do you have a bullshit job?

multiple + various levels

Partly.

I will state for the record that my job is at least mostly bullshit

Edgy write-in: 'All jobs are bullshit'.

You don't get to vote on all jobs! You get a vote on your job(s).

Mostly

When I was teaching grade-school full-time, partly, none of which had anything to do with the kids--all that came from the board and curriculum and reports and staff meetings, etc. I don't think I've ever had a job (I came to teaching after I was 30, so I've had many) that didn't have some.

I don't think my job is utter bullshit per se but most people do and that colours my perception of it somewhat. Hence I oscillate between 'partly' and 'complete' bullshit depending on my mood (i.e. how terminally depressed I am on a given day).

Mostly bullshit.

I spent the morning packing and shipping overpriced collectible game pieces (Luke Skywalker Commander Expansion), "vintage" D&D books, and graphic novels. That's less bullshit, people derive joy from them at least, physical objects, etc., job could be visually seen as done.

In the afternoon I'll be designing flyers and drafting social media posts about holiday sales, then doing bookkeeping. 100% soulless bullshit that forces me to interact with the Zuck behemoth.

I oscillate between 'partly' and 'complete' bullshit depending on my mood (i.e. how terminally depressed I am on a given day)

Oh yes this is a feeling I have known

Teaching. I like my job but it's mostly bullshit, really (like Clemenza says, not because of the kids, although they are often dicks).

My actual least bullshitty job was working on the bumper cars/dodgems at a fair in Perth, WA. I got asked to go travel with the fair; I said no and it's been downhill from there.

The teaching part of my job is not bullshit at all; the meetings and such are mostly bullshit, so it evens out. What clemenza said, basically.

My least bullshit job was washing dishes, which I did at various bars/restaurants for years. But seeing the amount of food waste that routinely goes into running a restaurant did make me wonder about the impact of that overall industry.

The teaching side of academia feels way less bullshit-y than the research, at least in the humanities. Maybe I'm biased because my mom was a high school teacher, but teaching – just about anything, really – strikes me as one of the least bullshit jobs of all.

I said “partly” but that’s because I think there’s always some amount of bullshit when you’re sitting at a desk. The purposes and impacts of my work per se don’t really seem to be bullshit. On the other hand I do keep having to learn about something called “kubernetes” which is obvious bullshit.

not because of the kids, although they are often dicks

Let me confirm this. When you're retired, and when it's primary kids (where actual maliciousness is rarely involved), you're a little more prone to gloss that over.

Least bullshit was construction - at the end of the day/week/month/etc. that building was either built or torn down, roof repaired or torn off, hammer swings had 1:1 consequences, there was no makework about it.

i voted complete bullshit though i think it's mostly bullshit on good days

Least bullshit was construction - at the end of the day/week/month/etc. that building was either built or torn down, roof repaired or torn off, hammer swings had 1:1 consequences, there was no makework about it.

― onlyfans.com/hunterb (milo z), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 8:09 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok, but the function of most of these buildings being built or torn down is mostly bullshit

and sorry, sending people collectibles is complete bullshit

for my own amusement, jobs I've had, ranked for bullshit level (most bullshit to least bullshit):

technical writer (somewhat evil startups division, 2x) - complete bullshit
treeplanter (commercial reforestation) - near-complete bullshit
technical writer (non-outright-evil non-startups division, multiple) - mostly bullshit
video store clerk - too much downtime for it not to be at least partly bullshit but lord it was fun
dish washer/prep guy (multiple) - very little bullshit
fry cook - my first job, basically bullshit-free (a shit job but not a bullshit job)

i say, as i order a record from discogs xp

my jobs are kinda like improving the lives of others by dealing with bullshit for them?

but teaching – just about anything, really – strikes me as one of the least bullshit jobs of all.

I think it's easy to idealise teaching and teachers? It's fun and funny but also humiliating. Teaching Jekyll and Hyde to a bunch of 14yr olds on a cold, dark Wednesday in January can be pretty abject. The next time I get called 'noble' by someone earning 3x my wage I'll give them my ears in an envelope.

in an ideal world there are portions of my job that could in theory be automated, so i guess in that sense its partially bullshit because i dont technically "need" to be here doing some of it, but practically speaking that automation will never happen. aside from that even though i loathe the actual work i have to admit it has a largely non-bullshit impact on society, so thats a silver lining i guess. i was much happier when i had bullshit jobs.

The one job I had I'd designate as complete was "listings co-ordinator" for Global Television (Simon will know what that is) circa 1989; I was supposed to round up the episode descriptions for the likes of Major Dad and pass them on to TV Guide. I was fired after six months.

oh my god

clemenza that is an incredibly bullshit job

I think it's easy to idealise teaching and teachers? It's fun and funny but also humiliating. Teaching Jekyll and Hyde to a bunch of 14yr olds on a cold, dark Wednesday in January can be pretty abject. The next time I get called 'noble' by someone earning 3x my wage I'll give them my ears in an envelope.

Oh, for sure. I'm not talking about the classroom experience, let alone the salary. I simply believe in its 'objective' ethical value compared to most other jobs (unless you're a professional fash/religious indoctrinator, of course).

And yeah, that one rules them all, clemenza.

ok, but the function of most of these buildings being built or torn down is mostly bullshit

Most of the time I built or fixed/remodeled houses, FWIW. I agree that collectibles are bullshit and 40k square feet printing operation buildings are mostly bullshit.

The job itself was the question, though. There are real world results to 'knocking down a wall' or 'painting a room' or 'shipping a package,' the job is done, complete, a thing happened. What feels like bullshit to me are the jobs where there is no endpoint, no physical reality to it - the mountain of paper to be pushed is constantly replenished, there are no results to the endless chain of 5 hour meetings, etc..

That's amazing clemenza - like a Joseph Heller outtake.

Tangible jobs feel less bullshitty by definition ime.

xp

i still haven't decided if the position of archivist is an institutional toadie pure-admin complete bullshit filler position or a mostly bullshit "occasionally responsible for preserving information that informs useful and enlightening research" position. i guess i would say it's mostly complete bullshit.

I have never attended a single office meeting, much less a chain of long ones, though so that's purely something I assume feels like the ultimate bullshit.

As someone who worked in education for a long time I think it's easy to start questioning how bullshit the general system and its iterations are

Currently hopefully close to starting a new job which will likely be mostly bullshit but you can have too much personal austerity apparently

good luck nv!!

There are real world results to 'knocking down a wall' or 'painting a room' or 'shipping a package,' the job is done, complete, a thing happened. What feels like bullshit to me are the jobs where there is no endpoint, no physical reality to it - the mountain of paper to be pushed is constantly replenished, there are no results to the endless chain of 5 hour meetings, etc..

yes! the major reason the evil startup jobs I had were the most bullshit isn't just because the companies were kinda evil, it was because we were working for maniacs or fools who were trying to execute projects we knew or sensed were doomed to fail - toiling away knowing full well it was for nothing but the pay.

there can be a kind of liberation/fun and camaraderie with your fellow workers in those situations but it's still all definitely tremendously, powerfully bullshit

This is probably the first job I've had in about 20 years that wasn't bullshit

the last couple of years are the first time in my life I've had a job I didn't consider to be majority bullshit

(currently editing & producing on a TV arts programme, previously was working in TV promo editing - a job with excruciating approval processes, lots of "creative culture" managerialism wank and nebulous goals that can never meaningfully be achieved)

being able to consider my job as worthwhile has had mental health benefits that are a revelation and life-changing

* also some sympathy to "all jobs are bullshit" option

at one point 3 or 4 years ago i was assigned to work on a project remotely and there was great confusion and mismanagement among the remote team, to the point where despite my best efforts i was given no duties, could find no agreement over who was my supervisor, and when i begged anyone and everyone for something to do with all-caps emails saying "I'M SITTING AT HOME DOING NOTHING, HALP" i would get a reply the next day assigning me a task that took 5 minutes or less. I seemed to have just completely fallen through a crack in the firmament of "work" and ascended into heaven, spending two months getting paid for literally zero job duties, watching movies at home. About a year later, long after I had been assigned back to my regular job and supervisor, I was awarded a special certificate of appreciation for my contributions to this essential project.

thanks map! just think, a whole new set of things for me to moan about 😁

almost completely bullshit. and as it goes along, i seem to have less and less to actually do (and resent it more when i *do* have to do something)

at least it's not fracking or selling cigarettes to children i guess

'At least I'm not Donald Trump' often crosses my mind when I feel bad about my job and/or place in the universe. Guaranteed morale boost.

thanks map! just think, a whole new set of things for me to moan about 😁

― big man on scampus (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, November 10, 2020 8:30 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hehe

The most completely bullshit jobs I ever had were writing advertising copy as a freelancer. Compared to ad copywriting, my decade-long technical writing job at least had an identifiable standard of usefulness to identifiable people.

I wrote "my job is partly bullshit". nobody here will ever believe me, but for a while, I loved my job and my company. I joined fresh out of college in 2004 - keep in mind, I almost flunked out of college due to depression/class-skipping/being too poor to afford the books, and I eked by with a BA in Psych and a 2.34 GPA. I worked 15 hours a week at Best Buy and could afford my car and insurance each month, and little else. zero motivation.

so, the first job I held here (taking calls in the call center wing) was the first time in my adult life I had found motivation to actually step up and be 'good' at something, as I'd half-assed college. But I needed the job as it came with affordable benefits, and would help me pay off my student loans, which were going to start coming due. at the time, the company had just gone public, but still had a lot of the perks it did when we were private - a cafeteria that served us free food. Free beverages in the break room of any kind. Free cookies/ice cream. and we didn't have our Handle Time monitored like other call centers - they said "take the time you need to serve the customer".

well, going public meant shedding costs, and of course, the free food and beverages were gone within a year, but hey, nobody else really has that either. a few years later, the first layoffs in the firm's history (which spanned 50+ years). and also us entering into stupid, non-profitable HR contracts that we insisted were good until we finally pulled the plug years later and said we were woefully unprepared for what we were getting into. the benefits were still mega affordable, with quality health plans that paid 90-100% coinsurance with low or no deductibles.

It was still a 'very good' company, but then we got acquired and merged with another big company, and then everything fell apart. the benefit costs skyrocketed and none of us were prepared. lots of people of course got laid off due to the move. my department dissolved. I wound up getting acquired by a new department that was one pay grade higher, which meant an unexpected pay raise, and I was happy there for about 5 years, but the company was getting more and more miserable by the day. kept cost-cutting, giving reps substandard computer equipment, trying to do more with less, and it was becoming hard to deliver.

I got promoted again to a project manager and I was killing it for 2 years, and then that department got toxic fast as it was run by this asshole Executive who went from telling us we needed to be selfish and spend time with our families for Thanksgiving to "fuck it, we stop working when the job is done" in a mere two years. we hired a head of Customer service who is constantly at war with reality (and still hasn't been canned). waged a war on my psyche for 2 years to the point where I started drinking heavily, and in a low moment of my life, totaled my car drunk driving, miraculously avoiding jail.

I demoted myself to the old job, and it was better for two years, but then I was on two projects where the clients we worked for were such emotional bullies that went unchecked and I had a mental breakdown and said I couldn't do it anymore.

So I moved on to being a trainer. I don't love it. I like it. I'm burnt out on it. but it doesn't stress me out.

I also make way too much to leave now so I'm basically holding on for the severance if I get laid off. 2 weeks per year of service (I've been there 16 years).

Current job is partly bullshit - contracting to large electrical utilities and getting systems and software to work correctly so power outages safely self-restore as much and as quickly as possible. Bullshit components include not being allowed to touch these systems, so watching and directing others to click on that, open that log, what does that say, etc.

Most bullshit job ever: paste up at a small town weekly newspaper. Taping sheets of layout paper to boards using a t-square, running velux headlines and reusable ad cuts through a machine that laid strips of warm sticky wax on the back, cleaning that wax machine.

my new employer is extremely not bullshit... and a lifesaver to underserved communities... my actual job, though? Remains to be seen

You can't spell shit with out IT.

Most bullshit job ever: paste up at a small town weekly newspaper. Taping sheets of layout paper to boards using a t-square, running velux headlines and reusable ad cuts through a machine that laid strips of warm sticky wax on the back, cleaning that wax machine.

this sounds like my first job in college, except I was only allowed to patch in tiny strips of copy edits

I was there until 2 or 3 AM four nights a week and had to listen to Christopher Cross and Journey the whole time ... it was a bullshit job

in the graeber sense, yes, as it is pretty much the archetypical "duct-taper" type job

giving myself a generous 'partly' - yes it's education but it's private

I think even the best job is at least partly bullshit because even the coolest, most social-justice-advancing, humanity-serving possible freelance position exists with a construct (society) that is fraught with bullshit, like the need to have money, for example.

I put mine in the partly category because I am a dork who things that the opportunity to be a civil servant is an amazing thing, because it can offer the chance to make a massive difference in millions of peoples' lives if done right (and in the right place at the right time); of course, it also comes with huge barrels of bullshit and frustration at bullshit and meta-bullshit because (especially in the US) there is a general trend towards distrust of government agents of any stripe and we often find ourselves paralyzed by the need to try and stay apolitical, etc. You find yourself wasting time on bullshit and then when you can break free for a few days you have to make a break for it and try to improve as many things as possible.

It was brought up in a couple other places elsewhere today, coincidentally, about why "we" (the discussion participants) don't just go get rich doing the consultant thing, or selling service X, and it came down to being bad at lying to people, basically, or more importantly, feeling much better in positions where we could feel like our positions could actually make a difference (as opposed to consultancy work, which is often "come in, re-use some slide templates from the last gig, fly out, take no responsibility for the consequences." I don't think I could stand that kind of work to be honest.

my job is mainly bullshit. part of the for-profit tertiary education business and a lot of the programming we offer seems to be bullshit.

Almost entirely bullshit, working for the wrong side of all that is moral and good in the world in an industry that grinds people into chum but sometimes I can convince somebody to do the right thing.

Dayjob: working on a vanity publication in an industry that's bad for the planet -- total bullshit, but I've been surfing the crest of the wave of shit so I've pretended I'm galaxy-brain for doing it.

Bartending: honorable not-bullshit work that creates occasional bullshit interactions

should be partly but feels mostly

I work in a harm reduction role that tries to reduce drug related deaths. I also do suicide prevention work. I’ve worked in record shops in the past but always felt I was just making money for somebody else. I’m finally in a place where I love what I do

Left my bullshit part time job, which was meant to be a bullshit part time job to focus on freelancing and none of it feel like bullshit, I get to make films and television shows and it means a bunch to me.

i want to find a job where I post half-assed thoughts to message boards about 3rd tier death metal albums, record random tracks in my house, and help my friends with random errands while they give me beer in return.

because that's all i have energy for right now

I’m a social worker, now working for the state, so there’s a certain amount of bullshit in the arbitrary way I assess people for services and the fluctuations in how much I accomplish in a given week. But I don’t generally feel bad about the job I have, it provides some benefit to people.

It's frustrating but also nice to not have a job, the bullshit goes different ways

yayyy I just found out that because I haven’t done a financial settlement with my ex wife, I can’t afford to take the redundancy I asked for. So yes, I have a bullshit job and I am chained to it.

Empathy ^

My least bullshit jobs: housepainter, dishwasher

Most bullshit: door-to-door marketing & telemarketing, both of which I quit after working a single shift.

My current job is partly-to-mostly bullshit; essentially a glorified mix of IT helpdesk and data entry automaton. I don't mind it so much, but I've been at it for a little while now and am trying to figure a way to something different.

I think the least bullshit job possible is to be a well-compensated, unionized garbage / recycling collector. No bullshit that it’s necessary for society to function, minimal bullshit if you’re appropriately compensated for the risks that come with the work.

hm well I actually think it would be...........a mother

go ahead, I dare u 2 disagree

idk i kinda disagree and think it might be ... an assassin?

So we all agree then that the least bullshit job is an Assassin Mom

This fall on QuiBi

Never underestimate my ability to treat any job, no matter how nominally important, as utter bullshit.

Least bullshit job was probably law clerk for a state trial court judge: while I was a minor functionary in a massive machine, that machine had direct life-altering effects on the individuals who interacted with it. Saw someone sentenced to life in prison on my first day; saw the effects of alcohol and drug addiction up close in the sense of people on their 4th and 5th DUI arrests whose only sober time was when they were in jail/treatment; saw lots of horrible child custody cases where the kids were mere weapons to be used in the parents' hatred for each other; attended a habeas corpus hearing for a guy who killed two cops with a shotgun in the 60s, where the petition had been outstanding for 17 years due to administrative snafus, and the guy, now in his 70s, shows up in a wheelchair having had both his feet recently amputated due to diabetes. All of this was (temporarily) quite sobering.

IT project manager in a civil service dept

i could argue either way to a high degree but most days i would defend both the core elements and the bullshit elements as the cost of doing business in the way a civil service should

ive done enough horrible, messy, difficult, low paid and immediately important etc jobs to happily avoid the temptation to declare that those elements are any less likely to make a job bullshit

My current job? Idk, partly? It’s quite varied so some parts are more satisfying than others. I guess the definition of bullshit really interests me more than does it apply to me (I have always found talking about my actual work very boring, sry). If you mean “does this job need to exist” then you can say a huge number of roles are useless and the tasks can be delegated or reassigned to other people... but within the organisation, I bet it makes a difference having those jobs there! We must have all worked somewhere where there was some failing in some mundane but utterly key process that made everyone’s lives miserable (ok maybe just me?), and at a previous organisation this was partly because nobody wanted to deal with it, so it didn’t get done.

Bullshit jobs I’ve had that I would consider to be so however: two days working at an info booth at an agricultural festival (“Where are the toilets” “Just around the corner there” x 500 times a day), shop floor working (the shop needs to be tidy and it’s nice to have people help you find things, but it was very much one of those “go fold if you’ve got nothing to do” gigs) and a temp job scanning papers at a university.

Oh I pressed post before I intended to. Having been part of a few places that had consultants in to do re-orgs, I have never not sat through a plan from them without thinking “I could have told you that.” I guess places are afraid of stagnation meaning they don’t see the problems but like... just ask people.

We must have all worked somewhere where there was some failing in some mundane but utterly key process that made everyone’s lives miserable (ok maybe just me?), and at a previous organisation this was partly because nobody wanted to deal with it, so it didn’t get done.

yep, totally otm ... so much of my professional life has been being the person to fix these things and do them. It's like being a clerical plumber.

Having been part of a few places that had consultants in to do re-orgs, I have never not sat through a plan from them without thinking “I could have told you that.”

hahahah omg yes. it's like "call yourself a consultant and you can charge $100/hr to tell people things they already know but avoid dealing with" ... my conscience won't allow me to charge nearly that much though. I'm always thinking, "okay, how much do I actually need to live on?"

You should never charge less than $100/hr for that kind of thing and you should probably charge more tho

hahah I am in a fb group for my main profession, which tends to attract people who are fairly conservative and like cruises and golf ... and dog breeding ... and wine o'clock memojis. And yesterday someone posted a meme that garnered many likes that was, "You are only worth as much as you charge" ... which to my "capitalism is problematic" brain was very o_O

I am so not gonna charge the volunteer-run community fridge people $100/hr to design spreadsheets and make a gdoc list of steps for them to track income and expenses ...

I got hired once to write and edit web content for Blue Note Records when they relaunched their website in 2012 or so, and when they asked what my rate was I said $100 an hour in a "they'll never go for this" way and the guy didn't even blink. I made almost half my annual salary from my regular job in a couple of months. That was sweet, but it's never happened again.

yes it is truly amazing what ppl will pay you (and what for) if you ask

truly amazing: as chronicled in
Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

in my job, when I train a new hire, i'm supposed to identify poor performers and then we give them three days to improve or we make them hit the road.

right now, I pretty much do not have the heart to make the decision to cut anybody loose given the state of the country right now, so any of them that get put on the 3 day notice, I pretty much find excuses to pass them as long as they're at least borderline...while trying to give them tips to help them stay afloat.

three days?? that's fucking brutal, good on you for making the best of what sounds like a deeply bullshit situation

it's a bullshit standard because training has been cut so much. When I started, I got trained for *five weeks* (aka 25 days). we train most classes in 12 now. and regulations for defined contribution and defined benefit plans have only gotten tougher since then. we have COVID-specific rules for 2020!

regulations for defined contribution and defined benefit plans have only gotten tougher since then. we have COVID-specific rules for 2020!

I am so not looking forward to next year at my somewhat bullshit job ... eh, who am I kidding, I am so looking forward to having to explain things to confused people and deal with even more bullshit forms that make adjustments to existing bullshit forms.

and the rules that haven't been determined yet! It will be as thrilling as when the ACA went into effect and I had to deal with, and explain to people, the three different kinds of 1095 forms!

Lol the 1095s. God I remember that shit rolling out for the first time

my jobs are kinda like improving the lives of others by dealing with bullshit for them?

― sarahell, Tuesday, November 10, 2020 8:15 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh this is a good description of what I do (social worker, geriatrics division, ask me about Medicare!).

I answered "partly" because I am paid a 40-hour-per-week salary for what could actually requires maybe half those hours.

Yeah I mean programming computers is like, you work 40 hours a week for something like 4-8 hours of actual coding, the rest is thinking, meetings, and miscellaneous.

Lol the 1095s. God I remember that shit rolling out for the first time

― Lover of Nixon (or LON for short) (Neanderthal), Saturday, November 14, 2020 7:05 PM (yesterday)

it was kinda exciting because it was first NEW form in a long time ... then with TCJA they eliminated the penalty, so I really don't need to see all the 1095s, only the 1095-As, but clients feel this sense of pride and accomplishment at saving the 1095 forms, whatever type of form, because it was a new thing they had to learn to save, that I would feel mean saying, "actually, I don't need that anymore, sorry."

heh yeah the last time I trained someone on HW we got to the 1095 part and I basically said "so here are 1095s...which....are pretty damn pointless now due to the elimination of the individual mandate. but we still send the forms so what the hell, let me tell you about them".

and dear god, the fucking age change to Minimum Distributions that they shoved through in December, which was then exacerbated by the suspension of the RMD requirement due to COVID. we couldn't get our materials updated in time.

"so if you are inactive and turned 70.5 prior to 2020, you have to take your first RMD by 4/1 of this year, but if you are inactive and you turn 70.5 after 2019, you only have to take it by 4/1 of the year after you turn age 72. however if you have to take one this year, you don't actually have to take it this year at all thanks to COVID-19. confused yet? good. moving on."

it does illustrate the problems though -- I will see people who have multiple 1095 forms covering the same period. Generally it will be the state version of Medicaid on top of employer coverage from a new job, which makes me think:

1. can't there be a better system for these entities to communicate? Like, can the employer notify the state that the person doesn't need to be on Medicaid anymore?
2. it would sure be a lot simpler with single payer

"so if you are inactive and turned 70.5 prior to 2020, you have to take your first RMD by 4/1 of this year, but if you are inactive and you turn 70.5 after 2019, you only have to take it by 4/1 of the year after you turn age 72. however if you have to take one this year, you don't actually have to take it this year at all thanks to COVID-19. confused yet? good. moving on."

hahahah -- do you have to deal w/stuff related to the rule changes for charitable distributions? Were there rule changes for that?

Honestly, I feel like there are some fairly simple tax changes a centrist government like Biden's could make that would greatly help people-- my centrist friendly short-list:

1. increase amount of pre-tax dependent care benefits to, like, $15k instead of $5k. Child care is expensive.
2. Eliminate the marriage penalty for student loan interest deduction (currently a married couple can only deduct the same amount of student loan interest as a single person)
3. Increase the student loan interest deduction to like ... the actual amount paid as opposed to capping it at $2500 where it has been for 20 years or thereabouts

There is some framing required to unpack the bullshitness of bullshit jobs.

If you approach it from "critique of capitalism," then lots of jobs are going to be bullshit, because an awful lot of jobs are about

a) Moving objects around at or near the earth's surface
b) Moving pieces of paper from one folder to another
c) Making it so that a corporation can make more money
d) Telling people to do things like a, b, and c

An alternative framing is, "given that a socialist utopia is not right around the corner, and most of us are circumstantially locked in a capitalist system, what should we be doing with our time?"

Still another framing is "what do I _want_, in an instrumental/consequentialist sense?" Speaking just for myself I mostly want guitars and whiskey. Speaking in terms of my family I want my children to be fed, clothed, housed, and happy. Speaking in terms of my society I want greater justice, sustainability, mercy, and kindness. Navigating those (sometimes competing) wants is part of the work of adulthood.

My children want to live in a house and eat food. So I need to work. In an important sense, I don't work for my employer - I work for my children. So my work can be "bullshit" in the sense that I'm not saving the planet when I sit down to work. But I am loath to say that feeding my children is bullshit.

Next, commerce exists (alas). Part of my work is making it so that people have jobs. If I do my work well, someone has a job tomorrow who didn't yesterday. So that person can feed his or her children, etc. Is that bullshit? No.

I have a whole separate stream of thoughts about cause-based (e.g., nonprofit) work, which I will save for another time.

Still another framing is "what do I _want_, in an instrumental/consequentialist sense?" Speaking just for myself I mostly want guitars and whiskey. Speaking in terms of my family I want my children to be fed, clothed, housed, and happy. Speaking in terms of my society I want greater justice, sustainability, mercy, and kindness. Navigating those (sometimes competing) wants is part of the work of adulthood.

My children want to live in a house and eat food. So I need to work. In an important sense, I don't work for my employer - I work for my children. So my work can be "bullshit" in the sense that I'm not saving the planet when I sit down to work. But I am loath to say that feeding my children is bullshit.

Next, commerce exists (alas). Part of my work is making it so that people have jobs. If I do my work well, someone has a job tomorrow who didn't yesterday. So that person can feed his or her children, etc. Is that bullshit? No.

the question isn't "is the compensation bullshit", it's "is the job bullshit"

nor is it "is work bullshit" or "are my kids bullshit"

my job involves pieces of paper and folders

Simon, most jobs are bullshit, but we put up with them because of the other things that job-having allows us.

Humans should mostly relax and make art and snuggle. We can't, so almost all of us work bullshit jobs in the meantime. Is my point.

my job is bullshit I like it, I don't really work that hard

I'm just saying I don't think you need to go full galaxy brain to answer the question "do you have a bullshit job". It's pretty simple and people have offered lots of varying answers itt! xp

ums I'm in the same boat, it's mostly bullshit but also pretty easy; "like" would be stretching it but I am going to cling to it as long as possible because most related options are significantly worse

Simon, ok. I agree the question is simple but its simplicity is problematic (for me). As I said, I think that the framing leaves out huge areas of what motivates people, how they live, and how they view what they do. I don't see why that meta-discussion is inadmissible, but I am happy to hold my tongue if it bugs you. Typing into this box is a voluntary leisure activity and we're all just typing into a box.

ok but is your job bullshit :)

(I kid, I kid)

I like the people I work with, work is interesting enough without being too challenging, not much stress esp working from home

I did the whole my job is my passion/indentity thing for a long time no desire to return

Any individual job or task may be bullshit, but the drudgery may be redeemed by a larger goal if you view it that way. Some years ago I was a dishwasher in a restaurant. I could either view it as "Bullshit, because all I do is spray food off of plates that are just going to be dirty again," or as "Not bullshit, because I'm helping (in an incremental way) to feed people tasty food and provide them with sustenance and joy."

There's a corny-ass old story about traveler coming to Chartres when the cathedral was being built. The traveler asks a woodcarver, "What are you doing?" and the woodcarver says, "carving wood." The traveler asks a stonecutter, "What are you doing?" and the stonecutter says, "cutting stone." The traveler then asks a woman sweeping up, "What are you doing?" and the woman says, "I'm building a cathedral."

I'm not saying everyone needs to take that attitude, and of course that attitude often serves moneyed interests, but the binary of the question lacks nuance.

I have unread the graeber book but as I understand the concept, no my job is not a bullshit job

my job is somewhat-to-entirely bullshit depending on your perspective. in a way i contribute to literacy and work on projects that are intended to increase the accessibility of books. in another sense i am a cog in a content machine that runs partially on outsourced labor

Cleaning hotel rooms daily: Bullshit, because ppl don't need new tiny soaps wrapped in plastic every day and they don't need clean towels every day, cleaning daily is a stupid waste of labor and time (and is poorly compensated despite how massively it wastes the workers' contributions).

Cooking meals/cleaning up after meals daily: I vote not bullshit bc eating does have to happen? I could posit wasteful situations of greed and excess that would be bullshit but just making food and eating, I vote no.

(These were my first two jobs.)

I’m reading the 5 different types of bullshit jobs and it seems like some astrology confirmation bias thing or something in my case. I mean, I work in an office and enter shit into a computer but it’s for a really fucking important cause and I love the org i work for with all my heart

and it’s not, like, far abstracted from helping actual people and stuff, but there could for sure be robots that do half or more of what I do I guess.

"it’s for a really fucking important cause and I love the org i work for with all my heart"

this sounds like a non-bullshit job to me!

probably fair to say my job as a whole is not bullshit though most of my day is spent in front of a computer

Most of what I do in a day is boring support staff bullshit for a bullshit company in a bullshit industry but my particular division services nonprofits so that's like this tiny sliver of something that lets me sleep okay at night (in non-COVID times when I was actually able to sleep at night, I mean).

this sounds like a non-bullshit job to me!

I always defer to the worker in their bullshit self-assessment

i was never clear on whether the bullshit jobs concept meant “my job is not of value even to my own employer” or “my job is of no net value to society” (ie, i work in zero-sum opposition) but the fact that teachers and nurses itt are saying they have bullshit jobs makes me think a lot of the reason the essay resonated so strongly was just because people don’t like their jobs

in the book there's a lot of discussion about bureaucratic nonsense and excess layers of management getting in the way of what should be fulfilling/meaningful work, or minimizing the meaningful part of the job to a tiny %

ive read quotes by DG that suggest that a BSJ is a job that is of no value to anyone, even the company itself. like in this vox interview where he says

We’re all taught that people want something for nothing, which makes it easy to shame poor people and denigrate the welfare system, because everyone is lazy at heart and just wants to mooch off other people.

But the truth is that a lot of people are being handed a lot of money to do nothing. This is true for most of these middle-management positions I’m talking about, and the people doing these jobs are completely unhappy because they know their work is bullshit.

if a company is really paying you to do nothing, they would be better off firing you. it’s like the ultimate inversion of marxian exploitation. rather than your boss paying you less than the value of what you produce, you produce zero value and yet he pays you a full salary! so weird

Maybe as an anarchist he just couldn’t conceive of the function of a manager

Anarchists are always like “we don’t need the bosses” and it’s like bro yes I do I don’t want to resolve conflicts on my own

lol :)

it’s interesting that his #1 example of a bullshit job is a corporate lawyer. they obviously produce huge value for the companies they represent, by helping them win law suits and stuff

also this is challops but bureaucracy is good imo

I agree.

This is the main reason I’m not an anarchist

Graeber was pretty explicit in the book iirc that bullshitness is entirely a worker-centric status, that two people doing the same job could have different opinions and thus the job was bullshit in one instance and not the other.

Also The Dispossessed is a good book

like there’s a reason why there’s all these annoying formalities and paperwork around everything. typically it’s because when you try do things informally and let it slide, people abuse the system, find loop-holes etc

People will do embezzlement anywhere. A finance office controller at my high school got caught embezzling! A public high school!

also this is challops but bureaucracy is good imo

what if, hear me out here, a certain amount is good but too much is bad

It comes back around when you keep adding it

Graeber was pretty explicit in the book iirc that bullshitness is entirely a worker-centric status, that two people doing the same job could have different opinions and thus the job was bullshit in one instance and not the other.

― I want to change my display name (dan m), Sunday, November 15, 2020 7:35 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

bullshit jobs is a p incoherent theory, he switches between 3-4 definitions willy nilly

like for example the subjective worker definition (a job is bullshit if a worker thinks it’s bullshit) is at odds with the definition of creating value for your employer; it’s possible for a worker to think their job is bullshit but nevertheless it still causes profits for the firm

what if, hear me out here, a certain amount is good but too much is bad

― it bangs for thee (Simon H.), Sunday, November 15, 2020 7:43 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure, but the optimal amount is probably even higher than the amount that exists today. socialism will prob be insanely bureaucratic. imagine how many allocations will have to be done via filling out various forms when we don’t use prices

the one thing i will give to DGraebz is that i got away with spending a LOT of time dicking around on twitter and ilx in the one white-collar office job i had, and i only almost got fired like twice in two years

graeber also pretty badly misrepresents the data. he relies almost exclusively on a yougov survey that asked 850 adults in the UK (link here) and found that 37% of respondents answered "no" to the question "is your job making a meaningful contribution to the world?" (note this is the zero-sum definition of bullshit jobs; a corporate lawyer working for wal-mart can be very valuable to wal-mart but their gains only come at the expense of corporate lawyers working for amazon, etc)

however there are like, actual large-scale global surveys that ask about social usefulness of jobs, which he completely ignores. like look at this abstract:

It has been claimed that many workers in modern economies think that their job is socially useless, i.e. that it makes no or a negative contribution to society. However, the evidence so far is mainly anecdotal. We use a representative dataset comprising 100,000 workers from 47 countries at four points in time. We find that approximately 8% of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17% are doubtful about the usefulness of their job. There are sizeable differences between countries, sectors, occupations, and age groups, but no trend over time. A vast majority of workers cares about holding a socially useful job and we find that they suffer when they consider their job useless. We also explore possible causes of socially useless jobs, including bad management, strict job protection legislation, harmful activities at work, labor hoarding, and division of labor.

link to full paper

so 25% of workers are doubtful about the usefulness of their jobs or worse, and only 8% find their jobs socially useless. in the same survey when broken down by country, about 10% of the british find their jobs socially useless. the number for americans is 6%

throughout bullshit jobs there's a suggestion that this is a white-collar issue and that manual labour jobs which were useful are a thing of the past. but if you actually look at the american working conditions survey (link here), 4/5 workers find their jobs meaningful, while "Nearly three-fourths of Americans report either intense or repetitive physical exertion on the job at least one-quarter of the time." and "More than one-half of Americans report exposure to unpleasant and potentially hazardous working conditions." i find bullshit jobs a bit navel-gazing in the way it foregrounds the existential ennui of the white-collar middle class while a shockingly high proportion of workers are still roughing it out in unsafe conditions

bullshit jobs is a super interesting theory and i'm sympathetic to the fact that it resonated with so many people. graeber just truck me as lazy in the way he handled it, preferring to shoot from the hip than do any serious analysis

Anarchists are always like “we don’t need the bosses” and it’s like bro yes I do I don’t want to resolve conflicts on my own

― The Bosom Manor Michaelmas Special (silby), Sunday, November 15, 2020 4:27 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago)

generally conflict resolution is a group process involving consensus and thus you don't actually do it "on your own" but as part of the group, but then if that doesn't work they kick someone out or make them go through a restorative justice thing with a stick and a circle. So, compared to that I can see why a lot of people would prefer bosses and middle management.

i get what silby's saying. even if i'm not kicking someone out 'on my own' but rather doing it as a group, my conflict aversion still kicks in and i'd accept some level of hierarchy in order to not have that be on my plate at all

how do you deal with conflict outside of work? ... sincere question

There are also many situations where the time required for consensus-based conflict resolution would render the entire point of the work completely moot, which is another reason hierarchy can be good and necessary

Interestingly, my job is not bullshit yet might be rendered partially redundant based on what Biden does with his executive orders

It is kinda gratifying to see smart ilxors like flopson and silby advocate that in a better world there will be even more forms to fill out, because I am good at filling out forms

i won a research grant for thousands of dollars and then nearly lost every cent of it because i messed up some forms

good posts flopson

if a company is really paying you to do nothing, they would be better off firing you.

it was this hardcore thru-the-marxist-looking-glass definition i kept seeing in interviews/reviews when the book came out and it struck me as the result of getting too addicted to systems thinking, like, it’s easy to imagine why Capitalism as a whole might find whitecollar makework useful (maintenance+tranquilization in face of automation of a professional class capable of high consumption and broadly supportive of status quo?) but impossible to imagine what would be in it for any individual boss or company lol

it was this hardcore thru-the-marxist-looking-glass definition i kept seeing in interviews/reviews when the book came out and it struck me as the result of getting too addicted to systems thinking, like, it’s easy to imagine why Capitalism as a whole might find whitecollar makework useful (maintenance+tranquilization in face of automation of a professional class capable of high consumption and broadly supportive of status quo?) but impossible to imagine what would be in it for any individual boss or company lol

― difficult listening hour, Sunday, November 15, 2020 8:51 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

he says repeatedly that when companies get more money they use it to hire more useless workers. in the vox interview:

I think one of the reasons is there’s huge political pressure to create jobs coming from all directions. We accept the idea that rich people are job creators, and the more jobs we have, the better. It doesn’t matter if those jobs do something useful; we just assume that more jobs is better no matter what.

but this is totally counterfactual; jobs are getting outsourced, automated, and eliminated. prime-age labour force participation is at an all-time low

something like the culture he described did or does exist, in neo-corporatist japan, where workers typically work for the same country for many decades and often their entire career. (interestingly, japan is among the countries with the highest % of socially useless jobs according to that global survey). but it definitely doesn't describe the labour markets of 21st century america

honestly, having worked mostly for myself and small non-profits and small businesses for the last 20 years, the ways that large institutions and corporations utilize workers is really alien to me. Like, it's almost a different civilization. Not to be an asshole, but it really amazes me how so many people can get so little actual work done.

the romantic idealist in me also thinks "good for those people" they shouldn't have to do that much work, really. Why should people have to work so many hours in the day if they don't want to?

agree

honestly, having worked mostly for myself and small non-profits and small businesses for the last 20 years, the ways that large institutions and corporations utilize workers is really alien to me. Like, it's almost a different civilization. Not to be an asshole, but it really amazes me how so many people can get so little actual work done.

― sarahell, Sunday, November 15, 2020 9:07 PM (forty-three seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

ya but on the flip-side think of how cheap it is to pay someone 50k per year if you're a big company. like say you're a paper-pusher and your paper-pushing reduces the chance your company gets sued in a 7-million dollar lawsuit by 2% over the next 5 years, you've already netted them triple your salary. and even if that lawsuit never comes to pass, ex ante it was worth it for them to hire you

my corporate job was fiddling around with prices to try to juice revenues. one day we did a post-analysis of a pricing strategy and found that, under our conservative assumptions, we'd made the company 5x our annual salaries by setting prices on a sale in a smart way relative to how it was done in past years

the cool thing about big institutions is that since all the big fixed costs of running a company are taken care of and absorbed into its "institutional capital", the marginal employee is only contributing a marginal amount of revenue. whereas if you're self-employed or part of a small business, you're more likely to be a necessary link in the chain where the whole operation would come crashing down without you

flopson otm

long live any system that relies upon my getting this well paid for this little effort, its an extraordinarily healthy thing and it in fact relegates work to its proper place in the hierarchy of things, above being bored and below literally everything else but it gets you out of the house and washed (well it did until march)

mostly fine by me personally but probably not great for the planet on balance

do I think my job is bullshit? nah.

does the functionary who serves as proxy for the "boss spending money on my salary" in this system think my job is bullshit, buddy id buy them drink for the evening if they could describe in a way that even they could understand what it was they even imagined my job was designed to achieve (let alone the two jobs we'd devise and petition funding for to determine whether or not you could then measure whether that was happening).

theres a massive difference between paying someone to do something (but that something is only very vaguely defined and reporting back on it is of limited necessity) and paying someone to do nothing but its not my job to look closely enough at what that difference might be nor what it suggests about the function of work, wages, structures or payroll momentum i just wrangle developers m8

one of the weird things about work today is that a lot of jobs deal with inherently intangible things, and it's kind of fundamentally impossible to quantify things like "how much extra revenue does an extra copy-writer bring in"?

whereas if you own a factory and each worker can produce 50 widgets a day and each widget sells for a dollar of profits, it's a lot easier to benchmark the value of each job to something concrete

i think this ends up meaning that the value of job ends up being determined much less by their observable productivity, and more by the going rate in the labour market. hr basically say 'hm, we could probably use another copy-writer since Pam went on maternity leave, looks like our competitors are paying 35k, let's put up an ad'

relatedly, it seems to me a lot of current jobs are a poor fit for the 9-5 model, when all that really matters is that certain benchmarks are met / deliverables get delivered / whatever. this may be recognized informally but ime ppl are still expected to at least be around and, in the case of in-office work, be expected to appear busy even if most people understand implicitly that there's only so much important work to be done

^ one of the big things that probably contributed to large legacy organizations being cautious about wfh/remote work and it will be interesting to see if the dam breaks on 40 hour weeks being the nominal expectation of “knowledge workers” or if freaks start getting IT departments to report how long people are on the VPN

I am currently in a position where if certain things get done then everyone concerned sees the team (me) as "high-performing" even though in practice it's actually very little work. but personally I have a difficult time fully relaxing when I know I'm on "the clock", not to mention the spiritual rot DG described in the book that comes from having so much of yr time allotted to appearing busy or doing nothing at all. I feel like my morale would be higher if I were, idk, doing manual labor on a new electric-vehicle grid or something. but of course we have new pipelines to service instead

the findings i have heard about are that full-time WFH has resulted in everyone working more hours, which has actually fucked up a bunch of budgets which modeled variable workers taking normal amounts of time off. my sense is that if companies could get people to work fewer, more efficient hours, they would be fine with that.

the point of the 9-5 structure to the extent that it still exists is that for all but the most isolated roles there needs to be an agreed-upon time where you're available for meetings. my meeting schedule drives the hours i work much more than some sort of 8-hour block.

I’m only really willing to be available for meetings from like 10-4

the point of the 9-5 structure to the extent that it still exists is that for all but the most isolated roles there needs to be an agreed-upon time where you're available for meetings

I'd like to do a separate poll at some point re: how many meetings do ppl have to attend each week. I feel lucky that I average 1 or 2.

of course at a previous, Agile-model job, this was a much higher number

I’m only really willing to be available for meetings from like 10-4

― The Bosom Manor Michaelmas Special (silby), Sunday, November 15, 2020 11:30 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

in theory i am too but i work across time zones

condolences

real quick look but i have 15 meetings this coming week that i am likely to attend and that excludes any ad-hoc meetings that get scheduled during the week

I like meetings bc they let me sound smart without having to do anything

xp- yikes

I have never attended a sit down at a conference table style meeting, the idea terrifies me.

If you aren’t a main character of the meeting you can generally just zone out

I can't remember a single meeting as a teacher--staff meeting, grade-level, one-on-one--where I wouldn't have rather spent the time catching up on marking.

obviously meetings take many different forms, but in general i don't dread many meetings. when it's something you've scheduled and have to run for a group it's not amazing ,but for the most part if you trust your colleagues things will be fine.

Work meetings are basically 'here, let me trim an hour of your life away so that I can talk about big boy things in a big boy voice and feel important'. Like pretty much every one ever. They serve only to back up my flow of actual work that they'd ostensibly like me to do for them.

I have a work meetings notebook sitting in the office which I've used for probably at least five years. Every page is blank except for the doodles in the margins.

I have never attended a sit down at a conference table style meeting, the idea terrifies me.

― onlyfans.com/hunterb (milo z), Sunday, November 15, 2020 8:39 PM (nine minutes ago)

I haven't done all that many compared to everyone else on ilx, I'm guessing but:

1. it's good when there are snacks and beverages; it's not as good when there aren't any snacks or beverages
2. the less the meeting has any impact on your personal work, the easier it is
3. the less the meeting has any impact on anyone's actual wellbeing, the easier it is
4. the less you actually have to pay attention or have to remember details of discussions or information, the easier it is

For the most part, the meetings I have been to tend not to have snacks and beverages and are difficult in re the criteria set forth in items 2 - 4

Meetings are maybe not inherently useless but the managers in my workplace definitely don't understand the reasons why people in a workplace might hold meetings. 'Because I want to say aloud some things that I could write in an email that, while composing it, I would realize isn't even necessary and would probably delete without sending' is not a valid reason imo.

I used to do two things at staff meetings: make lists (favourite movies, best shortstops of the '70s, etc.) and drift off. A couple of friends on staff started to pick up on the latter, and more than once I would snap out of it and find them looking directly at me with big smiles.

1. it's good when there are snacks and beverages; it's not as good when there aren't any snacks or beverages

Almost forgot--yes! Make that three things I used to do: make lists, drift off, eat.

i have the types of jobs where in order to get people to show up to the meetings you have to advertise the presence of snacks and beverages.

The quality of the food was basically how I evaluated PD workshops. I still remember this one (what it was about, I've long since forgotten) where they served us salmon.

as a technical writer the vast majority of meetings I have attended in my career have had, at best, 10% relevance to my role. at my current job I have one (1) meeting every week just with the documentation/training team and almost none with anyone else which is ideal.

xp - omg that reminds me of the occasions on which I get asked to be a panelist for various arts grant things, and the San Francisco Arts Commission paid $30/application and served us bagels with lox and a pickle plate, and coming from Oakland (the land of relative austerity), I felt like the stereotypical Eastern European visiting the West during the Cold War years.

Oakland would give panelists coffee, tea and subway sandwiches and $100/day iirc (I did not really pursue being a panelist for Oakland because of this)

I wonder if I've been almost entirely colonised by capitalist ideals and self-help bullshit (and am needlessly morbid) because I used to have a job where I got paid more than I currently earn teaching secondary but could often go almost entire *weeks* where I was accountable for nothing and quite simply got sick - something like the spiritual rot mentioned above. I found ways of filling the hole (writing, mainly - for a couple of music mags and nature websites) but I couldn't shake the sense, despite trying to see that in lots of ways I had it good, of chronic purposelessness. Now I have the opposite, where my job leaves very little me left for anything else (father, husband; there's definitely no meaningful art) but answers a whole bunch of fundamental questions, and I'm fucked if I know which would be the right long-term choice.

The optimal job makes a positive difference to other people’s day in one way or another while being sufficiently mundane as to prevent one from becoming emotionally invested in it, or from working too hard

if 9-5 got changed up where would that leave ilx???

xpost By that definition, I guess my job is almost an ideal job except for the 'not working too hard' part (which is largely a function of how useless our management is and how much of their job I have to do if I have any hope of getting my own shit done).

On that point, though, I have almost zero meaningful interaction with management (eg, I have run almost completely self-sufficiently over the past year, really only reaching out to give a heads up before I affix a manager's e-signature to an outgoing missive), so to that extent it really kind of is ideal. If managerial ignorance/disinterest is the tradeoff to avoid micromanagement, I guess I'll take it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

thanks for the data folks. no compensation sorry

My job is not bullshit. At least to me.

I do not have a bullshit job.

98% bullshit

Not anymore! Got laid-off yesterday

man, that's bullshit