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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
ALostInquirer @lemm.ee

If bullshit jobs are really bullshit, how do businesses justify the expense?

Businesses are in it for the money, employees tend to be one of the larger expenses, so maintaining some bullshit positions that would cost them money doesn't make fiscal sense, so what's up?

67 comments

  • I’ll also add that managers don’t think like normal people…

    IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.

    But Sales. Well that’s all profit. So we should give them all the money.

    Even if we closed sales most people who want our stuff will still buy it from us, but nothing will get done without IT…

    ¯(ツ)_/¯

    • IT makes your computers and networks and websites run. But the manager asks how much money does IT bring in? They are a cost and generate no profit.

      This was the "Doom talk" I had to have with my boss repeatedly when I was in a pure IT position. As in, he would bitch about, "Every time I come into your office you're just sitting here playing Doom." (It was not, for the record. At the time, it was Half Life 2 or, more occasionally, Unreal Tournament 2K4. But to your common-or-garden PHB, all first person shooters look alike.)

      I had to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that your IT guy sitting around playing "Doom" is the ideal scenario during business hours. Why? Because if I am sitting here doing this, that means none of the millions of dollars of mission critical IT infrastructure that your building full of engineers relies upon every second to perform work for billable hours is on fire. If any of said infrastructure catches fire, I am here, on site, to put it out. Not on call. Not four hours away. Right here, right now. Then I go back to playing "Doom."

    • And your competitors would love you for closing your Sales department.

  • To me, it looks like there are different levels of bullshit jobs.

    There are jobs that are entirely bullshit. Like the military sandbags example: guys filling bags, other guys emptying the same bags. This is a waste of time, money, and resources, AND contributes nothing to society. Jobs like this should not exist, and CAN only exist in an environment (like the military) where essentially nobody actually involved in the process has any profit motive, or any incentive whatsoever to make the process efficient or good.

    There are jobs that are bullshit to society, and this is where a lot of corpo jobs fall. They contribute nothing to society, they are meaningless to the person doing them, but somehow, some way, they contribute something to the purpose of making money for other people. And under capitalism, making money for someone other than yourself is the reason literally any job exists. If your job does not contribute to the almighty SHAREHOLDER, your job will not exist.

    So if it feels like your job is bullshit, look for who you're making money for, or who you're protecting from losing a few pennies of profit. That's who your job matters to. Not you, personally. The people who decided your job should exist don't give a single fuck about you as a human being and never will, ever. But your job matters to them because your job getting done means they make more money than if it didn't, and that's all they do care about.

  • A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).

    Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company's creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it's cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).

    Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you're basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.

    A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could've just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.

  • It mostly revolves around the belief that a successful company needs a certain set of moving parts. Workers. Management. HR. Accountant. Etc. Usually it’s not necessarily a bad premise, but often they just hire to fill these rolls first, rather on need and the right time.

    So you get a bunch of people mostly sitting around with unclear or obtuse duties because the same people need to justify their job. That cyclical pattern basically becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and can even take down established companies if they don’t keep up with the markets they are in.

  • Other commenters have covered the organizational inefficiencies that allow bullshit jobs to exist pretty well. I'd like to also point out that larger organizations have more of these inefficiencies (part of what is known as "diseconomies of scale", the counterpart to the more well-known term "economies of scale"). Our capitalist society actively subsidizes larger organizations, both literally and figuratively, resulting in more bullshit jobs and more economically wasteful behavior in general.

    A non-capitalist free market society (such as a mutualist one) would have significantly smaller and more efficient organizations across the board. One can't eliminate organizational efficiency entirely, but we currently have a lot of room for improvement.

  • Despite how people act, we are fundamentally flawed and generally imperfect.

    Whether we're talking about daily life or global industry, mistakes are often made, plans go awry, and processes are almost never perfectly efficient or optimized. Even the most highly engineered, well oiled machine has inefficiencies.

    Businesses are just the same and they actually waste a fuck ton of money every day, but all of that (plus a healthy profit margin) is ultimately factored in to the prices that we pay for goods and services. In other words, many people have bullshit jobs that don't actually improve services optimization or production, and that wasted effort is actually paid for by all of us, the consumers.

    On top of that there's another variant of bullshit job that's actually useful to the economy or society in some way, but might be inherently unfulfilling or unsatisfying on a personal human level. (For example, something like corporate data entry jobs come to mind. Potentially useful to someone, and better than being homeless, but maybe not a very meaningful way to live in the long term.)

  • A long line of passing down responsibility to someone else, all the way from the very tippy top executives. they hire someone to oversee operations. Those people hire people to oversee different parts of operations, all those people hire people to oversee parts of operations. Paperwork gets assigned, reports are shuffled around, meetings meetings meetings.

    None of it at all relevant to making dog toys to sell, even though all of them are much higher ranked than the people that make dog toys at Dog Toy Inc.

67 comments