Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Obviously "work" fills other purposes for the human experience other than pure productivity. Just like the stated mission of school is academic education, but you certainly miss out if you don't mingle.
Yes, because human beings can totally stay 100% focused and productive during the entire day. Unless you're an unethical and lazy communist ofcourse.
I wonder how many CEOs actually believe in this drivel...
If my aunt had balls, he'd be my uncle.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
20% effectively useless jobs? The number seems to be on the low side as in my place there are more than that who have the word manager in their title. When you group them with all the other time wasters and incompetents, it must be nearer 50%, as a lot of those individuals only work to feed each others' roles.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
WTF is that?
About 10 hours too long.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
Only if you're an idiot who doesn't understand that downtime is necessary for every job that involves even rudimentary cognitive skills, and doubly so if you want creativity, no matter if it is artistic or problem-solving.
The human brain is not designed to perform at 100% for extended periods of time. It evolved to run on a fairly lazy average level most of the time, and have reserves for bursts in times of need. Then it needs time to recover.
In simple terms for managers: If you condense workload to eliminate low-performance times, your top and average performances drop and you end up with the same or less total productivity.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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!
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
In the early nineties I was Director oif Development for a company that wrote and sold software to small telephone companies. We created a lot of automation into the process which allowed small companies to do much more than their staffing would otherwise allow. One prospective customer was a county owned telephone company. Their first response when we showed them all the features of our softwar ewas to ask if those capabilities could be turned off. Huh? Turns out that they viewed their primary role to be a provider of jobs within the county. Providing telephone service was considered secondary.
So there's nothing really new about these finds. Just that he's getting noticed for writing about them.
college has lot's of BS classes that not really need now days but the tech / trade schools have more of skills needed to do the job.
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.
We can easily lop off the 80% of the top 20% of the management, and since they are the one pulling in 80% of the total wages of the company, you might reduce payroll by a staggering 64%. But rest assured, they would rather cut 10 low wage employees rather than let go one of their own, even if that one fired VP can save more money, improve morale and increase productivity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Several commenters have pointed out that humans don't stay on task 100% of the time, so the question, as phrased, is silly. HOWEVER, if you don't over-specialize, or encourage people to spend a little time on things other than their core job, they can be productive while taking a break from the routine, instead of spending time on Facebook.
For many years, I ran small companies. The companies did web security software and web hosting. A programmer could, however, take a break from programming and spend half an hour on industry related message boards, which was where most of our sales came from. Answering a support call, they might chat with the customer about all sorts of topics (customer relationships are important).
I've often worked 60+ hours without getting burned out by varying my work. Just for one project I might shop for RAID cards and other components online, customize the hardware with hand tools, assemble the servers, install & configure the OS, write custom software for that server, etc. That way I'm productive almost 100% of the time, but don't get bored like I would in a company where one person does all of the purchasing, another person assembles hardware all day, and another installs software all day.
I now work in a large agency, big enough that you'd expect specialization, but although I'm a programmer most of the time, I'm also invited to participate in other things - long term strategy discussions, designing the architecture of systems other departments are working on, etc. I don't spend any time at work on Facebook. I "slack off" by pitching in on projects that I'm not officially part of, doing work that's different from what I was primarily hired to do.
* Every once in a while, I do look at Slashdot while in my office. Then again, I find work-related news and discussion here, and I also pitch our excellent free cyber-security courses here, so even Slashdot is somewhat productive.
...because we're automating everything that we can automate.
...Err...I'm going to stop now, before I embarrass myself. :)
There are a few businesses that WILL boom in the future though, such as the fitness (sports) industry, as we...when we become less and less physically active, will need to find a way to keep ourselves fit. Many things will change in the future because of this. What I'm worried about though - is the coming mass-unemployment, the extreme difference between the rich & the unemployed. Human greed knows no bounds, we already know that from our own history. But we're also inventive and creative creatures, so we will find a way, but it's going to hurt before it becomes any good.
Another business that will only increase, is entertainment - and advertisement. People won't know what to do with themselves as we get less and less stuff to occupy ourselves with. I suspect the Internet will be highly regulated, constantly battling with hackers (hacktivists) & crackers, the richer will get richer and the unemployed masses will be desperate for entertainment (which is good for the powers that be...because it numbs them down and make their dull lives easier, from the chair/sofa).
Eventually the greedy will go to far, and the people will uproar and a civil war will arise from this. This is the "shift in our time", after that horrible period in time...with seemingly endless poverty and suffering, things will eventually even out and become MUCH better than we have now. Everything is automated, the need for money has been abandoned as we don't need to purchase anything. Everything we need will be produced by robots & automated food-plantages. Overpopulation will lead to further research into terraforming planets...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Peter Gibbons: You see, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't- don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Porter: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
You forgot to mention all those useless telephone sanitizers.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
"off task probably half the day"
Which means that you are "on task" around half the day.
Wow! You rock!
Seriously, on a project management course some years ago, it was pointed out that the best individuals within an organisation can devote about 50% of their time to a task. The rest is taken up with (non-task) phone calls, meetings with others, summaries to your boss, and "personal needs breaks" (and lunch!), and so forth.
The "average" worker can be expected to devote 33% of their time to the task, as they also have to contend with IT issues, "other worker" issues and sheer "I need some downtime" type stuff.
So, if the article suggests "12 doing the work of 10" then that's an unrealistic 80% "on task".
Now, if it was "12 doing the work of 3", then there would be a case.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
I'm told that's what you get if you're a shitty (in any or all ways) place to work.
The good people will leave. They always have options.
The shitty people without options will stay. The ones who are just good enough not to get fired but not good enough to move someplace else.
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.
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This would work for some jobs, but not most IT jobs (and not an awful lot of other jobs). For example, I have had jobs (and know of others) that had a lot of downtime during the normal course of events. However, When things got busy, it was urgent that the problem got resolved as quickly as possible. If the company had cut employees so that the staff they had left were busy 100% of the time, when urgent problems arose, no one would have had time to address those problems while keeping the routine that was necessary to keep the company running.
The answer the type of person who does the studies in the article gives is to hire people to deal with those urgent situations when they arise. The problem with that answer is that those people will not know how the system is configured and will have to spend additional time figuring that out. No matter how well documented a system is, it will take someone who works with it every day less time to find their way around then it will someone coming in from outside.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There is, apparently, a huge shortage of English teachers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And that aside, there's the problem of things being tasked to capacity being unable to deal with surges when they happen. Like where I work we hire students to help (since we are a university). It is expected they'll spend a non-trivial amount of time sitting around, doing homework, etc. Why? Because when someone needs something done, we want to have a student to assign to it. If the students are working 100% of the time, well then anytime the workload increases, it means we have to delay things, we can't handle it then.
Of course it isn't like they'd focus on work 100% of the time, even if we did have them fully tasked.
There are just all kinds of reasons it doesn't work, and it is not unique to modern society. The past was NOT full of extremely hard working people who did nothing but focus on the job. That has never been true.
You are always going to need more people to do a job then if each person theoretically worked to 100% capacity 100% of the time. Since in most places work loads vary, that'll also make you need more people since you need enough to deal with the peaks, not the nominal amount.
This is life, this is how it has always been, and there's nothing wrong with it.
Let me introduce you to toe concept of "necessary waste".
In your business process, there is some limiting factor that is directly tied to how much you can produce: if had some more of that factor you could produce more, and if you run out you produce less.Maybe it's some machinery for which you can't yet swing the financing to get more units; maybe it's a skill for which there aren't many people tried for yet. If you can't get more, then your next move is to make sure you are utilizing that limiting factor as much as possible.
That means that the other factors that are inputs or outputs of the limiting factor need to be ready and waiting to make sure the limiting factor is never idle. If you are an input you need to have work prepared but your average rate can never exceed what the limiting factor can consume. If you consume an output of the limiting factor you need to be ready to pick up what the limiting factor gives you.
If reduce the labor available for the inputs and outputs then you run the risk of creating artificial limits on your business process. You can actually be less productive when you try to eliminate idleness if you don't know WHY things were idle. Idleness isn't actually your target, it is productivity.
Of course, all of this flies in the face of the slashdot conventional wisdom that management provides zero contribution to productivity.
When work comes in spurts and bunches you can look forward to the downtime in between. It can be a reward for getting stuff done. You can think that if I get this work done, I get a small break after or, if I work harder and faster to get it done sooner, I can have a big break. Think of roofers shingling a roof on a Friday. You don't see anyone standing around, they are on each others asses and by 2:00pm or so they are done the roof, packing up and starting their weekend early.
When you have a constant workflow that never ends there is no real incentive to work harder. You look around and see one guy doing the bare minimum and another guy doing 3 times the work load. Both get payed the same amount and the work never ends. The hard worker might think he is more likely to get a promotion but management thinks if we promote that guy, we would need to hire 3 guys to replace what he does. Lets keep him right there so we can keep our production numbers up.
The worst thing management can do though is fill an employees down time with more work. Basically you have punished a hard working person with more responsibility and work with zero pay increase. Unless you are trying to kill productivity.
BSc for Bachelors of Science is the usual
How often have you sat at your desk browsing the internet instead of being productive?
Who says I'm not being productive then? Some (many?) problems cannot be solved via by simply brute-force thinking them through - a linear left-brain methodology. Many times, especially for more complex things, I need to let things peculate awhile. Ever get the solution to a vexing problem (an "ah-ha!" moment) while taking a shower? That's your right-brain solving something non-linearly.
Going off and doing something completely different is a strategy for allowing a left to right brain shift -- keep the (usually) dominate left brain busy on something completely unrelated to the task at hand giving the (usually subordinate) right brain time and space to chime in. (read the book: "Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain" - and others on left/right brain)
How many people could your company fire if everybody just paid attention all the time?
Perhaps manyt, but how long would those people last/stay before burning out? There's more to work than "paying attention all the time".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Indeed. My boss, and particularly her boss, is awesome in that way. He takes care of all the politics and also makes sure we get what we need, so we can focus on the task at hand.
He also reads Slashdot, so "hi Tony, and thanks."
If I paid attention 40 hours a week, I'd be braindead within a month.
I actually tried working 6.5 days a week when I first started my "real" software development career job - going into the 3rd week it became painfully obvious to me that I was making less real progress (mistakes, rewrites) though the overtime pay was nice...
Turns out that they viewed their primary role to be a provider of jobs within the county. Providing telephone service was considered secondary.
If an organization thinks its role as a buyer of labor outweighs its role as a seller of services, that's when you break out the illustration of the broken window. If the organization's leaders refuse to understand the fallacy they've fallen into, complain to the local newspaper's editor.
I'm not sure that this case is a good example for the parable of the broken window, in fact it could be considered a counter example.
I do believe that the county telephone company's manager had jobs as a major consideration, but I also doubt that JimCC's observation "Providing telephone service was considered secondary" is accurate. In this case, they saw their choice as firing local people and sending the revenue from sales out of county.
Sure, the money saved from automation could be then used for something like infrastructure improvement (don't say "or lowering rates" because that does not happen), but infrastructure improvement versus local jobs still comes down to how to benefit the local people.
Speaking as someone who used to have to travel a large territory in a rural state, I saw the consequences over the last few decades this kind of decision, of letting money flow out of the local small city/county area. Everyone suffers except for a few at the top who leave because they don't want to live in a depressed area.
If 12 people spend 40 hours each doing the work of only 10 people, there are two ways of eliminating the wasted time.
They think two people have jobs that don't need to exist. A better solutions appears to be that all 12 people spend less hours at work.
How would society benefit from having two more unemployed people instead of having 12 people that can spend more time with their kids (or doing whatever they want to do instead)?
My job has mutated over the years such that that I am now tasked with doing work on I don't actually know how to do, on custom systems I don't understand. As a result, I suck at it. I have told management this many times but they blink and look at me like I am speaking Martian and basically think I don't WANT to work.
Anyway, I end up with a pile of work I can't do and a few things I can do and it is often a struggle to stay awake. I mean a serious battle between me and gravity pulling my head down to the desk. Snacks doesn't help. Three cups of coffee does not help. Even walks don't help: I am very good at falling asleep in motion.
Yeah it scares me too. Terrifies me.
The combination of boredom, lack of mental stimulation, and lack of ability to do the work leaves me physically devastated.
I am told I am the least productive employee in the whole company so I am waiting around now to see if they will fire me, at which point I will go home and take a nap.
Sig for hire.
I've read David Graebner's study and this has very little to do with it. The study set out to discover where our increase in productivity went to. He concluded that we created whole new classes of jobs that didn't exist before and aren't strictly necessary to produce goods which chewed up the productivity gains. IT/programming jobs were classed in the bullshit category. It was more along the lines of marketing, HR, etc. He also pointed out that the more crucial the job was to production the less likely it was to be well paid and the more likely the workers were to be over worked. He also pointed out that the pay rate and/or staffing is usually under active assault.
Three of his examples of this were teachers, garbage men, and firefighters.
At the same time bullshit jobs (like marketing and public relations) were well funded and the workers usually only put in 30 hours out of an expected 40 hour work week.
It has nothing to do with how workers spend there time and everything to do with the creation of waste in a capitalist system that should be driven to efficiency.
Try applying that 100% to RNs. How are you going to predict patients that get worse, that get better, that crach, etc. Impossible to predict workload of an individual patient. So impossible to get that mythical 100%. You need slack to be there when multiple codes hit a single ICU or unit, or when a big motor vehicle accident hits the ER and surgical staff. The article is written by some idiot efficiency expert who apparently has no idea how you need some sort of reserve to draw upon, both staff-wise and personal-wise. Running flat out for a full shift is enough to wreck even the greatest surgeon or nurse if done too often. Same goes for coders, having been both (RN and Sr SW Engr)
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Asimov and others predicted a future where there wouldn't be enough jobs to go aroundubt they saw that as a GOOD thing. Humanity was clever enough to build machines to do all the work, and now we can kick back and enjoy some leisure time. George Jetson had a three-hour workday. But that vision can only work if we view our increased productivity as a benefit to *everyone*, and compensate everyone accordingly: a dividend for being a member of the clever human race (or if you want, a dividend for being a citizen/resident of a first-world nation).
As more jobs are automated, it seems to me that there are three options: 1) we share the wealth, either with a guaranteed income or by raising wages while simultaneously cutting the number of hours people work; 2) we make a lot of fake jobs so that we can pretend that people are earning the money they need to live, and avoid the horrors of socialism (horror! horror!); or 3) a LOT of people drop into poverty.
Many people noted nobody can stay focused 100% of the time, and that productivity gains always go the the same. I would like to add a point on managing the unexpected
Having too many people for a given task means there is some extra work capacity. This is required to handle unexpected situations. If anything unusual strikes and require extra work while there is nobody left idle at any time, then the company is doomed to fail the unexpected event.
Anybody who has done this long enough (and I think I have), knows that IT isn't like making widgets. We spend a large part of our time sitting around doing "nothing", (which usually involves hours and hours of reading and learning and generally being prepared for...), BAM!!! Something is broken!!! FIX IT 5 MINUTES AGO, AND IF YOU DON'T, YOU'RE GOING TO BE FIRED!
I don't even know how you can truly measure *efficiency* in IT. If you have lots of customers and lots of employees and if neither have complaints very often, your IT department is probably doing a good job.
The only way to know for sure is to go ahead and just fire us. If the SHTF, you made a bad choice. If not, you didn't.
IT has been important enough for LONG enough, that most companies probably KNOW which is the best solution. If you are just now trying to figure it out, you've probably already missed the boat.
There would be explosions with massive loss of lives and property damage. Believe it. I'm one of the very few dedicated people who do natural gas leak surveys. I find gas leaks that are, or could be, dangerous. If you live in one of the Southeastern states, there's a good chance I've walked through your yard or driven past your house at some point over the past 38 years.
I've tried to come up with a way that my job could be automated, but I can't think of any. It requires boots on the ground, so to speak. Maybe one day somebody will come up with a small drone equipped with a laser that can fly through yards and over fences and behind bushes and dodging bad dogs, but I'm not holding my breath.
If we start with the premise that a 40-hour worker doesn't put in 40 hours (and I assume this is not talking about smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and such, but just really "browsing the internet to kill time" stuff)... how about shortening the work week?
And BTW: We *need* BS jobs. If we got really efficient, you can start to expect unemployment >20%.
Though if some of the BS jobs at my work would stop being sending me advertising in my email (seriously: in my building, which is only a few hundred employees, there are at least 4 whose full-time job seems to be telling me about hockey tickets, charity events, company socials, and Disney on ice)
A class in the Peloponnesian War does not teach a lot of critical thinking - mostly laborious reading of texts written by self important academics trying to find a way to make themselves relevant in a world that doesn't need their skills. Sure, at West Point, such a class might make sense, but most of us are not training to figure out how to apply ancient war strategies and tactics to the modern battlefield with drones being operated halfway around the world by guys in Missouri who work eight hour shifts five days a week.
Critical thinking is figuring out why the bare iron you just loaded your microcode on doesn't work -- sorry, there's no debugging tools below you. Sure, you could flash a light on the console from your code, but that would probably change the timing and give a register time to settle from a load from memory that you forgot to issue a WAIT for (or, in this case, NOT). You, a bottle of scotch, a listing of your microcode w/hex microcode shown (a luxury actually), the behavior you don't understand, and a platform reference manual (that, in the end, this version of the iron actually doesn't quite implement as it should). Been there, done that. That's critical thinking. (Turned out the machine hadn't implemented the spec correctly and it hadn't been reported (or fixed) in the ten years since the machine was built/loaded -- the current version of the machine had the same bug!
Tell that to my graduating class that had to take "Film and Theatre" to get their Bachelors of Technology. I'm sure at some point my job will require me to analyze a polish political film and compare its characters to those in Mother Courage...
Warning: this is a long and rambly reply.
Your job probably won't. Your life probably won't either, well not that specifically. Being British, not American (as I assume you are), we don't do university in the same way. Courses are basically just what you sign up for, so I don't have the same direct experience as you.
However, English classes in school were much along the same lines. We were required to write endless essays (which curiously, no one ever bothered actually teaching us *how* to do) on bizarre analyses of the author's inner thought processes while he (was all he in this case) was writing the book we happened to be analysing.
Not only did it utterly suck the life out of the books a good deal of it was probably outright wrong or at least deeply misguided. Oh and it utterly put me off the idea of analysing things.
The thing is, fast forward 20 years or so and I reently had a complete about-face. My SO is as a hobby an aspiring author. As part of this there are various writing forums out there, and much like tech ones have a range of characters form n00bs to experienced (to total nutjobs---it is the internet after all). Anyway, as you might expect a common topic of discussion is what makes bad writing, and exercises etc to help spot that and avoid it in your own writing.
Anyway to cut a very long story merely long, I've been offering moral support and doing some of these as well. Turns out it has all the same facets as literary analysis, but because it's being done by people for fun, they've figured out how to make it fun and interesting.
This is not to say your course on Polish film analysis falls into this camp: I strongly suspect it's the opposite.
However, I now feel a greater appreciation for certain things. One, and I've found this particularly entertaining, is when I end up reading a book I don't enjoy very much, I now generally understand *why* I don't like it and not only that, I can rant and rave about it in a semi-coherent manner.
Likewise, there's a lot of things in film and TV that can feel awkward and clunky or pull you out, and it's just plain interesting to be able to see why it's happening, and in many cases what they were clearly trying to achieve.
Is it useful to work? For me, certainly not. Is it fun? Yeah, definitely. It's basically added a layer of nuance and entertainment to already entertaining activities. The sad thing is, I got so damaged by my schooling, it took 20 years and a *LOT* of gentle prodding to get me get me to appreciate such things.
What I appreicate now is clearly what we were meant to be learning, but is to completely alien to what we were actually "taught" as to e essentially unrecognisable. I guess my conclusio is that it's good to do things like the thing you were complaining about in general (not for a job, just for the hell of it and ejoying life better), though in 99% of cases they are do so badly as to e actively damaging.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Not all subjects worth learning are well taught.