bullshit jobs

[mrswdk]

no, what he's saying is that keynes was proved correct - but that these 'white collar' jobs, as you put it, have filled the void left behind by automation without due cause. anyone who has ever spent time dealing with HR departments must surely intuit the truth of that argument. incidentally, the author does not argue that these white collar jobs are entirely unessential; merely that the 40/50 hour working week is, as GT has illustrated for us. i heard a few of the complaints about the former name of this thread along the lines of 'i use cc at work - the thread name is nsfw'. so on, so forth

I am always surprised to see people saying things like that on here. When I worked in the UK I had to keep a time sheet detailing exactly what I spent my time at the office doing each day, down to the half hour. One time I logged 4 hours of 'administrative' work in one day (because I was working on a contract that didn't have any budget left), and the head of my department emailed me to ask what I'd been doing. I don't recall ever surfing the internet or playing on my phone during office hours in that job. I had too much work to do.

got tonkaed is also far from a stereotypical financial services worker, in my experience. I have a couple of friends who work in finance, and they work incredibly hard. That's why people who work in that industry often leave by their mid-30s - they've been working so hard that they start burning out.

Another one of the author's incredible pearls of wisdom:

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.'

Wrong. It's as if someone wants those tasks performed and is prepared to pay someone else to perform them.

To think, he's a professor at one of the UK's most esteemed universities. World's most bullshit job: professor of anthropology at LSE!

and pray tell, what tasks are you currently performing at work that allow you to spend 12 hours a day on CC?

I'm currently enjoying some down time between my last contract ending and my next one starting, so I'm not actually working these days

[got tonkaed]

I just have a two monitor set up at home. One is tied into the work network and is probably as visible to them as they would like it to be. The other is whatever I want it to be. i do enough work that I am considered productive and no one would want to bug me. Doesn't seem that hard.

[mrswdk]

those [jobs] generate value for someone, so they can't be said to be 'pointless'.

No but incrementally they might approximate pointlessness.

Why?

[KoolBak]

Tonka! Why arent you trying to sell us financial services?!?! And are they pyramid shaped?

[got tonkaed]

Good news, the days of me selling stuff are over. You will have to find your pyramids elsewhere!

[KoolBak]

[Dukasaur]

There are a plethora of bullshit jobs out there. Unfortunately, the author did a piss-poor job of defining them and/or choosing examples.

When I worked in the construction of the SkyDome, for instance, I would break concrete test cylinders to establish that the concrete used in the SkyDome was of adequate strength for what the engineers required. Here's what would happen then:

• My immediate boss, the senior technician on the job, would then take my test results, glance at them without comprehension, sign his name and fax them to the office. Besides reading the newspaper, bitching, making disgusting unfunny jokes, and bragging about his qualifications, he really didn't have any duties beyond taking credit for my work.
• The next link in the chain, the chief technician, would then take those test results from the fax machine, look at them without interest, and walk them fifty feet down the hall to the consulting engineer on the job.
• The next link in the chain, the consulting engineer, actually had a good eye and could spot anomalies instantly. On the very rare days that something was wrong, he could be said to actually perform a useful function. On most days, however, his only task was to take the 20 or 30 cylinder breaks (each with its own page) and summarize them into a one page report, which would then go to the chief consulting engineer.
• The chief consulting engineer would initial each report without really reading it and pass it to his secretary.
• The secretary would make multiple copies and circulate them to multiple engineers at various companies.

One of the people receiving the reports was the site superintendant at the SkyDome itself. About a week after I would break a cylinder, he would get the report on it. The fact was, he already knew what the results were, because his trailer was beside mine, and I would walk over on a regular basis and tell him. But he had to get the official results, on pieces of paper signed by people with letters after their names, or be considered ignorant of the truth.

Was any real value added by any of the other links in the chain? No. There was no analysis of the data, no work done to it other than taking the results from 20 or 30 pages and concentrating them onto 1 page. There was no real oversight. If I had decided to falsify my results, nobody would have known. All that was added was that people with successively more letters after their name would attest to it. I had no letters after my name, my immediate superior had two, his boss had three, the consulting engineer had seven and the chief consulting engineer had fifteen or twenty. Count the steps -- one, two, three, four, five people between me and the site superintendant, only to convey to him information that I had already conveyed to him a week earlier.

That is one of the large classes of bullshit jobs -- people whose only job is to have letters behind their names, and sign reports generated by others, to make them "official."

There are many others -- people whose only job is to inspect machines and report that all safety devices and warning signs are in place, even though the machine itself does not work. People whose only job is to drive past construction sites, at a speed that prevents any real observation, and report that everyone is doing their job, even though they have no idea what anyone's job is. People whose job is to "teach" courses that simply repeat what all the employees already know, because there is a requirement to "re-certify" everyone on some trivial knowlege on a regular basis. And so on.

[DoomYoshi]

The only true vocation is gentleman.

[JBlombier]

Dukasaur painted a very sad picture of what I believe the so called "First world" is at the moment.

I can understand that bullshit jobs are created. With some creativity any company can get money from the jobs. Of course those who work the jobs benefit. That's good, those people are just another man or woman who can provide for his/her family.

Alright, I'll just post a random number, because I don't know the exact one. Right now, there are at least 50 million useless jobs (I'm really just posting a number here, but I guess it's a lot higher). The word 'useless' is not in order here, though. The job is useful by definition, because it gets the employee the money it needs to survive in our society. We can discuss the usefulness of money, but let's not do that, because we are a slave of money if the monetary system stays like it is.
If we keep on living in a society like ours (the people that can afford to play CC), people will always have bullshit jobs. I don't think it's that big a deal, because if someone really thinks their job is holding back their potential carreer, they have a choice to change their lives/job for the better. That choice isn't always without risk, I know. But it's a choice nonetheless, so if you don't want to work a bullshit job, you really don't have to.

I'm focussing on the human aspect here (whether people want bs-jobs), instead of the economical aspect. Bullshit-jobs are created by the weird evolution our economy has gone through, so it's pointless to debate whether there should be bs-jobs, because they are here for a fact and that won't change.
Economic evolution created useless jobs, because evidently there were none of them 4000 years ago. If you got a useless job, better embrace it and consider yourself lucky to have it.

- JBlombier

[khazalid]

Also, do you have a bullshit job Khazalid?

efl teacher.

i've worked a few bs jobs in my time though, sure.

[mrswdk]

Economic evolution created useless jobs, because evidently there were none of them 4000 years ago.

Don't forget the servants and slaves who used to have roles like carrying around a big fan or opening and closing doors, and spent 90% of their time doing nothing.