[obviuosly]

I do not get why cooperations make it so hard for people who simply want to do their job with minimal bullshit. You would think the free market gets rid of such inefficiency, but evidently the free market is not efficient enough for that.

Why is it not efficient enough?

Perhaps it has something to do with propserity. Prosperity allows bullshit to grow without bounds because bullshitters cannot experience complete distruction if they can easily feast on our prosperous wealth, so they can easily maintain their illusions and fakery.

[bradleyjg]

I see two possibilities:

1) You and the OP have discovered a trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk just waiting to be picked up.

2) There's value in what the two of you consider "bullshit".

[alexpetralia]

What about the fairly obvious third possibility that some processes are simply inefficient and/or unproductive (and even counterproductive)?

For example, a manager reads a Medium article and mandates that everyone on the team spend 2 hours everyday documenting what they did yesterday.

Certainly you'd agree that there is not positive value here - maybe even negative value! This may very well be "bullshit" work!

Of course, we can find "reasons" for anything - even spending 2 hours a day on documentation - but that does not mean they are good reasons. (In fact, they are probably post hoc rationalizations.) We should not assume that just because something is the way it is, it is immediately value-adding. Nor should we assume it's immediately value-subtracting. We just shouldn't assume, which unfortunately, (2) does.

[obviuosly]

It's both.

Of course there is value in such bullshit. It rewards the status drive of those who can play the game. Those who don't, get only negative value out of it. Overall, productivity probably suffers. But those in charge do not care because bullshit games allowed them to get where they are and stay there.

[bradleyjg]

I meant value to the shareholder. If there is none, then that trillion dollars is just waiting for you to grab it.