It takes some guts to come write for The Savage Collective arguing the side of business. I appreciate it.
There's an important distinction that's getting ellided in this response and the first two pieces. As you say, most businesses won't employ too many non-useful people for too long. But just because a job produces value, i.e. contributed to profit, and is thus worth paying for, doesn't make it good, meaningful work -- doesn't save it from being BS.
The quintessential "email job" might be for HR and ensure everyone in the office gets paid on time. That's useful to the business; critical even. It's not BS in the sense of the "value" MBAs and economists would measure. But it's BS in a grander sense: the work is not valuable intrinsically, it does not aid the flourishing of the person doing it, it does not even offer the satisfaction of accomplishing something hard (perhaps even brutalizing) like railroad construction or coal mining. No one would call mining "BS" but all office work hangs on the hairy edge of that definition. It's not about producing profit -- because producing profit is, itself, quite suspect in the larger, spiritual pursuits of human beings.
Your observation brings to mind two thoughts. First, I agree that the quality of a job can't be reduced to the value that it creates. That is what I was trying to say in referring to the issue of job design and the Job Characteristics Model. So, yes, some jobs, due to their design are more or less gratifying.
The second thought, is that the perspective of the worker is even more important than job design. You'll recall the old story about the three men working on a construction site, laying bricks. A passerby asks the first man what he is doing. He replies, “I’m laying bricks.” The passerby asks the second man the same question. He says, “I’m building a wall.” When the passerby asks the third man, he smiles and says, “I’m building a cathedral.”
Our HR payroll clerk may answer "I make sure everyone who works so hard here is able to feed their families and pay their mortgages." In other words the clerk may, as Mother Teresa said, "Do ordinary things with great love."
And since I went to bat for business, I might as well speak on behalf of the spiritual merit of profit. :-) It's worth remembering that every family that has bread on the table, every school where children study, church, synagogue or mosque, every library, every museum, every concert hall, every park, every government, every army and every aid organization exist because somewhere, some business has provided something important that was valued a little more than it cost to produce - and in that gap - a profit was created. Profitable businesses are like the sun - they make life on earth possible. :-)
(1) "At its core, quiet quitting breaches the trust between employer and employee. It’s akin to entering a covenant, much like a marriage, where mutual expectations and responsibilities are foundational. Quiet quitting, then, is like practicing quiet polygamy in a marriage —repurposing time and effort meant for one commitment to serve another, without honesty or consent."
I think that's a good point. But it should be counterbalanced by another: it is a myth — a sustaining myth, perhaps, but a myth nonetheless — that the purely contractual relationship entered into by potential employer and potential employee is entered into by equals. In only a thin, legalistic sense does a pre-employee "freely" enter into such a contractual relationship, and only in a similarly thin, legalistic sense is the employee "free" to leave. The contract binds, sure, and brings a host of mutual expectations and responsibilities into existence. But the relationship has a different tenor when one party has less power and less real freedom to leave — just like a marriage.
(2) "In a competitive marketplace, jobs are created to enable companies to meet real needs or solve real problems. Companies only hire people when they need them. Take a company that hires someone for a task no one really needs—soon enough, that job will be trimmed. In a competitive environment, if you’re not providing real value, you don’t survive. Efficiency is the market’s regulator, and inefficiency is not just wasteful but fatal."
Again, good point. But I think the term "bullshit jobs" has been used ambiguously to refer to (a) bullshit positions and to (b) necessary positions with bullshit shadow work. You argue that the former don't really exist, because they don't last long in a competitive environment. Fine. But that doesn't mean the latter don't exist.
I have a necessary and valuable position, but my role is increasingly encrusted by tasks with no real value, and often those very tasks make it harder for me to perform the other tasks that make my position necessary and valuable. A typical bullshit shadow task will contribute to the *appearance* of value but not the *existence* of it. A bit more specifically: one kind of valueless task will, in essence, require me to spend time and energy trying to measure my contribution according to reductive, simplistic, bureaucratically legible metrics and then reporting my measurements. I spend time and energy providing the firm with things it can show others, or itself, to make it *appear* effective, which keeps me from doing things that would make the firm *be* more effective.
Thanks for your response @Eric. I appreciate your thoughts.
I agree that there are power dynamics at play in an employee/employer relationship that are highly contextual. Beyond the legal sense - in which the employee generally has many more protections, the soft power in the relationship is determined by options. Jeff Pfeffer, who writes about power in organizations, has made this point. An employee with high-demand skills and many potential employers will have more power than their employer, just as an employer hiring for easily substituted skills in a loose labor market will have more power than the employee.
You raise a great point about administrative work often associated with measuring performance or with things like regulatory compliance. I’ll use a concrete example, I have never heard a salesperson describe how they love updating their CRM. However, the data really is essential to managing the performance of the salesperson, the team, the organization and to forecast revenue. Just like a professional sports team, any performance oriented organization needs to be able to measure their effectiveness and “keep score” if they are going to win. So, sometimes the perceived value of our efforts may not be visible to us, but they create value for other stakeholders.
And in the case of non-profits, the responsible stewardship of funding requires people to do their best to monitor prudent use of funds. That said, I know people working on government grants that require them to invest a lot of time and effort counting activities that are at best an approximate measure of effectiveness. Activity does not often equal productivity.
There are a couple of risks with measurement. One is that the measurement itself is not fit-to-purpose or even worse creates perverse incentives that distort performance (measure hours worked and things will take more hours). Another is that the juice is not worth the squeeze. This is a case where the cost of the measurements or controls exceed the value created. This is particularly a risk where there aren’t market incentives, such as government regulatory oversight.
Thanks for replying. I'm enriched by seeing things from your perspective (which, I would add, you articulate with admirable, imitation-worthy clarity).
(1) I have little doubt that it's essential for a firm to have knowledge of employee performance. What I doubt is whether self-measurement by too-crude metrics produces that knowledge. As it stands, it gives only the appearance of knowledge. And that's what makes these tasks bullshit. My hypothesis — defeasible, of course — is this: if the firm sincerely cares about knowledge of performance, and if it sincerely cares about good performance, it would devote resources to articulating more faithful metrics, to ensuring the performers are not the ones measuring their own performance (or ensuring that performances are measured by competent and disinterested measurers), and to empowering the performers to focus on the truly necessary and valuable tasks.
(2) Your experience has taught you that exposure to market pressures tends to lead to efficiency. That might be true, if (it's appropriate that) productivity (and thus efficiency) is measured in market terms. But if a firm's productivity is not (appropriately) measured in market terms, exposure to market pressures might lead to gross inefficiency. At least, this is what my experience in academia has taught me. Due to things we could change but haven't, academia is increasingly exposed to market pressures, its success measured in market terms, and this has deformed higher education into something monstrously inefficient at providing a genuinely higher education. For example, students (quite rationally, given the circumstances) enter the institution demanding to have their desires met, rather than ready to have their desires challenged, reoriented, or enriched. Because students are customers, the para-educational apparatus has proliferated in order to draw their money, and the administrative apparatus has metastasized in order to ensure they're always right. This funnels resources away from the those who would actually educate. And so we have the overworked, underpaid, vulnerable adjunct burdened with hundreds of students she is supposed to educate. But it is obvious to everyone, regardless of the measurements slickly displayed through the high-definition projectors in glassy administrative dens, that there is no educating taking place. This play-acting at educating really wears on one.
Eric, thanks for your kind words. I appreciate it.
You, of course, are completely correct that if a firm sincerely cares about performance they will invest in the quality of their approach. To my mind this really boils down to culture and values.You can see a firm's real values when they invest more than the market in a particular capability. For example, Apple invests more in design than their peers. Nordstrom is willing to spend more on customer satisfaction with out-of-market return policies. Ideally, these investments also help differentiate the firm from their peers. But you are right. That is why some firms actually innovate and some just go through the motions and do “innovation theater”.
As to the higher education industry, it really is heartbreaking to see. I agree that market pressures AND government policy failures AND toxic cultures combine to create a genuinely unique poisonous cocktail of perverse incentives. You have my genuine sympathy.
Thank you for an interesting article. Nice to see the debate about 'meaningful work' is still alive. In my era of entering the workforce Mike Cooley's "Architect or Bee?" was one of the go-to books on the interaction of technology in the work-place and its relation to meaningful work.
Historically, people were forced (dispossessed and starved) off the land to go and work in the dangerous and clock-watching factories that fuelled the Industrial Revolution; that was the first blow to their autonomy. It doesn't surprise me that survey after survey on work notes that about 75% of people would quit their job if they could financially afford it. I did when I was 44 - and I had a really good job as an academic.
I tend to be more of the persuasion that in a global capitalist competitive world, there will always be an unresolvable tension between between those who work in an organisation (but don't own it) and those who own it (but don't work in it).
I agree that under shareholder capitalism there is a tension between unvested employees (non-owners) and external investors (non-employed owners). And not to grossly oversimplify but I would lay most problems at the feet that the feet of external investors. First, external investors require a Board to exercise fiduciary responsibility to manage the company in the interest of the shareholder. That immediately subordinates the interests of everyone else from employees, to customers, to suppliers and the community. This creates pressure to exploit various contributors to the value chain (suppliers, employees, customers) in order to extract more profit for the shareholder. Secondly, external investors invest with the expectation of a return on their investment. This creates pressure for "liquidity events" regardless of whether it is in the overall interest of the company. This generally means selling the company to generate cash for the investors. The problem with "maximizing shareholder value" is that it creates a financial return for investors while destroying immeasurable social capital in the process. Separating ownership from involvement in a business creates a misalignment of interests between the owners and pretty much everybody else.
What most people don't realize is that it does not need to be that way. As long as a company is private you are free to run your company however you see fit. You can actually pay your employees well, do excellent work for your customers, and take good care of your suppliers and community. Personally, I wish everyone could start their own business.
I agree, if the private owner is of the decent kind. But "common-ownership" companies like Scott-Bader (The Man who Gave Away his Company to his Employees) is also an option.
Whilst the legal model of 'shareholders first' remains, there will always be a tension. It's the model that needs changing too.
There are some good points in here, but the first section (asserting that bullshit jobs are a myth) is frustrating. It's basically some statements of faith (e.g., "this is not how market economies actually operate") propped up by fallacies (e.g., begging the question: "if you’re not providing real value, you don’t survive"). And those articles of faith are plainly disproved by the author's real-world examples at the end of the section (e.g., a defense research program "spun off" from a university into a commercial startup; and Amelia’s experience with an overstaffed university department).
If Mr. Ianova has evaded exposure to bullshit jobs, then kudos to him. But don't gaslight the rest of us. This sounds too much like the princess who hears reports that the peasants have no bread and responds "Let them eat cake."
Thanks for your response, @buzzard! First, please forgive me if I sounded dismissive of anyone's experience. That was not my intention and if I was, I apologize.
To respond, remember, we are talking about Graeber's view of bullshit jobs that create no value and are created to perpetuate the machine of capitalism. Maybe I should have said, yes, bullshit jobs according to Graeber can sometimes appear in specific circumstances: Companies characterized by excessive profitability and rapid scaling. With the top 10 profitable companies employing 2.5% of the workforce, you aren't likely to run into too many non-value creating jobs in the private sector.
I also acknowledge non-value creating jobs can (and are much more likely) to occur in government or grant-funded non-profits AND would fall outside Graebers definition as you can hardly blame machine capitalism for creating government jobs. The government and non-profits employ 20% of the workforce. Let's imagine that even as much as 10% of the jobs in those environments are bullshit jobs. That's 2% of the workforce. So, yes, they happen. They are possible - and I am sorry that you had to suffer through one - they are just not probable.
It takes some guts to come write for The Savage Collective arguing the side of business. I appreciate it.
There's an important distinction that's getting ellided in this response and the first two pieces. As you say, most businesses won't employ too many non-useful people for too long. But just because a job produces value, i.e. contributed to profit, and is thus worth paying for, doesn't make it good, meaningful work -- doesn't save it from being BS.
The quintessential "email job" might be for HR and ensure everyone in the office gets paid on time. That's useful to the business; critical even. It's not BS in the sense of the "value" MBAs and economists would measure. But it's BS in a grander sense: the work is not valuable intrinsically, it does not aid the flourishing of the person doing it, it does not even offer the satisfaction of accomplishing something hard (perhaps even brutalizing) like railroad construction or coal mining. No one would call mining "BS" but all office work hangs on the hairy edge of that definition. It's not about producing profit -- because producing profit is, itself, quite suspect in the larger, spiritual pursuits of human beings.
Hi J.M.
Haha! Thank you for your kind words.
Your observation brings to mind two thoughts. First, I agree that the quality of a job can't be reduced to the value that it creates. That is what I was trying to say in referring to the issue of job design and the Job Characteristics Model. So, yes, some jobs, due to their design are more or less gratifying.
The second thought, is that the perspective of the worker is even more important than job design. You'll recall the old story about the three men working on a construction site, laying bricks. A passerby asks the first man what he is doing. He replies, “I’m laying bricks.” The passerby asks the second man the same question. He says, “I’m building a wall.” When the passerby asks the third man, he smiles and says, “I’m building a cathedral.”
Our HR payroll clerk may answer "I make sure everyone who works so hard here is able to feed their families and pay their mortgages." In other words the clerk may, as Mother Teresa said, "Do ordinary things with great love."
And since I went to bat for business, I might as well speak on behalf of the spiritual merit of profit. :-) It's worth remembering that every family that has bread on the table, every school where children study, church, synagogue or mosque, every library, every museum, every concert hall, every park, every government, every army and every aid organization exist because somewhere, some business has provided something important that was valued a little more than it cost to produce - and in that gap - a profit was created. Profitable businesses are like the sun - they make life on earth possible. :-)
Thanks for this post. A couple of thoughts:
(1) "At its core, quiet quitting breaches the trust between employer and employee. It’s akin to entering a covenant, much like a marriage, where mutual expectations and responsibilities are foundational. Quiet quitting, then, is like practicing quiet polygamy in a marriage —repurposing time and effort meant for one commitment to serve another, without honesty or consent."
I think that's a good point. But it should be counterbalanced by another: it is a myth — a sustaining myth, perhaps, but a myth nonetheless — that the purely contractual relationship entered into by potential employer and potential employee is entered into by equals. In only a thin, legalistic sense does a pre-employee "freely" enter into such a contractual relationship, and only in a similarly thin, legalistic sense is the employee "free" to leave. The contract binds, sure, and brings a host of mutual expectations and responsibilities into existence. But the relationship has a different tenor when one party has less power and less real freedom to leave — just like a marriage.
(2) "In a competitive marketplace, jobs are created to enable companies to meet real needs or solve real problems. Companies only hire people when they need them. Take a company that hires someone for a task no one really needs—soon enough, that job will be trimmed. In a competitive environment, if you’re not providing real value, you don’t survive. Efficiency is the market’s regulator, and inefficiency is not just wasteful but fatal."
Again, good point. But I think the term "bullshit jobs" has been used ambiguously to refer to (a) bullshit positions and to (b) necessary positions with bullshit shadow work. You argue that the former don't really exist, because they don't last long in a competitive environment. Fine. But that doesn't mean the latter don't exist.
I have a necessary and valuable position, but my role is increasingly encrusted by tasks with no real value, and often those very tasks make it harder for me to perform the other tasks that make my position necessary and valuable. A typical bullshit shadow task will contribute to the *appearance* of value but not the *existence* of it. A bit more specifically: one kind of valueless task will, in essence, require me to spend time and energy trying to measure my contribution according to reductive, simplistic, bureaucratically legible metrics and then reporting my measurements. I spend time and energy providing the firm with things it can show others, or itself, to make it *appear* effective, which keeps me from doing things that would make the firm *be* more effective.
Thanks for your response @Eric. I appreciate your thoughts.
I agree that there are power dynamics at play in an employee/employer relationship that are highly contextual. Beyond the legal sense - in which the employee generally has many more protections, the soft power in the relationship is determined by options. Jeff Pfeffer, who writes about power in organizations, has made this point. An employee with high-demand skills and many potential employers will have more power than their employer, just as an employer hiring for easily substituted skills in a loose labor market will have more power than the employee.
You raise a great point about administrative work often associated with measuring performance or with things like regulatory compliance. I’ll use a concrete example, I have never heard a salesperson describe how they love updating their CRM. However, the data really is essential to managing the performance of the salesperson, the team, the organization and to forecast revenue. Just like a professional sports team, any performance oriented organization needs to be able to measure their effectiveness and “keep score” if they are going to win. So, sometimes the perceived value of our efforts may not be visible to us, but they create value for other stakeholders.
And in the case of non-profits, the responsible stewardship of funding requires people to do their best to monitor prudent use of funds. That said, I know people working on government grants that require them to invest a lot of time and effort counting activities that are at best an approximate measure of effectiveness. Activity does not often equal productivity.
There are a couple of risks with measurement. One is that the measurement itself is not fit-to-purpose or even worse creates perverse incentives that distort performance (measure hours worked and things will take more hours). Another is that the juice is not worth the squeeze. This is a case where the cost of the measurements or controls exceed the value created. This is particularly a risk where there aren’t market incentives, such as government regulatory oversight.
Thanks again for your comments.
Thanks for replying. I'm enriched by seeing things from your perspective (which, I would add, you articulate with admirable, imitation-worthy clarity).
(1) I have little doubt that it's essential for a firm to have knowledge of employee performance. What I doubt is whether self-measurement by too-crude metrics produces that knowledge. As it stands, it gives only the appearance of knowledge. And that's what makes these tasks bullshit. My hypothesis — defeasible, of course — is this: if the firm sincerely cares about knowledge of performance, and if it sincerely cares about good performance, it would devote resources to articulating more faithful metrics, to ensuring the performers are not the ones measuring their own performance (or ensuring that performances are measured by competent and disinterested measurers), and to empowering the performers to focus on the truly necessary and valuable tasks.
(2) Your experience has taught you that exposure to market pressures tends to lead to efficiency. That might be true, if (it's appropriate that) productivity (and thus efficiency) is measured in market terms. But if a firm's productivity is not (appropriately) measured in market terms, exposure to market pressures might lead to gross inefficiency. At least, this is what my experience in academia has taught me. Due to things we could change but haven't, academia is increasingly exposed to market pressures, its success measured in market terms, and this has deformed higher education into something monstrously inefficient at providing a genuinely higher education. For example, students (quite rationally, given the circumstances) enter the institution demanding to have their desires met, rather than ready to have their desires challenged, reoriented, or enriched. Because students are customers, the para-educational apparatus has proliferated in order to draw their money, and the administrative apparatus has metastasized in order to ensure they're always right. This funnels resources away from the those who would actually educate. And so we have the overworked, underpaid, vulnerable adjunct burdened with hundreds of students she is supposed to educate. But it is obvious to everyone, regardless of the measurements slickly displayed through the high-definition projectors in glassy administrative dens, that there is no educating taking place. This play-acting at educating really wears on one.
Thanks, again, for a wonderful post.
Eric, thanks for your kind words. I appreciate it.
You, of course, are completely correct that if a firm sincerely cares about performance they will invest in the quality of their approach. To my mind this really boils down to culture and values.You can see a firm's real values when they invest more than the market in a particular capability. For example, Apple invests more in design than their peers. Nordstrom is willing to spend more on customer satisfaction with out-of-market return policies. Ideally, these investments also help differentiate the firm from their peers. But you are right. That is why some firms actually innovate and some just go through the motions and do “innovation theater”.
As to the higher education industry, it really is heartbreaking to see. I agree that market pressures AND government policy failures AND toxic cultures combine to create a genuinely unique poisonous cocktail of perverse incentives. You have my genuine sympathy.
Thank you for an interesting article. Nice to see the debate about 'meaningful work' is still alive. In my era of entering the workforce Mike Cooley's "Architect or Bee?" was one of the go-to books on the interaction of technology in the work-place and its relation to meaningful work.
Historically, people were forced (dispossessed and starved) off the land to go and work in the dangerous and clock-watching factories that fuelled the Industrial Revolution; that was the first blow to their autonomy. It doesn't surprise me that survey after survey on work notes that about 75% of people would quit their job if they could financially afford it. I did when I was 44 - and I had a really good job as an academic.
I tend to be more of the persuasion that in a global capitalist competitive world, there will always be an unresolvable tension between between those who work in an organisation (but don't own it) and those who own it (but don't work in it).
Thanks @Joshua - I appreciate it.
So you have touched on an important issue.
I agree that under shareholder capitalism there is a tension between unvested employees (non-owners) and external investors (non-employed owners). And not to grossly oversimplify but I would lay most problems at the feet that the feet of external investors. First, external investors require a Board to exercise fiduciary responsibility to manage the company in the interest of the shareholder. That immediately subordinates the interests of everyone else from employees, to customers, to suppliers and the community. This creates pressure to exploit various contributors to the value chain (suppliers, employees, customers) in order to extract more profit for the shareholder. Secondly, external investors invest with the expectation of a return on their investment. This creates pressure for "liquidity events" regardless of whether it is in the overall interest of the company. This generally means selling the company to generate cash for the investors. The problem with "maximizing shareholder value" is that it creates a financial return for investors while destroying immeasurable social capital in the process. Separating ownership from involvement in a business creates a misalignment of interests between the owners and pretty much everybody else.
What most people don't realize is that it does not need to be that way. As long as a company is private you are free to run your company however you see fit. You can actually pay your employees well, do excellent work for your customers, and take good care of your suppliers and community. Personally, I wish everyone could start their own business.
I agree, if the private owner is of the decent kind. But "common-ownership" companies like Scott-Bader (The Man who Gave Away his Company to his Employees) is also an option.
Whilst the legal model of 'shareholders first' remains, there will always be a tension. It's the model that needs changing too.
There are some good points in here, but the first section (asserting that bullshit jobs are a myth) is frustrating. It's basically some statements of faith (e.g., "this is not how market economies actually operate") propped up by fallacies (e.g., begging the question: "if you’re not providing real value, you don’t survive"). And those articles of faith are plainly disproved by the author's real-world examples at the end of the section (e.g., a defense research program "spun off" from a university into a commercial startup; and Amelia’s experience with an overstaffed university department).
If Mr. Ianova has evaded exposure to bullshit jobs, then kudos to him. But don't gaslight the rest of us. This sounds too much like the princess who hears reports that the peasants have no bread and responds "Let them eat cake."
Thanks for your response, @buzzard! First, please forgive me if I sounded dismissive of anyone's experience. That was not my intention and if I was, I apologize.
To respond, remember, we are talking about Graeber's view of bullshit jobs that create no value and are created to perpetuate the machine of capitalism. Maybe I should have said, yes, bullshit jobs according to Graeber can sometimes appear in specific circumstances: Companies characterized by excessive profitability and rapid scaling. With the top 10 profitable companies employing 2.5% of the workforce, you aren't likely to run into too many non-value creating jobs in the private sector.
I also acknowledge non-value creating jobs can (and are much more likely) to occur in government or grant-funded non-profits AND would fall outside Graebers definition as you can hardly blame machine capitalism for creating government jobs. The government and non-profits employ 20% of the workforce. Let's imagine that even as much as 10% of the jobs in those environments are bullshit jobs. That's 2% of the workforce. So, yes, they happen. They are possible - and I am sorry that you had to suffer through one - they are just not probable.