I liked the book and agree with a lot of it's conclusions, but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing. For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?
I think you're right that line employees often lack the "big picture," but the big picture is also frequently not required.
An anecdote from one of my friends, who works in the finance department of a university: her entire job is to copy rows from one piece of software (PeopleSoft) into another piece of software. She's told which rows to copy by another person in the department (via email), who in turn is copying them from a third piece of software. All of this could be automated without any "big picture" changes, and everybody who works these jobs is aware of that fact; hence "bullshit."
Is it bullshit, though? It's definitely tedious and clearly she's replaceable, but until she's replaced, presumably there is a reason that the rows need to get copied into that other piece of software. Maybe not - maybe there was once a reason and now the whole thing's vestigial and nobody's really thought about it enough to realize she can be fired, but I would wager that more likely that not, there is an actual reason that task needs to be done.
I think that too often folks conflate the fact that a job is boring/tedious/simple/whatever other negative characteristics with the idea that it's "bullshit," when really it does serve a useful purpose and is worth more to the company than they're paying in salary to the person doing it.
The point is that they think it's bullshit. The operation of copying rows itself exists for an intelligible reason (settling the university's accounts), but the dedicated role of "row copier" is a bullshit job from the vantage point of the people working it.
No shared notion of "bullshit" needs to exist between the two of us (or you and Graeber, me and Graeber, etc.). Assuming that we need to agree on what actually constitutes a "bullshit job" is making the same error that the GP points out.
Then shouldn't the title be something like "Self-proclaimed Bullshit Jobs".
Even in the example given by Graeber at the start could have variables that make the job of having an IT guy drive 6 hours to move a computer down the hallway make sense. Maybe soldiers moving computers has resulted in many computers becoming broken costing more in money and downtime than having a trained professional drive in and move the computer. Maybe having on-site IT staff is more expensive than having the off-site IT guy make a few visits a year.
I agree with the driving IT guy example. I used to be a technician who would travel via plane to another state to fix "broken" production lines for pharma companies. After I made the fix, they would have me sit in the cafeteria for two days doing nothing but drinking coffee and reading the paper (pre-smartphone era). When I told the plant manager I felt guilty about sitting around doing nothing, he said that the profits from 5 minutes of the production line running paid for my two days of doing nothing. So it was worth it for them to pay me to hang around just in case there was another problem.
THIS, and it applies to far lower tech than modern pharma. A century ago, one of my grandfathers was a blacksmith in a little farming town, which had a little canning factory. During harvest season, when that factory was running 24-hour days, grandpa was paid to sleep there every night. Canning food is a complex, time-sensitive, and safety-critical activity. If production is halted even "briefly" - you may have to start throwing out large quantities of spoiled food, waste more time re-sanitizing things, etc.
It's an anthropological book; you, as a reader, are expected to understand that the framing is subjective.
Compare The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down[1]: tacking "self-proclaimed" on the front doesn't improve any understanding of the contents, and would only make the author come across as smarmy.
In the Preface, the earlier inspiration for what's a "Bullshit Job":
> Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything...
> This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible.
> Clearly, then, we have an important social phenomenon that has received almost no systematic attention.
There's also a Chapter titled: "Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?"
It seems Graeber is making a much wider commentary, including society's perspective, which goes beyond the personal opinions of the people holding these jobs.
One of the first things he does in the book is define the term "bullshit jobs", and refine that definition to specifically include that the workers feel it is bullshit. I think it's fair to make a larger statement of social phenomenon using that definition, the same way many people can make statements of depression or poor mental health without everyone expressing those feelings being clinically diagnosed.
> Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.
The qualification is that even the person doing the job thinks it's bullshit. That doesn't mean the definition relies solely on them thinking it's bullshit.
Frankly, reading through the article, it feels like the definition keeps shifting and much of it is his struggle to even define what it means. He then goes on to start giving his definitions of the what he thinks are types of bullshit jobs.
The article I don't think is all that consistent and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
> ...much of it is his struggle to even define what it means
Exactly. Like many of us, Graeber writes to understand.
His stated purpose is abundantly clear. Many, many people were sharing with Graeber complaints of a similar theme. So he tried to name and describe it.
Rightly, wrongly, or otherwise, it's all in the book. For other people to pick apart and response to.
How else is scholarship supposed to function?
Would Graeber have been more effective as an op ed columnist, churning out saccharine blather which confirms everyone's priors? eg The World is Flat and Bobos in Paradise?
I don't have a problem with Graeber writing about bullshit jobs, and think it's a worthwhile topic to discuss. My issue was with people narrowly defining the qualification of a bullshit job as being solely based on the perspective of the person doing the job, without looking at the bigger picture.
I think there are definitely jobs that a computer or robot should be doing, but a human is there instead because of what our economy and society currently values. However, until the computer or robot is actually doing the job, I don't think I'd call it a bullshit job. That's not to say society shouldn't consider the impacts of grinding people's lives away with rote repetitive tasks.
Its his opinion about society. Not something like scientific/statistical facts that can be improved by having precise definition approved by IBRAA (International Bullshit Recognition and Accreditation Agency).
He's welcome to his opinion, and I am not necessarily disagreeing with the concept. I am stating that his definition is broader in scope than only considering the employee's perspective.
Certain critics have adopted a labored, willful misunderstanding. eg Brad DeLong.
Graeber became public enemy #1 with Debt: The first 5000 Years. Some economists just couldn't wrap their heads around the anthropological viewpoint. Graeber is talking about people and societies evolving relationship(s) to debt, not economies and finance.
Economists and anthropologists like to dunk on each other. It's now something like a blood feud.
It's not that the conclusion is drawn, it's that we recognize the possibility that self-perception of the value of one's job is not necessarily an actually good measure of the value of that job.
> We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-perception because it doesn't align with our perception of their role.
I submit that not only can we, but we must, admit that in some individual cases the person in the position knows best, and in others, they don't.
We can't simultaneously claim those in the position know best (Cohen's take) and then dismiss their self-perception because it doesn't align with our perception of their role.
Further, how can we trust our perception is the better measure of the value of that job? If the person performing the role can't even assess the value properly, how are they providing that value?
some consequences have feed-back loops with long delays.
go remove some guys that do legal compliance stuff and when the random inspection happen years later, you'll find out that maybe it would've cost you less to keep that employee.
IIRC one of the examples in the book is someone who just stopped doing their job or showing up and nothing bad happened, and the bureaucracy of their organization kept paying them.
You're quite right. The true value could be much lower on average than the average self report held it to be. I hadn't considered that Graeber might have under-reported this phenomena if people are consistently over-optimistic.
Or maybe, absent other evidence, it might make more sense to tentatively take people's self reports at face value. Or at least hold off backing some particular elaborate alternative which involves people being wrong about the things they have most information on.
>The conclusion is drawn, "Actually their job is vital and their self-report is deluded."
The conclusion is drawn because presumably someone thinks they output enough value to continue paying them for their work. That person might be wrong, and maybe some PE firm or consultants will come through and cull the chaff to capture the lost expenses but the person themselves doing the work probably doesn't have the full perspective.
Reminds me of when my foreign wife, new to my country and still lacking local-language skills, settled for an entry-level job at a multinational. It was glorified data entry, and after she described her job to me in detail, I said, “That could be automated with just a few lines of AWK.”
Years ago I was doing QA for a flight simulator, and they decided that we would add every airport in the US to it. Not detailed for most, just number of buildings, runway orientation, etc. The FAA conveniently published the info, so they bought a stack of little blue books and had half a dozen of us transcribe them into Excel over a few days.
Of course the data was available on disk, but the boss didn't want to take the risk of nobody in our giant building full of computer programmers being able to crack the government's database format.
Then the lines of AWK fail. I believe one reason for the continual use of human workers in information processing jobs is that they (we?) can keep the system running when it's broken, which turns out to be most of the time. This could be a widespread "big picture" reason for many bullshit jobs.
I disagree. I believe that the lack of such automation is due to the clerical class largely forgetting that scripting languages exist since the mouse-based desktop-computer paradigm became entrenched in the 1990s. In the 1980s, awk and Emacs Lisp were taught to middle-aged female secretaries at various corporations, such scripting wasn’t considered something beyond an ordinary employee’s ken.
A lack of big picture understanding is often what creates “bullshit” jobs. Consider when someone is doing something simply because “That’s the way we’ve always done it” with no understanding on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. When business goals or processes change, these jobs persist out of simple inertia because people have lacked the understanding of their original relevance (and more recent obsolescence)
Yes this definitely happens. I'd say the flipside though is Chesterton's fence, where there's a good reason some things are the way that they are, but people with limited perspective say they're pointless. Both things happen and it's hard to tell which is which.
Sure, but the chestertons fence scenario isn’t a bullshit job. It’s just not understanding the system. My point was more pressing back on the idea that someone can just be a cog without knowing the larger machine.
Carl Icahn offers a great illustration of the point that executives can think it's BS too. He once acquired a firm that had an office whose business purpose nobody was able to explain to him so he fired twelve floors of workers.
bumby is on right on the money. I've seen it happen: a poor understanding of the big picture leads to pretty common scenarios: department and role duplicity, unnecessary redundancy and cases like the one you mentioned.
Personally it's pretty obvious the problem arises precisely because no one has the visibility that there's people doing bullshit jobs, meaning the process can be automated. When you say "automated with big picture": who do you think has 1) the incentives to fix the issue; 2) the power to order that and 3) the cultural capital to push for a change in the old ways? Who do you think will "run the automation"?
That's an executive failure to communicate (the big picture). Sometimes they don't know that they're failing, and sometimes they're just beyond their depth.
> For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
Because of course, the executive are always driving things in the optimal way, but only them can see it…
In fact, in most orgs the higher in the management position you climb, the more acutely you see the organisational warts of the company, which more often than not, is governed not according to some clever plan from the executives, but instead is the results of political struggles between entities whose leader often hate each other.
>Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.
And executives do not understand the details of what is actually happening on the production floor. They might be fed inaccurate information or outright fantasies by middle management. This is how Russian leadership believed they had winter uniforms, but in reality those uniforms did not exist. The same power dynamics, hiding of errors, exaduration of what convenient, happens in companies.
>For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
So you could use the same logic to say that electorate has no business complaining about decisions taken by politicians, after all they have no big picture view and don’t have access to the report that politicians do.
I don't think it's an error to ask people what they think. It's one imperfect source of information, and better than just blindly assuming that any money spent on wages or salary is spent on something truly "productive" regardless of the perceptions of those doing the work.
Graeber was an anthropologist. Anthropologists want to understand how people feel about their lives and why. They don't take feelings of meaninglessness to imply that, objectively, a job could be cut without consequence. Just that many jobs don't satisfy a human thirst to be doing something subjectively worthwhile.
> Give people a meaning and they will do much better work. It’s not rocket science.
This sounds good, but it's honestly just not realistic in a lot of jobs. How are you going to make working at an Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart? Making fries at McDonalds?
You can give the usual platitudes of how you're helping to make sure that people in your community can get the goods/food/whatever they need, but I think most people know that they're not really contributing to the betterment of society in a lot of jobs.
And to be clear, that's not just menial labor - I've been a PM on some products that could disappear off the face of the earth without making anybody especially worse off (except the guy managing the part of the operation that used our software, but ultimately he'd go to a competitor and all would be fine).
I think that it's often better to forget the idea that work needs to be deeply meaningful and treat people with the respect of recognizing that they're there for a paycheck and nothing else, and then try to do what you can to make the day-to-day work easier and more pleasant.
Meanwhile I'll be hoping against hope that when these meaningless jobs get replaced by robots and AI that we get UBI and people can actually work to find meaning.
Amazon warehouses & retail are actually called out in the book as not being bullshit, as in - the workers know exactly why people would want packages and find it useful.
> How are you going to make working at an Amazon warehouse meaningful? Stocking shelves at Walmart? Making fries at McDonalds?
Those are not “bullshit jobs” by any definition. An Amazon warehouse worker knows that someone has to do that job. The same is true for your other examples.
I think people have this idea that meaning must not be fair compensation (or put another way, adequate compensation relative to the size of the company and demands required).
I think excluding compensation from those jobs, meaning higher compensation, from the idea of meaning is losing sight of it all. There at a lot of jobs that if people were compensated better they would find it to be more meaningful to engage with. It can be a primary motivation to simply do well because they feel fairly valued.
I don't understand what you mean. You can have a great manager but still not a meaningful job. That's what I meant when I talked about making the job easier and more pleasant - you can have a manager who optimizes for your happiness by making the job as non-tedious as possible. It may still be tedious in the grand scheme, but maybe they're rotating everyone through different tasks to make it less tedious, and you feel that and appreciate it. That's good and will definitely increase your satisfaction, but it doesn't mean the job is meaningful.
"Tedious" is different than "bullshit". A bullshit job is a combination of two things: pointlessness and tediousness. Painting pictures nobody buys is pointless, but it is not tedious if you're being creative. Likewise, working hard on an assembly line doing the exact same operation is incredibly tedious, but it is not pointless: the line has an output which is presumably useful.
Mere tediousness would consign all warehouse jobs and janitorial positions to "bullshit" - which they are not, as specifically called out in the book. They might be unpleasant, but are definitely necessary.
Parent commenter is stating that, with a good manager, they will remind you of the meaning inherent in the work. At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"
I like this post. My first employment with a corporation was McDonalds. You could really get a boost from the more involved managers. They didn't treat you like some replaceable idiot. I was genuinely surprised how much there was to learn at McDonalds. A large number of different food stations, a crazy amount of kit to repair, never ending specials and register upgrades. It was much more interesting than I expected. And, yes, the lunch crush was the most fun every day.
A bullshit sector, but the jobs themselves are not "bullshit jobs". Also, the climate change stuff here is a total non sequitur, stick to the discussion. I agree with you - everyone should eat a plant-based diet - but it's incredibly off-putting in this context. The worst part about being vegan is other vegans. There will always be food service jobs, and they will always be tedious and taxing, and also not bullshit jobs. That would still be true even if they were serving ideologically-correct foodstuff.
> A bullshit sector, but the jobs themselves are not "bullshit jobs"
If a sector (industry) is bullshit, the jobs are too.
> the climate change stuff here is a total non sequitur
I was reacting to
'with a good manager, they will remind you of the meaning inherent in the work. At McD's, perhaps: "Remember folks, we're getting hungry people fed, hard working folks deserve a fresh hot meal"'
Serving hungry people "fresh" hot meal does not alone make it non-bullshit job. Maybe I was not clear enough ... consuming meat & dairy destroys the environment (and animal agriculture is the main culprit), and not consuming meat & dairy is a best way to stop anthropocenic crisis (overshoot). There are enough peer reviewed scientific studies that confirm that. Ask if you want more sources.
> The worst part about being vegan is other vegans
>I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the ground.
> but I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research. Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.
Is it not problematic that so many people feel that their jobs are bullshit? Is that an issue with the individual or society at large?
Line workers have a better idea of whether their jobs make any kind of sense. Yes, they don't often have the executive view, but the executives frequently have no idea how the work gets done all the way down the chain; they have a huge amount of blindness as to the realities and limitations of things on the ground.
Especially at large organizations, they're relying on summaries of summaries of summaries observed by line managers summarizing information. Tons of information is lost that way.
This is why high-level strategy fails. Theoretical ideas hit reality and fall apart pretty quickly. Few executives are grounded enough to actually know how things work.
> I consider relying on people's own answers to be a methodological error in the research.
If the conclusion of the research is "these jobs are bullshit", then I agree, but if it is about how people are doing in these jobs, it is completely valid. Graeber was mixing these in his book to have more popular appeal, which is bad.
> Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.
That's what Marx called alienation of labor. While it may increase efficiency, it takes all the pleasure out of work. But that's not really the topic of the book: There's entropy in any larger organization, and I'm sure we all have an example or two of people who are a pure waste of energy in their position.
You might not be surprised to learn that Marx, as an economist among other things, was almost certainly familiar with Adam Smith's work. Capital, for example, was at least partly a direct critique of On The Wealth of Nations.
>>For the same reason I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
Common theme in most of the executive decisions that I've seen. Lets shutdown product X, it costs us Y to run. We could use ~X from a different company that costs Y-2.5% to run. Then only months to an year later- We shouldn't have shut down X, as ~X is not what we actually want and our initial budgeting didn't cover it but we need 2Y to pay for and rebuilding X could cost us up to 10Y-20Y.
People at the top generally don't have what is 'precisely' needed. And the kind of resources it could to go about achieving it.
Oh, so then the problem is only that they are spending their nine-to-five in an alienated existence and it is impossible (“They don't have the executive view”) for them to fix it.
>Line employees often do not have a big picture understanding of the work they are doing.
Been a while since I read Graeber's book but I recall one self reported "bullshit job" being to lift rocks scattered across a field and put them in a pile. The people doing the task thought it was a time wasting activity as they were unaware that winter frost pushes up new rocks every year.
It's possible that a lot of these so called bullshit jobs are just jobs where the purpose hasn't been explained to the employee.
Having leadership that can't help you see the big picture and leaves you feeling like a duct taper or a goon is a problem in and of itself, for multiple reasons.
Not to say executives don't put people into bullshit jobs for exactly the reasons Graeber gets at. It's just that their (employees) judgement is biased and so there will be false positives. Haven't most people been on a project where people thought some task assigned was a waste of time, that maybe looking back was actually valuable?