- Tags:: #📚Books , [[Sociology]], [[Capitalism]], [[Work-life balance]] - Author:: [[David Graeber]] - Liked:: #4/5 - Link:: [Bullshit Jobs: A Theory - Kindle edition by Graeber, David. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.](https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber-ebook/dp/B075RWG7YM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1676563181&sr=1-1) - Source date:: [[2019-02-07]] - Read date:: [[2022-12-31]] - Cover:: ![[cover_bullshit_jobs.png|100]] ## Why did I want to read it? I already read the "seed" article of the book, [[🗞 On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. A Work Rant]]. Note that a bullshit job is not a "McJob", and has to do more with its (lack of) purpose than the conditions of the job. It resonated with me for many different reasons: - I crave meaning from work but somehow people I talk to see this as something weird. - I read this during the COVID year, where there was an important discussion on which were really "essential" jobs, and how they were compensated. - I wondered... is most Software Engineering a bullshit job? Particularly Engineering Management is a bullshit job on top of that? What about working in Data? (three layers of bullshit job). - And PMs? [As a product manager, I stopped doing product management and became happier as a result : r/ProductManagement](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/ya30re/as_a_product_manager_i_stopped_doing_product/) ## What did I get out of it? The dedication is already very inspiring: > To anyone who would rather be doing something useful with themselves. ### What is a bullshit job? > Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that **even the employee cannot justify its existence** even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee **feels obliged to pretend that is not the case**. (p. 9) ^d82517 In numbers: [37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless | YouGov](https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless), affecting more men than women. These are not "shit jobs": > Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They're just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it's just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly. (p. 14) Both oppressive but not equivalent: > few people I know would trade in a pointless middle-management position for a job a as ditchdigger even if they knew that the ditches really did need to be dug. (p. 15). My boyfriend [[Humber]] does not have a bullshit job: >Purveyors of expensive perfumes might think their products are overpriced and their clients are mostly boorish idiots, but they rarely feel the perfume industry itself should be abolished (p. 22) ### What sorts of bullshit jobs are there? #### Flunkies Exist only to make people feel important (e.g., hotel porter). Inheritance from feudal times. #### Goons Jobs with an aggressive element, but more importantly, exist simply because others employ them (e.g., armed forces, PR specialists, telemarketers). #### ⭐ Duct tapers > [!important] Manteca aquí > ...who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. I am **adopting the term from the software industry**... (p. 40) >Pablo \[a software dev.\]: Basically, we have two kinds of jobs. One kind involves working on core technologies, solving hard and challenging problems, etc. The other one is **taking a bunch of core technologies and applying some duct tape to make them work together.** So... most software development would be duct-taping. Though not sure if that should make us feel pointless. From [[The Bulk of Software Engineering Is Just Plumbing]]: ![[The Bulk of Software Engineering Is Just Plumbing#^fca347]] Pablo believes it is unnecessary duct taping because there is a vicious cycle: >...**if core technologies were done properly, there would be little or no need for duct tape**. (...) Nowadays companies rely heavily on open source (...) Coders are often happy to perform the interesting and rewarding work on core technologies **for free at night but, since that means they have less and less incentive to think about how such creations will ultimately be made compatible**, that means the same coders are reduced during the day to the tedious (but paid) work of making them fit together (...) given that people choose to work on core technologies for free, no company is investing in those technologies. (p. 40) Also related to software we could find: > The most obvious examples of duct tapers are **underlings whose jobs are to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.** (p. 41) This is clearly the case with [[📖 A Philosophy of Software Design. 2nd Edition#Tactical tornados]]: > Having a full-time occupation cleaning up after such a person can only breed resentment (p. 41) Or the antipattern with the architecture team pointed out by [[📖 Team Topologies]]: > In a more material sense, duct taping might be considered a classic working-class function. **The architect may come up with a plan that looks stunning on paper, but it's the builder who has to figure out how to actually install** electrical sockets in a circular room or to use real duct tape to hold things together that in reality simply don't fit together the way the blueprints say they should (p. 45) Omg! This actually happens with [[Lean Product on data platform teams|platform teams]] (and starts a crazy bureaucracy): >Sigmund [[Freud]] even spoke of "[[housewife's neurosis]]": a condition that he believed affected women forced to limit their life horizons to tidying up after others, and who therefore became fanatical about domestic hygiene as a form of revenge. This is often the moral agony of the duct taper: to be forced to organize one's working life around caring about a certain value (say, cleanliness) precisely because more important people could not care less. (p. 41) ^0af917 And... surprise! Another for [[✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management]]: >On the social level, duct taping has **traditionally been women's work**. Throughout history, prominent men have wandered about oblivious to half of what's going on around them, threading on a thousand toes; it was typically their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters who were left with the responsibility of performing the emotional labor of soothing egos, calming nerves, and negotiating solutions to the problems they created (p. 43). ^32dfc2 #### Box Tickers Exists only to allow an organization to claim it is doing something that it is not doing. This is literally a Data team job in many places ([The inflated world of data: have you actually seen a business decision taken based on your analytics work? : datascience](https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/uzr464/the_inflated_world_of_data_have_you_actually_seen/), see also [[✍️ Sobre si mola levantar un equipo de Data]]). I even run a poll at LinkedIn where the most surprising fact for me were not the results, but the fact that out of 1333 people who saw the poll, only 25 voted 🤔. ![[Pasted image 20221229174820.png|400]] >If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager's power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports (p. 49) #### ⭐Taskmasters ##### Engineering Management Create tasks for others to do. Only bullshit job if you think that your "underlings" could do so on their own. Is this Engineering Management (particularly in its most paternalistic, "coaching" way?): > Ten people work for me, but from what I can tell, they can all do the work without my oversight. My only function is to hand them work, which I suppose the people that actually generate the work could do themselves. I will say that in a lot of cases, the work that is assigned is a product of other managers with bullshit jobs, which makes my job two levels of bullshit. (p. 51) ^d93161 From another manager: >... they are trained in all the tools they need to use and they can, of course, manage their time and tasks. So I normally act as a "task gatekeeper." Requests come to me through Jira (a bureaucratic online tool for managing tasks), and I pass them on to the relevant person or persons. Other than that, I'm in charge of sending periodic reports to my manager, who, in turn, will incorporate them into "more important" reports to be sent to the CEO. (p. 52) ^e4857d > [!important] Manteca aquí >This kind of combination of taskmastering and box ticking would appear to be **the very essence of middle management.** (p. 52) >Performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit, explaining, "Everyone already knows who the slackers are" (p. 124) That is a very sad view of what a performance review is about. And usually it's not that easy to know who is a slacker: biases and glue work make it hard ([[✍️ Sin machirulos hay paraiso. Una charla heterofriendly sobre management#Foco del líder]]). This is always the case when working with people, in general :/ >If there's any satisfaction that comes from my job, it's being an expert in navigating the waters of our disorganized organization and being able to get things done. But being an expert in something that is unnecessary is, as you can imagine, not all that fulfilling. (p. 124) ^91d2f6 ##### Social "dynamizers" I suspect these ones try to act as a social lubricant (but usually fail miserably): >...workers whose entire careers are based on dressing up in costumes or otherwise designing silly games to create rapport in office environments where everyone would probably be happier just being left alone (p. 59) >A common problem in large cities, especially in the North Atlantic world, is that most middle-class people now spend so much time at work that they have few social ties outside it; (p. 105) >I should add as a final note there was really only one class of people that not only denied their jobs were pointless but expressed outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. These were--predictably enough--business owners, and anyone else in charge of hiring and firing. (Tania appears to be something of an exception in this regard.) In fact, for many years, I have been receiving periodic unsolicited communications from indignant entrepreneurs and executives telling me my entire premise is wrong. No one, they insist, would ever spend company money on an employee who wasn't needed. Such communications rarely offer particularly sophisticated arguments. Most just employ the usual circular argument that since, in a market economy, none of the things described in this chapter could have actually occurred, that therefore they didn't (p. 65) ### Why do those in bullshit jobs regularly report themselves unhappy? Contrary to popular belief, people don't like to do nothing. >... everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to find themselves a situation where they can get the most benefit for the least expenditure of time and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this-especially if we are talking about such matters in the abstract. (**"We can't just give poor people handouts! Then they won't have any incentive to look for work!"**) On the other hand, our own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends to contradict these assumptions at many points. (p. 68) >Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don't actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs. (p.81) >There is endless empirical evidence to back this \[that people don't want to do nothing\] up. To choose a couple of particularly colorful examples: working-class people who win the lottery and find themselves multimillionaires rarely quit their jobs (and if they do, usually they soon say they regret it). (p. 82) ^1ad940 The first study was done by in the sixties by [[Nancy C. Moore]] and [[Robert S. Weiss]]: [The function and meaning of work and the job. - PsycNET](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1957-01820-001) and has been replicated several times since with similar results: 74 to 80 percent of workers claim they would go on working if they suddenly got a fortune on their hands. ^750e75 German psychologist [[Karl Groos]] discovered in 1901 that we have "the pleasure at being the cause" of effects. We are happy to exercise our powers for the very sake of them, and it's directly related to play, and, to our own very sense of self. This would be later explored by [[G. A. Klein]], or [[Francis Broucek]], among others (p. 83) ^d8cbe9 Your architects! >One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories airing. The more patriarchal the society, the more power men have over women, the more this will tend to be the case. The same pattern tends to reproduce itself whenever one group clearly is in a position of power over another, with very few exceptions. (p. 87) ## Other notes #### Selling ones time >As the great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Greek of Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter--slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter's time. As Finley observes, any such notion would have to involve two conceptual leaps which even the most sophisticated Roman legal theorists found difficult: first, to think of the potters capacity to work, his "labor-power," as a thing that was distinct from the pot ter himself, and second, to devise some way to pour that capacity out as it were, into uniform temporal containers- hours, days, work shits that could then be purchased, using cash." (p. 88) >The English historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote a magnificent 1967 essay on the origins of the modern time sense called "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" pointed out that what happened were simultaneous moral and technological changes, each propelling the other. By the fourteenth century, most European towns had created clock towers--usually funded and encouraged by the local merchant guild. It was these same merchants who developed the habit of placing human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves that they should make good use of their time because each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. >Once time was money, it became possible to speak of "spending time" rather than just "passing" it--also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the "husbandry of time, proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor." (p. 91) >The middle classes came to see the poor as poor largely because they lacked time discipline:. they spent their time recklessly, just as they gambled away their money. Meanwhile, workers rebelling against oppressive conditions began adopting the same language. >Mitch's Story highlights the religious element: the idea that dutiful sub mission even to meaningless work under another's authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes you a better person. This, of course, is a modern variant of Puritanism. (p. 94) #### Unhapiness because of ambiguity >Who exactly is forcing you to pretend to work? The company? Society? Some strange confluence of social convention and economic forces that insist no one should be given the means of life without working, even if there is not enough real work to go around? At least in the traditional workplace, there was someone against whom you could direct your rage This is one of the things that comes through strongly in the testimonies I assembled: the infuriating ambiguity. There is something terrible, ridiculous, outrageous going on, but it's not clear whether you are even. allowed to acknowledge it, and it's usually even less clear who or what can be blamed. (p. 102) >Many, probably most, bullshit jobs involve a similar agonizing script-lessness. Not only are the codes of behavior ambiguous, no one is even sure what they are supposed to say or how they are supposed to feel about their situation. (p. 113) #### More Soft engineering! >The rest of the day, I explain incomprehensible procedures to my colleagues, help them locate directives that serve no purpose, cheer up the troops, and reassign files that "the system" has misdirected. Oddly enough, I enjoy going to work. It's as if I were being paid sixty thousand dollars a year to do the equivalent of Sudoku or crossword puzzles.' (p. 104) This reminds me on how many military stuff in software engineering and leadership. >**In such minimal, but clearly unequal, social environments [work environments]**, strange things can start to happen. Back in the 1960s, the radical psychoanalyst [[Erich Fromm]] first suggested that **"nonsexual" forms of sadism and necrophilia tend to pervade everyday affairs** in highly puritanical and hierarchical environments. In the 1990s, the sociologist [[Lynn Chancer]] synthesized some of these ideas with those of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin to devise a theory of Sado-Masochism in Everyday Life. What Chancer found was that unlike members of actual BDSM subcultures, who are entirely aware of the fact that they are playing games of make-believe, purportedly **"normal" people in hierarchical environments typically ended up locked in a kind of pathological variation of the same sadomasochistic dynamic**: the (person on the) bottom struggles desperately for approval that can never, by definition, be forth-coming; the (person on the) top going to greater and greater lengths to assert a dominance that both know is ultimately a lie-for if the top were really the all-powerful, confident, masterly being he pretends to be, he wouldn't need to go to such outrageous lengths to ensure the bottom's recognition of his power. (p. 121) ^8b7b26 ![[IMG_0752.jpeg]] > Describing a country's economy as dominated by the service sector leaves one with the impression that people in that country are supporting themselves principally by serving each other iced lattes or pressing one another's shorts. Obviously, this isn't really true. So what else might they be doing? (p. 148) Robert Taylor classification: >administrators, consultants clerical and accounting staff, IT professionals, and the like. The financial sector is a scam. In a way, one could argue that the whole financial sector is a scam of sorts, since it represents itself as largely about directing investments to The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with government to create, and then to trade and manipulate, various forms of debt. (p. 151) Since having a bullshit job is better than having none... [[Al menos tienes trabajo]]: >"I don't think in ideological terms. I never have," Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork: That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?" (p. 157) Counterarguments: - The world has grown more complex, there is hyperspecialization. >Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; - It's government interventionism. >And cites a counter example of the rise of administrators in public and private universities (where affairs shouldn´t be that much complex), and rises more than the administratives within the government. In the case of bullshit jobs, this means we can ask three questions: 1. On the individual level, why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs? 2. On social and economic levels, what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs? 3. On the cultural and political levels, why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it? (p. 154) Bullshit jobs and remote work: ![[AF994C49-9369-4DA8-8EF8-F8809B9545CE.png]] - Conspiranoia: why nobody did anything? Although social engineering does happen (p. 155). - There seems to be support for his claims, based on research. [‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless - Simon Walo, 2023](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170231175771)