Ever been in a bullshit job?

in #life6 years ago

Do you know what a “bullshit job” is?
In short, it is a job where you have to be there and look busy but not actually do anything, or one where you do things that should not be done (or not by a human).

It doesn’t even need to be a “job”.

If you are unemployed, you are often send to a well-paid private company where “job application specialists” are telling you how to write an application, because your existing bad one prevents you from getting a job.
And of course the one you have now is bad. It is horrible, even if it is exactly the one you got from the last specialist, which is sometimes the same person that tells you now how horrible it is.

After that you are supposed to sit down with 20 other people in front of incredibly old computers that are likely so badly updated that you will catch a computer virus just looking at it. You are supposed to “look for jobs”. 6 hours a day. 5 days a week. For 3 month. Because if you look hard enough, something on the job market must change, or so Quantum Physics tells us.

Why does this happen?

My guess is that because the neoliberal dogma tells you that it is only your lazyness that prevents you from getting a job (and not e.g. there are not enough jobs), you, logically, have to stop being lazy and you will get one.

And since taxpayers don’t like it when “lazy” people are lying back in the social security net with their money and not getting a job, the unemployed must be visibly busy. It is more expensive and does not help them getting a job, but at least they do something. And, admittedly, the “job application specialists” do get a job from this.

But if you think those bullshit jobs can only be the result of a strange democracy inefficiency, then you are wrong.

Sociologist David Greaber, who became famous for his book Debt: The first 5000 years looked at bullshit jobs, which he defines as:

A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

In his new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Greaber has analysed 250 of those bullshit jobs and found 5 types of them.

Flunky Jobs

flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important.

You probably know him from old movies: The lift boy, whose only role in life seems to be to press the button in the lift so that the important people using the lift don’t need to use their fingers.
It probably takes longer to tell him where you want to go then doing it yourself, but at least it is more hygienic.

Goons

The goons are a very distinctive class of bullshit jobbers, because they only exist because others employ goons too.

The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies; if no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers and corporate lawyers.

Most of those people not only do no good, they actually harm the society. Call unsuspecting people at home to sell them shit they don’t need?
You surely like your job!!

Duct-tapers

Duct-tapers only exist because there is a problem that should not exist. They spend years doing a task that could be automated by a halfway competent person in half a day. Or a duct-taper has do undo the damage of incompetent superiors.

Box-tickers

Box-tickers are those who are tasked with doing something without actually achieving it. A box-tickers purpose is not to look busy, but to make others look busy you could say.

Imagine something bad happens. The first that (ought to be) responsible people do, is to create a task-force that should find out the underlying cause of that bad thing.
The intention is to imply that “something” is done, and the problem will be solved once the data is dug out and put on the table. But of course it is not intended to ever give the task-force any tables.

This phenomenon is mostly known from the political sphere, where you can often find the figurative phenomenon of “commissions to find out a way to reduce the number of useless commissions”.

In private corporations it is more often a sort of information service – a newsletter with all the “interesting stuff that happens in our company” that is read by probably less people then are making it.

Taskmasters

As the name says, these people are distributing tasks. If the person doing it thinks the people getting tasks would do fine without him, this is taskmaster variety one: not achieving anything, but also not doing any damage.

But the second type of taskmaster is actually damaging.

These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs.

I have started this post with this type of taskmaster, but I want to give you Graeber’s own example, too:

“Strategic mission statements” (or, even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror in academics. These are the primary means by which corporate management techniques – setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do, and less and less time actually doing it – are insinuated into academic life.

If you are reading this post while at work, you may have a bullshit job.
Please take your time then to describe it in the comments. After all, that helps you looking busy. I hope it is not as bad as this one:

“I worked as a museum guard for a global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused. My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touched the, well, nothing in the room and ensure nobody set any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones, etc. As nobody was ever there, I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I was to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it.”

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I have hated every hourly job for this reason. Having to waste time, even though my work is done as to avoid getting screwed out of my paycheck infuriates me. I do work now where I am paid per project, and I enjoy it much more. I'm actually rewarded with a higher "pay per hour" by being more efficient, as opposed to being punished for it like the rest of the jobs in this whacko world.

The worst part of being a manager in my old job was the employee review process. Every six months I had to evaluate the members of my team and assign them a rating. The rating itself was a combination of a bunch of subjective ratings I would assign, plus some metrics that were supposed to show objective things like numbers of calls taken or whatever.
Apart from taking a huge amount of time to gather all the data, collate it write it up a cogent review document and deliver it to the employee, the employee was often confused because the system would change at least once a year. Of course you wernt allowed to have a team of great people, it was a relative system, so even if Joe did a bang up job all year, if Mary did a little bit better, then poor Joe gets a lower rating.
Even if people did understand, I literally never saw it change anyone's behaviours; the bright compliant ones, carried on being great to work with; the ones that struggled didn't do any better for being told they were struggling.

Haha, yes. People don't change with that sort of thing. There is no combination of review and any consequence.
Since it has no (visible) influence, people just shrug it off as unimportant.

Inviting someone to a hotdog for his good work on Project X has more effect.

Good article

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