Nice to see more empirical backing of the Bullshit Jobs theory 
The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others.
The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were "bullshit"—socially useless and meaningless.
my job is socially useful but it's only something that takes like idk 15 hours a week to do, so forcing me to be on the clock 40 hours a week is bullshit. luckily i can squeeze in 25 hours of reading and gaming and get paid to do it
I have a friend that does IT for a winery that I would frequently see playing WoW in the middle of the day, he apparently set up his desk and computer so you couldn't see his screen walking into the room.
Everyone in my office has rearranged their monitors and desks so no one can see monitors until they're right behind you lol
I've had my staff's desks moved/oriented around so only the managers monitors can be seen when people are walking through the office
It's actually easier to just have a million things up. I made sure that all our project tracking stuff is self managed in open source web apps, so everyone has an excuse to have like 3 tabs open. Plus the work we do is so hard for the owners to understand that just having ArcGIS open on one monitor is enough to make it look like you're working
I've got "gis toucher" as a skill I'm working on before I graduate, what field are you in, more or less?
Telecommunications permitting and design. We design fiber optic networks.
If you want to have a leg up once you get into an industry with GIS focus, definitely learn scripting and modeling tools. Knowing those you get the option of either leading a team or showing up and doing nothing forever because you've automated out a large portion of the work.
I'm our case, we've packed our templates to the gills with automation code, we used to manually index each cable, manually draw each drop to each home, and manually draw the underground conduit, but now since we know the topology of the drawing, we're able to use the base span and nearby context to auto-draw most of the equipment according to predefined specs.
I sign paperwork for car sales and I think private ownership of motor vehicles should have never been allowed
If we survive the next hundred years or so, future generations will look back at it as utterly barbaric.
My uncut copium is "maybe China can do carbon capture" because looking this shit in the eye ain't healthy
100% same, it’s the only way I can stay optimistic enough to still operate on a day to day basis
graeber talks about this in the BS jobs book. he talks about how the feeling of doing something useful is supposed to be pay in and of itself and how its used to make other workers feel resentful if you make demands re conditions&pay.
I read bullshit jobs via audiobook while doing useful work. That phenomenon changed my brain chemistry. Cause my decision was going "well then I don't care about being useful." and have pivoted to a position much less useful to society.
Curious that topping the chart are jobs that don't seem that useless. They can be all kinds of shit, but not useless
Yeah I was about to say, as someone who works food service, that while every day I feel overworked and underpaid, the simple fact is that I'm making food and people need food to eat. There's nothing useless about that
seriously? material transport? like the supply chain? that's socially important as fuck.
also construction/extraction? I take issue with the categories. construction is much closer associated with maintenance.
But there's also a lot of bullshit going through the supply chain, transporting fast fashion isn't the most fulfilling job
Especially when the mechanic won't take off the limiter even if you shout, 'But it's fast fashion!'
Got to wonder how much money the bourgeois spend on convincing logistics workers that they're unimportant. If that lot went on strike, the world would stop.
Be interesting to see if these figures are the same in every country. There's an old Soviet documentary that shows dock workers in Ukraine getting a good salary and knowing their worth. It's a bit hard to watch at the moment because of the war, as it shows Ukraine and Russia working together.
The whole reason is that there are 50 people touching each package so they feel useless
Not everybody in the transport industry is there to do logistics and drive the transport vehicles
I work at a big box store that rhymes with Ballmart. I know my job is useless. I put out way to much fruits and vegetables and the throw them away three days later. I once threw away over 170 pounds of onions cause they turned green.
why don't people understand how meaningful it is to serve the inhuman algorithm destroying the planet?
page 1: government confirms aliens
page 10: government confirms alienation
I don't think this supports grabbers thesis a lot of bullshit jobs add value to the production process we saw in the tech lay off this year they rehired a bunch of them for more money after these realized they added so much value collectively they made operations profitable.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I understood gaebers thesis on bullshit jobs as a way for anarchists to match Marxist bouguous decadence theory, its something else too but i cant rember. like we have a medical industry that is more expensive then having single payer but decadence of having an insurance industry is hard for capital to over come.
"socially useless and meaningless" is the phrasing they used
The average ad tech engineer at Google or Meta probably provides a couple dozen millions of revenue to the company but socially, it's useless and meaningless
do you think it is really meaningless? seems to me there is hella meaning
Considering google and meta are advertising companies, the meaning is a net negative.
What is "bourgeois decadence theory?" I thought bourgeois decadence was just a way of comparing the capitalists to popular depictions of romans during the fall of Rome?
I think it came more out of Graeber's desire to provide a left wing critique of bueracracy in order to take it back from the right and correct some of the missteps of previous socialist movements. It's in the same vein as Utopia of Rules imo.
There's also lots of "bullshit jobs" in Graeber that still aid in valorization. Lawyers for example. The issue is that their role is only relevant in our particular social context. You can make a movie without lawyers in theory, but can't in reality (if you want it to sell). So lawyers, who aren't redundant, can still look at their work and go "this is pointless, jurassic park could get made with or without me."
I'm middle management PMC with about 30 PMC staff
The work is like, 10 percent dealing with staff who are wreckers, 10 percent dealing with upper management having their crisis of the week, 40 percent bullshit and 40 percent meaningful work.
I can tell you're middle management because that sums to 100%
I loved being a librarian but had to quit because it didn’t pay a living wage. Even though it was a city job they kept most of us under 20 hours/week to avoid paying benefits, and the wage was less than $9/hour
Looking at the local librarian positions and realizing I will be paid more to clean the library than to run it was eye opening.
They’re only looking for retirees and people who are in it for the love of the game, not workers.
For real, i have worked in HR (I was young, naive, and thought I'd be a voice for the workers lmao), but changed paths to get my teaching degree. The joy in life I feel now, as opposed to the alienation I felt while in HR, is nothing but amazing.
Now I have the opportunity to teach young people about capitalism, unequal exchange, imperialism,... I guess I'm
