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?
Load them all up on a spaceship, along with the telephone sanitisers, and blast them into space.
...pointless job like....slashdot editor?
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.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
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.
So if I perform useful work for people doing a useless job, does that make my job useless?
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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."
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
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...
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).
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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 :-) ]
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.
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.
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.
You didn't say it, but I would bet " re-done poorly on purpose for revenge / teach you a lesson"...
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. :-)