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.

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