Comment by beckingz
4 years ago
Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation have a tendency to look useless.
In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform incredible work. Large organizations have scale though.
I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.
Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law.
The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in part and attempting to optimize that part.
There is no “product” other than the change in metric selected. There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual observable inputs and outputs of the system.
The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything whatsoever outside the context of the system.
Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an organization actually makes it less productive unless their contributions can be abstracted globally.
At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead growth.
One of the interesting things about Graeber's typology is that it includes things that you wouldn't consider to be bullshit jobs. There's an entire category of his typology dedicated to jobs that destroy productive output; like if a business were to hire lawyers to sue the pants off of competing businesses. They get a competitive advantage by increasing everyone else's compliance and legal costs.
I believe this particular categorization could apply to game development in the context of NFT or microtransaction driven gameplay. The economies that these games provide are specifically engineered to increase user spend by targeting "whales". Someone being paid to play a game for someone else is providing a valuable service; but the game doesn't just exist naturally. It's designed. Building a game so that you need to pay to skip the grind is a bullshit job. And if that's a bullshit job, then the people selling their Axies and other game resources have transitively bullshit jobs, even if their own job is not inherently bullshit.