I mean, a bullshit job is someone who spends their entire workday in meetings, answering e-mails and generating reports. None of which is useful if it isn't actually in support of _real_ work.
If you were to mediate conflicts all day between super talented, but very quarrelsome, experts: that's useful work. If you spend your entire day mediating conflicts between mediocre developers bikeshedding over logging frameworks, a topic that only came up because of nihysim: that's a bullshit job. Those developers are not useful, and neither are you.
> I mean, a bullshit job is someone who spends their entire workday in meetings, answering e-mails and generating reports. None of which is useful if it isn't actually in support of _real_ work.
What counts as real work? How many levels of indirection is allowed?
What would be the impact if that job and/or person disappeared right now (aside from personal relations; on the job, business, organization)?
Would they be missed for more than the candy jar they stocked on their desk? Would something critical go undone? Why? Was their job as a pass through (notify Alice that Bob is done)? Was the job a meaningful check (verify Alice's work then notify Bob)? Is that verification mechanical (a sanity check that can be automated) or does it require expertise (huh, that widget won't work in that gizmo, there's an issue documented at...)?
Obviously, low/negative performers disappearing can always improve things, but usually by the work itself being dispersed to competent people. Assume a competent person in the role, is it actually useful and providing value that would be missed if they left?
Exactly one. The whole point of supporting someone doing real work is that you are valuable to that person and therefore your work is real. The moment the number of levels of indirection can go beyond 1 is where it spirals to infinity, and you enter the bureaucratic nightmare world.
It might be arbitrary, but it doesn’t have to be. You can measure the human perception of indirection. The trolley proplem has a different answer if you order someone to pull the lever instead of pulling the lever your self. The Milgram experiment only works if there is at least one level of indirection, and works better the more levels there are.
I would guess an expert anthropologist would know about this cognitive effect and count for it.
I take your point, but citing Milgram is a bad idea. The Milgram experiment turns out not to work that well at all, or at best to require very specific sort of conditions to get people to behave as they did for his iteration.
Regardless of the conclusion, the experiments are robust and show that people behave differently with different levels of indirection. So the experiments can still be used to argue that the effects of indirection are real and probably measurable.
I think you’re confusing people who are bad at their jobs, with jobs that are themselves pointless.
Also, you can add software development to the “meetings/email/reports” list, because that too is just another form of admin overhead from the perspective of most businesses that exist to do something other than sell software.
I know a company -- many companies-- where there are people who do nothing all day but talk to people, send emails, and very occasionally produce presentations. I knew a few of people at Disney consumer products who had jobs like that.
Those people could probably sleep in their office some weeks and not have anything very bad happen. Every now and then, not even once a year, those people find and close deals that generate millions of dollars. By your definition they are worthless but really they are a crucial ingredient in setting up projects that create work for dozens of programmers, artists, writers, etc.
If you don't understand why people exist in an organization, it may be because they are useless. But it may also be because you don't understand their purpose.
I think it's worth pointing out the difference between "it didn't work" and "it could never work" though, the latter of which seems more like what people mean with BS jobs.
I know a fair number of people in consulting who have seen how the sausage is made, and they don't see how it's useful in any normal way. It's useful for certain parties in a firm, but it's not useful in a general sense of delivering what it says on the tin.
If you were to mediate conflicts all day between super talented, but very quarrelsome, experts: that's useful work. If you spend your entire day mediating conflicts between mediocre developers bikeshedding over logging frameworks, a topic that only came up because of nihysim: that's a bullshit job. Those developers are not useful, and neither are you.