2
via You must be vouched for by a vouched user to participate.
-
Which should I read after "Bullshit Jobs"? "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology" seems quite interesting.
This guy spoke my mind. This is what I've been telling people in tech for years.
There's plenty of money in technology but do many jobs in that market -need- to exist? Heck no. They don't have a purpose other than to keep the rest of the cogs in the machine spinning.
I worked at Google for a while, and I felt kind of like a modern Abraham in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Silicon Valley runs on what I like to call "bullshit alchemy". In the Middle Ages, you had these alchemists trying to turn lead into gold and such. In the 21st century, we have a new set of alchemists turning bullshit into billions of dollars. Unlike their medieval forebears, they are wildly successful.
Is Slack really worth billions? No way. Do developers at Google deserve $15000 coffee machines while the people making their food work on their feet all day and struggle to make ends meet? No.
It is all a very sick joke.
It's really depressing to think about all the man-hours of incredibly talented engineers being used by Google, Facebook, et al, to make us click on one more ad, view one more video, scroll one last time.
As discussed in the article, it really speaks about our current society that this is what we value the most.
The technology and capital is there to give everyone a good standard of living, but we have instead decided to shop and tiktok ourselves to death.
I like to think that my job (boring enterprise backend development) at least has real customers paying real money for software that will be useful for their actual jobs, but if I peek just behind the curtain I notice that we are enabling the very bullshit jobs discussed in the article.
-
First of all, I agree with Graeber and would love to minimize bullshit jobs.
However. He ignores the major purpose of those bullshit jobs in a large organization: to slow things down. This sounds bad...until you realize that moving at full speed is incredibly risky, especially if you're working on a project with huge scope and very different users/consumers.
Bullshit jobs serve the same function as enzyme inhibitors, or maybe resistors. By forcing people to communicate and write things down, people have to pay attention to what others are doing. So you don't get 20 people who know how to produce their part, and after a frenzy of productivity they realize nothing fits together and even if it did then it doesn't solve the actual problem well. It also means that one part can't race ahead of a dependency because different parts can be produced at different rates. It's primarily risk mitigation.
That's not to excuse bullshit jobs, just to explain that they do have a function. They are a "solution" to what happens when projects get too big, when the stakes get too high, and when someone can't even fit what an organization does in their head. I'd much rather reduce scope to eliminate the problem, not patch over it.
Tangentially relevant: slack (not quite of the SubGenius variety) as an antidote to efficiency.
That's a fair point and a well-written article.
It honestly makes me feel better about my job. I've got plenty of "slack." It means stuff gets done when it's asked for, not "as soon as I'm done with these other 3 fires I'll put yours out."
Guess I got lucky with my workplace.
The rant from 2013 was later expanded to a full-length book, Bullshit Jobs, and I highly recommend it. Really, I recommend anything Graeber has written. He had a real gift. I was saddened to learn of his passing last year.