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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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