Comment by api
4 years ago
The problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is similar to this common saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad spend. I just don't know which 80%." The same principle likely applies to wages across the economy.
I think it's rather obvious that a huge fraction of employment is worthless. The problem is determining which fraction that is. It's not obvious. Many jobs that look and feel like bullshit may have some hidden function within an organization that is essential (and may not even be the "primary function" of the job as per the job req), and many very important looking jobs may create little to no value. There are probably companies that could knock out the CEO but would have a tougher time without one of their office assistants, but where telling which office assistant this is would be almost impossible without spending months observing the intricate details of operations.
The fact that markets are bad at optimizing out this obvious cost center makes me wonder if it might be "non-computable."
The only way we know of to discover this is to use Darwinian methods, but this is incredibly destructive. Deep recessions take out a lot of good but not-yet-robust businesses along with the bad and the obsolete. The modern practice of pumping economies along forever and not allowing deep recessions probably leads to a ton of dead wood building up but it's also probably why we have progress in quantum computers, electric vehicles, and space flight among other speculative areas that would probably implode in a deep recession (without being specifically subsidized). Forest fires burn the dead wood but they also burn a shitload of trees, especially immature ones who don't have layers of flame retardant bark. Lots of old and injured animals die but so do the babies who can't run fast yet.
Also, many jobs are probably partially bullshit or mostly bullshit, but also have one critical (often undocumented) function wrapped into them that if eliminated, would cause enormous damage.
Companies often barely have any idea of what employees spend the majority of their day doing. They are never going to catch all the little things.
It’s also very “easy” to identify a BS job, especially when you don’t know much about it.
Yup, and it gets worse when you consider that everyone is usually trying to make their job look important regardless of how important it actually is. It's likely that a deliberate attempt to weed out BS jobs would select for good fakers, ass kissers, and con artists and weed out a lot of heads-down productive people.