[danielvf]

It’s the second half of the article that contain the real insights - that what are termed “bullshit” jobs, and despised by the people working them, actually do create economic value. Today younger people have an expectation of meaningful work, even though the world for the most part still doesn’t provide it. This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be pretty terrible in the past too.

[bartread]

> This expectation / reality mismatch creates the impression that jobs are much stupider now then they used to be, when in fact most jobs used to be pretty terrible in the past too.

I think this is the nub of it: we think things have changed, but they really haven't. Whilst the content/descriptions may have changed, grim jobs have always existed and have always been the majority.

I spent the summer of 1998 working in a wines and spirits bottling plant. I'd either be loading bottles on to the beginning of the line, or stacking boxes at the end - as a university student, and a temp, I wasn't trusted with the machines in the middle. Doesn't really matter: the work was beyond mind-numbing.

The first couple of hours I was checking my watch incessantly. Then I realised I was driving myself slowly (or, quite quickly) insane and limited myself to checking every N palettes of bottles, where N was a suitably large number. After a week or two got to the point where I'd check my watch once during the morning and it would be nearly lunchtime. Oh yeah: winning at life!

And this was a job that had some tangible output: thousands of gallons of some beverage started out in a massive tank and ended up in neatly labelled and packaged bottles ready for sale. Didn't change the fact that the job was boring as #### and that I hated every minute. But the money was essential to me at the time, and I was and am grateful to the childhood friend who offered me that job.

I have no end of respect for people who do these kinds of jobs their entire working lives for the simple reason that they have to in order to survive. I know exactly how fortunate I am to have other options open to me.

Perhaps a wider point: over the span of an entire career almost everyone has at least one, and often several, terrible jobs. E.g., including contracts, since graduating I've had two great jobs, one good, one that started great and remained that way for quite a while but became terrible during my final years, a couple that were all right but nothing special, one that was bloody awful from start to finish, and one that was entirely bipolar (sometimes from day to day).

Work isn't always enjoyable, and doesn't always (perhaps not even often) use you to your full potential. Yes, you may be better than that job, but so are lots of people, and you still have to eat. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try to find something better, but sometimes - and possibly for quite a long time - we have to do things we don't enjoy in order to live.

Sorry, I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.

[bloudermilk]

I think we have to look pre-industrialization to see fundamentally different ways of organizing production and work. The digital age has certainly sped things up, but the 20th century was full of bullshit too.

[notahacker]

And before industrialisation the tendency was for everyone to inefficiently cultivate their own food whilst most semi-skilled tasks were carried out by small numbers of artisans typically organised around protectionist guilds, whilst the largest employers (preferring unpaid labour where possible) were religious orders and landowners conspicuously consuming and fighting their neighbours. I'm not convinced this arrangement involved less bullshit, but it certainly entailed less production.

[rleigh]

One perspective is that while the job you were doing wasn't particularly fulfilling or exciting, it was just a summer job, not a career. The interesting and demanding part is the bit in the middle you weren't trusted with; that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience.

If you put yourself in the position of this not being a summer job, but a real job, then it would likely not be a career either. It would be a stepping stone to working on areas with more responsibility, allowing you to pick up expertise with the full operation of the production line. You would have to have zero ambition to do it for your entire life, and I've not seen many people who did; there's always progression and more responsibility even for those who don't have a good education, but do have a desire to improve themselves and show they are capable.

I used to work in a brewery, as an analytical chemist, but this also involved some time on the bottling and canning lines taking samples and calibrating the equipment, so I did see a lot of what went on, from the depalletisers loading the empty cans and bottles onto the conveyors, to the fillers, pasteurisers, labellers and the packaging and warehousing. They did employ a number of temporary workers to do some of the simpler stuff, like what you were doing. But since each line was several million pounds worth of state of the art German engineering, the people operating and maintaining it were well compensated for their expertise. If you'd stayed, then you could have worked your way up the ladder to do that, perhaps including part time study for an engineering degree or industry-specific qualifications.

A lot of industries like this do have good prospects for career progression. But they do require time to be served at the bottom before working up the ladder. And even the bosses have to do the menial stuff when required from time to time; I've seen the production site manager doing your job when they were caught short-handed. One of the great things about this environment is that you have everyone working across a whole site in synchrony to make the whole process work; and on the site I worked at, it was a great place to work.

[bartread]

> that part requires a lot of training and expertise, if not an engineering degree and many years of experience.

Not in this place it didn't: nobody had a degree, and even the permanent staff weren't on particularly good money. For sure, better money than I was on, but not by a wide margin in most cases, and I'm talking here about people who in some cases had worked their for decades. As for the chemists, my degree was half biochem and half chemistry and I'd just finished my third year so I was probably "better qualified" than they were. They absolutely knew their jobs but, again, no degrees.

[d0gbread]

> actually do create economic value

This is just another opinion though; an opinion based on generalizing value on as broad a dataset as individuals across an economy. The author may be right in some cases, but so might be many employees. What's still missing from this conversation are methodologies for identifying and articulating individual value from leadership, down to the individual whose job it is.

One possible solution (from my own career perspective) is solving a rampant issue with "management" being a step in a career path rather than a career in its own right, promoting functional employees based on tenure rather than their ability to manage (and manage _people_, not projects and tasks). In practice, this results in micro-managing at the expense of vision, creative freedom, and general flow, replacing it with anxiety across the board and employees slipping into a "peace and pay" mindset (or worse yet, hopping jobs every couple years as is the trend, only to experience similar conditions).

At the end of the day, no one wants bullshit jobs. So whether that's remedied via better management, or molding it into a better job, some kind of action needs to address this considering how much Graeber’s original article resonated with, well, far too many people.

[drdeadringer]

Now I am curious: was there ever "meaningful work"? Have people "always" searched for such a thing and "never" found it? Sure, Farmer Joe [or whoever] can declare that s/he finds meaning in what they find themselves doing to live, perhaps after the fact of becoming entrenched in the doing of it ... but how common is it for Newboy Johnny to boisterously look upon the world with his newly minted College University degree in hand and say "Yes, this one lifetime career path is just for me and I'll take it!"? It's not 1952 any more. I don't know why anybody younger than I am still believes that any of this is real.

You don't have a career, you have a job. You shall change jobs throughout your life. The moment the word "loyalty" is uttered you should laugh as you run as far away as reasonable if not possible. I am open to thinking otherwise.

[coldtea]

>Now I am curious: was there ever "meaningful work"? Have people "always" searched for such a thing and "never" found it? Sure, Farmer Joe [or whoever] can declare that s/he finds meaning in what they find themselves doing to live, perhaps after the fact of becoming entrenched in the doing of it ...

Meaningful work is not about fulfilling someone's dreams or them "becoming entrenched in the doing of it".

It's about the work itself having meaning.

If farmer Joe didn't farm, people wouldn't be able to eat their veggies.

If some office drone doesn't do his job, chances are nothing much would change to the output of their company (assuming the company is actually doing something meaningful and not harmful itself). If anything, some jobs just create more work for other parts of the company, without meaning (e.g. just to satisfy some state or company bureaucratic procedures) as opposed to improving workflows.

>ut how common is it for Newboy Johnny to boisterously look upon the world with his newly minted College University degree in hand and say "Yes, this one lifetime career path is just for me and I'll take it!"? It's not 1952 any more. I don't know why anybody younger than I am still believes that any of this is real.

They might not believe that any of this is real today, but they could very well believe that the old way is better, and that as active citizens that shape our society and steer it (as opposed to mere pawns that go this or that way randomly as technology or time changes) we should recreate that kind of environment.

Changing multiple jobs throughout one's career should be a personal choice, not something imposed by a thankless and merciless corporate consensus -- alongside discarding people after a certain age because they can hire young starry eyed idiots to pay them way less while overworking them.

[notahacker]

> Meaningful work is not about fulfilling someone's dreams or them "becoming entrenched in the doing of it".

In the Graeber "hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at" sense, it literally is exactly this. It all kicked off with an article whose most concrete example was a former musician who had failed to sell enough albums to not end up as a corporate lawyer instead, but remained convinced his music provided more value to a society that hadn't shown much interest in paying for it.

I suspect pretty much everyone who failed to have a successful music career and subsequently ended up on a production line at a farm, as Graeber puts it in his original litmus test for bullshit jobs "rant about how pointless and stupid their job is" if asked about it at parties. And for that matter I'm also sure there are a whole bunch of people flogging zero-insight reports to the network they made at business school that genuinely believe what they do is extremely valuable to society, even if they never get repeat customers. So the claim that the meaningfulness of work is better defined by the employee than the employer is far from convincing.

I doubt many bright graduates disillusioned with their inability to make much difference to how their corporate employer operates and convinced some of the decisions they're required to implement are counterproductive (yep, I know that feeling well) would start considering the work they performed meaningful if they were redeployed to pressing buttons on a food production line, even if their link in the food production chain directly stopped hundreds of meals from premature decomposition every day. It might even make some of them nostalgic for micromanaging task allocations, whiteboarding brand values, taking this week's compliance course and politely telling the customer to try turning it off and on again. After all, Marx's theory of alienation which Graeber updated for the service industry was entirely focused on people who actually directly contributed to making stuff whilst still feeling useless, powerless and disassociated from what they actually made.

The irony is that there actually is a vast literature out there on principal-agent and adverse selection problems in the workplace, positional goods, regulatory capture etc means that employers might actually pay for services which don't increase their output, but this gets far less currency than Graeber really all about "the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"; a theory which doesn't survive contact with reality.

[thatoneuser]

I’ve been reading through Sapiens lately and it lends some insight into the whole “was work ever meaningful”. My take is that basically once we got to the agricultural revolution, the answer has basically always been no.

We evolved to be hunter gatherers. Millions of years of evolution brought us there. Then in the recent thousands of years we found ourselves being repurposed for efficiency. But at the end of it, were spear throwing carnivores still. We just don’t have the physiology and mental wiring to be happy going into the same place for decades doing bs abstracted work.

[DATACOMMANDER]

I have a strong hunch that human evolution has been accelerating for quite some time. I can’t back this up with citations, but intuitively, as fitness becomes more complex, adaptations should spread faster (and maladaptations should disappear faster). This is of course partly counteracted by the presumably much higher percentage of individuals that reproduce in a civilized environment compared to a pre-civilized environment, but the dawn of civilization by no means brought about full reproductive parity. It seems to be taken for granted that cultural evolution largely replaced genetic evolution circa 10,000 years ago, but I highly doubt it. It seems much more likely to me that cultural evolution has been taking place alongside accelerated genetic evolution.

[coldtea]

>It’s the second half of the article that contain the real insights - that what are termed “bullshit” jobs, and despised by the people working them, actually do create economic value.

Only there's no proof, just some handwaving. I'd rather trust those actually doing the jobs for their assessment of them.

[sowbug]

An employer profitably exchanges wages for labor. That profit is the economic value. If this weren't true, then all businesses would be bankrupt.

By definition, non-owner employees are insulated from that economic value. It's unclear, then, why you'd prefer their assessment over that of someone looking at the business as a whole.

[TeMPOraL]

Because employers are unavailable for comment. Few would be willing to say out loud that their business is bullshit, but makes money, simply because of negative PR effect.

That someone's willing to pay for it doesn't automatically imply the job is useful on the societal scale, and the latter is IMO a more important concept. There are plenty of businesses that can earn money even though everyone would be better off if those businesses weren't being done.

[sowbug]

My earlier comment assumes that value is measured in dollars. Denominating value in subjective units like "useful on the societal scale" would lead to different conclusions for anyone but the most die-hard capitalist.

[coldtea]

Note that TFA is about "meaningless jobs" not "profitless" ones.

[sowbug]

True, but the comment from danielvf that you replied to narrowed the discussion to economic value.

[Nasrudith]

Technically that only states that employers /think/ they provide value not that they actually do it. It may fit inside their expense margins but that doesn't mean it is valueable only that it is viable from /something/ in it. This is an important distinction - the higher level up means not seeing all of the details and they have their own biases.

To give a deliberately absurd example a rich madman made $5 million per year from his vinyard and winery for personal and spend $1 million on running the place to the highest quality, $0.5 million buying piles of bananas and $2 million on mercenaries paid to beat the piles of bananas with baseball bats so they don't plan a rebellion he would still make $1.5 million a year profit could make $4 million a year profit if he didn't spend so much money on repressing fruit.

Silly example aside it is possible for both employee and employer to be both right or both wrong. An employee might notice low level waste that could be avoided by not repairing defects, and the employer knows that the cost of labor to fix it is more expensive than materials for a new one. Even if the one strategy is right both have a point.

Or in the reverse both employee and employer could think that the new fangled automobile won't be able to compete with horses because of vast fields of grass for free on the plains and even hay being cheaper than gasoline.

[coldtea]

>An employer profitably exchanges wages for labor. That profit is the economic value. If this weren't true, then all businesses would be bankrupt.

The fact that you can have a net profit doesn't mean you operate anywhere near 100% efficiently, or that you don't have tons of BS jobs. After a point of profit, wages are only a tiny part of the cost of a company.

Besides industries and companies get bailed out, VC money pay for tons of useless jobs (and/or indulgences) and then companies crash, etc.

Not to mention: we're not looking for economic value, but to value to society. You can make a good profit in all kinds of leechey businesses too.

[jahaja]

How would one measure each employee's individual profitability?