2-3-4 Friday: Bullshit jobs

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1 thought

Details have been changed to protect confidentiality.

My friend is incredibly hardworking. He does the payroll for his company, comes up with the strategy, and attends to the HR matters the employees brings to him. The only problem is, he’s just an executive. I wondered then what his manager actually did, if he was doing both the operational, and the strategic functions of HR.

Well, nothing, it seemed. My friend later shared about how he’d seen his boss slowly moving the work upwards to his boss, and downwards to his executive, leaving the manager with an ever-decreasing amount of work. What then was the value the manager was creating?

One could argue, nada.

I was recently reminded of the idea of bullshit jobs when I started interviewing more and more candidates for the roles I was hiring for. Hear David Graeber, who wrote the book on bullshit jobs.

I define a bullshit job as one that the worker considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious - but I also suggest that the worker is correct.

I started to hear more of the jobs that people did, and wondered what the actual purpose of the job was.

Hear some examples.

1. Being a train marshal to direct people off the train, when there were already automated announcements flashing everywhere.
2. Managing Facebook and Instagram comments for a company page.

There is a distinction between shit jobs, and bullshit jobs. Shit jobs are those that are often blue collar, like your cleaners and rubbish collectors. Bullshit ones are white collar, and they often masquerade as meaningful ones.

Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers-as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do.

Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it's all based on a lie - as, indeed, it is.

Why am I talking about bullshit jobs? Because I think there are many of us who’ve seen people with higher salaries than us, working in similarly simpler and less taxing jobs.

And we want that.

But I’m here to say - actually you don’t really want it.

Because it can be utterly soul-sapping.

I had the fortune (or misfortune) of observing this HR manager a few weeks ago, and realised slowly that he wasn’t doing much. Most of his days was spent pretending to work. Making an impression to his bosses that he was doing a lot, when in fact he wasn’t. Making a lot of noise.

As I spoke to him, he didn’t sound happy at all. In fact, he sounded unhappy that he wasn’t earning more money, buying more things, getting a bigger car, sending his children to a fancier childcare.

But he wasn’t taking any effort to change things.

1 talk

If you feel your job is meaningless, it probably is. Don't kid yourself. 

1 tip

Here’s a question. How many people do you need to staff a concierge?

If your answer was one, you’d probably be right.

Except that WeWork doesn’t just have one, it has 3.

3 people just sitting there, typing on their Macs, and barely looking up when someone walks in. What are they doing there? No one knows.

Graeber argues that having people at concierge gives the company a badge of credibility that makes customers okay to pay hundreds of dollars for rent per month, when one could basically sit for free in a public library, and work, with possibly, even more productivity.

But what this whole phenomenon reveals, is a deeper malaise around our culture today.

That even if your job were BS, looking like you work (even if you don’t actually produce any value, and you know that for yourself), is better than just following what you really want to do.

I’ll close with this story. In October 2021, I finally had enough of social work.

I loved the counseling bit. I would film my sessions, agonizingly go through the times where a client teared, experienced some emotional movement, and try to repeat that.

But increasingly, a large chunk of my time was spent filling forms, doing ‘assessments’, and not doing the real interventions that would produce change. I was talking about my work, without actually doing the work.

So I left.

This checks out across other research too.

2016-2017 US State of Enterprise Work Report

Today, if you have some leeway over what you’re doing, ask your boss why you’re doing certain bullshit tasks (like the forms you’re filling). Tell your boss,

okay, we have to do X, Y and Z. Realistically, only Y contributes to the change of our clients.

What would you prefer to have me do?

Push back against bullshit tasks.

Because if you don’t, it will keep growing.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love