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?"
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 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?
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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
...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!
"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.
Sadly, many of the things that good managers take care of are caused by bad managers. One of the many reasons there are so few good managers is that they can get fed up with the bullshit, too.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
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)?
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.
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
This.
I wouldn't describe my job as "hard". I have about a 30% duty cycle, on a typical day. And yet, that doesn't mean you could replace three people like me with just me. When the time comes to save the day, I need similarly qualified "boots on the ground" to get everything done ASAP and minimize downtime. Compare that to how much it costs for a multinational to lost the ability to post sales for an hour, and I look like a goddamned steal.
For the most part, I try to fill my spare time with "fun" projects that just happen to marginally benefit my employer. But when something goes wrong, having me there to fix it in seconds rather than letting the company falter uselessly for days at a time more than justifies my salary.
Now, if they wanted to pay me somewhere around 5k per half-hour incident 15-20 times a year (and let me sleep in most days), hey, I wouldn't object. But Corporate America hasn't really matured yet to the point where they understand that it doesn't take a body at a desk to put out the occasional fire.
As a maintenance electrician at a facility that runs a blast furnace I don't work every minute of my 12hr shift but when something does come up it I have to run, coke is not a cheap fuel to waste. My employer understands this, having me in the building to fix one problem all day can save them thousands in down time and lost product. I don't think they are about to consolidate me out of a job any time soon but that doesn't mean they wont try. Service contractors of every kind are getting more popular with businesses that have frequent need for repair or troubleshooting of equipment.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Not to mention that we're expected to work long hours or "challenged" to hit pretty incredible deadlines, but there's only so much gas in the can. Periodically you just cannot code another line and need a break, but if you're not at your desk or otherwise online, you're not looking good. So you're off task, recharging. If you were out digging ditches instead of coding, they can hit you with the whip but the shovel can't move any further no matter how in shape you are.
Some corporate cultures fill this down time with meetings, in which a lot of people's time is collectively wasted in the name of communication. Some see this as a form of productivity. I see it as waste every bit as much as looking at funny pictures of cats. Either way there's a limit to productivity, firing 20% and driving everyone harder is just not going to work.
The article's point though is that employing 3 people like you is more expensive than getting you to do 8 hours a day not 2-3.
It's right too - assuming your 2-3 hours can scale to a full day.
I'm not sure it can. I know that I can do more in a day than others get done in a week, and I often spend a lot of time just chatting to people, browsing the web, finishing early, etc as a result.
If I didn't get all that 'downtime' then I wouldn't have the contacts/knowledge about the organisation that I use when I'm being 'productive'. If I didn't browse the web I'd lose track of industry changes, trends and activities. If I applied myself solidly then I'd burn out and add no value.
So I don't measure by hours worked. I don't even measure by whether I get my job done, although I do get it done. I measure by the direct cost impacts I have on the company.
E.g. last year in two hours I saved the company around 4 times my annual salary in direct storage costs. This year it's taken me 6 weeks of hard effort (and is stopping me getting my job done) but I've saved the company around 80 times my annual salary in upfront software licence costs, and an ongoing 15 times my salary in support fees.
So as with you, and half the people this article refers to: Am I excess headcount, under-utilised, or an asset to the company?
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.