Is squeezing most sales per advertising campaign or saving a few pennies per unit delivered of a mass market product really worth what the economy is willing to pay for that? Does it really make sense to make that kind of optimization scale to the point that absolutely necessary work fails to have meaningful value?

It is really hard to measure bullshit jobs specifically, but it might be more easy and meaningful to try to characterize this strange gradient where abstracted work that is distant from people has value far beyond the simple and necessary basics of human social function. Worry less about the bullshit label and try coming up with a measure more like dollars lost per human life improved.

I decided that I didn’t want to be a part of the bullshit and self aggrandisation any more. And why not, since I’d already deleted all of my other social media accounts long ago. I have the email or phone number of everyone I need to be in contact with. I had a chat about this with a friend who himself is a founder of a company and uses LinkedIn to keep track of developments inside his work network. It made me wonder whether I’d done the right thing.

Can anyone here who isn’t a recruiter or employer say that it’s worth having a LinkedIn profile?

I know a lot of people who work in the consulting industry (As in Big4, MBB, etc). None of them are starving, and someone seems to want to pay them to work. But zero of them can see why there's any point in their work. Whatever the purported reason for a project, it always seems at least wasteful, and at worst deceptive.

The other part of it is that a BS job can only be hard due to unreasonable constraints. If you just plod away on your powerpoint slides, they will eventually be finished. It only gets stressful because someone is telling you it needs to be done before the sun comes up. Chances are your client also isn't listening when you do the presentation, so that's fine as well.

Interesting jobs like coding can fail for the same reasons, but they aren't the only reasons. You can design a cloud solution badly, even if you had a lot of time to think about it. Your ML model can... be no better than chance. Even if you have a phd in it.

That possibility of real failure I haven't seen in the discussion yet.

edit: elaborating a little on why I referenced the Gervais Principle:

It's an interesting guide to understand the relationship between executives, middle-management, and the worker/producers and the relationship each has with "The organization".

Per the gervais principle, a lot of the bullshit job phenomenon is explained through the relationship an employee has with reality and the organization in which they work.

In gervais, the sociopaths at the top (executives) and the losers at the bottom (actual producers of some value) both have some grasp on reality - whereas the clueless middle are full of cognitive dissonance about the reality of their position and loyalty to the idea of the organization. So, IMHO, the clueless category, in moments of honesty are the ones most likely to call out their position as a "bullshit" job.

This mainstream self-actualization of work is probably an artifact of knowledge work moving from the domain of the intellectual elites towards the masses, which broadened the prospects of people beyond working on the fields or factories for a lifetime. Two generations of this during an economic boom created a recipe that was immortalized in culture, but didn't work as well this time, and the ones who were spoonfed the dogma are still reeling from the bust, while the ones who were rich enough or lucky enough have made it through fine. The angst about the lack of job-related fulfillment transcends generations, but it mixes with the realization that they likely can't leverage their job experience and relationships to advance forward. And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum, people aren't blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.

Nonetheless, we shouldn't conflate intellectual fulfillment with financial security, and their respective lack thereof. People earning well who feel professionally unfulfilled have options to find something they like more, without the crushing pressure of needing uninterrupted income. And those engaged in fulfilling work with tangible impacts can get paid peanuts; in these cases it's often their emotional attachment to their work that keeps them going. It's most unfortunate when the two conditions coincide. But it should also not come as a surprise, as there's no morality in the economic system itself; rather, all money being paid out is coming from somewhere else, because somewhere someone thinks it's where it should go. The people in bullshit jobs wish they were in control, but control is harder to come by than money. Others on a different tier of Maslow's just wish for money, and so on.

Self-actualized, high-value, "skilled" labor (nurse, programmer), requires a person willing to work, motivations are varied, some requirement to delay gratification, but not limitless.

Weakly-actualized, minimal-value, minimally-skilled labor (bar tender, data entry "content" producer), requires minimal willingness to work ("just keep a roof over my head, please"), motivations are varied in direction and caliber, minimal requirement to delay gratification (but may paradoxically suffer severe lack of gratification relative to the surgeon by age 50)

Weakly-actualized, low-value, minimally skilled labor (Guatamalan mountain family growing what they eat, contributing minimally if at all to external society): requires minimal motivation (external motivation to survive is entirely sufficient), gratification isn't even an issue. Ref (1)

De-humanizing, moderate-value, unskilled labor (Guatamalan working in a concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa). Requires tremendous motivation to get to Mount Pleasant, gratification is highly delayed (scrap by, send all money home, hope it gets there). You can imagine how these immigrants' children become doctors and business owners. Ref (1)

My apologies for those who suffer in the "bullshit job" economy. Maybe at some point you'll be the director of a PR firm or something. I would point out though that if you want a "strong storyline" to your life, there are options. Moving to Guatamala being one of them.

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800808

The truth, though, it probably somewhere in between. Operations management tools exist to cut down on bullshit (inefficiency) and goal posts are moving so fast that it's making a lot of room for bullshit jobs, however they might be defined. Businesses are certainly not optimized, and there's a clear difference between, for example, needlessly delegating tasks as your sole responsibility, and actually serving to complete those tasks (at likely a fraction of the pay).

Is this true in anyone's experience? I've worked at banks for a long time and I've never had anyone ever bring up my Linked In profile, despite being connected to many of my colleagues. I doubt anyone is carefully watching my profile apart from the occasional check to see if I'm still at the bank or what location I am. I don't feel any pressure to update it. People just don't care in my experience, or maybe they don't care at my non-management level.

The reason people feel like what they're involved in is bullshit, is because it is. There is no grand conspiracy.

It's bullshit so much of the time is because people are more interested in succeeding personally, than in not screwing things up for tens, hundreds, millions, billions, of others.

Is your job bullshit? Then quit and get a potentially lower paying job that is less bullshit. Have you done that? No? End of debate. If you actually can't afford to get paid any less, you are not busy moaning about your job being bullshit. People in survival mode are hustling, not moaning.

This is not news and there is no cure that doesn't involve re-structuring, which always involves many at the very least getting their life ruined. Re-structuring doesn't guarantee that things get better, only that they change. Until by some miracle, intelligent people with integrity end up at the top, have enough power to cut heads, get away with it and understand that it's necessary, nothing is going to really change. It'll merely re-structure.

Capitalism today, communism tomorrow, we're still dumb, selfish apes that are largely uninterested in the welfare of others unless it directly affects us. Most people I know didn't start to care about anyone other than themselves until they had children. Now they care about themselves and their children - so we have private schools instead of improving the school system. Selfish to the bone, this will not change.

Could somebody explain what this sentence means?

It keeps throwing up the occasional article that I actually want to read, often because some random person I'm mysteriously connected to liked it.

If the algo gets "too good" I find it gets too samey.

Also there's some humour to be found when every other person is a "thought leader" but graduated less than 10 years ago. The self-puffery is kinda fun to watch. You can imagine how deflated the person would feel if you met them IRL and started asking proper questions.

But you probably already decided that it's not valuable enough to keep you on the platform. Only thing I can add if you ever start your own company it's becomes over an order or magnitude more valuable.

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.

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.

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.

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

Economy as a whole may not be zero-sum, but this reminds me of the stuff we did on maths/physics classes. You'd have a thing X with some aggregate quality, but there was a way of "drawing a circle", selecting a subset of X which has the opposite aggregate quality. It's easy to draw circles over our economy that surround areas that are zero-sum, or even negative-sum. I think a lot of complaints about bullshit jobs come from people who realize they're stuck in one of such areas.