This is entirely caused by construction companies that take too many jobs and don't allocate sufficient equipment. They want to spread themselves and their equipment thin to have as many concurrent jobs as possible.

That's pretty much sales. If the market were efficient and easy to navigate as a buyer there wouldn't be a need for salespeople, just like how I can buy my own cereal without one. Imagine if you went to buy cereal and the sign said "call for quote." Imagine that extended to every single item you can possibly purchase. The world would stop from the inefficiency. And yet we tolerate it especially in business 2 business setting because hey its not our money we are spending, and smooth talking works really well on our monkey brains.

Everyone says this and then when the company experiences a round of layoffs everyone’s job gets harder, service gets worse and delivery slows down

Chesterson's Fence at a corporate level.

> There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.

This only works (reliably) in an idealized free market.

That is to say, in the classroom.

In the real world, there are a myriad of reasons in any given situation why a company might have a low profit margin, but still have loads of inefficiencies and other imperfections that haven't been, and won't be, "competed away".

My latest armchair theory is that bullshit jobs might be like “junk” DNA, which researchers learned isn’t actually junk and influences various cellular and genetic behavior, just not through direct protein instruction.

Or as engineers know: sometimes legacy code doesn’t initially appear to do anything, but then messing with it has unexpected effects.

I think its easier to state "bullshit jobs" but the reality is every single job has "bullshit tasks" and usually these are the easiest things to do. TPS reports and the like. BS Tasks are ripe for AI to do the drudgery but I don't think there are a lot of actual full time jobs where the entire job is BS. These can't exist en masse for very long in capitalist companies.

There's always Dunbar's number - the larger an organization gets beyond the capacity of people to socially know one another, the greater the "what do they even do?" types of attitudes form about other distant parts of an organization.

> I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.

Interrogated to what extent? 'Bullshit jobs' was originally coined to mean jobs that do serve a useful purpose within the environment they exist in, but where zooming out reveals that the environment has no good reason to exist in the first place.

The original study defined "bullshit job" as something the worker described as "not societally useful". Well, my job is not societally useful, but is not bullshit job.

My company is earning money on my work and customers use my software to earn more money. But, that is it, I am not a doctor, I am not a teacher, I am not making the world better. It is a business, not unethical one, but also not world saving.

Per original definition, it is a bullshit job.

Bullshit jobs don't mean that they are full of dead time, it means jobs that don't really matter. Like if SalesForce disappeared tomorrow the world would be fine, but if all your garbage collectors disappeared you'd likely descend into chaos and start several public health crises quite quickly.