Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of the Pointless Job (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an article via The Guardian, written by David Graeber: One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I'm a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I would have to stack the books and not touch anything else, whereupon he would return at the earliest available opportunity. The carpenter never reappeared. Each day, someone in the anthropology department would call, often multiple times, to ask about the fate of the carpenter, who always turned out to have something extremely pressing to do. By the time a week was out, it had become apparent that there was one man employed by buildings and grounds whose entire job it was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter hadn't come. He seemed a nice man. Still, it's hard to imagine he was particularly happy with his work life.
Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. What if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are actually aware of it? Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse? There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist? I decided to investigate this phenomenon by drawing on more than 250 testimonies from people around the world who felt they once had, or now have, what I call a bullshit job. Graeber defines a "bullshit job" as "one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there's a good reason for them to be doing it." Do you feel that your work is completely unnecessary?
Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. What if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are actually aware of it? Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one's adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse? There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist? I decided to investigate this phenomenon by drawing on more than 250 testimonies from people around the world who felt they once had, or now have, what I call a bullshit job. Graeber defines a "bullshit job" as "one so completely pointless that even the person who has to perform it every day cannot convince themselves there's a good reason for them to be doing it." Do you feel that your work is completely unnecessary?
Do you feel that your work is completely unnecessary?
I can't understand how you would think that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an interstellar flight I need to catch ... A ... B -- here we go. Chat with you later!
Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.
...pointless job like....slashdot editor?
We literally canned the thoughts of our client's managers, and packaged them in powerpoint for their CEO.
And the firm was paid $1M/month for it.
This article is 100% wrong. This isn't anything about a pointless job. This professor got his first taste of union labor. Not one single union laborer in existence will go above and beyond their job. Fuck 99.9999% won't ever do their job.
This so call carpenter, who actually lacks any skill what so ever, as most union workers do. Can not pick up or move your books because that is not in his job description and also against labor union rules.
The anthropology professor could have got his/her pretty little lily-clean hands dirty and fixed the shelf him/herself. Just because you're in academia doesn't mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
So editors, how does it feel to have a pointless job?
...Professor of anthropology.
"Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything" ... said the "professor of anthropology".
Pointless job? As in Slashdot editor?
It basically says "I don't know what these people are doing, so it must be nothing", which is the most dangerous kind of ignorant. Once you've run a business, you realize that accountants, lawyers, and others are there to make it so you can focus on doing the "important" stuff, and good ones are worth their weight in gold. Think you're a smart developer? Trying doing the company books and getting the taxes right for millions of dollars worth of revenue, and do it internationally. Or defend the company against a vicious lawsuit. When these people are doing their jobs, you won't see much of anything.
No, the useless person is the one whose job is to apologize that the carpenter can't come
He wasn't saying the carpenter was useless. He's saying that there was a guy who's primary job seemed to be apologizing for why the carpenter couldn't come and help them just yet. That was the useless job.
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This is pretty common in Japan and comes in various forms. Back in 2013 the NYT did an article about workers sent to the boredom room. Many of these workers were hired into the company back in the period when lifetime employment was the way things went, so I guess many workers had contracts that made it impossible for them to be laid off. When Sony closed down a number of their older products such as Betamax or the Walkman, they couldn't fire a lot of these old timers that only knew about their specific product, so they stuffed them in 'boredom' rooms where they'd come in every day and read the newspaper or a book, and then go home after 8 hours.
I've also personally experienced similar redundant jobs in Japan. When I went to the city hall to pick up some official tax form information, they had someone that took my request form and handed it to someone who printed out the document. The printer-person confirmed the document, stamped it, and then passed it to the person sitting next to them. This next person looked it over for all of 5 seconds, stamped it and passed it to the person at the head of this block of four desks and he glanced it over and stamped it. Then the person that took my request form took it to another guy sitting in a separate desk about 5ft away ("section chief") and he stamped it and then I got my tax forms. I have no doubt that 2 of the people in this process were completely useless in most of the work they do.
I think the lesson here is that if you want to find pointless jobs, just look in highly bureaucratic systems -- there are bound to be tons.
I mean, what do they actually do?
Do people care their jobs are pointless? I suspect the answer is no. Most people are only interested in doing the minimum to get by. They will say and do what's necessary to get by, but little more. Most people won't go above and beyond or make the effort to go beyond what they need to get by. Lots of people live in their own little bubbles where they convince themselves they're incredibly busy with their everyday tasks and never go beyond that. They don't concern themselves with bigger ideas or the world around them, just the mundane tasks of their daily lives. But as long as they have enough to live on comfortably, they're more than content to not really matter. Maybe people are aware their jobs don't amount to anything, if they take the time to reflect on it, but most of them just don't care.
I was in Iceland a couple years ago, and it was someones job to collect a small free (maybe $.25?) to use the toilet. There's essentially no way this person collected enough money to justify someone doing this job. Obviously you could replace this person with a donations box, and make more money off it. It seemed the job was just busy work provided by the government to lower the unemployment rate.
What about all the people devoted to complying with pointless regulations?
Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.
We are their children.
By the time a week was out, it had become apparent that there was one man employed by buildings and grounds whose entire job it was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter hadn't come. He seemed a nice man. Still, it's hard to imagine he was particularly happy with his work life.
I know this isn't the point of the article, but univesities all over the world are stuffed with useless administrative staff to help justify endless tuition increases above inflastion.
I work for a well-known charity. I love their mission and I love my job.
I would do it for free if I could afford to.
I wish everyone could have a job where they went home thinking "I can't beleive they pay me to drive to 'work' and have fun."
Without my pointless job, id be homeless. I thank god every day for my pointless job. And i share this fortune with others when i can. Every meal, every night under a roof, every piece of clothing, is something that millions of people dont have. Something they die for trying to reach on migrant ships. Trying to flee war and tyranny. They would give everything they have to have my pointless job. I try not to take it for granted. I know that my pointless job could disappear at any time. For any reason. This pointless job is only pointless from one perspective. Its only as pointless as i allow it to be.
There is a theory that this is the underlying cause of the rise in depression. It surmises that the human need to be useful causes the drop in seratonin when it is not met. Antidepressants only treat the symptom, not the underlying cause.
So if I perform useful work for people doing a useless job, does that make my job useless?
suckle upon mine DAMN balls
Wow. Exceptional reading comprehension.
.. of capitalist society. In capitalist society most people must sell themselves in order to acquire resources to survive and the oligarchs and their state have to keep creating nonsense jobs to keep revolutionary politics from reappearing and thereby getting the funny people of the working class asking questions again.
The anthropology professor could have got his/her pretty little lily-clean hands dirty and fixed the shelf him/herself. Just because you're in academia doesn't mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
Actually, it does in a lot of places. It's stupid, but if the professor fixed it himself or herself a union would drum up massive amounts of political drama. There would be formal complaints the next day.
a pot is calling a kettle black...
The guy telling us this is a professor of anthropology.
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To some extent I agree with Anonymous Coward here in that accountants, lawyers and others can be doing something important and 'good ones are worth their weight in gold'. But I suspect that to some extent they are needed because of other inefficiencies. We've grown so productive thanks to technology that we can bear the strain put on us by non productive things that would have been impossible to support 100 years ago. One particularly dismal example is how many people are in prison now. Economically, we could not have supported that a century ago.
Famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in 1930 predicting a 15 hour work week by projecting how workers were steadily becoming more productive. But it hasn't happened.
Historian C. Northcote Parkinson came up with "Parkinson's Law" that work expands to fulfil the time available. So I suspect that is partly also what has derailed the 15 hour work week.
I think there's something in human nature that causes us to never be satisfied. If there's a society where things are all hunky dory, pretty soon neighbors will feud over what used to be trifles, fashions and manners will become very elaborate, new religious cults will arise, until the general level of stress is barely tolerable again. I suppose this is so because back in the days when we were all hunter gatherers, the tribes that were laid back got pushed out by the ones who never had enough.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Pointless jobs help keep the unemployment rate low. Management creates a few high salary pointless titles for their cronies and others build their empires. What's left of the unions have a go with their empires as well. Stockholders turn a blind eye as long as the bottom line holds up.
The professor of anthropology naively assumed that the carpenter was qualified to correctly convey the procedure. The system has become deadlocked,
because the carpenter is waiting for the appropriate parties to signal the completion of their tasks so that the carpenter can safely return and repair the
shelving.
The actual procedure is as follows:
1. The professor submits a report to his superior in the anthropology department explaining that the carpenter was not qualified to perform the task.
2. The Anthropology department reviews the report for accuracy, signs and dates it, and forwards the document to the facilities manager.
3. The Facilities manager then brings in a consultant to assess the situation.
4. The Consultant then requests the services of three individuals:
A: A librarian - to personally enumerate, collect, and stack the books (because we need a qualified individual to handle those books)
B: A Garbage Truck Driver (with Truck) - To dispose the books (because we once against need a qualified individual to handle those books)
C: A Fire Marshal - To supervise the situation, ensure safe performance of the job, to inspect the room afterward
All three, upon completion of this sub-task, then submit reports directly to the Carpenter, indicating that the unsafe circumstance has been remedied and that he may now return and perform the requested repairs.
5. The carpenter then returns, observes that the metal frame is damaged, and declares that the services of a qualified metallurgist is required before repairs can be made to the shelving.
6. At this point, another report goes to the anthropology department, then facilities, then we bring in the consultant again.
7. The Consultant then gives his qualified report indicating a need for a metallurgist to repair the metal frame, so in he comes.
8. The metallurgist then takes a look at the room and the damage, and states that the work environment is unsafe by reason of the many broken pieces of wood scattered around the damaged frame.
9. So, once again, another report to the anthropology department, then facilities, then the consultant, at which point the Fire Marshal, Garbage Truck Driver, and carpenter are brought in to manage the broken pieces of wood away, then the requisite set of reports to the metallurgist so he can return and safely proceed with the repairs.
10. The metallurgist then returns, repairs the damaged frame, and submits a report to the carpenter informing him that the frame has been restored to a functional state.
11. The carpenter then returns, observes that there are no undamaged wooden shelves, then submits a report to facilities stating that the task is complete and certifying the functional state of all wooden shelves in the professor's office.
12. Facilities forwards the report to the anthropology department, and the anthropology department informs the professor that his office has been restored to working condition.
By stacking the books himself, the professor performed part of the Librarian's job for him. There are no provisions for the librarian to simply enumerate already-stacked books. That librarian becomes subject to blame, should he deviate in any way from the procedure, so his only option is to have nothing to do with it -- meaning no report to the carpenter. Though the carpenter may get two of the three reports he needs, he'll be waiting indefinitely on the Librarian's report.
You bastard, you beat me to it. I logged in specifically to make that observation. Bastard. I bet you wear bastard T shirts and bastard shorts and have a bastard laptop. Bastard.
Remember, his memo is accurate to a "t" -- i loved his memo.
At the end of any day, no one cares, no one matters, no one deserves, you are only as good as who you believe in.. I believe in only a few.
I have lived all these lives mentioned over thousands of years and the meaning of life is: "you are not alone"
All the tv chaos we see is just terrible and not acceptable. i am appalled that our world does not stop that sooner and stop the crazy.
The deadlines placed on you by others who have a higher pay or title are just part of the equation to achieve a result which you agreed to be a part of...
Take charge of yourself and if you love your life, just relax, breathe, and realize you are just part of an amazing experiment and greater good.
~Drew
You are the 4th person making the same joke.
You are the 2nd person making the same joke.
You are the 3rd person making the same joke.
You are the 3.5th person making the same joke.
No, the useless person is the one whose job is to apologize that the carpenter can't come
That guy's job wasn't to apologize for the carpenter, it was to distract the anthropologist such that the carpenter could get some work done.
That's probably the foreman. There's that joke about how a small town wanted to hire a caretaker to take care of a work yard. Due to government regulations, any workman would have to have a supervisor. The supervisor would also need a superintendant. Because public funds were being spent, they would need an accountant. They would also need a recruitment coordinator. A health-and-safety advisor would also be needed due to manual labor. After a year, they were over budget and fired the caretaker.
I've worked in companies where they had a manager/worker ratio of 1:3. The director sits in the office behind three managers, who each supervised a lead engineer, who in turn supervised three engineers. The three managers and director were in their own office. The lead engineers/help desk manager were right next door. Everyone just spent their time printing out task lists (what would be Jira today) and getting them approved by each other. This was bedore the paperless office and a year later the entire management layer was then flattened to a ratio of 1:7 like the film Office Space.
The latest thing I've encountered is with Agile process. One engineer had to become the "architect" who was allowed to describe how things were to be implemented but not actually see or review the source code.
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A professor of anthropology waxing philosophical about other bullshit jobs? Come on, the jokes write themselves.
The "pointless job" is that of the anthropologist, who cannot be bothered to get some boxes and *put their departments' books in them*. Or, in this situation, the janitorial staff who cannot help with the cleanup.
I spent a few years working in England for the BBC and dealing with various banks. British "health and safety" practices are, in fact, this confusing and inane, interpreted on the fly by local bureaucrats who cannot be bothered to read or understand the original regulations.
Ha ha ha ha ha
This is so true
Do you work for the ATO?
Imagine this, you spend half a year building something. You put your best effort to it so you can be really proud of what you do. Then after half a year, the company changes its mind and decides to stop the project and commands you to destroy all the code.
Or this: You are assigned to maintain an old project, you know that in a year it will be thrown away and will be replaced with a new one, but you still need to learn the old code base so you can do emergency fixes and even new features that are required while waiting for the new version. After a year all that you have learned will be worthless and all improvements you did will be thrown away.
These are both real situations I have encountered in my work.
What could be more pointless than to have a job producing videos that everyone ignores?
How about
- Bellhops
- Free community newspaper editors
- Sign spinners
4 different people converging on the same idea is better than 1 person saying the same thing 4 times.
There was a Job in New Orleans
They called it a pointless job
and it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
and lord, I know, I'm one
My mother was a receptionist
sold my commodore 64
My father was a program man
scripting in brainfuck
The only thing a scripter needs
is an editor and some luck
And the only time, he's satisfied
when he's, using, a thunk
Oh Mother, tell your children
Not to be a cunt
Spend your life in sincere misery
In the house of the pointless Job
Not attached to a platform
No, specific, tool chain
I'm goin' back, to New Orleans
To slowly go insane
Well, there is a Job in New Orleans
They call the Pointless Job
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I'm one
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Wait! What? Anthropology professor? Now thats a useless job in my books. Talking about the pot calling the kettle black! Sheesh
Sometimes it's easier to just do it yourself, but it's not that simple in this professor's case.
Don't forget that it wasn't his property to fix; It was the institution's property. He technically didn't have the right to fix it. In fact, he likely would've gotten in trouble with his building's facilities management team.
What if he was working in an older university building, and there was asbestos mitigation that had to take place due to federal and state regulations? That's legal liability that has to be considered.
And that says nothing about some union people getting upset about someone doing their job for them.
As much as it sucks for the professor, he probably did the right thing and let it go - other than cleaning up the initial mess, of course.
And you'd think a bunch of tech nerds who work in IT would know that you spend a lot of time apologizing for broken things that can't be fixed because nobody has enough money. It's just as likely the Carpenter knew they weren't going to be given the time or materials to do the job and so they're putting it off. It's a school, and we've been cutting funding to those for 30 years.
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Why were the books still on the ground!? What kind of company doesn't employ a book pickeruperer for such situations?
Anthropologist, and Guardian columnist.
I think you're mistaken. He and the people in his department kept calling that dude, so clearly the apologizer was in demand. The anthropology professor's job however...
I do a job that you could pay an Indian a third of my wage and even they'd feel overpaid. I'm not complaining; I work about 2 hours a week (get paid for 40 on salary). Six figures. This is the same company that has 2 consultants making 200k (GBP)+ year and the only thing they do is sit on conference calls and say "Yes, that sounds good, please send me the meeting notes" while they're obviously doing something else. But they were brought on by a previous C-level and no one knows what to do with them or what they actually do. It's really fucking weird.
The apology was futile, the same amount of work would have been done if they'd kept calling and never got through to anyone
You know, I'd almost opt voluntarily for a "boredom" room job. Bring suitable study material, have a quiet place to study, and get paid for it.
Me, I don't have a job, so I'm living on savings in this western european welfare state that both refuses me benefits and doesn't allow me to earn my own living in any way at all. And the savings have run out. So a "boredom" room looks pretty much like heaven to me right now, yes.
That's not a useless job. The apologizer was doing an extremely important job. Without him, the carpenter would become so distracted and completely bogged down in responding to status update requests that he wouldn't have any time to do any carpeting.
It's important to protect your most valued assets so they can focus on doing solely what they do best. This is why management is supposed to exist. This concept is everywhere in manufacturing plants, dev ops, software development, trade jobs, etc... You don't have your AI experts writing style sheets. The anthropology department was effectively trying to harass the carpenter. Why didn't they attempt to schedule an appointment for the future rather than constantly calling "are you ready now"? The people in the anthropology department who spent their time calling multiple times each day are the people with the useless jobs. Clearly they didn't have enough tasks to do. Couldn't it be understandable that there was more important things to work on than a broken book shelf? Wouldn't it be safe to assume the guy picking up the phone would have been doing something else if the anthropology folks weren't constantly calling him?
How could the department not have the foresight to move the books? Did they want the books damaged by someone who might not know how to properly care for them? Did they think the carpenter would know which things were ok to displace so that he could make room for a stack of books? Did they think he could do construction work while trying to carefully step around tripable and slidable objects on the floor? Did they want the books put back out of order? The people in the department have no common sense. Useless people.
What we need is less people making snap judgments and instead thinking things through a bit more before complaining.
I feel like 25% of the company are critical, the rest just kind of pretend to do things.
Ask any MBA manager who does nothing but has meetings all day to set you straight. Technology is not important nor impacts productivity at all. Now back to generating wealth for the shareholders by having management who make up 50% of the office do more meetings
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im a psychiatric social worker. i try to help people with severe drug and mental health problems move forward. i often dont get results, but the effort has been scientificially proven to help people overall. (evidence based practice) now, some of the billing and other routines on the job often seem pointless, but the engagement is truly useful. now, if we had better preventive measures and more social supports, my job would be less overwhelmingly necessary, but we have no cure for MI or addiction, and no vaccine for either. so there you go. one good job.
I wish I could get hold of a copy (electronically or in dead tree format, but I recall vividly a story by the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell. Several of his stories and novels had a slightly anti authoritarian and anti establishment feel (Next of Kin, Allamagoosa and Wasp being prime examples which are available in ebook formats).
His "Study in Still Life" though is the classic. It was written in the late 50s/early 60s but is still 100% relevant. Essentially it's about a bureaucrat who games the system to prioritise life saving equipment: the request and its approval / traceability / fulfilment process is described in detail at each stage for what is basically a bundle up and put in the mail activity -- it would be comic if it were not (still today) very true. The twist in the tail about bureaucratic hierarchies is a real gem.
Read it if you get the chance [and please post a link if you find a copy online as I'd love to read it again :-) ]
No, if you create a useful output, (it meets the client criteria, and they pay for it), then by definition your job is "useful". Does not necessarily make it a "good" one.
Anyway, sounds like you need a change...
Wal-Mart Greeters, Security Guards, Priests and Prophets of all Imaginary Gods are equally useless and especially the priests are downright malevolent. If people would just behave properly, then millions of minders would be able to do something useful.
Not useless, just ultimately unnecessary..
His own: anthropology professor.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
That dude must have started his own religion now, having magically disappeared of the face of the Earth for no reason.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Seriously. The most useless function populated by useless people.
Closely followed by the process guys.
No, that would not have placated them, and they might have caused more problems, for example by complaining to higher-ups. The misunderstanding is that the apologizer's job was to get the bookshelf repaired. His job is that of a "firewall": To stop the damage from spreading. Now, about the anthropology professor's job...
My favourite e-book site has a copy, and I've posted it here.
Also some bad news - I'm not going to post the address of the site I pulled it from, as I still want to be able to use it...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
This is hilarious on a number of levels, not in the least because the person writing about "bullshit jobs" is an anthropologist--a field of science that originally had a goal, had its goal branded politically inappropriate and scientifically not rigorous enough, and then transitioned into an eternal cycle of doing nothing but self-reflecting on par with some kind of Buddhist monastery.
The whole area of humanities--which I originally come from myself--and large chunks of social sciences are by and large jobs in search of a job. You need not look further than the most junior level entrants into the job: the Ph.D. candidates. I know a number of people both in STEM and in humanities and have been to general meetings and colloquia of both. STEM candidates usually have a work group that has a problem and a team leader that coordinates the new entrants to solve the problem and produce results. It's not perfect, but it's objective driven more often than it is not. Humanities candidates on the other hand each have their own project that they make up and meet on a weekly basis to discuss how they can "problematize" their research. The people who get the most ahead are the ones who are best are "problematizing" their research, whatever that research may be about. It still annoys me to this day to think of some of the mundane crap I had to sit through and then sit through some more as two dolts were discussing whether they should call something A or B for half an hour, because A sounds more foreign, but B is used in the literature.
Quite frankly, our dear anthropologist should probably do some more self-reflecting and determine if his job is not a "bullshit job". Out of all the candidates I have run across and I have run across many different breeds from humanities--mostly historians, area studies people and anthropologists--anthropologists are by far the most bullshitty of them all. At least the guy whose job is apologizing for why the carpenter didn't complete the task on time is working towards keeping the client--because the carpenter sure as hell can't--and thus a presumably profitable business afloat. The only thing Dr. Graeber is doing is wasting the taxes paid by the same business because some capital bureaucrat deemed his research worthwhile without having the slightest idea of what it is about. Everybody in humanities know that this is precisely how it works.
This is getting very religeous.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
> The latest thing I've encountered is with Agile process. One engineer had to become the "architect"
That sounds absolutely retarded. Yes, there should be an architect, or someone with a high level view of what the total product should be.
But what is the point of not having them see, or write code?
I see your point, but I suspect the anthropologists were more calling repeatedly to see what would happen than to actually get the bookshelf fixed
He wasn't saying the carpenter was useless. He's saying that there was a guy who's primary job seemed to be apologizing for why the carpenter couldn't come and help them just yet. That was the useless job.
And, of course, saying that is a bloody stupid thing to do since it's 100% certain that the guy did quite a lot of different things in addition to apologizing for the carpenter.
He's saying that there was a guy who's primary job seemed
And this is fundamentally the problem with his premise. Most of the things he complains about is not someone's primary job, but rather some single side part of their job. The guy postulated that there's a man employed to apologise, but in reality there's a man employed to manage facilities with the incredible amount of shit that comes with it who occasionally will have to apologise because of backlogged work.
The key words were in the first line of the second paragraph: "to the outsider". In otherwords, you have no idea what's going on and don't claim to understand what people's jobs actually entail.
We used to have a similar problem at my government job. We had modular furniture and the wall hanging brackets would pull out of the shelf supports. What was the fix? Well the government wanted to get them replaced under warranty. So you could wait about a year for the levels of government to communicate to the contractor who supplied the modular furniture who would then interface with the make of the modular furniture. In a matter of months, you would be certain that you were going to get a new set of brackets. At some point. In the future. Maybe.
Would the government fix the shelves? No, of course not. It had a warranty!
Five minute epoxy (and I needed my MSDS sheet on file if the other group of bullshit people found that in my office) and a hammer and the shelves were fixed and back in service.
Unions are my first thought as well. They often define these incredibly narrow jobs, in order to create more roles for more people. I've told the story before, but my first encounter with this was installing a sewage plant automation system. My company had programmed the computer, and we were installing the computer and the software. As part of these, I was sent around to all the various valves and actuators and such, with the job to test whether or not wire A on the one end really did correspond to the wire labelled "A" on the other end.
For this, I obviously needed someone from the sewage plant, who knew where all the valves and actuators were physically located. Fine, that's two of us. Now the union rules start: neither of us was allowed to do anything. There was the guy who opened the physical casings. There was the second guy who physically attached the leads from the multimeter. There was the third guy who was allowed to actually look at the multimeter. And there was the fourth guy, from operations, who had to be physically present because union regulations said so. Six people, in total, where only two were needed (as an EE, I was perfectly capable of handling the connections, multimeter, etc.).
Did any of these people resent having such a narrowly defined job? Imagine, for example, the guy who is allowed to attach the multimeter leads to the actuator, but was not allowed to actually look at the multimeter: does that job make any sense? I dunno, but I expect after a while you just figure it's a cushy job, requiring little effort, and you're glad to go home at the end of the day and drink a beer.
The result, of course, is higher taxes (in this case, because the sewage plant is paid for by taxes), or else needlessly expensive products (US auto makers' downfall: to stay price competitive, given union-driven labor costs, they have to cut corners on quality).
Of course, the other group are government bureaucrats. In private industry, cruft is eventually cleaned out by falling profits. The government has no such external constraint. So there are plenty of bureaucrats who shove papers around. They may not realize how useless their job is, because they are just complying with regulations - it's the regulations that need to go, thus eliminating the excuse for the useless positions. But that would reduce someone's little empire, so it never happens...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Socialism turns potentially productive people into useless eaters.
The UK is a democratic socialist country which believes that capitalism is inherently incompatible with equality and that the state, therefore, has the charter to step in and order everyone's lives about to make things fair.
So of course in a place where everyone waits for the government to tell them what to do, those books are staying right there on the floor until a maverick comes along with common sense and picks them up.
That kind of schtuff doesn't happen as much in the US, because individuals are expected to act independently.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The latest thing I've encountered is with Agile process. One engineer had to become the "architect" who was allowed to describe how things were to be implemented but not actually see or review the source code.
Seems excessive.
OTOH it is probably a good idea to have a project manager that doesn't do actual work in the project.
When you work at the project you manage it is very easy to just try to fix things instead of actually managing the project.
That means that the project manager might not realize that some parts took longer than expected and what the consequences are for the rest of the project.
It is also a lot harder to get the big picture if you are too involved in the details. If you try to fix small problems then you might not see that it is possible to cut out/replace that entire part of the project or postpone it to the second iteration of a product or whatever.
That doesn't mean that the project manager should just sit on his ass, but when he does non-management work then perhaps it should be with other projects than the one he manages.
The latest thing I've encountered is with Agile process. One engineer had to become the "architect" who was allowed to describe how things were to be implemented but not actually see or review the source code.
And like most things labeled "Agile", it has nothing to do with Agile development... Still, that's not bad at all!
I (briefly) held a job in which the architect not only described at a high level how things were to be implemented, but before you could start coding you had to provide the architect with a detailed implementation plan for him to approve, and at the end he had to review and approve the final code. There was one architect and some 40 developers. By the time I left, my entire team had been idling for an entire two-week sprint because the architect was still working through last month's paperwork, and we'd yet to be given the go-ahead to actually write any code. (This, management told us, was supposed to be Scrum.)
Which is probably why he went and asked people idiot, that is how you learn things you realize you don't know but someone else probably does.
He collected 250 stories of people who did not think there was any point in what they did. Is that all anecdotal or is 250 starting to become data; can't say don't know enough about the study objectives but it's a start
You pick up the fucking books before the carpenter arrived. Or was that something that Professors don't do? Maybe you could have taken your head out of your academic ass and done something pro-active towards the fucking problem. Then the carpenter could have fixed the problem immediately. But then again, that wouldn't have fulfilled your cynical narrative would it.
Maybe you just don't understand it . . .
considering modern jobs... and especially the contracts... carpenter prolly didnt get paid for shifting those books by himself due contract... my friend is cleaner and she doesnt get paid for wiping freezer's or coffee table... if she does... she is doing it on her sparetime... and if ordered to wipe then its xyzed extra cost for corporatino that purchases and she can clean it for same salary as regularly, but cleaning company charges hefty extra... its insane
I am paid full time to work ~15 minutes a day 5 days a week. The rest of the time I am paid to sit in a chair and wait for work to happen. Realistically my work could be absorbed into some of my co-workers' roles but lucky for me they haven't chosen to do so.
Of all the comments, yours shows you actually know what was going on. Probably dick all the Carpenter can do. And absolutely the person who's tasked with answering phones in the maintenance department can't just up and tell a professor to sod off.
It's that old saying, too many Chiefs not enough Indians. Probably a racist statement these days but still true. We hire people to do jobs that make little sense and certainly are not productive jobs. Some jobs actually make money for a company, which is good. Some are just liabilities that cost money and that's bad. We should want less jobs that cost money. Unfortunately too many jobs in public sector are handed out like candy.
I'm a developer. My job is stimulating, well-rewarded, indoors and in the warm. I work for a company that connects holidaymakers to holiday cottage owners, taking bookings for a very reasonable cut. It's a good company, the people are lovely, and it's nice to think my work is making people happy.
However, I'm still a hairless ape with delusions of importance, desperately grasping for meaning as I cling to the surface of a precarious, unprepossessing ball of rock orbiting a very average star in the suburbs of the galaxy. In an eye blink, I will not be. Neither will the holiday makers. The sun need only hiccup for my planet, along with everything that ever gave me meaning to be scorched from existence, and the universe would not blink.
Define 'Useless'.
but suffering from bibliophobia.
How many people in the university actually live and work in the outside world, the real, physical world? Not many. So, they don't understand or appreciate the critical necessity for people who do, the carpenters, mechanics, technicians etc., people who can and do get things done with their hands. Not understanding means not appreciating means not valuing means not funding and manning properly the positions. It would be more economical and understandable to them to hire one essentially useless desk-sitting, phone- manning, "Dean of Apologizing," than to hire the correct number of carpenters. Must keep the budget down after all. And while the task the professor wants accomplished seems important to him the carpenter may just have looked it over and determined it was way down his list of priorities in his busy work day. Bookshelf for some entitled professor? Nope, not now. Besides, why did the professor expect the carpenter to move and pile his books for him? Did he call a servant?
E Proelio Veritas.
For those few who made it as far as reading the Guardian piece, here's an earlier version of Graeber's argument.
You seem to think society exists to support companies. On the contrary, there is no purpose to the economy, and hence no purpose to allowing companies to exist, unless the activity supports society. Companies exist and have a purpose purely because they can be a benefit to society.
To allow companies to burn out their workers and toss them aside is silly. Companies that are so dysfunctional should be dissolved, and then companies that work properly will take their place.
A corollary to the useless job appears to be the important, but extremely scarce job. The carpenter probably had to join a union, spend years in apprenticeship, and the combination of limited intake by the union and a long training pipeline creates a labor cartel that is artificially scarce. What if, instead of an overscheduled carpenter and a full-time coordinator/apologist, there were two carpenters, likely for the same or less pay? How would that be accomplished in a modern labor market?
I don't know if this is a pointless job but here goes; real estate agents.
You visit one and ask what houses are available to go visit them and perhaps negotiate through them with the home owner on the price and then meet to sign the paperwork.
All this could be done twice as fast and twice as accurate on a website. I log in, set my search parameters like location and price, see some photos, click bid like on eBay, read the terms and conditions and click accept. Perhaps do the final handshake at the bank.
Pointless jobs? You mean like 90% of all high tech jobs? Lol.
The story describes a standard union work rules situation. The carpenter arrives on scene and notesthat there are books on the floor. But the Book-Stackers Local is tied up right now on a library addition. Eventually, the prof restacks the books himself. Now he can have the carpenter over, but when word gets out about the prof's unauthorized performance of union work, he will be denied tenure.
The good news is that there is a decent position waiting for him at Arizona State.
I had a co-worker with more than 30 years with our company. Many of our co-workers would comment that his job was pointless, all he had to do was to pass out hard copies of a printed schedule to people in his department and then try to look busy for the rest of the day.
The gentlemen confessed to me, in his office, that he knew his job was pointless. He said that he overheard people in his department commenting that things ran better when he was on vacation because people just downloaded the PDF and looked at it on their computers instead of waiting for the hard copy. He also told me that he saved a significant part of his salary as he lived in fear that the company would realize he had nothing to do and would fire him. He intended to "ride the gravy train" as long as possible but would get ready for the inevitable firing. As it turned out, the company shut down the plant and everyone lost their jobs.
I estimate that 2/3 of all the employees were busy doing real value added work and 1/3 were trying to look busy. A significant percentage of the busy people were less than satisfactory at their jobs because they resented the people that were carried with little to do. The work ethic of many people was adversely affected by the dissatisfaction with management.
The problem with pointless jobs is that we have the entire ecosystem built around earning and consuming. This isn't going to go away without a fight. And when you consider that most technical jobs are going to be automated, pointless work will be all that's left pretty soon.
I've worked in big companies for most of my career, and there are plenty of jobs like this. Not, "Oh, you don't see everything I do behind the scenes" type jobs, but jobs that could be automated with nearly zero effort. The techies among us will jump on writing whatever shell script is needed, but I don't think automating everything is a good idea.
"Luddite!" you cry...not exactly. Here's the problem...large companies provide semi-stable employment and are almost the only source of stable employment outside of government. Thousands of graduates come out of Big State University with some generic management, psychology or communications degree they partied their way through. If all the pointless jobs go away, there's nowhere to employ these people, and they won't buy houses, buy cars, go on vacations, pay property taxes, have children, and basically keep the consumer economy going.
tl;dr: Unless you want to break the work-for-money-so-you-can-consume cycle, think of the C students. :-)
are like that. We have a lot of programming systems that are still in use. Money is budgeted every year for their maintenance just in case a change has to be made or there is a program failure of some sort. Almost no work is ever done so these programmers sit at their desk and browse the internet. Of course the IT department will never do something about this since it would be suicide to cut your own budget.
Real (inflation adjusted) median household income has in fact increased 265% since Keynes wrote that. Average home size has also tripled, because apparently we'd rather buy ever larger homes and TVs instead of working less.
Just wondering.
They are a Muslim after all.
Anyone who has worked in a large defense company has observed people who had no identifiable skills or duties, yet were hanging around on the payroll. A common characteristic is that they were buddies with lots of other people and had been there a long time. Some of them were managers who were known to have "retired on the job" - which did not appear to interfere with their continued employment.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Btw when I wrote "Average home sizes have tripled, because apparently we'd rather buy ever larger homes and TVs instead of working less", I was sitting outside my 3,500 square foot house. I share this house with my wife and daughter.
My mom grew up in a 1,200 sq foot house, in a family of six. They had 1,200 sq feet for the family, I have 1,200 sq feet PER PERSON. My dad's family home was probably 850 sq feet, for a family of five.
I might be silly. I *could* instead work a three-month contract once a year, taking 9 months off each year, and have a standard of living more like my parents grew up with.
I've known people who took delight in doing as little as possible. In fact they put a lot of effort into performing as few job-related tasks as they could. While, of course, getting paid.
They felt they were quite clever about getting one over on The Man.
When a person has a worthless life then yes, everything including their job is worthless. Most of you people today have no goals in life. What? You disagree?
What accomplishments have you made or will make that are noteworthy? The key word here is 'noteworthy'? Raise a good family is a good answer. It doesn't have to be an earth shattering event such as declaring to save mother earth. But the fact is that the vast majority of young people have 'goals' that are sing, dance, get high, get drunk, fornicate, and have a good time. Those are NOT goals, but shallow self-indulging interests.
So, if you look for meaning in your work, keep looking because there are just as many jobs out there today that are not pointless as there were 20 years ago.
The job described, managing the scarcity of carpentry at a university, isn't completely pointless so is a bad example. Our economy is not so advanced that it can avoid scarcity of a lot of things. That is why we use price to regulate demand. Sometimes we manage scarcity through rationing or long lines to get service instead. If you don't want riots, you probably need someone to manage the rationed or delayed people.
In this particular instance, 2 carpenters would probably have been a better idea than 1 carpenter and an apologist. But for all I know, that area has a carpenter shortage. I don't think the guy who has to manage the big faculty egos is doing nothing.
A humongous amount of jobs these days revolve around marketing and sales. Apart from the small minority that actually brings some fun to our lives (I'm talking about you, Red Bull) or actually provides some useful information about innovations that I might like, they are utterly pointless. The software they use is pointless and we have thousands of marketing software packages with overlapping features. All pointless.
Then we have the vast majority of software engineers that work on making and integrating these useless solutions. All pointless, just like the people maintaining their offices and sitting at the desk in front of it.
That's what capitalism is. Practically nobody does anything because it is useful. They do it because they can make some money. The alternative is communism, which trades pointlessness for inefficiency.
There used to be some jobs that were less pointless. They still exist, but they're a monitory. Those are the jobs that provide us with homes, food, fun, care and knowledge. The rest is all pointless. Or maybe they all are, because what is the point of humanity anyway?
0x or or snor perron?!
what do most professors do? regurgitate others works. most are as replaceable as tissue paper. the professor is as unnecessary as the faux carpenter. Doubly so since he was such a lazy useless ass he didn't want to pick up books.
Anyone whose job title begins with "Chief" and ends with "Officer", for example.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Apparently the person who taught you to read was useless.
Warning, the planet is doomed! Please grab your belongings and head to the Ark Ships.
If you are a scientist , engineer, or a doer Take Ark Ship C.
If you are in a management or political position Take Ark ship A
All others, Hairdressers, Telephone Sanitizers, etc..Take Ark Ship B.
The first Ark ship to depart will be B so hurry and get your things... Time is running out...
I was there, I was the light bulb
One could argue that being an anthropology professor is a completely pointless job.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
All jobs are pointless. If you have meaning in your life it's because you managed to create it yourself out of the pointlessness of your existence, not because there was inherent meaning in it.
The UK is a democratic socialist country
No it isn't, it's pretty centrist.
that capitalism is inherently incompatible with equality and that the state, therefore, has the charter to step in and order everyone's lives about to make things fair.
Lolwut? Have you ever actually been here?
That kind of schtuff doesn't happen as much in the US, because individuals are expected to act independently.
Have you ever been to the US either?
Honestly it sounds like you've been living in ther libertarian paradise of mum's basement where you never actually see the real world.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
> No I do not live in Silicon Valley. I live in a crappy, somewhat iffy, part of Orange County California. You can't pin this on lack growth/development.
You anticipated my question. I lived on Orange County when I was a kid. I now live in a very nice Dallas suburb. For 3,500 sq feet, I paid $240,000, 18 months ago. I say I paid $240K - I paid about $19K or $20K out of my pocket. The rest of the down payment was seller concessions, a rebate from the agent, etc.
If I had bought a brand new house in a nice neighborhood, I would get maybe 2,100 sq feet for the price. My house hadn't had updates since it was built in the 1990s. The sellers should have spent $10K on updates and sold the house for $35,000 more. Stupid shit I fixed in 15 minutes, like an incorrectly wired outlet, cost them thousands of dollars at resale.
Along with wondering where you live, I also wondered exactly what your "STEM degree" is and if you actively manage your career.
.. of communist society. In communism, you wait for some bureaucrat to decide your worth for you, from cradle to grave. Those who dare to take individual initiative are sent to reeducation gulags lest their fascist questioning of state mandates spread to the working class.
I'm sorry, but a lot of you folks don't seem to understand the implication of the article. No, it's not about unions and "less regulation" will make the problem much worse.
The real question is if the economic system we have allows everyone to make a living. Because, you know, there is no rule which says that capitalism generates jobs which pays the bills
for everyone. It did not, does not and will never, in no country around the globe, for a period longer than a few years.
[In case you're wondering... Do I want communism? Nope. The right answer is something completely new and a lot of intelligent minds will be needed to come up with a good solution. But this doesn't stop me from calling bullshit when I see it.]
Remember, you do not have a job to have a job. It's to pay your bills. If it does not pay your bills, you obviously don't need it. Employment is not an end in itself.
So, if there's not enough "real work" for people to do, OF COURSE there will be bullshit jobs. Because, honestly, you can't tell a good and growing percentage of the populace to go fuck themselves because they can't support themselves in the system they are provided with. Yes, I repeat, they are provided with this system, people have no opt-out choice, and still they are told "oh, it doesn't work for you, can't be the system's fault, oops". Do that too much and you're begging for rising crime rates, because obviously, if people can't find a way to feed themselves legally, they will find other ways. Do it even more and you get a revolution.
Please, don't be naiive. This "from the dishwasher to the millionaire" thing is a fairy-tale. And still, a lot of people act like addicts when they want even more "tax cuts, less regulation, less wellfare,
less job security", because it worked oh-so-well in the past. It worked so well in fact that there are people living in the sewers in every major US city, and a good percentage of the populace can't
afford even basic healthcare needs [and now I'm waiting for people to point out that it's obviously their fault if they're living in the sewers... surely it cannot be the perfect system]. Welcome to the third world...
I haven't held a pointless job, but I've sure had pointless tasks added to a job that I was doing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I have to confess that in my younger days I was part of turning Ft. Lauderdale into a mess. i mover there in 1953 as a child and went to work doing such things as concrete work, clearing land, installing traffic and street lights and other things. like most people i had been told that making a place more desirable was a good thing as it attracted tourists as well as new residents who were impressed with area. What we did was create a horrible mess. People came by the millions to Ft.Lauderdale and surrounding suburbs. the town has killed off almost all wild life, polluted the waters, now has crime rates and morals of the lowest type etc.. Doing most of the work that I did has helped to ruin a good place to live. The public would have been better off if they payed me to do nothing. I am one of millions that should admit that. All i can tell you is that when you hear the word growth look at the person who wants growth as if he was Satan's best friend.
If all goes well, we'll be skipping the cyberpunk age pretty quickly and move into diamond age style post scarcity. No need for too many jobs then anymore.
15 hours per week and person would do perfectly fine already. All over the planet.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whose journalistic standards have fallen precipitously over the last few years.
What is really "necessary"?
So you'd have us believe that an anthropology professor is such a dysfunctional human being they wouldn't even pick up some books after a shelf collapsed? Or that a carpenter that apparently never shows up anywhere can make it to the office so promptly that he gets there before said books are picked up, and then never shows up again after that? Something about that story doesn't add up. In fact, I think it's just made up. And what's more pointless than making up a story about someone with a pointless job? That's like the most pointless job of all!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The anthropology professor/major has been the but of more than one joke on a pretty useless profession. And I do understand they fill a niche.
Not necessary in a communist one. hell your whinge about lazy fucks was already discussed and shown to be a shibboleth of no actual true nature. Fucking crab bucket mentality makes people claim it, though, incandescent in rage that "someone else is getting away with it", so ensuring that nobody wins.
That sewer is nothing but a drain. Pointless jobs, including the 435 members of congress, and the 100 senators.
Pretty much.
I've quit two jobs because they were pointless like this. The punchline: I'm a software engineer, not a bureaucrat. There was definitely meaningful work to be done in both cases. I knew what had be done & I very much wanted to do it. However, my immediate managers were very bent on managing me, and they managed me in a way that I could not get real work done, at least not at any meaningful rate. After wasting countless days of my life being managed in each case, I ultimately said "f it" and quit.
Yeah, that's probably one of the worst places for this.
As has been discussed elsewhere, you'll have people being sent left and right on health and safety courses, telling you what you can and cannot do. If you try and complete a job that is not your official job (Just put the bloody shelf up yourself), and it doesn't have the paperwork to go with it - good luck with that.
There are Administrators. And Administrative Administrators. And Office Administrative Administrators to administrate the Administrative Administrators. The Vogons were likely based solely on the administrative system of a UK university.
Whereas the academic side of a UK university is whichever race can get to a villa in southern France the fastest.
I started reading the article with interest, and got down to where he defined Goons,
The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies
Call the military goons if you like, but the logic behind calling it a bullshit job is, well, bullshit. It's like saying that we wouldn't need programmers if there weren't computers. Or, we wouldn't need police if there was no crime.
Just another day in Paradise
"I’m a professor of anthropology at a university." asking about pointless jobs that don't produce?
And people wonder what Bernie's "jobz for allz" will look like.
> I don't get what people see in big houses.
Aside from "impress your friends and family" (with your stupidity?) I can only tell you how *I* ended up in a house much too big.
I'm a tinkerer, with a lot of hobbies, so it's worth something to me to have room to work on model planes, DJ lighting rigs, and all manner of other things. Ideally I'd like to live at Jamie Hyneman's M5 Industries shop. :)
When I was shopping for a home, houses were being sold in about a day or two, so buyers really didn't have time to think much about a specific house, to analyze things before putting in an offer. I was shopping for about 1,900-2,100 sq feet when I came across one in the same price range that has 3,500. That's an extra 1,400 FOR FREE*. I don't need all that room, but I'll take it if I get it for free, I figured.
What I didn't account for, because I hadn't planned on buying something this big, was that insurance cost is based on REPLACEMENT cost, not purchase price. So my insurance is based on what it would cost to build a brand new 3,500 sq foot house. Taxable value also uses square footage as a major factor.
* One reason I got an extra 1,400 sq feet "for free" was because the previous owner hadn't done various simple maintenance and upgrade tasks. There were several jobs around the house that will each take anywhere from a few minutes (replacing worn door knobs) to a weekend (painting some rooms) which they never got around to doing. The kitchen light is the old style with two four-foot fluorescent tubes; recessed can lights are in style now. It'll take a couple hours to upgrade that. (But I'm waiting to see what new styles come out based on high output LED technology).
Federal governments around the world compete to master the art of creating such jobs.
"Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don't seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything"
Like Professor of Anthroplogy?
Look Dr. Jones- maybe keep your mouth shut for once instead of advertising to the world how much of an uninformed non-reality dweller you are.
You're the poster child for why teaching staff should *NEVER* get tenure and should be subject to being fired at will for any reason.
You're a disgrace.
Iâ(TM)ve done that job. The apologizing job. The âoetechnical guysâ never had to leave their desks and fucked stuff up remotely in MS SCCM and the rest of us had to walk around apologizing for their idiocy. It really sucks to do that job.
Don't forget that after all the telephone sanitizers were launched into space an epidemic from a disease caught from a dirty telephone wiped out the people who stayed on Magrathia.
===
One of my friends used to work for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.(This was 25 years ago, and has likely changed).
He told me the DWP on most days had about 25-33% too many workers. But, 20 or 60 days a year when it rained heavily or when the wind was blowing strong, they could have used 2 or 3 or 10 times as many workers.
Couldn't you teach yourself carpentry from YouTube videos and then set yourself up as "The Carpenter who DOES show up - AND does the job!"
It would be a lot more rewarding than teaching a bunch of boneheaded students that carpenters evolved form an ape-like ancestor called Homo Habilis - whose work ethic is sometimes called the "missing link".
It would also be FINANCIALLY rewarding as there appears to be a shortage of carpenters - or good ones, at any rate.
He could of picked up the damn books. The carpenter is probably a maintenance or handyman that performs countless other tasks. In this case, I would be mad that the professor didn't pick up the books for me to fix the shelf. I am sure that a leaking roof or faulty electrical outlet is more important than a book shelf.
90% of everything is crap, including the private sector.
Why is the web slathered with helpful little articles on how to put up with your asshole boss—especially in the private sector? People don't simply leave these asshole jobs, especially in America, because of systemic mobility friction, like a health plan tied to an employer who wields it as a club to get away with hiring cheap (and bad, and often abusive) bottom-tier management staff.
When you form the Cantor map of government suckitude to private sector suckitude to determine which has the larger cardinality, a single Enron cancels out 10,000 small anecdotes. But we wrap up colossal stinkers like Enron in a tidy garbage bag with a red bow tie: the foolish shareholders deserved to lose their money, and then we neglect to gape over the majestic size of the Enron crater.
Who were the biggest losers? Hard-working California linemen, whose pensions funds were taken for a ride at the Arthur Andersen cleaners. Oh, they screwed up, too, bigly? Quick, hand me another garbage bag, and let's not gape at that majestic hole, either.
Bottom line: there ain't no monopoly on inefficiency in any walk of life. The Cantor map between private sector and public sector fuckitude takes a lot of brain power, because the sectors have very different shapes and ultimate loss functions.
So what people do instead is a stupid pet trick: declaring that every fuck-up of the private sector can be construed as "some foolish stakeholder deserved the shit outcome; they'll wise up next time, and the world will turn better soon." The whole point of Authur Anderson (and their ilk) was that society had come to a joint realization that having everyone in the entire country devoting 25% of their day to caveat emptoring basic business criminality was a colossal waste of human potential.
Caveat emptor—done right—is a substantially specialized skillset in the complex modern economy. This is why grandma missed Spectre and Meltdown and bought herself a fucked up Intel box, nevertheless; one that an active, private-sector vigilance (on the back of a caveat emptor PhD obtained in her well-spent youth) would have adequately warned her against. And now some Russian mobster has spent your inheritance. You go, private sector, FTW.
It's not unusual for there to be rules about moving books, papers, or anything with writing on it. So if someone sees a floor covered in books it's reasonable to wait until they've all been moved by someone responsible for them before restarting the work.
Some people think vaccines are useless too.
I recall a story years ago about exiled teachers who were either incompetent or being accused of various types of misconduct who are literally paid to sit around and do nothing because they can't teach because of the above, and not be fired because of their union.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3149...
Most people couldn't do what, exactly?
> mortgage/rent and bills takes up most of people's income.
You're right, that's a major expense.
The median home size has tripled. In other words, what most people do is they pay a major portion of their income for a home that's three times the size of what their parents or grandparents had. They *could* cut their rent, heating and cooling costs, etc by 66% by choosing a home the same size they grew up in.
You CAN upgrade to a new TV every few years, so you have the best 4K home theater experience, or you can keep a TV for 10-15 years like your parents did. If you choose the second way, you can work a six month contract and take six months off each year.
The UK is a democratic socialist
Confirmed that parent poster has neither been in the UK nor that they have any greater conception of the political climate here than, as Adams put it, an Ilford-based gnat knows about life in Peking.