Ask Slashdot: Does Your Job Need To Exist?

An anonymous reader writes "PBS has an article about the growth of jobs that really don't need to exist. It includes an interview with professor David Graebner, who's known for his 2013 article 'BS jobs.' The premise is simple: as technology has automated huge portions of work that used to fill the days for millions of workers, many jobs simply involve less work. How often have you sat at your desk browsing the internet instead of being productive? If your company is such that you can aggregate that lost time across a bunch of workers, you could probably reduce the headcount significantly if everybody just stayed on task all the time. But that's not even an expectation at a lot of companies. Graebner ballparks the number of effectively useless jobs at around 20%. (It's not that the individual workers are useless, just that there are, for example, 12 people doing the work of 10.) So, how about it: how much actual productivity goes into your 40-hour workweek? What about your co-workers? How many people could your company fire if everybody just paid attention all the time?"

Comments

Re:That's totally how it works

[MiKM]

What's worse is that many of those same CEOs probably aren't constantly focused/productive themselves.

Productivity gains to the oligarchs!

[mspohr]

The history of the past 30 years has been that all productivity gains from people working harder, etc. have gone to the corporate owners, not to employees. It's not in their interest to work harder or longer because they won't get paid any more.
Slackers unite!

Re:Seems low

[Tom]

Bad managers (i.e. 80% of them): Yes.

Good managers, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold. Especially if you're a geek and want to spend your working hours with fun tech stuff, someone who handles the office politics for you and maintains your work environment, secures you the resources you need and generally removes obstacles from your path is priceless.

If you do this, you don't have enough people

[Todd Knarr]

The problem is that if you do this, you remove all your slack. If you cut it to just enough people to do the work if they work 100% of the time, the first time someone calls in sick you don't have enough people to do the work. If you get a sudden spike in business because of a holiday or special, you don't have enough people to handle the extra work. If something goes wrong, you don't have anybody to assign to handle it without leaving you short-handed. And that's before you even get to the need for workers to take breaks during the day to avoid burning out.

It's the same problem that's plagued just-in-time delivery of inventory. Sure it saves money to have stock and raw materials delivered just as they're needed. But the moment a storm or a port strike or anything delays deliveries, you're in a world of hurt because you don't have any inventory on hand to tide you over. Sure it's saved you money, but it's made your business much more fragile and the costs of even one shut-down can easily eat up any savings.

This is already happening

[rsilvergun]

I noticed it in 2008 when the economy crashed. Companies fired like crazy, and when the economy recovered they only did modest hiring but maintained the same level of productivity.

We're running out of work to do, but we don't have any socially acceptable way to distribute wealth w/o work. This should be fun.

Re:Obviously

[Z00L00K]

Some work is in not in a linear form - it can be intense periods broken up with idle periods.

Another factor is that a person is not always producing, but a competence resource. What is a five minute action for a person with competence can be a week long investigation for another - it doesn't matter if you have documentation, sometimes the volume of it makes it hard to sift through - especially if you don't know what you are looking for.

Unfortunately not all companies values the knowledge an employee has and only looks at productivity figures - not the loss of production that may occur when the person isn't there.