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

That's totally how it works

[fey000]

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...

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.

Re:That's totally how it works

[khasim]

Not only that but from the summary:

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.

Even if I was focused 100% for an 8 hour day that still wouldn't account for problems happening AFTER work.

Or to put it another way, why aren't fire fighters putting out fires 8 hours a day and then taking 16 hours off (not accounting for lunch and breaks).

Things do not happen on an orderly schedule. Tasks do not perfectly fit the time available.

And who says that browsing the Internet is not helping me be more productive?

This guy seems to have the assembly line mentality. If only the workers would stay focused we could speed up the assembly line by 15%.

Re:That's totally how it works

[Hognoxious]

To an uneducated minion like you it may look like they're they're playing golf and having huge lunches with their buddies.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They're, ummm, liaising with customers and, ummm, influencing key decision makers. I forgot, they're holistically enacting marketplace appraisal strategies at the C-suite level.

Re:That's totally how it works

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:That's totally how it works

[Charliemopps]

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...

Most. I'm a pretty big advocate of the idea that happy people are more productive people. Every place I've worked at I end up on whatever "Improve everyones view of work!" committee they have. This usually means I get to have meetings with CEO's and VP's about how to get people to like their jobs better. The nonsense those people come up with is crazy.

It's pretty typical that we'll have a few meetings where the VP wont even bother to read the minuets... then suddenly they appear one day out of the blue and it's inevitable that they have some trade magazine in tow that states that it's finally definitive! Workers don't really like money! What they like is company sponsored jogs before they clock it! or A plaque that rotates between team members to recognize special achievement! It never dawns on these 6 or 7 figure business geniuses that they've fallen for the typical "Tell them what they want to hear" nonsense that Seventeen magazine fools teenage girls with every day.

I can show them pretty consistent scientific studies that show people like being VALUED by their employer. And while it's true, there is a threshold for wealth that once you've gone over it, further raises have little impact on their dedication to work, there's is also a lower threshold where if they are consistently under paid, they'll also feel as if they're not valued.

The most important thing to convey to an employee is that they are important to the companies goals. They are valued and trusted. If none of those things are true then fire them, they're going to cost you more money than they'll make. Even a data entry person can do nothing all day if they really don't give a shit about your opinion anymore.

My goals when in such groups is to get management to understand this. To make it obvious the company needs it's people. To not only value them, but value their entire family. Good health insurance. Programs for family members to deal with mental health issues, child care, etc... Then some big ticket things. Re-reimbursement for rare disabilities and such. You can do that and maybe a couple of your employees will take advantage of the programs. But the other 1000 employees will see that and think to themselves "Wow, that's great. If I leave and go work at that other place for $10k a year more, will they care about me that much?" Granted, in the grand scheme of things they probably will. But perception is reality.

When your company has a major outage that costs a couple of hundred grand an hour while it's down, and a little known employee rises to the top and fixes it in a very creative way most executives will tell their manager to do something like give them a $50 gift card to Starbucks. How do you think that employee feels about that given that they're well aware of how much they just saved you? You know what's cheaper? Get off your ass, walk down there, and say "John, we really appreciate what you did last night. Really, personally, thank you. If you need to leave a little early today you go ahead, your manager told me how late you were up. Good job." That employee will be glued to that chair for the next 6 months guaranteed. Yet this never, ever, happens.

moronic work model

[Tom]

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.

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.

Sometimes Extra Jobs are Intentional

[JimMcc]

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.

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.

20% may be right but it is all in the top.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Almost all the senior managers, are total time wasters. They either spend time plotting meaningless metrics like, "the user story points burn down rate" or "team velocity" etc. Clueless idiots add up story points from divisions that use 1 story point = 1 engineer day with other divisions using 1 story point = 1 engineer week. They think fixing one bug that was remotely root exploit is 10 time less productive than fixing 10 dialogs with mis aligned text field with radio buttons.

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.

Office Space Nailed It

[Irate Engineer]

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.

Re:can only speak for myself, but..

[BeerCat]

"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.

Just good enough to not get fired

[swb]

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.

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:college has lot's of BS classes that not really

[Hognoxious]

There is, apparently, a huge shortage of English teachers.

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.

Down time can be a goal.

[Xeno man]

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.

More people need to work less hours

[rundgong]

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)?

Re:Obviously

[pla]

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.

Re:Obviously

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:Obviously

[Cederic]

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?

Re:college has lot's of BS classes that not really

[serviscope_minor]

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.