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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?
...pointless job like....slashdot editor?
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.
One would argue that those jobs are a way of taking care of the less fortunate without calling it "welfare." As opposed to the US way, where older employees are tossed out with the trash :(
The guy telling us this is a professor of anthropology.
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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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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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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.
The US is very extreme in other direction with no job security
The only real job security is to be so valuable to the company that replacing you would clearly be a large net loss. Other countries are in denial about this. If a charity wants to help those who lose their jobs, then that charity can do so. A business is not a charity, and it strikes me as both immoral and inefficient (both for the business and the person losing their job) to make charity itself a business's job. If a society doesn't want to leave the safety net to charity, then society should take on that burden itself. From what I gather, Denmark doesn't burden employers the same way as does, say, France, yet has a strong safety net. This separation of concerns (business vs job security) is a pretty strong argument for a basic income, too.
Yes, real estate agents are kind of a drag on the whole process, and I don't know what's going to happen to them. Most are adapting by charging lower commissions. But it's not like you can go on Zillow or Redfin and click "Add to Cart" on a house you like. They really did provide a service up until MLS was put online...they were the ones with the keys and the books of Polaroids showing their inventories, and you really couldn't go house hunting without talking to one.
Real estate transactions in general are very expensive because you have so many people involved at every phase (the agents, the buyers, the sellers, the title search company, the mortgage company, etc.) But, I'm not convinced that suddenly pulling all middlemen form the economy and causing double-digit unemployment overnight is the answer either.
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.
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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.
Some people – libertarians mostly – would look at the difference between what you cost to your employer and what you end up with (i.e. taxes), and scream that it should all be given to you. What they don't realize is that, if those payroll+incomes taxes didn't exist, you wouldn't get $122.30; your employer would pay you about $70 instead... maybe $75. And if they knew you didn't have to pay VAT, they'd pay you even less, because they could. It isn't an exact correspondence, and if taxes go up/down dramatically it takes a while for wages to adjust to compensate, but that's how it works on the macro level: taxes are factored into wages. This is why (for example) Norway is "highly taxed" but middle-class Norwegians can still afford the same kinds of food and housing and entertainment that middle-class people in "low tax" countries can. The main difference is that high-tax countries tend to have better-funded governments, and low-tax countries tend to have wealthier business owners.
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