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?

Comments

Certainly not

[Krishnoid]

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 onto a spaceship and blast off into space

[Lanthanide]

Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.

Can't...resist.....

[Anonymous Coward]

...pointless job like....slashdot editor?

To the anthropology professor...

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Re:To the anthropology professor...

[whoever57]

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.

This was in the UK. Without a full risk assessment, the idea of anyone touching the shelves is laughable. So, no, he wasn't allowed to work with his hands.

In fact, it's probably because of "health and safety" that the carpenter would not do the job until the books were stacked.

Re:To the anthropology professor...

[slew]

Who would know if he didn't scream for help?

Eventually, the carpenter is going to come back, and he will either:
1. See that his work has been done and go away, saying nothing.
2. Complain, likely resulting in a written warning to the professor.

Is it worth the risk? Or did you forget that he already asked for help?

OR 3. See that his work was done, spend his time to undo the work, and submit a formal complaint through union channels that unauthorized work was done, causing management to discipline you, and force you to wait 1 month to have the work done by authorized labor using work-to-rule levels of efficiency and have your manager's department be billed for both the undo work and the re-do work.

As you might have surmised, #3 has happened to me... If I only had to live with a warning, it might have been still worth a warning, but having to wait an extra month and see your work be undone, and re-done poorly, certainly tips the scale the other way (which was of course the point of the whole exercise).

Re:To the anthropology professor...

[Solandri]

Most U.S. states require workers compensation insurance, whose premiums are based on the type of work an employee does. A "clerical" worker like a professor "dirtying his hands" and fixing a shelf would be doing something more risky and outside the scope of his job description. If the insurance company caught wind of it, the school could lose its insurance, or worse yet all its professors could be reclassified as a different type of employee with a higher rate, and the school's insurance premiums would go up. So yes, being in academia may in fact mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.

I ran into exactly this type of situation at a previous job. We had a restaurant on our resort, and all the restaurant employees were categorized as restaurant workers with about a 8% insurance rate (i.e. we paid the workers comp insurance company 8% of their wages as a premium). Someone in another department began a school camp program - urban elementary schools would send a class for a week-long stay at our resort (located in a rural area), learning about nature and the environment. They ate meals at our restaurant. When the state workers comp insurance board caught whiff of this, to our astonishment they reclassified all of our restaurant staff as camp workers at a 15% insurance rate, even though there was nothing camp-related about their duties. The vast majority of the restaurant staff weren't even preparing meals for the camp kids, and the ones who were weren't doing anything they wouldn't normally do for regular restaurant customers. But the board insisted that because the kids were there for a camp and eating meals prepared in our restaurant, our restaurant workers were camp workers.

I appealed and lost. There's a single state government insurance board which decides these things, so after your appeal is decided, that decision is final. But I did manage to convince them to charge camp rates for our restaurant workers only on days when this camp program was present (weekdays, vs most of our regular customers being on weekends). This increased my workload considerably since I now had to record the restaurant payroll day-by-day and cross-reference against days when camps were present. But the difference in insurance premium was over $10k/mo. I did this for close to a year, while we worked to spin off the camp program into a separate company. Then this new camp company became a "customer" of our resort, thus allowing us to legitimately tell the insurance board to rescind their ridiculous classification change because we weren't running any camps and didn't have any camp employees on our payroll.

Re:To the anthropology professor...

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

You didn't say it, but I would bet " re-done poorly on purpose for revenge / teach you a lesson"...

Re:To the anthropology professor...

[Anonymous Coward]

but having to wait an extra month and see your work be undone, and re-done poorly, certainly tips the scale the other way (which was of course the point of the whole exercise).

Perhaps now you can appreciate why the libertarians among us are not so keen on government bureaucracy. They say that those of us who want less government are crazy, but I ask you what is sane about pointless rules, the little people who revel in them, like your carpenter, and the government that inflicts the whole mess upon us? These are not isolated incidents. Governments are terribly inefficient and work through coercion and fear. As a society we should limit our use of such tools to those situations where they are absolutely necessary and frankly it's not necessary for the government to be involved in education.

Re:The irony is palpable.

[yorgasor]

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.

Sounds like Japan

[vix86]

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.

Re:Sounds like Japan

[b0s0z0ku]

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 :(

Re:Sounds like Japan

[Miamicanes]

Sony can't compete with rivals because its content-owning division is bigger than its engineering division & vetoes just about everything new and creative the engineers come up with unless it somehow involves tightening DRM even further.

Sony is the perfect example of a company where literally EVERYONE -- investors, consumers, and employees -- would be demonstrably better-off if the company were forcibly split up into a content-owning company and a consumer electronics company that couldn't veto or hamstring each other's activities.

Re:Sounds like Japan

[Billly Gates]

Keep in mind Japanese has a radically different culture than Europe or Both America.

In USA you are valued on money and job title. In Europe you are valued on your contribution and character. Americans irritate HR as we become job hoppers to outdo the fellow man and make more $$$$

In Japan your face is who you work for. Job title is irrelevant. A VP for a company that makes shit is less valued than an assistant at Toyota or Ninetendo. The culture of die for the emperor and defend your honor from World War 2 is alive and well. They stay many hours working too.

People commit suicide if they leave and are unemployable again. With such loyalty companies can't just do this to employees like in the US which encourages fear and a revolving door

Re:Sounds like Japan

[thegarbz]

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

Bureaucratic systems don't appear out of nowhere. Often they are built up from incidents:
We need to verify! Fine let's add a step.
The second person in the step made the same mistake the first person did. Fine let's add a step.
The third person in the step ...

To the outside they look pointless, it could very well be that each person was looking at a different portion of the paper. It could very well be that one of them was in charge of making sure the other 3 were not corrupt. It's easy to assume lots of people are pointless if you assume that one person has complete authority and autonomy. But like all assumptions there's often a reason why they don't pan out.

Re:Sounds like Japan

[thejam]

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.

Re:Sounds like Japan

[Kjella]

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.

I can't really speak for Denmark but here in Norway it's mainly solved through employment taxes, which are kinda like income tax except they're not deducted from my nominal salary but rather added to the company's taxes. Basically, if my employer wants to pay me $100 he'll have to pay $8.20 in "trygdeavgift" and anywhere from $0 to $14.10 in "arbeidsgiveravgift", usually the latter which together make up something like a social security tax. And that money then goes to pensions, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, sick leave, maternity leave and so on. And then they take a good ~30% of my pay in taxes. And the general VAT is 25%.

So essentially, my employer pays $122.30. My pre-tax income is $100, my post-tax income $70 and when I buy something 25/125ths goes to VAT so $56 end up in someone else's pockets. So companies are not keeping people on for charity, not private ones anyway but you're pretty well covered for. And you get a free education, free healthcare, in fact a whole lot of services are free or subsidized and my mum and dad have been living on public pensions for a long time now. But we're sure as hell paying for it somehow...

Someone tried that once

[Anonymous Coward]

Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.

We are their children.

I'm a web developer consultant to HR consultants

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I perform useful work for people doing a useless job, does that make my job useless?

Re:This article is wrong

[ArchieBunker]

I was going to say the same thing. Probably a union guy. Did the light bulb on your desk burn out? You dare not lay a finger on that bulb or you'll be taking someone's job away. Submit a request to the union electrician and he'll be by in a week or so. Spill something on the floor and need a broom? Don't even think of looking for one. A floor sweeper by show up sometime this week.

You have to remember

[93 Escort Wagon]

The guy telling us this is a professor of anthropology.

Re:The irony is palpable.

[mikael]

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.

Re:NO!

[mikael]

There are exhibition and conference venues like that. Vendors could set up their own stands. They could unpack, move, place and connect their equipment together. But any electrical plugs had to be installed and turned on by the union electrician. Mainly because some bozo would daisy chain a bunch of extension cords to one socket, having everything switched on, and then turn on the switch at the socket. Instant power surge.

Re:This article is ignorant and fiction

[mikael]

You need to watch those old black and white movies more carefully. The elderly guy with the white gloves operating the elevator cab would make note of when each person used the elevator, take bookings and anticipate when executives would be arriving at the elevator room. Effectively operating the cab like a limousine chauffeur. "There's Mr Goldberg, he always goes up to the executive meeting room at 2.00pm every Monday. Always have the cab waiting for him 10 minutes early."

It's not that simple, unfortunately

[bjdevil66]

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.

Thing is it's probably not

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:This article is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

This happened to me --
Back in the remote past, my cubicle fluorescent light burned out. The storage closet that had replacement bulbs was 20 feet away from my cube in the hallway. Being a union shop, I stopped and asked a passing electrician if he could set me up with a bulb and he responded that I had to go though "Facilities" and submit a request. I duly filled out the request. A week went by in the dark. I returned to "Facilities" and between the 7 guys in there standing around joking and drinking coffee, asked them what the holdup was as the closet was so close and had plenty of bulbs and wouldn't take but a minute. They responded that they needed millwright to get the bulb out of the closet deliver it to my cube and then the electrician could then install it, but that all the millwrights were extremely busy in the moving of furniture! I tried to explain that the darkness made it almost impossible for me to work in my cube and my lost productivity was needlessly costing the company money. He just shrugged.
On the way back I retrieved a bulb and replaced it in about a minute. One of the "busy" millwrights that was chatting up one of the secretaries while he watched an old timer co-worker struggling to single-handedly navigate a heavy filing cabinet on a moving dolly spotted me and reported me to the union!
It ended up our dept had to pay the union for 8 hours of labor because I had the audacity to "infringe on their livelihood" when I changed a frickin light bulb!
I spoke with the friendly old timer later and asked him about why he wasn't getting any help from his union buddies and that most of them were literally standing around doing nothing. He responded that his old school work ethic was alien to the new younger union members when they realized that they get paid whether they're working or not! Absolutely no frickin shame!

Since that incident, fuck the unions and the horses they rode in on! It's even worse now...

Re:This article is wrong

[Bert64]

Give people too much power and they will abuse it, it happens with unions but also without them it would happen in the opposite way - you would be expected to do everything, and work longer hours at no extra pay etc.
There's a happy medium where employers cant abuse employees and union workers do their jobs efficiently, but we never seem to get there.

It seems all of these people campaigning for equality or fairness want nothing of the sort - they all want inequality to remain, just that they want it to be in their favor instead of against them.

Eric Frank Russell wrote about this YEARS ago

[andrewbaldwin]

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 :-) ]

Good news...

[YuppieScum]

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...

Re:NO!

[nojayuk]

We have Big Dave, our Speaker to Electricians who does all the hand-off stuff between a site's electricians and our own kit when we set up shows and displays since he's a qualified and experienced sparky. He has a posse of knowledgeable but unqualified people who are allowed to plug stuff in on our side of the panels, and no-one else.

We told Sarah (not her real name) not to plug anything in to the exhibition centre's distribution box which was rated 6A per circuit. Sarah plugged a 3kW heater into the breaker box and switched it on because her photo-shoot models were cold. It cost us a couple of hundred quid for a call-out to the site electrician to reset the breaker on the exhibition hall side of the panels. Sarah, to this day, does not know what she did wrong.

There's a reason for the seemingly-bullshit restrictions on working conditions and who can do what, where and how. Dunning-Kreuger is alive and well, unlike some of their victims.

Unions, most likely

[bradley13]

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...

Re:This article is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Since that incident, fuck the unions and the horses they rode in on! It's even worse now...

It is easy enough to blame the unions, but remember that the old timer also was unionized.

The "busy" millwright didn't report you because of the union, he reported you because he was an asshole and he would have been that without a union too.

If you want change then unions is the wrong target to fight.
The problem is a culture that is endorsing assholes instead of promoting honesty, humility and being helpful.
Just getting rid of the union will only mean that assholes has to go through company management instead of the union to make your life miserable.

Pointless, but still necessary

[ErichTheRed]

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. :-)

Re:real estate agents

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re: This article is wrong

[Immerman]

Unfortunately the labor market for any particular skillset tends to be very small, to the point of oligarchy. Especially now that menial jobs are more and more commonly being "outsourced" to contracting organizations so that instead of 3,000 businesses in a city all needing janitors, you have 3 or for "janitorial service" contractors that service most of those businesses.

The result being that there's near monopoly level of abuse across much of the available labor pool, and people take whatever job they can get, despite it paying far less than the work is worth.

Defense Companies

[careysub]

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.

PS: "We" includes me

[raymorris]

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.