit our explosive growth phase. Maybe a quarter of that is strictly necessary for allowing people to have bums in seats/realistic worklife balance. The rest is just a slow grind towards bureaucratic inertia and shipping pace has fallen off several cliffs.
It has been my observation that engineering productivity often scales sub-linearly with team size. Coordination between developers isn't zero-overhead, but it can still be "faster" (to market) overall than a small, dedicated team.
Yeah this is essentially it. When we hit our initial explosive growth we had a combination of being absurdly lucky in terms of right place/time and had some smart, skilled guys working 100-hour weeks. Now most of the original drivers have enough cash to have a strong buffer and minions, nobody's pushing it anywhere near as hard.
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You jammy bugger! Congrats. That's the dream right there.
I saw the same dynamic in projects that I was part of - you can absorb a surprising number of people without really meaningfully improving performance.
I mean I'm talking essentially going from a staff of 10 of us where we were all pulling 100-hour days to now 100ish people but like the explosive growth tailed off about 70 hires ago and I'm not sure what everybody else is notionally doing when fuck all is being shipped.
I'd like the secret to pull 100-hour days seems quite useful.
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In my teens, and early twenties I split time between agricultural labor, food service, and construction. After that, I ended up in logistics before moving into software. I don't think I'd say any of those would meet those criteria.
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By and large and also unfortunately: The bullshit is distributed throughout the system at different levels of concentration.
When I did Labor, my job (based on what I was compensated for) was about 20-30% bullshit; given that that was how much my paycheck reflected massaging the owners ego vs. actually doing stuff; but I did actually do stuff all day.
I've also had an office job that was more like 90% bullshit; I mainly read ebooks while pretending to do email bullshit, but there was an occasional critical task that needed me specifically. I could Have been in the office for 1 hour a day with room on both sides; but the owner needed me there for 8 hours in order for his dick to feel big.
There are probably jobs out there that are 99% bullshit, and 1% irreplicable and critical process knowledge that shuts the plant down for a week if the one guy who sits on a stool spitting sunflower seed hulls everywhere like a god damn savage leaves because he is the only one who knows what that sound means.
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There's a simple question that needs answering and yet never gets one regarding this. If the jobs were so clearly bullshit, why are employers paying for it? There must be value somewhere in some way expected from it. That value might not be immediately noticeable, maybe it's some PR thing like how companies do donation matching. Or maybe it's as you say, more complex than people think it is. Hell maybe you just exist as a redundancy in case shit goes wrong and in the rare case you're needed, you're there for the emergency. But there's gonna be something worth it.
This doesn't mean perfect. Companies will overhire on tasks from time to time and employers will make mistakes or have stupid ideas because they're people too. Or sometimes a project seems good at first but just ends up failing due to competition doing better or society/market conditions shifting.
But the corrections do come and jobs that are determined to not be working out get fired. The owners want profit, they are not running a charity.
Especially funny that this populist sentiment tends to coexist with another common one about greed. You can have "bullshit jobs where people get paid despite not being of value" or you can have "greedy owners who don't care about employees and will fire you without care" but not both.
Those aren't mutually exclusive if the owners are terrible judges about what actually produces value.
And if they're particularly bad and they don't make up for it somehow else then the company takes a backseat to competitors and the CEO gets replaced/owner fails. Lots of businesses fail, the culling process is an important part of optimizing.
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Massive stack of competing incentives where selling needing more minions to boost your headcount to your superiors is imperative for getting more clout in the business, plus weird complexity situations where owners are sufficiently alienated from day-to-day coalface operations to not know where things are actually getting done.
Without getting into obvious absurdities like hiring to meet affirmative action quotas or personality hires or random goonsquads of friends/family. There's also a lot of weird situations in business where owners aren't necessarily running enterprises for purely financially optimal reasons. I once worked in a computer store that was lucky to break even, but the guy running it had been a very early mover on retailing PCs and essentially banked Financial Independence money 20 years ago. Now his entire social being was tied up in being a small business owner, he is a complete workaholic and he additionally had a bunch of 20-year employees that he felt were unlikely to be able to find employment elsewhere. I was there for 6 months and it was essentially a sitcom where this 70 year old owner would wake up in the morning, come up with some hare-brained scheme for a new product line to introduce to 'bring the business back to the old days' and everybody essentially went through the motions.
The only reason I understand that it was essentially a lifestyle business for the owner was a chance encounter with his wife where she told me, and things like this aren't even that rare in the economy. Though notably he did eventually sell to a random Indian guy who proceeded to replace all the old-timers with the Australian H1B equivalent, so I guess the economy finds a way.
Small businesses can get away with being pure passion projects. Small businesses are also small. The value provided isn't always financial, often especially for many small business entrepreneurs, it's social and emotional value. They crave control, or recognition, or freedom, or the feeling, or ego, or whatever and they're willing to substitute some financial value in exchange for their social or emotional value. Heck even large companies and owners do that sometimes too, just not to the same relative degree. They're still human at the end of the day, not emotionless robots with pure logical finance guided thinking.
Like I said, it's not perfect. Often companies do prefer to be a little too much than to risk not being enough. But generally there is an expected value to come from you, and if you don't fulfill it then you'll be dropped eventually.
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Managers have competing interests with their org and with the broader enterprise. Career growth for management is managing more people - nothing else really exists. Sufficiently large companies have strong conflicts of interest between departments. Microsoft VPs have historically preferred outright killing winning projects if they can’t get a slice of the action in their org. On another note, firing people is truly awful for most (0/10, do not recommend), and is disruptive to the rest of the team… and the career consequences of a bad fire differ from just hiring too many people.
Now that's true, but to be clear here hiring people so the manager in charge can feel more important is a value provided too! A stupid one to many of us, but people spend tons of money validating their egos. It's not too much different than someone who spends millions of dollars on some art piece so they can say they own a piece from Famous Artist instead of just a cheap replica.
The value can manifest in weird ways that aren't directly profitable.
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Most bullshit jobs exist because other bullshit jobs exist. You can see this in healthcare; you've got armies of healthcare admins whose job it is basically to make sure they get paid, and other armies of insurance people whose job it is to try not to pay. Or "compliance", where you've got people whose job it is to make sure all the paperwork is done right, and other people's job it is to punish the first set if they don't do it correctly.
A good project manager may be useful, but most of them IME were basically making sure the paperwork got done and the charts filled out, and were a net negative for actually getting the stuff done. The usual argument is they're needed for management to do their job, but I'm doubtful.
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