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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?"
You also have to account for expansions in volume or increases in business activities.
An overly simply explanation of this might be a restaurant I once worked at. About 20 years ago, I worked at one as a line cook. One Friday, the dinner crowd just wasn't happening. The city had some festival thing going on. The manager who was new to the store decided to cut staff down to levels more accurate for the amount of sales while having wet dreams of being the GM's bitch or something. Most of the employees went into the bar section and had a drink after clocking out. Then we heard the crack of thunder, the power blinked off then on and about 30 minutes later, the dinner rush was on as strong as ever because it started pouring down rain and the festival closed. Except we had no way to accommodate the crowd effectively due to all the staff being sent home and/or drinking.
So you sit there doing your thing with a little time to relax here and there because 12 people are doing the job of 10. Then one day, you start getting busier and busier then the boss hires another person and you have 13 people doing the work of 11 but all your customers are happy and being taken care of which encourages even more sales. Or you could have 10 people doing the work of 10 with the other 2 across the street getting drunk and when business increases, lose all or some of it because those 10 people cannot handle the increase.
Some times inefficiencies need to be built in just so increased demand can be satisfied. It takes time to hire and train someone. It takes less time to have someone do a little extra work that they already do.