> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.

He couldn't even keep that straight, though. There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code? It didn't make sense and you could see that he didn't really understand software, other than how he imagined it fitting into his idealized world where everything anarchist and open source is good and everything corporate and capitalist is bad. Once you see how little he understands about a topic you're familiar with, it's hard to unsee it in his discussions of everything else.

That said, he still wasn't arguing that the work didn't generate economic value. Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually. They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people. The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.

"They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people."

Sure, but there's no such thing as "the company." That's shorthand - a convenient metaphor for a particular bunch of people doing some things. So those jobs can exist if some people - even one person - gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs that person to employ them. For example, a senior manager padding his department with non-jobs to increase headcount, because it gives him increased prestige and power, and the cost to him of employing that person is zero. Will those jobs get cut "eventually"? Maybe, but I've seen them go on for decades.

> There's a part where he argues that open source work is valuable but corporate programmers are doing bullshit work that isn't socially productive because they're connecting disparate things together with glue code?

I don't know if maybe he wasn't explaining it well enough, but that kind of reasoning makes some sense.

A lot of code is written because you want the output from Foo to be the input to Bar and then you need some glue to put them together. This is pretty common when Foo and Bar are made by different people. With open source, someone writes the glue code, publishes it, and then nobody else has to write it because they just use what's published.

In corporate bureaucracies, Company A writes the glue code but then doesn't publish it, so Company B which has the same problem has to write it again, but they don't publish it either. A hundred companies are then doing the work that only really needed to be done once, which makes for 100 times as much work, a 1% efficiency rate and 99 bullshit jobs.

Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit Jobs was based on people who self reported that their jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the negative psychological impact this can have on employees, and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense economically, the bureaucratization of the health care and education sectors for example, in contrast so many other professions that actually are useful. Other examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-tapers, etc.

I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact.

> They exist because the company gets more benefit out of the job existing than it costs to employ those people.

Not necessarily, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that were just flying under the radar. Sort of like a cockroach that skitters when light is on but roams freely in the dark.

> The "bullshit jobs" idea was more about feelings and notions of societal impact than economic value.

But he states that expressis verbis, so your discovery is not that spectacular.

Although he gives examples of jobs, or some aspects of jobs, that don't help to deliver what specific institutions aim to deliver. Example would be bureaucratization of academia.

> It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyone is perfectly behaved, everything is perfectly ordered, and therefore we don't have to have certain jobs that only exist to counter other imperfect things in society.

> Jobs that don't provide value for a company are cut, eventually.

Uhm, seems like Greaber is not the only one drawing conclusions from a hypothetical perfect world

Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.