Yep, the "bullshit jobs" narrative sounds like an elegant description of corporate reality at the macro level, but always seems to fall apart whenever I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.

(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)

▲

burnto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	keybrd-intrrpt 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For sure. Especially as organizations grow in size. A small startup usually has little-to-no "junk" or "fat" to trim. But as orgs grow, and since we have imperfect knowledge and communication systems, more an more "junk" or "connectivity" roles emerge. Microsoft: 223,000 employees Alphabet / Google: 198,933 Apple: 150,000 Oracle: 141,000 Meta / Facebook: 75,472 I tried to stay way from companies with retail or warehouse workers like Amazon and Walmart (though Apple likely has a lot of retail). I don't see HOW companies get to that size without some "junk DNA" that keeps it operating. Maybe in the next few years we'll have AI-powered knowledge bases and communication lanes that smooths things out, but - how do we 'quantify' what "Steve, the guy who has been there for 22 years and works as the company phonebook and knows who to refer you for the thing you need"

▲

mattbrewsbytes 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

win311fwg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

▲

watwut 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	asadotzler 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Products and services that work and that people want and need are societally useful. You've moved the goal posts from "useful" to "world saving" and used that to discount the original description. That's seems odd to me.

▲

shimman 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.