Bullshit jobs
What are they? Why are they?
Some (many? most?) non-fiction books could have been and should have been essays. Some, such as Bullshit jobs, should have only been a title. I try not to write snarky, negative reviews, because though satisfying and fun, it’s mean and petty. Nevertheless, Bullshit jobs, and its author’s smug and superior tone, absolutely deserved such a review, and the review I wrote of it on Goodreads is the most liked thing I’ve ever written (not that this says much).
Yet I’ve come across many smart people who feel there’s something in the concept of Bullshit jobs — I myself felt that enough to buy the book in the first place. Undoubtedly, there are bullshit jobs. But how can we identify them?
David Graeber defined a bullshit job as one that is 'so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence’. As I wrote in my earlier review of the book, this is a terrible definition; some people might think their jobs are useless because they do not understand how their work serves the organisation and the economy in general; and conversely, some people may think they are adding value when in fact they are not.
A better definition is “a job that does nothing to increase societal wealth”, where an increase in wealth is either an increase in the number or quality of goods and services given fixed resources, or a decrease in the resources required to produce an existing level of goods or services (this is assuming that a job is done well — a job that doesn’t lead to an increase in wealth because the person doing it is incompetent isn’t inherently BS.)
(A free market sceptic might argue at this point that this definition means almost all jobs in the private sector are BS, because most companies are focused on stealing market share from each other, instead of increasing the size of the pie — in other words, competition among firms results in some companies winning and some losing, with total wealth remaining the same. But for a company to win over a competitor (short-term market share fluctuations aside), it must either provide better goods / services, or provide them at a lower cost.)
Alright, we have a better definition, but why do BS jobs exist? Graeber argues that economic theory precludes the possibility of BS jobs, and uses that to argue that economic theory is clearly wrong; he says BS jobs are a ploy by the ‘ruling class’ to keep the ‘mortal danger’ of a ‘happy and productive population’ at bay.
This is nonsense, as is any theory that rests on the existence of a shadowy cabal of elites who secretly orchestrate masterplans to subjugate the people. Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden and the Koch brothers do not meet in secret and think ‘hmm how can we stifle creativity and reduce people’s free time — oh we know, we’ll create BS jobs in our organisations, bwahahaa’. Like, if you ever find yourself entertaining the notion of a ruling class that coordinates the proliferation of BS jobs, please do take a moment to think about how this would actually work in practice, and you’ll realise how silly it sounds.
Nevertheless, BS jobs do exist, and Graeber is right that a shallow understanding of economics makes their existence seem impossible. So why do so many people think BS jobs (including their own) are real?
I think there are three reasons. The first is the one mentioned earlier — people think a particular job adds no value, but they are simply wrong: either they do not understand the value the job adds, or their subjective opinion is that this value is not real, even though it is to other people. If you believe fashion to be pointless, then you’ll consider everyone working in the industry to be doing BS jobs — but this doesn’t mean there is objectively no value there: these jobs lead to the creation of goods other people appreciate, so there is wealth created.
The second is that many jobs do serve a purpose, and do increase wealth because they provide a service that someone is willing to pay for, but they only do so because BS jobs or BS rules exist upstream. For example,
There are armies of lawyers who absolutely have a positive impact on their clients, but only because their clients are subject to frivolous lawsuits or arcane regulations.
There are savvy managers whose main impact is navigating corporate bureaucracy — and so they do good work for their employer, but work which would not be necessary if there weren’t other managers coming up with stupid processes (this is closely linked to the third reason below).
There are compliance officers who help their clients avoid massive fines by ensuring they tick the right boxes — but without meaningfully improving customer outcomes. (To be clear, I’m not saying all or even most compliance work is BS: there is a lot of sensible regulation, and there are compliance officers who help their employer improve the quality of its services and goods by adhering to it.)
In all these cases, these jobs have a very real impact for the employer; but it’s hard to argue that these jobs create value for society. They consume resources without improving anyone’s quality of life.
And the third is principal-agent problems, which is a fancy way of saying people working in organisations do not always have the organisation’s interest at heart. In particular, managers (both in the public and private) sectors are often rewarded for having large teams. This looks good on a CV, and in some cases, it’s actually a factor in people’s compensation (I was once chatting to someone working for a large automotive company who told me factory managers’ income was a function of the number of workers in the factory, not the number of cars produced! A perverse incentive if ever there was one.)
All BS jobs are soul-destroying, but not all equally so. I’d argue the ones that owe their existence to the last reason above are the worst. Jobs incorrectly perceived as BS are not bad — they may feel pointless at times (‘all I’ve done with my life is optimise shampoo pricing — whoop-de-do’) but, I mean, ultimately what’s not pointless. A better-priced shampoo does make the world a little bit better in its way.
Those that are BS because they exist to deal with upstream-BS are bad, but at least they do have an impact. A lawyer can proudly say ‘I saved my client from a stupid lawsuit’, even if that lawsuit should never have been filed in the first place.
But those that are due to the third reason are the worst. First of all, they are the cause of the second reason. Second, they reduce wealth in two ways — directly, by squandering resources, and indirectly by creating a world where people climb corporate ladders, not through their ability to create better outcomes for their customers, but because they are good politicians: they can successfully argue for headcount, and end up with small empires, which make them look more impressive, and so they can climb even higher. Such people create rotten organisations and end up wasting even more resourced.
But third (and this deserves its own paragraph), they are sucking the life out of the people who are doing them — and especially when they convince those poor souls that their jobs really do have value (when in their heart of hearts they know that’s not true). Think of Twitter: regardless what you think of Musk, he let go like 90% of Twitter’s workforce with no visible impact on the company. If Twitter was anything like Google, I’ll bet it was staffed with brilliant people producing powerpoint deck after powerpoint deck with theoretical explorations and analyses with no action plans, no concrete next steps, no ‘so-whats’; and the result is people in their thirties (most of whom had graduated top of their class at Ivy league uins) who have never done anything measurable, who cannot point to a thing they’ve built, or to a change they’ve caused in the real world.
All this creates a society that has lost its appreciation for the joys of real work. Look, I’ve never done anything world- or even life-changing at work — I haven’t come up with a new technology, or saved a life as a doctor might have done, or designed a new building to grace a metropolis’s skyline. But I’ve done real work in my life — work that had a small but actual impact on the world: I’ve worked in a factory that’s produced physical products; I’ve set prices for consumer goods, and have walked in supermarkets able to point to a shelf and say ‘I decided this should cost this much’; in my current role I can point to functionality in a banking app that exists thanks to my and my team’s work. And I’ve also been in BS roles, with no sense of urgency, no satisfaction to be derived from an accomplishment other than praise from my superiors. The pride and sense of purpose that I’ve derived from the former is matched by the despair induced by the latter, and I’m worried that too many people have only experienced the despair part.