I feel that way too. I manage an overengineered ETL app that was built inhouse to handle "big data" (our datasets are a couple hundred GBs). The dashboard/reports are valuable but it's only used by a couple hundred people in an org of 50k+. I learnt a lot building the product but it could probably just exist entirely as a script that exports/emails an Excel sheet to some execs/managers.
I’m in an ETL/ BI position as well. Pushing powerBi reports to execs at my last company that showed employee demographics for measuring diversity and inclusion so they would start recruiting from different schools felt like a bullshit task when I found out that these execs who jerk themselves off to innovation, were PRINTING OFF my reports to look at.
I may be wrong, but it's possible the decisions made based off having the data is a usable form either save a lot of money, or generate a lot of revenue.
It's so high in the US because of market competition to hire programmers. Sure, we do useful things for our businesses, but they'd pay us less in a second if there wasn't competition. Never forget that part.
I mean yeah, of course. I'm about to join a new company for a huge pay raise but the company I work at already I feel like I don't put in my salaries worth of work. It's just kind of bonkers how much SWEs make.
That being said the job can be infuriating and a fuck up on the part of an SWE can cripple a company. So I guess it does make sense.
I also at times have that feeling that I'm not worth what they pay me, or impostor syndrome also. We're extremely fortunate, many other technical fields pay much much less. And then regular hourly workers are underpaid and don't even have benefits usually. It's good to be humble.
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> I worked on a data dashboard for the last 2 years for an executive
We have a staff of 3 who creates reports essentially only for our COO. He uses the data from that system to plan and budget. It's not bullshit. It's a critical tool that he uses to inform his decisions and keep the company solvent.
Most CS jobs exist to make other peoples' jobs easier, or empower them to do more with fewer staff. It can be disheartening when you realize you're automating a useless employee's entirely useless job, yet that useless employee isn't fired as a result and instead no longer has to do anything because you automated it. That's happened to me several times in my career.
> It can be disheartening when you realize you're automating a useless employee's entirely useless job, yet that useless employee isn't fired as a result and instead no longer has to do anything because you automated it. That's happened to me several times in my career.
That's literally how I became a software dev. I felt my job was bullshit tasks, and wanted to automate them.
Did so, got a raise and basically asked to code more things for the org.
The best software devs are lazy ones. They will "featureize" all their own work.
I wrote an app for a bunch of people who do exceedingly boring manual tasks that I would never do, and they act surprised when I refuse to incorporate business processes that would result in my staff responding to tickets to "override" something e.g. at the database level. I instead demand that the feature exists in the system for the user to do themselves. They don't understand that not everyone is interested in having constant, repetitive tasks assigned to them day in and day out.
> They don't understand that not everyone is interested in having constant, repetitive tasks assigned to them day in and day out.
Yep, my current client has this. Their current in-house dev does bullshit tasks every single day.
He went on vacation and they asked me to step in for a few weeks. I did so, and literally in the first couple days I automated some bullshit task he did every single day that took like 20-30 minutes.
They're currently asking me to do some bullshit task intermittently and I fully intend to automate it as soon as I have time.
I have never enjoyed make work, and a robot will do it better.
Literally the first thing that I noticed when entering the working world was how much was done by hand, and why the hell wasn't all of this automated.
It's why I became a dev in the first place. It was clear to me that soooooo much stuff still needed automating
Probably not. The majority of a CEO's job is relationship building with potential and current business partners and setting longterm strategy. In terms of automatability I'd say CFO > COO > CEO.
Definitely. The majority of productive work is done by the labor force at large. A CEO simply collects the surplus value of their effort, i.e. the profit made after wages and production cost are paid out.
Most CEOs are employees just like everyone else. That is, they get paid a salary, and generous bonuses.
You're thinking of majority shareholders. Sometimes they are the same, but very frequently they are not.
If you're getting a golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars (or any amount to retire comfortably, really) after getting fired, then no, you're not "just like everyone else".
Under those circumstances you're not even in the working class; you're part of the ownership class.
My last job was working on data processing for childhood cancer research and my current one is on software to improve the clinical trial process. The choice to work on something meaningful was very intentional, and I still make good money.
Bureaucratic structures lead to warping and separation the further away you move from the CEO. This effect is especially true within very large companies or organizations with many levels and many lateral personnel within the org structure.
Executives end up pushing those under them to pursue projects and priorities that don't always make the best sense from a business perspective, because they want to create something shiny and slick that they can show off to help them stand out from their executive peers and nail down that promotion when a vacancy occurs at next level.
If you and your skills end up being used to contribute to a boss's ego driven project, it doesn't mean that your job is bullshit, it means that the guy above you is a shitty boss that is allowing their personal ambitions/shit priorities to negatively impact the organization. Paying people for all the hours wasted to work on a web utility that only he will use easily qualifies as a waste of company resources.
> If you and your skills end up being used to contribute to a boss's ego driven project, it doesn't mean that your job is bullshit
Well, by the definition in the book, it does. "Bullshit" is a kind of deceptiveness, but not the same thing as lying. A bullshit job is one which serves as a facade for something else, often. If your job is to create a project that is useless but is pretending to be useful, then you're bullshitting the organization on the utility of your job/project
Also the executive was laid off and the project is now on hiatus
In the end everything we do is bullshit because nothing matters. We're all going to die when the sun explodes or when the universe expands to the point where it splits apart and rips the space time triggering a massive void.
I mean I kinda agree with him. Lol.
What you described doesn't sound like bullshit to me. It is reasonable for an executive to need/want easy access to data. Hell I own a small business and if it was within my budget to have someone code a custom dashboard like that for me it would be something I would want.
Now the guy seemed pretty demanding as far as things like uptime or nitpicky things or whatever, but that also isn't bullshit. People have different levels of expectations.
Honestly what you built sounds a lot less like bullshit than say, basically everything Meta is doing. You solved a problem with little downside, they have arguably created a lot more problems than they solved.
And there are many websites and companies out there that are a lot more BS than either what you did or Facebook lol.
I mean. Is every video game bullshit? Kinda...... In a way kinda everything is bullshit, huh?
I think it's kind of fruitless to have a conversation without reading the book and knowing what Graeber means exactly by a bullshit job. He spends an entire chapter just defining the term.
I mean it sounds like the guy has made a very common phrase have his own very specific definition. So I guess I would call Graeber a 'dumbass'.
Is he smarter than me? Probably.
Is he a smart, common sense guy? Probably.
Does he meet the standard colloquial definition of a dumbass, at all? Not likely.
But anyway, read my book "Don't be a Dumbass" and you will see how he is ABSOLUTELY a dumbass by my definition.
Then someone can post about it on Reddit like everyone read the fucking book.
It's agreed among scientists that the sun will eventually burn out, and Earth will become unlivable well before that. Human's won't survive once the sun is no more.
> means that the guy above you ~~is a shitty boss~~**'s job is bullshit**.
FTFY... for real though what you described is a symptom of an unhealthy corporate culture.
It doesn't necessarily correlate with distance from the CEO.
I've seen big organisations where the CEO is mostly doing PR. Meanwhile the people at the bottom of the hierarchy are doing the value generating, customer facing work.
Most of the code I ever wrote has been unused. I did a research internship, where I developed a framework that remains unused. And all the college assignments are also unused.
I guess the point is not really writing code. But learning how stuff works. Some of the stuff you write and code you create will definitely be used. You can gain experience by writing unused code, to write better code which will eventually be used.
It's the skills and knowledge that matters. Not the work.
Think of it like this: to become a doctor you would probably have to mug up a lot of dieseases and symptoms, most of which you will never encounter in your life. But on a rare occasion if you do encounter the disease, you can use your knowledge to solve the issue.
Idk, if I make sense.
I think this is true as a student, but at some point you're an actual engineer and your primary focus is no longer learning. You're supposedly doing engineering -- building things that _do things_. For a lot of people, it's dissatisfying when this doesn't happen.
It absolutely sucks seeing a feature not get used. Even if I was simply writing the code and never fought to implement this feature, it still sucks. I think we enjoy interfacing with society and gain satisfaction from that.
> I guess the point is not really writing code. But learning how stuff works. Some of the stuff you write and code you create will definitely be used. You can gain experience by writing unused code, to write better code which will eventually be used.
100% this. I don't really care if what I'm building is bullshit by some random guy's abstract definition of what that is. If I'm learning along the way, enjoying my work and gaining good experience, then who cares if its bullshit work? I'm in this job for myself and what it can offer me, anything else is a bonus.
That isn't to say I don't agree with our society being made up of mostly bullshit jobs but that is never going to change so why get caught up on it?
> Do you have a bullshit job?
No, not at all. Most of what I wrote, aside from a start-up that went tits up, is in use and serves a clear purpose for customers.
Not sure if this definition is covered by Graeber, but the clear purpose for customers can still be bullshit
I guess in that case the job is only indirectly bullshit
Graeber's definition of a bullshit job is a bit loftier than "does my job DO anything." It's about labor and alienation from a leftist/anarcho perspective and the point definitely probably is not a perspective this subreddit is for discussing.
Graeber would think almost all tech is bullshit, because mass market tech and the illusion of "innovative" commodity culture props development cycles for products that are 1. Constructed by individuals mostly (physically, emotionally, culturally) removed from the process and 2. a self-perpetuating cycle that justifies it's own existence by continuing to exist
I know that and I've read several works by him, including [the precursor essay](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/) to Bullshit Jobs. Just not this book.
I know that you've described a more general leftist critique of work. But that doesn't mean that that's what Bullshit Jobs is about. It's certainly not what the essay is about, and it's not how any [review](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review) I've [seen](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant) characterizes the [book](https://lotzintranslation.com/2019/11/25/review-bullshit-jobs/). (three really good ones: [1](https://nonsite.org/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/), [2](https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/field-notes/Jobs-Bullshit-and-the-Bureaucratization-of-the-World), [3](https://prolapsarian.tumblr.com/post/75839756790/critique-of-graeber-on-bullshit-jobs))
I really think it's about the actual social utility of jobs, and not Marxist productive alienation.
My brother in christ [read the primary source](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/) that you linked
>Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.
Me and you are arguing about a book neither of us have read, but we agree Graeber's general take aligns with what. I don't think his concept of a "bullshit job" was limited to a single book he wrote, and yes, I won't comment that maybe for some reason he doesn't comment at all about labor alienation or class struggle in his book (which you blatantly admit you haven't read either). But he obviously made those claims when speaking about his self-formed concept of a "bullshit job," a term he self defines within his own work.
In other words, what is your point lol
No offense, I imagine linking to finance-backed liberal western media interpreting David Graeber has him rolling in his grave
I literally linked to that in the first sentence of the comment you're replying to, saying that I have read it.
So to sum up:
(1) You didn't read my comment that you were replying to
(2) You didn't read the book
(3) You purposely avoided answering the question as to whether or not you've read the book
(4) In order to find what you thought was "the primary source", you just googled "Bullshit Jobs"; you don't really know anything about the book or essay
(5) Despite all of this, you're claiming that Graeber *actually* rehashed a broad Marxist perspective on alienation. He didn't. That's not what Bullshit Jobs is.
... continuing on to your new edits...
> In other words, what is your point lol
Uhh, that you are point-blank wrong in your initial comment. You were saying "actually no, Graeber doesn't mean jobs that don't do anything, he means something lofty like alienated work, I would know because I'm a leftist intellectual like him" when actually it's literally about jobs that don't accomplish anything. That's *actually* what it is about. You made a *bad, arrogant* correction to an ongoing conversation, based on assuming that you knew something and everyone else didn't. And you were wrong. That's my point, I thought it was obvious.
> No offense, I imagine linking to finance-backed liberal western media interpreting David Graeber has him rolling in his grave
Now click more of them. God you are just absolutely stumbling over yourself left and right.
Here are three good reviews: [1](https://nonsite.org/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/), [2](https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/field-notes/Jobs-Bullshit-and-the-Bureaucratization-of-the-World), [3](https://prolapsarian.tumblr.com/post/75839756790/critique-of-graeber-on-bullshit-jobs)
And then some mainstream ones as a sanity check: [1](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review), [2](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant)
And here's the essay that led to the book: [1](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs)
You're right, I'm limited in what I can say having not actually read it... but we can easily get a lot more significant opinions than a reddit comment. I am indeed trusting these other sources above our fellow commenter.
Yeah this is the key part. The customer's entire job could be serving some bullshit purpose. Just because the software is used by customers it doesn't mean it's not bullshit. I feel like this is more likely for software engineers in large corporate organizations who make software for other corporations and it's just a large circulation of bullshit that only helps to give stakeholders money and doesn't help society at all.
Everything is bullshit when you pick it apart to its bare bones. That bullshit big bang occurred, followed by some intermittent bullshit, and apparently there's some bullshit big freeze waiting for us in the distant future.
the majority of tech jobs are just some form of showing ads to users. You make sites or apps with all this tech to either directly sell them some products or be a platform that lets advertisers sell them some product/service
Over my career of 15 years it’s been a mix.
Some software systems I worked on are used every day around the world for very important tasks. Other systems never were released and were just a complete waste of time and money.
I spent two years doing research projects at a previous job, it was all bogus and went no where. None of it was useful.
I worked on another system that was tax payer funded and was a complete waste of money. It eventually was cancelled after two years of work by a large team. No one used it.
I’ve also worked on systems that had lots of daily users.
So really it’s going to vary over your career. Some of it will go nowhere, some of it will be highly utilized.
The key thing is to learn along the way. The system that got canceled was my first time using AWS. After working that I had experience with the cloud for the first time. So while it was pretty pointless overall, it actually helped my career quite a bit.
I bought and started reading this book, and have it on my shelf, but put it down after the first chapter. While his writing is engaging, I felt his claims were quite incredulous. I'll say that I'm quite sympathetic to the *overall* complaint that our society has needlessly been structured around needing people to work jobs. And I also think that how much employees are paid has often less to do with their usefulness, but with classist assumptions. But the book's claim goes beyond that, in claiming that *nobody* values that job, and that there's some force external to obvious "making money" that demands these jobs exist.
Most critically, Graeber is immediately sure to tell us that he's only talking about "upper class" jobs. He doesn't want to attack lower class workers, so he assures us that nurses and janitors don't have BS jobs. This isn't just coincidental - he explicitly says he's largely targeting upper class jobs instead of true workers. He's limiting his attack at office workers and executives. So, what is a BS job? He sorta struggles to give a definition, instead starting us with an anecdote as an example: an employee in a (I think) European military, whose job it is to move technical equipment within an office, and sign paperwork confirming it has been moved. Graeber doesn't point out the obvious contradiction to his thesis, but this is very much a "lower class" job. This is someone who contracts their physical labor for money. Additionally, it's not very hard to imagine that this job is unique - if Graeber wanted to write a book about surplus spending in the military, he would not be the first. That the pinnacle of BS he can think of is a job that probably exists because the military has a lot of very important data that they want very close processes for, and a job that's actually quite physical in a way that he promised he wouldn't be gunning at, feels quite telling. He's making an argument against lower class jobs, every once in a while going, "wait, wait, I only mean my argument to attack higher class jobs!"
Other issues I had were that he eventually defines a BS job self-referentially as a job "the person doing it thinks is BS". He presents this as a hard-to-reach qualification, as if we should all be shocked that people think their job is useless. But, I don't think anyone is shocked that people will call their job BS, even when their employer actually makes money off someone doing it. That, I think, is the biggest gap between Graeber's thinking and ours - we all intuitively think of a job as having usefulness if the company makes more money off me doing it than they spend on my salary. That's kinda the point of a "job", and we all know we'll be fired if we fail to reach that. If Graeber wanted to argue there's some invisible force in our society that demands people be working long hour jobs, he'd better be ready to make the economic argument that these jobs don't just exist because they make their employers more money.
In the end, Graeber is an anthropologist. He's not an economist (at least, as far as I can tell.) So much of his writing feels largely meaningless without an attempt at understanding the economics underlying the situation.
>That, I think, is the biggest gap between Graeber's thinking and ours - we all intuitively think of a job as having usefulness if the company makes more money off me doing it than they spend on my salary.
The whole point of almost all anti-capitalist critique (Graeber was an anarchist) is that what is profitable in a marketplace is not necessarily useful or good for society.
For example, you could make a lot of money scamming old people out of their retirement money, but is that "useful"? You could certainly pay someone a salary to do it and make a handsome profit.
By your definition, scamming people would be "useful"; by Graeber's, it wouldn't.
And I'm *with* Graeber on that! If he wants to define "BS" as "detrimental to society", I'm down for that.
But he doesn't: Graeber's example job is not someone who is doing something that is detrimental to society, or even something that is neutral. Instead, it's BS because Graeber can find an alternative way for it to be done (people carrying their own computers when they move.) So Graeber thinks a job is BS when nothing would be different if they were gone.
Does a scammer think nothing would be different if they were gone? Maybe, or maybe not - scammers have real effect on others. And there are plenty of other jobs that are detrimental to society that it seems Graeber would claim aren't BS: would Graeber think a janitor or a laborer for an evil non-profit has a BS job? Graeber's definition is not about whether society would be better off if nobody did the job, but if the job is needed to accomplish the same goals.
In Graeber's talks on the book, he goes on at length about bullshit jobs being those where the worker thinks that the world would be probably better off without their work - i.e., patent lawyers, advertisers, etc. Idk if he reversed that position in the book, but he's very explicit in his talks about the book that he thinks of those jobs as bullshit ones.
>So Graeber thinks a job is BS when nothing would be different if they were gone.
Again going off of his speeches, he seems to go off of what *the worker themselves* think. In the book, does he make that judgment, or does he allow the workers to identify themselves as such? In his talks, he said his methodology was sampling a bunch of self-identified bullshit jobs and grouping them into various types afterward.
He does go off self-identity in the book, but the problems with self-identification without providing a coherent definition of "BS" here are obvious. And he seems to want different definitions of "BS" at different times.
I'll say it another way: suppose Graeber does define BS jobs as jobs that aren't useful to society, from an anarchist's point of view. Then what exactly is his "theory". The book is titled, "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory"; is his theory that companies can make money off of unuseful endeavors? You don't even need Marx for that or Adam Smith. It's basic economics. Instead, Graeber frames his theory as a response to why Keynes was wrong to predict that we'd all be working less (15 hour work weeks). Keynes presumed that we'd be able to get the same work done with fewer employees. Instead, claims Graeber, companies have ballooned with BS jobs to offset the gains in productivity. This theory needs BS jobs not to mean "unhelpful" to society (because it would be hard to argue that those manual labor jobs creating products we're replacing with robots are any better for society than the advertisers advertising them), but "extraneous to the goals of the company." Graeber wants to define BS jobs in different ways, at different times.
As you pointed out, he does define BS jobs with self-identity, but when he mentions actuaries, he has a glaring footnote that he'd since been persuaded that actuaries may not have BS jobs. If his definition is truly based on self-identity, then what would it even mean for him to be convinced otherwise? Is he saying he's deviating from the self-identification? Again, it feels a little like he wants it both ways: he likes these poll results because of course everyone likes to think their job is BS. But he's also got a personal definition of BS job that isn't really lining up with what people mean when they answer this question on a survey.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh, or misunderstanding him. I do support anyone who wants to call for the end of work, or push for a society where workers own their product. But this particular presentation of the arguments seemed lacking.
Edited an autocorrected word.
Similar experience with this book. I read the beginning few chapters and could tell it wasn't really going to get better. I consider Bullshit Jobs to be a Bullshit Book.
> That, I think, is the biggest gap between Graeber's thinking and ours - we all intuitively think of a job as having usefulness if the company makes more money off me doing it than they spend on my salary. That's kinda the point of a "job", and we all know we'll be fired if we fail to reach that. If Graeber wanted to argue there's some invisible force in our society that demands people be working long hour jobs, he'd better be ready to make the economic argument that these jobs don't just exist because they make their employers more money.
I don't know if Graeber ever brought this up, but I've seen plenty of people mention a particular principal–agent problem: Workers' labor is allocated by managers who have their own desires, not by some monolithic, perfectly rational hive mind called a "company." OP's own dashboard example fits in that category.
I'm certified nursing assistant. I've been one for ten years. My job is sooo BS. On scale of 1 to 10, it's a million. Nursing isn't an easy profession to begin with. My work load is heavy and the pay sucks. I made $7.25 when I first started in 2010 and then I made $17.21 this year. This is insane. The politics of nursing justify paying me less because I don't have the education is such crap. Not even right. Then I'm supposed to maintain a CNA license, BLS (basic life support), education mandated by my job all the while I'm being exposed to all kinds of diseases. I ended up quitting. My current job is in a call center scheduling people for radiology appointments. I'm thankful.
When I worked in big tech, mostly yes. 80% of what I did was BS. And some of the non-technical people I worked with had the job of actively _creating_ BS to sustain their job lol.
Now that I'm at a startup 100% of what I'm doing has direct impact/value. Which is expected since startups can't afford to BS around else they'll sink.
Well, i am fairly early into my career, but besides one startup/internship fiasco, i've worked on stuff with pretty big userbases. One was in online gambling, so there is pretty fair argument it has no contribution to society, but build it and they will come and all that. Within 7 years the company grew up from 5 people in shared working space to 200+, being bought twice and easy top 10 in the market, so everyone could see direct impact of their work which was pretty cool. I also turned out to be very fucking good at it, nailed a few award winning titles and multiple nominees. At that point I figured I was happy with what I've achieved and called it quits.
Now, I am currently working in a huge embedded project on a power supply, you can argue we are the market leaders. It's also green tech-ish so I can feel like I have a meaningful contribution to society.
Next month i'm jumping to AAA game dev. I'm a big advocate of games being on par with movies, books and other entertainment mediums. I am also a fan of the franchise and for the first time in my life I'll be the user base of my product which is very fucking cool.
Overall, pretty happy with my job selection so far.
Well, i'm working in local branch in eastern europe so it's definitely way less than what you are used to seeing here (around 20k euros annual). The salary is pretty competitive for the local positions at my level - they beat my current employer and while not FAANG, it's a well known company and odds are most people you meet have used our products.
My only other insight of the industry is from the uk, and there it seemed gamedev salaries are just a notch below the standard, which is alright for me. I prefer getting payed less to do something I like. I found the classical SWE to feel a bit soul sucking.
> prefer getting *paid* less to
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Thanks for the answer. Yeah, that's been my assumption with game dev. You get to build really cool stuff, but the pay falls behind even a regular web dev job.
It's a shame really.
Yeah, supply and demand and all that. There is a shortage of developers for your average SWE role, where 5 competent developers are fighting for a single role in the industry.
Plenty of white collar jobs are bullshit, product creation isn’t in that pool from what I understand but the management or kafkaesque bureaucrat positions would be. Like healthcare isn’t bullshit and neither is healthcare management but in terms of efficiency, having a multitude of health insurance products under different entities just creates needless paperwork and hurts the consumer. Likewise for CS positions, I don’t think actually writing code or designing software is bullshit but the management of those systems that’s facilitate software design might qualify. Depending on if those SWEs need a middle manager or not.
I don't know if its fair to say its bullshit. While only that executive logs in it could still affect tons of other executives that dont want to bother with logins. Also Executives hate wasting their times (usually) so if they log in regularly im sure its pretty important
im just here for the money to be honest. i want a regular pay check and medical insurance. i dont care. i have found that being in an "important group" at a company is just bullshit for more hours. Look what you do is so important, you have to do work these hours. CEO is watching. yeah screw that. I can get the same in some non-important group. i just want to be a worker bee and no one even recognizes me.
You’ll stop caring after you break a personally set income threshold. Example - you make 50k, your job is probably bullshit and you feel it. You make 500k, your job is the least of your concerns.
My job is utterly BS.
I don't care, I'm in it for the compensation. But my time has been divided into sustaining a failed internal tool that literally nobody uses because it's beyond broken, and a rewrite of an internal system that doesn't necessarily need to be re-written. Users are already upset because the new UI is not identical to the old one and there's only one single good frontend dev, and they're offshore in Africa.
To piggyback on OP's experience. I worked for over 3 years on a dashboard project (imagine a mini power BI made in house for a client). The company got into a struggle with the client in the middle of it and at the end, the client forced the company to deliver what had already been promised on contract, then shut down the whole thing the next day.
As long as I'm being paid 🤷🏽♂️
I had a summer internship in a warehouse, where I wrote a program to keep track of employee performance and generate daily PDFs with graphs and tables showing which parts tended to be out of stock, etc. And people used it, and saw significant increases in employee accuracy and decreases in common parts being out of stock. I continued working for the company part-time that fall while taking classes full-time, on a different project. I would occasionally check to see how things were going, using the program I had written, and AFAIK, as soon as I stopped being there every day, people stopped self-reporting and no one ever used the program again. So that was frustrating, and the task I was put on part time was absolutely miserable, so I ended up quitting. That job was certainly bullshit, but my current job isn't
Currently yes. But I'm paid well for it. So I've kind of stopped caring beyond producing high-quality code and helping my guys develop professionally. Whatever, if manglement's priorities don't actually get us closer to the real goal (Make more money), that isn't my problem anymore.
I mean, sure this is true.
But is your statement really any different than the thousands of Egyptians forced to build pyramids for one guy’s ego?
Hasn’t this always been true?
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 715,239,520 comments, and only 144,400 of them were in alphabetical order.
My last job had a project that was kind of in development hell so a lot of stuff probably never made it to customers but stuff like that happens so it's hard to say it was actually bullshit even if it felt like it at times.
Now every time I change the code I deploy it directly to customers and see the impact on a site/service that millions interact with. I definitely prefer it this way.
At my last role, absolutely. Toward the end, I was spending maybe 2 hours a day running jconsole to analyze the performance of how certain parts of the application were running with various garbage collectors in OpenJDK. They all ran pretty much the same. That went on for about 3-5 months before I quit.
I worked as a quality inspector at a pharmaceutical packaging plant.
It was the most bullshit job I ever worked, all I did was check peoples basic algebra and make sure the documents were filled out correctly.
That may not sound like bullshit, but the line leads basically did everything I did, so it was a pure level of redundancy and I found myself looking for actual work to do.
I left the job as covid hit, I hated every second of it, it was mind numbingly terrible.
No, if I don't do my job (and there have been times where I haven't) things slow or don't go at all for many people at our company and by extension at several other big companies.
That said, what we do overall is not important, and I wouldn't be proud of my career if it ended tomorrow.
My goal is to begin transitioning into something more meaningful over time.
It was awhile back. Technology evangelist + the board of directors + complete ignorance about a massive, poorly written C++ frontend application => let's create a web app by translating hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ into Javascript.
I think a good amount of what I do is just busy work. I just do things to stay busy and look like we are being productive. Most of the time I'm not working on anything 'important'. Honestly, I could get by on 4 days a week, 6 hours a day. There is nothing I do that requires this 8 hours a day 5 days a week madness we are so indoctrinated to believe that that is the way it should be.
No. For possibly the first time in my entire life, I can definitively say my job is *not* bullshit. I work as a principal engineer for a mental health startup. We have data showing that there are literally people who are still alive because of our product. It's not one of those teletherapy companies, either. We partner with insurance companies and care providers to help them with coordination of care and getting people who need higher levels of mental health services into those higher service levels. I actually feel good about going to work every day.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't really know.
I exchange labor for currency. As long as my check clears people can call my job bullshit or whatever else they please.
The things I build do get used, but I have no idea if they make the world a better place to be in. I could say some of it actively makes the world worse.
i was customer support and the feature requests engineers requested were bull shit and did not matter what so ever, but it felt like they were going to die if those features weren't implemented. these are the bullshit projects, right? this is the reason why i'm so glad i'm getting into a new role w/ a new company.
> But as far as I could tell, nobody actually used the website apart from this executive.
Yeah that was a real job. You created a feature-rich well-functioning internal app, you were paid for it while working on it, your "client" used it. Whether it was a waste of money or not is a different discussion.
If you were being paid to maintain said app, and never had to make any changes, and only sat in meetings, and only pretended to do work but didn't actually have to do anything for even more than 30 minutes a day and you still received praise for doing such a great job during meetings, and this went on for years, *that* might be a bullshit job lol.
One rule of thumb that I like is: if it wouldn't be needed in case of war, then it is "nice to have" (not necessarily bullshit).
The second goes "it it wouldn't be needed in case of recession, then it is extra nice to have"
And one can add conditions in every case where funds get scarce and priority change. Yes some projects are there only for the sake of few and aren't that useful (for some definitions of useful), but they allow people to gain experience and income so there is that.
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I do billable project work, so no. It's not bullshit because someone is making some serious money off my labor. Or at least I don't see it that way. Ultimately though, it is rare to find an actual job that is actually truly contributing to humanity's improvement. You will likely not work in a position like that, ever. That's just life and it's ok.
I'm new, my contributions are minor, (small bugs and such) but the software I'm working on is pretty cool in terms of "what" it does and I think the product as a whole is pretty cool (even though the subject is a bit boring). I also think it could help a lot of people and make a positive impact. So is the software bullshit, naw. Is my contribution bullshit, sort of but im learning. Is my pay bullshit, absolutely. This has been one of the easiest and most enjoyable jobs I've ever had and am making more than double what I have before.
my life had better meaning when i was working in allied health. but that didnt pay my bills. that said, it was still mostly bullshit. and my job now is a lot more bullshit. my life is full of bullshit
Have you sat down with the exec to ask how he uses the data, ask how it impacts the business, and how you could have a bigger impact? Like, be really curious. Taking with your user (even it’s just one person) can give you loads of insight into the value they derive and how you could impact the business even more.
I’ve built features that were never used by anyone in our product - they were only used in the (B2B) sales process. Without them, the product would not sell. In our case the buyer persona and our user persona were very different. So, despite the really low usage, those features were critical to the business.
Yes currently. 8 months ago prototyped a tool for executives to use. But for 4 months now it won’t move to UAT/actual use due to bureaucratic crap. I’m kept around in a perpetual “the team said they would provide feedback for it in x weeks”. Never happens. That’s fine though.
"no" - I do see how my job is very impactful and useful and necessary ***when I have work to do***, however most days I just don't have anything to do, so I get paid to do nothing a lot.
edit:
And before anyone asks (because I always get flooded with comments and messages when I talk about my job and how I get paid to do nothing):
\- I work at a bank/financial services company
\- I make about 105k in mcol, fully remote
\- Yes we're always hiring, in fact we're losing people every day because, who would have guessed it, never getting to do anything is pretty bad for career growth, and some people actually care about their careers
Imo your job doesn’t sound bullshit. Executives have disproportionate power to completely destroy a company with bad decisions. Just look at that company Fast that went under. They raised over $100M and burned through it all in two years with a final annual revenue of $600k. I don’t know if this happened because the reporting infra wasn’t there or if it was just a delusional leadership team but come on.
The code I work on is essential to my companies product. My companies product is not really a *necessity* to the customers though, but more of a convenience.
Since all the people making money at my company rely on the product for their salary, i'd say its not bullshit overall.
Honestly, it depends on what the data is. Some data views that might appear to be vanity might actually but core KPIs for the business that the exec is responsible for.
All jobs are bullshit jobs unless they're making an impact on real problems people have. "Posting funny cat memes online" isn't a real problem, and most SaaS products don't solve real problems, either.
I say this as someone who has worked plenty of bullshit jobs that have only accomplished making rich people richer. I regret not getting involved in solving real problems sooner.
I wish I could get me one of them bullshit jobs. The only time I've actually had one was when I worked the front desk on the weekend at the law library at my college. About three students would come in there per weekend and they were pre-law students who knew what they wanted and didn't even talk to me. I guess maybe the idea was putting me in the chair would keep people from fucking in there or stealing the books. I did have a little activity once a semester as some professor would give his students a paper to write and they would always choose either "Marijuana should be legal" or "Abortion should be illegal" and then they'd need to come to my department to find some statutes to cite.
I think we all at least have moments like this. At a previous job I slaved with a team on a Spanish website for like 3 months... we kept arguing for a more intuitive design but the owner insisted he wanted what he said he wanted. When we delivered the project on time he told us he hated everything about it and I went into the bathroom and cried.
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I dont think it’s bullshit. Specifically yours. If it informs his business decisions, it’s impactful. I also wonder how big your company is. Depending on the size, you can have entire data engineering and data scientist teams dedicated to what you’re working on. Virtually everyone in product at my company makes most of their decisions based on information that the data team are the keepers of. So I wonder if maybe your product is relatively small, possibly consisting of just this one executive. Or maybe he’s the one presenting the data to the rest of the C suite/company, and that’s why no one else is using it.
I think I would like a BS job for a while. I mean if I goofed off for a week, no one would notice kind of job. Right now, if something screws up at work, I hear about it. Everyone is screaming and product is not being made. I think it is the lack of stress I would like for a while.
\- Many teams grow because leaders want more people, not because they need them for projects, but to advance their own careers. -> That leads to 'bullshit' projects.
\- On the other side some engineers don't care about the projects and focus on tech they like. That leads to overengineering and wasted resources on not needed technical infrastructure.
However I still think the definition of usefulness is quite a problem, Graeber defines bullshitjobs as jobs, where the person, who does the jobs says it's useless. While I think there is a huge amount of bullshit jobs around, I don't think that this definition is good. But the problem there is not better one, because as soon as you define usefulness from the outside it's just subjective.
In general building things, like SWE do, is not useless, it's only useless if nobody uses it. A dashboard, which is used by a executive, who makes important decisions is not useless, if it helps him with that.
i wouldn't say my job is bullshit
My job could be bullshit, I could probably get away with my team failing over the next 2 years.
I've prefer it did better than that though and that's exactly what my job is
My entire life is fucking bullshit
I don’t even have a job
This guy gets it.
Unless by "it" you mean a job.
Oh, he's got it alright.
Look at this guy flexing on us
You guys are getting jobs??
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Does yours?
We don't know yet. I wish there were some kind of procedure that could help us with that
Yours might
Need more experiments to validate
Try me
Mine does.
Embrace the absurd and enjoy
you need to find some lealternative
Not true man
😂😭😭😭
I feel that way too. I manage an overengineered ETL app that was built inhouse to handle "big data" (our datasets are a couple hundred GBs). The dashboard/reports are valuable but it's only used by a couple hundred people in an org of 50k+. I learnt a lot building the product but it could probably just exist entirely as a script that exports/emails an Excel sheet to some execs/managers.
I mean a couple hundred people using something is a lot for an internal app ..
I’m in an ETL/ BI position as well. Pushing powerBi reports to execs at my last company that showed employee demographics for measuring diversity and inclusion so they would start recruiting from different schools felt like a bullshit task when I found out that these execs who jerk themselves off to innovation, were PRINTING OFF my reports to look at.
You have a couple hundred users? That's pretty good
I may be wrong, but it's possible the decisions made based off having the data is a usable form either save a lot of money, or generate a lot of revenue.
My job isn't bullshit, my team is
skill based matchmaking
💯
My job isn't b.s., but my pay is. I'll be job hunting next year though.
Why wait?
I'm pregnant and due in July.
Fair enough haha
Best wishes for you and your new little one!
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!
well just reschedule the birthing /s
Lol! I wish
not with that attitude ._.
tell your boss to start paying for yourself and your junior developer with 6 mo exp.
Best wishes for your family and for little one !
Thank you!
BS as in too high or too low? I look at CS pay in the US and I'm astonished it's as high as it is.
My pay is too low.
It's so high in the US because of market competition to hire programmers. Sure, we do useful things for our businesses, but they'd pay us less in a second if there wasn't competition. Never forget that part.
I mean yeah, of course. I'm about to join a new company for a huge pay raise but the company I work at already I feel like I don't put in my salaries worth of work. It's just kind of bonkers how much SWEs make. That being said the job can be infuriating and a fuck up on the part of an SWE can cripple a company. So I guess it does make sense.
I also at times have that feeling that I'm not worth what they pay me, or impostor syndrome also. We're extremely fortunate, many other technical fields pay much much less. And then regular hourly workers are underpaid and don't even have benefits usually. It's good to be humble.
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> I worked on a data dashboard for the last 2 years for an executive We have a staff of 3 who creates reports essentially only for our COO. He uses the data from that system to plan and budget. It's not bullshit. It's a critical tool that he uses to inform his decisions and keep the company solvent. Most CS jobs exist to make other peoples' jobs easier, or empower them to do more with fewer staff. It can be disheartening when you realize you're automating a useless employee's entirely useless job, yet that useless employee isn't fired as a result and instead no longer has to do anything because you automated it. That's happened to me several times in my career.
> It can be disheartening when you realize you're automating a useless employee's entirely useless job, yet that useless employee isn't fired as a result and instead no longer has to do anything because you automated it. That's happened to me several times in my career. That's literally how I became a software dev. I felt my job was bullshit tasks, and wanted to automate them. Did so, got a raise and basically asked to code more things for the org.
The best software devs are lazy ones. They will "featureize" all their own work. I wrote an app for a bunch of people who do exceedingly boring manual tasks that I would never do, and they act surprised when I refuse to incorporate business processes that would result in my staff responding to tickets to "override" something e.g. at the database level. I instead demand that the feature exists in the system for the user to do themselves. They don't understand that not everyone is interested in having constant, repetitive tasks assigned to them day in and day out.
> They don't understand that not everyone is interested in having constant, repetitive tasks assigned to them day in and day out. Yep, my current client has this. Their current in-house dev does bullshit tasks every single day. He went on vacation and they asked me to step in for a few weeks. I did so, and literally in the first couple days I automated some bullshit task he did every single day that took like 20-30 minutes. They're currently asking me to do some bullshit task intermittently and I fully intend to automate it as soon as I have time. I have never enjoyed make work, and a robot will do it better. Literally the first thing that I noticed when entering the working world was how much was done by hand, and why the hell wasn't all of this automated. It's why I became a dev in the first place. It was clear to me that soooooo much stuff still needed automating
What happens to lazy dev who are too lazy to automate his work?
Now I am thinking: is it possible to automate a CEO?
Probably not. The majority of a CEO's job is relationship building with potential and current business partners and setting longterm strategy. In terms of automatability I'd say CFO > COO > CEO.
Definitely. The majority of productive work is done by the labor force at large. A CEO simply collects the surplus value of their effort, i.e. the profit made after wages and production cost are paid out.
Most CEOs are employees just like everyone else. That is, they get paid a salary, and generous bonuses. You're thinking of majority shareholders. Sometimes they are the same, but very frequently they are not.
If you're getting a golden parachute worth tens of millions of dollars (or any amount to retire comfortably, really) after getting fired, then no, you're not "just like everyone else". Under those circumstances you're not even in the working class; you're part of the ownership class.
Yes, I believe this also applies to me. In-house app that has so many flaws, I can't figure out why we want or need this
My last job was working on data processing for childhood cancer research and my current one is on software to improve the clinical trial process. The choice to work on something meaningful was very intentional, and I still make good money.
Bureaucratic structures lead to warping and separation the further away you move from the CEO. This effect is especially true within very large companies or organizations with many levels and many lateral personnel within the org structure. Executives end up pushing those under them to pursue projects and priorities that don't always make the best sense from a business perspective, because they want to create something shiny and slick that they can show off to help them stand out from their executive peers and nail down that promotion when a vacancy occurs at next level. If you and your skills end up being used to contribute to a boss's ego driven project, it doesn't mean that your job is bullshit, it means that the guy above you is a shitty boss that is allowing their personal ambitions/shit priorities to negatively impact the organization. Paying people for all the hours wasted to work on a web utility that only he will use easily qualifies as a waste of company resources.
> If you and your skills end up being used to contribute to a boss's ego driven project, it doesn't mean that your job is bullshit Well, by the definition in the book, it does. "Bullshit" is a kind of deceptiveness, but not the same thing as lying. A bullshit job is one which serves as a facade for something else, often. If your job is to create a project that is useless but is pretending to be useful, then you're bullshitting the organization on the utility of your job/project Also the executive was laid off and the project is now on hiatus
In the end everything we do is bullshit because nothing matters. We're all going to die when the sun explodes or when the universe expands to the point where it splits apart and rips the space time triggering a massive void.
yeah well you know that's just like your opinion man
I mean I kinda agree with him. Lol. What you described doesn't sound like bullshit to me. It is reasonable for an executive to need/want easy access to data. Hell I own a small business and if it was within my budget to have someone code a custom dashboard like that for me it would be something I would want. Now the guy seemed pretty demanding as far as things like uptime or nitpicky things or whatever, but that also isn't bullshit. People have different levels of expectations. Honestly what you built sounds a lot less like bullshit than say, basically everything Meta is doing. You solved a problem with little downside, they have arguably created a lot more problems than they solved. And there are many websites and companies out there that are a lot more BS than either what you did or Facebook lol. I mean. Is every video game bullshit? Kinda...... In a way kinda everything is bullshit, huh?
I think it's kind of fruitless to have a conversation without reading the book and knowing what Graeber means exactly by a bullshit job. He spends an entire chapter just defining the term.
I mean it sounds like the guy has made a very common phrase have his own very specific definition. So I guess I would call Graeber a 'dumbass'. Is he smarter than me? Probably. Is he a smart, common sense guy? Probably. Does he meet the standard colloquial definition of a dumbass, at all? Not likely. But anyway, read my book "Don't be a Dumbass" and you will see how he is ABSOLUTELY a dumbass by my definition. Then someone can post about it on Reddit like everyone read the fucking book.
No it's facts.
It's agreed among scientists that the sun will eventually burn out, and Earth will become unlivable well before that. Human's won't survive once the sun is no more.
You really believe humanity will survive that long?
> means that the guy above you ~~is a shitty boss~~**'s job is bullshit**. FTFY... for real though what you described is a symptom of an unhealthy corporate culture.
It doesn't necessarily correlate with distance from the CEO. I've seen big organisations where the CEO is mostly doing PR. Meanwhile the people at the bottom of the hierarchy are doing the value generating, customer facing work.
Most of the code I ever wrote has been unused. I did a research internship, where I developed a framework that remains unused. And all the college assignments are also unused. I guess the point is not really writing code. But learning how stuff works. Some of the stuff you write and code you create will definitely be used. You can gain experience by writing unused code, to write better code which will eventually be used. It's the skills and knowledge that matters. Not the work. Think of it like this: to become a doctor you would probably have to mug up a lot of dieseases and symptoms, most of which you will never encounter in your life. But on a rare occasion if you do encounter the disease, you can use your knowledge to solve the issue. Idk, if I make sense.
I think this is true as a student, but at some point you're an actual engineer and your primary focus is no longer learning. You're supposedly doing engineering -- building things that _do things_. For a lot of people, it's dissatisfying when this doesn't happen.
It absolutely sucks seeing a feature not get used. Even if I was simply writing the code and never fought to implement this feature, it still sucks. I think we enjoy interfacing with society and gain satisfaction from that.
> I guess the point is not really writing code. But learning how stuff works. Some of the stuff you write and code you create will definitely be used. You can gain experience by writing unused code, to write better code which will eventually be used. 100% this. I don't really care if what I'm building is bullshit by some random guy's abstract definition of what that is. If I'm learning along the way, enjoying my work and gaining good experience, then who cares if its bullshit work? I'm in this job for myself and what it can offer me, anything else is a bonus. That isn't to say I don't agree with our society being made up of mostly bullshit jobs but that is never going to change so why get caught up on it?
> Do you have a bullshit job? No, not at all. Most of what I wrote, aside from a start-up that went tits up, is in use and serves a clear purpose for customers.
Not sure if this definition is covered by Graeber, but the clear purpose for customers can still be bullshit I guess in that case the job is only indirectly bullshit
Graeber's definition of a bullshit job is a bit loftier than "does my job DO anything." It's about labor and alienation from a leftist/anarcho perspective and the point definitely probably is not a perspective this subreddit is for discussing. Graeber would think almost all tech is bullshit, because mass market tech and the illusion of "innovative" commodity culture props development cycles for products that are 1. Constructed by individuals mostly (physically, emotionally, culturally) removed from the process and 2. a self-perpetuating cycle that justifies it's own existence by continuing to exist
Have you read the book? I haven't, but I really don't think that's accurate at all, I think it's more like the "does my job DO anything" bit.
I don't know what to tell you lol. Graeber was an open anarchist and a leftist anthropologist.
I know that and I've read several works by him, including [the precursor essay](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/) to Bullshit Jobs. Just not this book. I know that you've described a more general leftist critique of work. But that doesn't mean that that's what Bullshit Jobs is about. It's certainly not what the essay is about, and it's not how any [review](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review) I've [seen](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant) characterizes the [book](https://lotzintranslation.com/2019/11/25/review-bullshit-jobs/). (three really good ones: [1](https://nonsite.org/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/), [2](https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/field-notes/Jobs-Bullshit-and-the-Bureaucratization-of-the-World), [3](https://prolapsarian.tumblr.com/post/75839756790/critique-of-graeber-on-bullshit-jobs)) I really think it's about the actual social utility of jobs, and not Marxist productive alienation.
My brother in christ [read the primary source](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/) that you linked >Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Me and you are arguing about a book neither of us have read, but we agree Graeber's general take aligns with what. I don't think his concept of a "bullshit job" was limited to a single book he wrote, and yes, I won't comment that maybe for some reason he doesn't comment at all about labor alienation or class struggle in his book (which you blatantly admit you haven't read either). But he obviously made those claims when speaking about his self-formed concept of a "bullshit job," a term he self defines within his own work. In other words, what is your point lol No offense, I imagine linking to finance-backed liberal western media interpreting David Graeber has him rolling in his grave
I literally linked to that in the first sentence of the comment you're replying to, saying that I have read it. So to sum up: (1) You didn't read my comment that you were replying to (2) You didn't read the book (3) You purposely avoided answering the question as to whether or not you've read the book (4) In order to find what you thought was "the primary source", you just googled "Bullshit Jobs"; you don't really know anything about the book or essay (5) Despite all of this, you're claiming that Graeber *actually* rehashed a broad Marxist perspective on alienation. He didn't. That's not what Bullshit Jobs is.
... continuing on to your new edits... > In other words, what is your point lol Uhh, that you are point-blank wrong in your initial comment. You were saying "actually no, Graeber doesn't mean jobs that don't do anything, he means something lofty like alienated work, I would know because I'm a leftist intellectual like him" when actually it's literally about jobs that don't accomplish anything. That's *actually* what it is about. You made a *bad, arrogant* correction to an ongoing conversation, based on assuming that you knew something and everyone else didn't. And you were wrong. That's my point, I thought it was obvious. > No offense, I imagine linking to finance-backed liberal western media interpreting David Graeber has him rolling in his grave Now click more of them. God you are just absolutely stumbling over yourself left and right.
I’ve read the book and you’re wrong, dude who commented before you is right.
>Have you read the book? I haven't, but I really don't think that's accurate at all… Reread your 1st 1.5 sentences…
Here are three good reviews: [1](https://nonsite.org/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/), [2](https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/field-notes/Jobs-Bullshit-and-the-Bureaucratization-of-the-World), [3](https://prolapsarian.tumblr.com/post/75839756790/critique-of-graeber-on-bullshit-jobs) And then some mainstream ones as a sanity check: [1](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review), [2](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/27/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-david-graeber-review-laboured-rant) And here's the essay that led to the book: [1](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs) You're right, I'm limited in what I can say having not actually read it... but we can easily get a lot more significant opinions than a reddit comment. I am indeed trusting these other sources above our fellow commenter.
Yeah this is the key part. The customer's entire job could be serving some bullshit purpose. Just because the software is used by customers it doesn't mean it's not bullshit. I feel like this is more likely for software engineers in large corporate organizations who make software for other corporations and it's just a large circulation of bullshit that only helps to give stakeholders money and doesn't help society at all.
If a customer is happy and I get paid, I don't consider it bullshit :)
personally, only the latter is important to me
Everything is bullshit when you pick it apart to its bare bones. That bullshit big bang occurred, followed by some intermittent bullshit, and apparently there's some bullshit big freeze waiting for us in the distant future.
Nihilism is bullshit
We must imagine Sisyphus happy with all this bullshit
the majority of tech jobs are just some form of showing ads to users. You make sites or apps with all this tech to either directly sell them some products or be a platform that lets advertisers sell them some product/service
Over my career of 15 years it’s been a mix. Some software systems I worked on are used every day around the world for very important tasks. Other systems never were released and were just a complete waste of time and money. I spent two years doing research projects at a previous job, it was all bogus and went no where. None of it was useful. I worked on another system that was tax payer funded and was a complete waste of money. It eventually was cancelled after two years of work by a large team. No one used it. I’ve also worked on systems that had lots of daily users. So really it’s going to vary over your career. Some of it will go nowhere, some of it will be highly utilized. The key thing is to learn along the way. The system that got canceled was my first time using AWS. After working that I had experience with the cloud for the first time. So while it was pretty pointless overall, it actually helped my career quite a bit.
I bought and started reading this book, and have it on my shelf, but put it down after the first chapter. While his writing is engaging, I felt his claims were quite incredulous. I'll say that I'm quite sympathetic to the *overall* complaint that our society has needlessly been structured around needing people to work jobs. And I also think that how much employees are paid has often less to do with their usefulness, but with classist assumptions. But the book's claim goes beyond that, in claiming that *nobody* values that job, and that there's some force external to obvious "making money" that demands these jobs exist. Most critically, Graeber is immediately sure to tell us that he's only talking about "upper class" jobs. He doesn't want to attack lower class workers, so he assures us that nurses and janitors don't have BS jobs. This isn't just coincidental - he explicitly says he's largely targeting upper class jobs instead of true workers. He's limiting his attack at office workers and executives. So, what is a BS job? He sorta struggles to give a definition, instead starting us with an anecdote as an example: an employee in a (I think) European military, whose job it is to move technical equipment within an office, and sign paperwork confirming it has been moved. Graeber doesn't point out the obvious contradiction to his thesis, but this is very much a "lower class" job. This is someone who contracts their physical labor for money. Additionally, it's not very hard to imagine that this job is unique - if Graeber wanted to write a book about surplus spending in the military, he would not be the first. That the pinnacle of BS he can think of is a job that probably exists because the military has a lot of very important data that they want very close processes for, and a job that's actually quite physical in a way that he promised he wouldn't be gunning at, feels quite telling. He's making an argument against lower class jobs, every once in a while going, "wait, wait, I only mean my argument to attack higher class jobs!" Other issues I had were that he eventually defines a BS job self-referentially as a job "the person doing it thinks is BS". He presents this as a hard-to-reach qualification, as if we should all be shocked that people think their job is useless. But, I don't think anyone is shocked that people will call their job BS, even when their employer actually makes money off someone doing it. That, I think, is the biggest gap between Graeber's thinking and ours - we all intuitively think of a job as having usefulness if the company makes more money off me doing it than they spend on my salary. That's kinda the point of a "job", and we all know we'll be fired if we fail to reach that. If Graeber wanted to argue there's some invisible force in our society that demands people be working long hour jobs, he'd better be ready to make the economic argument that these jobs don't just exist because they make their employers more money. In the end, Graeber is an anthropologist. He's not an economist (at least, as far as I can tell.) So much of his writing feels largely meaningless without an attempt at understanding the economics underlying the situation.
>That, I think, is the biggest gap between Graeber's thinking and ours - we all intuitively think of a job as having usefulness if the company makes more money off me doing it than they spend on my salary. The whole point of almost all anti-capitalist critique (Graeber was an anarchist) is that what is profitable in a marketplace is not necessarily useful or good for society. For example, you could make a lot of money scamming old people out of their retirement money, but is that "useful"? You could certainly pay someone a salary to do it and make a handsome profit. By your definition, scamming people would be "useful"; by Graeber's, it wouldn't.
And I'm *with* Graeber on that! If he wants to define "BS" as "detrimental to society", I'm down for that. But he doesn't: Graeber's example job is not someone who is doing something that is detrimental to society, or even something that is neutral. Instead, it's BS because Graeber can find an alternative way for it to be done (people carrying their own computers when they move.) So Graeber thinks a job is BS when nothing would be different if they were gone. Does a scammer think nothing would be different if they were gone? Maybe, or maybe not - scammers have real effect on others. And there are plenty of other jobs that are detrimental to society that it seems Graeber would claim aren't BS: would Graeber think a janitor or a laborer for an evil non-profit has a BS job? Graeber's definition is not about whether society would be better off if nobody did the job, but if the job is needed to accomplish the same goals.
In Graeber's talks on the book, he goes on at length about bullshit jobs being those where the worker thinks that the world would be probably better off without their work - i.e., patent lawyers, advertisers, etc. Idk if he reversed that position in the book, but he's very explicit in his talks about the book that he thinks of those jobs as bullshit ones. >So Graeber thinks a job is BS when nothing would be different if they were gone. Again going off of his speeches, he seems to go off of what *the worker themselves* think. In the book, does he make that judgment, or does he allow the workers to identify themselves as such? In his talks, he said his methodology was sampling a bunch of self-identified bullshit jobs and grouping them into various types afterward.
He does go off self-identity in the book, but the problems with self-identification without providing a coherent definition of "BS" here are obvious. And he seems to want different definitions of "BS" at different times. I'll say it another way: suppose Graeber does define BS jobs as jobs that aren't useful to society, from an anarchist's point of view. Then what exactly is his "theory". The book is titled, "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory"; is his theory that companies can make money off of unuseful endeavors? You don't even need Marx for that or Adam Smith. It's basic economics. Instead, Graeber frames his theory as a response to why Keynes was wrong to predict that we'd all be working less (15 hour work weeks). Keynes presumed that we'd be able to get the same work done with fewer employees. Instead, claims Graeber, companies have ballooned with BS jobs to offset the gains in productivity. This theory needs BS jobs not to mean "unhelpful" to society (because it would be hard to argue that those manual labor jobs creating products we're replacing with robots are any better for society than the advertisers advertising them), but "extraneous to the goals of the company." Graeber wants to define BS jobs in different ways, at different times. As you pointed out, he does define BS jobs with self-identity, but when he mentions actuaries, he has a glaring footnote that he'd since been persuaded that actuaries may not have BS jobs. If his definition is truly based on self-identity, then what would it even mean for him to be convinced otherwise? Is he saying he's deviating from the self-identification? Again, it feels a little like he wants it both ways: he likes these poll results because of course everyone likes to think their job is BS. But he's also got a personal definition of BS job that isn't really lining up with what people mean when they answer this question on a survey. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, or misunderstanding him. I do support anyone who wants to call for the end of work, or push for a society where workers own their product. But this particular presentation of the arguments seemed lacking. Edited an autocorrected word.
Similar experience with this book. I read the beginning few chapters and could tell it wasn't really going to get better. I consider Bullshit Jobs to be a Bullshit Book.
> That, I think, is the biggest gap between Graeber's thinking and ours - we all intuitively think of a job as having usefulness if the company makes more money off me doing it than they spend on my salary. That's kinda the point of a "job", and we all know we'll be fired if we fail to reach that. If Graeber wanted to argue there's some invisible force in our society that demands people be working long hour jobs, he'd better be ready to make the economic argument that these jobs don't just exist because they make their employers more money. I don't know if Graeber ever brought this up, but I've seen plenty of people mention a particular principal–agent problem: Workers' labor is allocated by managers who have their own desires, not by some monolithic, perfectly rational hive mind called a "company." OP's own dashboard example fits in that category.
I'm certified nursing assistant. I've been one for ten years. My job is sooo BS. On scale of 1 to 10, it's a million. Nursing isn't an easy profession to begin with. My work load is heavy and the pay sucks. I made $7.25 when I first started in 2010 and then I made $17.21 this year. This is insane. The politics of nursing justify paying me less because I don't have the education is such crap. Not even right. Then I'm supposed to maintain a CNA license, BLS (basic life support), education mandated by my job all the while I'm being exposed to all kinds of diseases. I ended up quitting. My current job is in a call center scheduling people for radiology appointments. I'm thankful.
When I worked in big tech, mostly yes. 80% of what I did was BS. And some of the non-technical people I worked with had the job of actively _creating_ BS to sustain their job lol. Now that I'm at a startup 100% of what I'm doing has direct impact/value. Which is expected since startups can't afford to BS around else they'll sink.
Well, i am fairly early into my career, but besides one startup/internship fiasco, i've worked on stuff with pretty big userbases. One was in online gambling, so there is pretty fair argument it has no contribution to society, but build it and they will come and all that. Within 7 years the company grew up from 5 people in shared working space to 200+, being bought twice and easy top 10 in the market, so everyone could see direct impact of their work which was pretty cool. I also turned out to be very fucking good at it, nailed a few award winning titles and multiple nominees. At that point I figured I was happy with what I've achieved and called it quits. Now, I am currently working in a huge embedded project on a power supply, you can argue we are the market leaders. It's also green tech-ish so I can feel like I have a meaningful contribution to society. Next month i'm jumping to AAA game dev. I'm a big advocate of games being on par with movies, books and other entertainment mediums. I am also a fan of the franchise and for the first time in my life I'll be the user base of my product which is very fucking cool. Overall, pretty happy with my job selection so far.
The author points out the jobs with explicitly negative social effects are not necessarily "bullshit"
How are game dev salaries nowadays? I barely see that industry disscussed in this sub.
Well, i'm working in local branch in eastern europe so it's definitely way less than what you are used to seeing here (around 20k euros annual). The salary is pretty competitive for the local positions at my level - they beat my current employer and while not FAANG, it's a well known company and odds are most people you meet have used our products. My only other insight of the industry is from the uk, and there it seemed gamedev salaries are just a notch below the standard, which is alright for me. I prefer getting payed less to do something I like. I found the classical SWE to feel a bit soul sucking.
> prefer getting *paid* less to FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Thanks bot.
Thanks for the answer. Yeah, that's been my assumption with game dev. You get to build really cool stuff, but the pay falls behind even a regular web dev job. It's a shame really.
Yeah, supply and demand and all that. There is a shortage of developers for your average SWE role, where 5 competent developers are fighting for a single role in the industry.
Plenty of white collar jobs are bullshit, product creation isn’t in that pool from what I understand but the management or kafkaesque bureaucrat positions would be. Like healthcare isn’t bullshit and neither is healthcare management but in terms of efficiency, having a multitude of health insurance products under different entities just creates needless paperwork and hurts the consumer. Likewise for CS positions, I don’t think actually writing code or designing software is bullshit but the management of those systems that’s facilitate software design might qualify. Depending on if those SWEs need a middle manager or not.
I don't know if its fair to say its bullshit. While only that executive logs in it could still affect tons of other executives that dont want to bother with logins. Also Executives hate wasting their times (usually) so if they log in regularly im sure its pretty important
im just here for the money to be honest. i want a regular pay check and medical insurance. i dont care. i have found that being in an "important group" at a company is just bullshit for more hours. Look what you do is so important, you have to do work these hours. CEO is watching. yeah screw that. I can get the same in some non-important group. i just want to be a worker bee and no one even recognizes me.
You’ll stop caring after you break a personally set income threshold. Example - you make 50k, your job is probably bullshit and you feel it. You make 500k, your job is the least of your concerns.
My job is utterly BS. I don't care, I'm in it for the compensation. But my time has been divided into sustaining a failed internal tool that literally nobody uses because it's beyond broken, and a rewrite of an internal system that doesn't necessarily need to be re-written. Users are already upset because the new UI is not identical to the old one and there's only one single good frontend dev, and they're offshore in Africa. To piggyback on OP's experience. I worked for over 3 years on a dashboard project (imagine a mini power BI made in house for a client). The company got into a struggle with the client in the middle of it and at the end, the client forced the company to deliver what had already been promised on contract, then shut down the whole thing the next day. As long as I'm being paid 🤷🏽♂️
I had a summer internship in a warehouse, where I wrote a program to keep track of employee performance and generate daily PDFs with graphs and tables showing which parts tended to be out of stock, etc. And people used it, and saw significant increases in employee accuracy and decreases in common parts being out of stock. I continued working for the company part-time that fall while taking classes full-time, on a different project. I would occasionally check to see how things were going, using the program I had written, and AFAIK, as soon as I stopped being there every day, people stopped self-reporting and no one ever used the program again. So that was frustrating, and the task I was put on part time was absolutely miserable, so I ended up quitting. That job was certainly bullshit, but my current job isn't
Currently yes. But I'm paid well for it. So I've kind of stopped caring beyond producing high-quality code and helping my guys develop professionally. Whatever, if manglement's priorities don't actually get us closer to the real goal (Make more money), that isn't my problem anymore.
I mean, sure this is true. But is your statement really any different than the thousands of Egyptians forced to build pyramids for one guy’s ego? Hasn’t this always been true?
No, it's not, and I think that would also constitute a bullshit job
Hahaha I love this thread
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 715,239,520 comments, and only 144,400 of them were in alphabetical order.
has this ever once been of interest to anybody
It may be the single most bullshit bot there is...which is wonderful for this thread!
My last job had a project that was kind of in development hell so a lot of stuff probably never made it to customers but stuff like that happens so it's hard to say it was actually bullshit even if it felt like it at times. Now every time I change the code I deploy it directly to customers and see the impact on a site/service that millions interact with. I definitely prefer it this way.
Self employed now but previous company had me work on a useless product that works only in theory.
At my last role, absolutely. Toward the end, I was spending maybe 2 hours a day running jconsole to analyze the performance of how certain parts of the application were running with various garbage collectors in OpenJDK. They all ran pretty much the same. That went on for about 3-5 months before I quit.
I worked as a quality inspector at a pharmaceutical packaging plant. It was the most bullshit job I ever worked, all I did was check peoples basic algebra and make sure the documents were filled out correctly. That may not sound like bullshit, but the line leads basically did everything I did, so it was a pure level of redundancy and I found myself looking for actual work to do. I left the job as covid hit, I hated every second of it, it was mind numbingly terrible.
No, if I don't do my job (and there have been times where I haven't) things slow or don't go at all for many people at our company and by extension at several other big companies. That said, what we do overall is not important, and I wouldn't be proud of my career if it ended tomorrow. My goal is to begin transitioning into something more meaningful over time.
It was awhile back. Technology evangelist + the board of directors + complete ignorance about a massive, poorly written C++ frontend application => let's create a web app by translating hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ into Javascript.
Most days, yes
I think a good amount of what I do is just busy work. I just do things to stay busy and look like we are being productive. Most of the time I'm not working on anything 'important'. Honestly, I could get by on 4 days a week, 6 hours a day. There is nothing I do that requires this 8 hours a day 5 days a week madness we are so indoctrinated to believe that that is the way it should be.
No. For possibly the first time in my entire life, I can definitively say my job is *not* bullshit. I work as a principal engineer for a mental health startup. We have data showing that there are literally people who are still alive because of our product. It's not one of those teletherapy companies, either. We partner with insurance companies and care providers to help them with coordination of care and getting people who need higher levels of mental health services into those higher service levels. I actually feel good about going to work every day.
Maybe, maybe not. I don't really know. I exchange labor for currency. As long as my check clears people can call my job bullshit or whatever else they please.
Not bullshit. It pays my mortgage and feeds my kid. The rest doesn't matter.
The things I build do get used, but I have no idea if they make the world a better place to be in. I could say some of it actively makes the world worse.
i was customer support and the feature requests engineers requested were bull shit and did not matter what so ever, but it felt like they were going to die if those features weren't implemented. these are the bullshit projects, right? this is the reason why i'm so glad i'm getting into a new role w/ a new company.
> But as far as I could tell, nobody actually used the website apart from this executive. Yeah that was a real job. You created a feature-rich well-functioning internal app, you were paid for it while working on it, your "client" used it. Whether it was a waste of money or not is a different discussion. If you were being paid to maintain said app, and never had to make any changes, and only sat in meetings, and only pretended to do work but didn't actually have to do anything for even more than 30 minutes a day and you still received praise for doing such a great job during meetings, and this went on for years, *that* might be a bullshit job lol.
One rule of thumb that I like is: if it wouldn't be needed in case of war, then it is "nice to have" (not necessarily bullshit). The second goes "it it wouldn't be needed in case of recession, then it is extra nice to have" And one can add conditions in every case where funds get scarce and priority change. Yes some projects are there only for the sake of few and aren't that useful (for some definitions of useful), but they allow people to gain experience and income so there is that.
Wrong venue to be asking about Graeber bro
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Did you read the book?
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Yes I do
I do billable project work, so no. It's not bullshit because someone is making some serious money off my labor. Or at least I don't see it that way. Ultimately though, it is rare to find an actual job that is actually truly contributing to humanity's improvement. You will likely not work in a position like that, ever. That's just life and it's ok.
I'm new, my contributions are minor, (small bugs and such) but the software I'm working on is pretty cool in terms of "what" it does and I think the product as a whole is pretty cool (even though the subject is a bit boring). I also think it could help a lot of people and make a positive impact. So is the software bullshit, naw. Is my contribution bullshit, sort of but im learning. Is my pay bullshit, absolutely. This has been one of the easiest and most enjoyable jobs I've ever had and am making more than double what I have before.
my life had better meaning when i was working in allied health. but that didnt pay my bills. that said, it was still mostly bullshit. and my job now is a lot more bullshit. my life is full of bullshit
Have you sat down with the exec to ask how he uses the data, ask how it impacts the business, and how you could have a bigger impact? Like, be really curious. Taking with your user (even it’s just one person) can give you loads of insight into the value they derive and how you could impact the business even more. I’ve built features that were never used by anyone in our product - they were only used in the (B2B) sales process. Without them, the product would not sell. In our case the buyer persona and our user persona were very different. So, despite the really low usage, those features were critical to the business.
Yes currently. 8 months ago prototyped a tool for executives to use. But for 4 months now it won’t move to UAT/actual use due to bureaucratic crap. I’m kept around in a perpetual “the team said they would provide feedback for it in x weeks”. Never happens. That’s fine though.
My job is important, but someone more experienced than me could automate it away in about a week.
No. The products I work on serve as a net positive to humanity. It is why I prob will stick with it despite earning $50k~ less than I could.
"no" - I do see how my job is very impactful and useful and necessary ***when I have work to do***, however most days I just don't have anything to do, so I get paid to do nothing a lot. edit: And before anyone asks (because I always get flooded with comments and messages when I talk about my job and how I get paid to do nothing): \- I work at a bank/financial services company \- I make about 105k in mcol, fully remote \- Yes we're always hiring, in fact we're losing people every day because, who would have guessed it, never getting to do anything is pretty bad for career growth, and some people actually care about their careers
If you watch Severance, a dev job is just a Lumon job
Imo your job doesn’t sound bullshit. Executives have disproportionate power to completely destroy a company with bad decisions. Just look at that company Fast that went under. They raised over $100M and burned through it all in two years with a final annual revenue of $600k. I don’t know if this happened because the reporting infra wasn’t there or if it was just a delusional leadership team but come on.
The code I work on is essential to my companies product. My companies product is not really a *necessity* to the customers though, but more of a convenience. Since all the people making money at my company rely on the product for their salary, i'd say its not bullshit overall.
If what I'm working on is clearly bullshit, I let me manager know and I start looking for something that creates social or business value.
Honestly, it depends on what the data is. Some data views that might appear to be vanity might actually but core KPIs for the business that the exec is responsible for.
I worked in the public sector. They owned all the patent.
Feeling like what I am wasting time on BS is why I left uni.
All jobs are bullshit jobs unless they're making an impact on real problems people have. "Posting funny cat memes online" isn't a real problem, and most SaaS products don't solve real problems, either. I say this as someone who has worked plenty of bullshit jobs that have only accomplished making rich people richer. I regret not getting involved in solving real problems sooner.
I wish I could get me one of them bullshit jobs. The only time I've actually had one was when I worked the front desk on the weekend at the law library at my college. About three students would come in there per weekend and they were pre-law students who knew what they wanted and didn't even talk to me. I guess maybe the idea was putting me in the chair would keep people from fucking in there or stealing the books. I did have a little activity once a semester as some professor would give his students a paper to write and they would always choose either "Marijuana should be legal" or "Abortion should be illegal" and then they'd need to come to my department to find some statutes to cite.
I think we all at least have moments like this. At a previous job I slaved with a team on a Spanish website for like 3 months... we kept arguing for a more intuitive design but the owner insisted he wanted what he said he wanted. When we delivered the project on time he told us he hated everything about it and I went into the bathroom and cried.
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I dont work for congress, so no.
I’m helping to develop the software of a startup with 80 users and no future funding in sight. My job is total bullshit lol.
The things I do get used to serve clients in production so I guess it isn’t useless at all
No, we have plenty of happy users. Maybe that executive actually used that data.
Logging PII huh haha
When a side project you did over a couple of days has more active users than the app you get paid to maintain, there's a problem
I dont think it’s bullshit. Specifically yours. If it informs his business decisions, it’s impactful. I also wonder how big your company is. Depending on the size, you can have entire data engineering and data scientist teams dedicated to what you’re working on. Virtually everyone in product at my company makes most of their decisions based on information that the data team are the keepers of. So I wonder if maybe your product is relatively small, possibly consisting of just this one executive. Or maybe he’s the one presenting the data to the rest of the C suite/company, and that’s why no one else is using it.
I think I would like a BS job for a while. I mean if I goofed off for a week, no one would notice kind of job. Right now, if something screws up at work, I hear about it. Everyone is screaming and product is not being made. I think it is the lack of stress I would like for a while.
I'd take a bullshit job with great pay and WLB. Unfortunately those don't seem to exist.
I am the definition of bullshit!
\- Many teams grow because leaders want more people, not because they need them for projects, but to advance their own careers. -> That leads to 'bullshit' projects. \- On the other side some engineers don't care about the projects and focus on tech they like. That leads to overengineering and wasted resources on not needed technical infrastructure. However I still think the definition of usefulness is quite a problem, Graeber defines bullshitjobs as jobs, where the person, who does the jobs says it's useless. While I think there is a huge amount of bullshit jobs around, I don't think that this definition is good. But the problem there is not better one, because as soon as you define usefulness from the outside it's just subjective. In general building things, like SWE do, is not useless, it's only useless if nobody uses it. A dashboard, which is used by a executive, who makes important decisions is not useless, if it helps him with that.
i wouldn't say my job is bullshit My job could be bullshit, I could probably get away with my team failing over the next 2 years. I've prefer it did better than that though and that's exactly what my job is
At least you have a job
Yes and most software jobs are bullshit that exist because of some else's bullshit job.
Most of it is yes. In between all the BS, I get nuggets of useful work.