It's been a while since I read it, but there are two broad categories of bullshit jobs, right? In the first, the job itself is bullshit; you might barely have any day-to-day responsibilities and no one notices if you do any work or not, or perhaps the work itself doesn't accomplish anything of value (I think an example of the latter was someone who prepared exhaustive compliance reports that no one actually read). The second category is a real job that contributes to a bullshit industry. So a network administrator is a real job, but doing IT work for an insurance company is in service of a bullshit industry that just shuffles money around. On the other hand, an engineer for Lockheed Martin, while undeniably doing harm, is not doing a bullshit job.
Totally with you on complexity not implying bullshit, though.
It's been a while since I read it, but there are two broad categories of bullshit jobs, right? In the first, the job itself is bullshit; you might barely have any day-to-day responsibilities and no one notices if you do any work or not, or perhaps the work itself doesn't accomplish anything of value (I think an example of the latter was someone who prepared exhaustive compliance reports that no one actually read). The second category is a real job that contributes to a bullshit industry. So a network administrator is a real job, but doing IT work for an insurance company is in service of a bullshit industry that just shuffles money around. On the other hand, an engineer for Lockheed Martin, while undeniably doing harm, is not doing a bullshit job.
Totally with you on complexity not implying bullshit, though.