I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would.
I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.
One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A.
Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and further to formation of more companies supporting those games. Consider the advertising industry, the poster child of wasteful negative-sum games: in saturated markets, it supports competition for fixed customer pool. To that end, it employs countless of creatives designing new texts, posters, videos, etc. It then employs printing shops and distribution centers to place all that material in the real world. All that effort, man-hours and fuel is wasted - in an attempt for one side to get more market to themselves, only for the other to cancel it out. If all parties agreed not to do this, everyone would be better off. But they can't, and so instead a whole industry of bullshit jobs is created.
Those are, I believe, the two main sources of bullshit jobs - internal closed loops, and negative-sum games.
(EDIT: in a sense, those two are actually facets of the same phenomenon.)
I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.
Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down.
But if you zoom out a bit, so your domain of analysis is "The Health Care System", you find that these so-called competing bureaucracies are a large organ whose function is to make it difficult to accurately assign costs to services. As long as those prices are hard to know, they are impossible to optimize, and so the prices stay exorbitant.
That is absolutely a great example of bullshit jobs. It gets even worse when each side outsources this function to other companies. If they outsourced to the same company, then maybe some genuine efficiencies could be realized.
When single payer healthcare comes up, free marketeers ask, "Do you want an unelected bureaucrat to decide if you get healthcare?" They must have never been in the situation where someone at the insurance company my employer picked - an unelected bureaucrat with a profit incentive - has denied coverage.
> The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.
Our company once was in the same office building as another company that specialized in billing for health care.
They would look at the services provided by a doctor's office, and figure out ways to code the procedures performed so that it would maximize the payout from the insurance.
Doctors liked it because it was easy to sign up and just increase their revenue without doing any additional work.
That's one of the reasons why insurers are moving away from the fee-for-service model toward value-based care. So those bullshit jobs at least will eventually disappear.
If the advertising competition you mention didn't exist, for example competitors closing shop and not playing the zero sum game, then you'd have a monopoly company, which would also be bad.
So in that case, it's good to play the zero sum game since it's a redistribution of income.
Of course, it's wasted labour, and so what you really want is for the government to step in and extract more in taxes and simply hand over the money as welfare or invest in more fruitful pursuits such as scientific research, rather than redistribution of income coming from zero sum games.
I'm not saying the competition shouldn't exist - just that we should put brakes on some of the negative-sum games it causes, once the market is saturated and things turn into a fight for a fixed pie. As you say, at this point it's all wasted labour, and it can eat pretty much all your profits.
I tried to refrain from mentioning government regulation here, but the brakes need to be put on everyone simultaneously - deciding to just stop all advertising expense for yourself is a competitive suicide.
I get what you're saying, but I wanted to point out that lower profits can be better for society if due to competition. Every dollar a company earns in profit is a little more of efficiency that could be eked out of the business
I think we need to be cautious here, though. A perfect market would bring perfect efficiency, but perfect efficiency is a disaster for humans who depend on the market to live. Happiness and quality of life today happen in places where market is not efficient yet.
To live in a world where markets can be perfectly efficient and everyone happy because we stop staking the lives of people to their worth as determined by the market.
Burger King stops advertising on Tv and loses even more market share to McDonalds. McDonalds then spends less on advertising because it realizes it doesn't need to because Burger Kind gave up. You're left with a "monopoly", McDonalds whose shareholders/top management make even more money, rather than it being redistributed to employees of Burger King.
That's why such change needs to be enforced simultaneously and externally.
As an example, I recall reading that tobacco companies were actually very happy about regulations limiting the marketing of tobacco products - by themselves, those regulations didn't change anything about their market share (the market was already saturated), but everyone got to stop spending so much on advertising.
I don't think Marlboro cared about newcomers, a big company can usually buy out the small one if it gets dangerous. Consumers usually don't even notice.
Unrestricted advertising is basically Red Queen's race; capping it levels the playing field, so it's better for newcomers as well.
McDonalds would only have that dominance thanks to years of advertising. If the mass advertising game never existed, those companies would have to have grown through their own merits instead of advertising dollars, and BK might have a chance (opinions of their food nonwithstanding). I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.
> I think that's what the person meant by "but they can't [agree not to advertise]", because now we're at a point where removing advertising from the equation would favor those who have already advertised the most.
That's not what I meant. What I meant is that neither BK nor McD can risk cutting advertising efforts, because if either one does, the other automatically starts winning market share. They can't agree to it together, because the first party to defect from the agreement will win (not to mention a third party could swoop in and (excuse the pun) eat their lunch).
This is a prisoner's dilemma situation, and as we all know, the optimal solution for prisoner's dilemma is to have a mob boss proclaim that he'll kill any prisoner that rats others out to authorities. Similarly, either there's a way to punish defectors, or McD and BK will forever be stuck in the loop of ever growing advertising expenses.
Removing advertising would definitely benefit both BK and McD, as both could be able to stop spending money on advertising just to protect their market share.
Antelope eat grass and breed. If they eat faster than the grass can regrow, they starve and die, and their bodies become grass.
Death through starvation is unpleasant. Suppose they could agree to breed less, as to not expand beyond carrying capacity of the place they live in. They would lead a happier life.
Point being, some feedback-driven systems are good, and some are bad.
Why is the supposition that fewer lives is good controversial? What do we owe the unborn and non existent? Surely in any moral framework, if one could prove that additional organisms in an environment degrade the quality of life for all organisms, then it would be a moral decision (in principle) to reduce by attrition the number of new organisms? I am not arguing for population control as the mechanisms to achieve it are themselves morally dubious, but surely in principle we can agree that there is no moral imperative to grow a population, or alternatively that is not immoral to advocate for preventing population growth where it would reduce quality of life and lead to environmental degradation?
A moral framework is inherently subjective, so it should be no surprise that the rights of the unborn are considered more important in some than others.
Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan. Buddhists likewise consider all life as sacred, in that an animal may previously/subsequently be a human soul. Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.
> Christianity arguably disagrees with you - see the tale of Onan
"Be fruitful and multiply" is Genesis 1:28.
Onan is, per Jermone and canonical discussions, about spilling seed unnecessarily, but is more about not raping your sister-in-law and betraying dead family than it is about having many children. Nothing in there about the sacredness of babies or anything.
Onan's brother died and by tradition Onan entered into a Levirate marriage with his dead brother's wife, Tamar, to continue the brother's line. If Onan fathered a child by Tamar the child would inherit all of the dead brother's possessions and rights; if there were no sons Onan would inherit everything. So Onan pulls out, meaning he gets to bang the widow, and still gets to keep everything -- which is pretty sleazy.
God isn't really a fan of this, and punishes him accordingly.
> Lastly, many atheist progressives would argue that preservation of the human race is a moral imperative, and having more total humans rather than less ensures preservation in at least a simplistic mathematical sense.
It doesn't, because what I've essentially explained in my example. Too much population, and you collapse the environment, and human race suffers and then dies. I hope even smart atheist progressives would realize that meaningful ways to preserve human race are things like building a Mars colony, or ensuring the Earth's ecosystem does not collapse (such collapse would likely lead to great wars, possibly nuclear).
I would argue that a strictly rationalist or at least secular morality should be applied given the sheer religious or spiritual diversity of the global population.
And regarding your latter point,it is as you say simplistic - much like the proverbial bacterium on an agar plate, our growth imperative will destroy our future if we overrun the bounds of our environment. I think we will see the issue become more important as the consequences of overpopulation (with respect to resource consumption and carrying capacity) begin to bite.
Science cannot speak to general morality, as an abstract set of axiomatically good values, because it tends to tell us that those are completely arbitrary.
But science also teaches us that humans have a set of common, shared values, and while they may be arbitrary in general, they're not arbitrary to us. And they're shared, because humans are not isolated minds, each coming to existence ex nihilo, but in fact are connected through the process of reproduction. All of us have brain architecture we've inherited from a common ancestor.
This is how science can point us where to look for some practical morality.
I agree with the first loop. I think there are very few markets where the 2nd loop actually exists.
1. There is constant innovation, even in the most established areas people are always trying new things.
2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.
> 2. Advertisement is an education campaign. There are always new people that have a problem to solve and they may not be aware of what exists.
That's motte-and-bailey defense of advertising. Yes, it also serves to help people discover off-the-shelf solutions to their problems. But that's not its primary function, nor it's where most money is being made. The discovery part is easy - in fact, most of the times it's best done in pull fashion ("I have a problem, let me look for solutions") instead of push ("here is a solution for the problem you didn't know you had"). Most of advertising is about misleading people to make suboptimal choices - choosing the product whose vendor is best at advertising, instead of the one best suited for the need - and about fighting for a fixed-size pie of customers in a given market.
What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition' and it's healthy considering the alternative dynamic of monopoly.
All corporate systems could be described as various intertwining loops (that intertwine with other corporate loops), it's really a matter of efficiency of those individuals and loops as a system.
Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..
> What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition'
The broken windows fallacy doesn't suddenly become net-positive when renamed. Perhaps humans are not capable of improving interaction outcomes any further than we've gotten and humanity has reached peak efficiency re: transaction costs and firm-size, but I have a hard time believing that.
> Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..
That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop. It doesn't justify the bullshit, it is an object lesson in how it works.
If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.
"That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop."
No, it's not. It's not always clear what is illegal, what is not, what is infringement, what is not.
Rather than having a totalitarian authority create, divide and control IP etc. we have adversarial law and companies can file suit and work it out in court.
When there isn't overt corruption in the system, it works reasonably well.
That we're even having this conversation over the internet in 2018 is evidence that it's not 'negative sum'.
> If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.
The internet was developed by Darpa so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. Competition did not produce the internet, and the telecommunications industry, which came about after as a commercialization project, has serious issues which make this an even harder argument to make.
Competition definitely created the telecommunications industry and by the way most of the electric grid as well.
'The internet' as we know it was not created by DARPA.
DARPA created some protocols - of which there were many, private and public.
It just so happens that a certain version of it got a critical mass - it didn't have to be that way. And a lot of private interests were involved, particularly private universities.
The network over which the internet was overlaid is entirely commercial - and of course most of the variation of it has been commercial, or non-governmental type NGOs, i.e consortiums.
Nobody is going to argue that some projects, particularly long-term/pure R&D, or projects that literally require a scale that's out of reach of even the largest private entities, are not going to require some kind of collective participation.
But the argument that competition is kafkaesque or inherently problematic because of entities competing for the same turf is short sighted.
I'm not criticizing competition itself. It's wasteful, but it's also necessary because this is how we solve resource allocation problems - we're too dumb to do it directly, so we use market dynamics to implicitly compute it for us.
I'm criticizing runaway negative-sum games. Like where companies are competing for a fixed-size market - any marginal effort to win more of the market will be cancelled out by equivalent effort of the other party. The end result is the same, only both companies just wasted money fighting.
I don't think it would be. I think if everyone stopped advertising unit sales would crash.
Coke vs Pepsi is much less of a thing than the constant reinforcement that you would really, really enjoy one or the other right now. The constant reinforcement drives absolute sales, not just relative market share.
I think the problem is more that a lot of heavily advertised products are incredibly harmful to personal and environmental health. Sugar is unbelievably toxic over the longer term (weight gain, diabetes, etc) but the canonisation of the profit motive means that market morality rewards the creation and promotion of these toxic effects.
You could argue that if people want to poison themselves they should be allowed to. But even ignoring the direct social costs of the medical care required to clean up the effects of Type II diabetes and heart disease, the argument is patchily applied.
Some poisons (sugar, alcohol, tobacco) get a pass, while others (psychedelic drugs) don't. A few like cocaine remain in limbo, with nominal disapproval but tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - covert political support.
It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.
> It's not just about bullshit jobs but about bullshit consumption, and the curious moral frameworks that support it.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive. There might not be a perfect solution for this problem, but we don't seem interested in having a discussion about any solution to it.
Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well). Because most people will calculate someone's worth by having a job, not by judging its impact on society (at least, most of the time).
> Like you said, we have a curious moral framework at play here. For instance, a highly paid person who has a job with a net negative impact on society is often considered more moral than a beggar on the street (and it should be noted that the former is going to be consuming more resources from society as well).
More than that, we also have very peculiar standards between jobs. I like to pick on marketing/advertising, because I'm absolutely baffled by it. Somehow the profession that often dabbles in lying, scamming and generally making other people's lives worse off (by dragging them towards suboptimal choices) became a respectable occupation, even though if a typical salesman applied their skills to their friends and family, he'd eventually end up punched in the face. It's not even an issue of impact on society at large - we've legitimized, and even glorified, acting maliciously towards random strangers.
Also: the mortgage industry as arms dealers in a bidding war -- and the proceeds of the bidding war don't even go to the counterparties of the contract being sold!
People marvel at how successful the greedy optimization algorithm of our economy is at finding local optima, but when you take a step back the emperor has no clothes. Sigh.
Credit cards definitely provide value, the anti-every-using-credit crowd seems to not understand how they work. If my pet ever needs thousands of dollars of emergency vet care, I can now pay for that using my credit, and then spread my payment of that bill over a longer period.
"Many jobs seem to have a net negative value for society - soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc."
Rubbish.
Soda taste great, I love it. Don't tell me what is 'good or bad for me' - I can figure that out.
'Processed Foods' feed the world. They're not fundamentally unhealthy, can can absolutely be part of a decent diet.
Credit Cards - are an amazing financial innovation. Consumer credit is a really big deal that helps grease the wheels. Wherever there is no good consumer credit system - the economy is crap.
Car Dealerships and Salespeople - they definitely serve a function and it's why they are among the highest paid. Most people still like to test cars. The car industry relies on the model of dealerships and Tesla riding without is just like a new airline entrant just running only the profitable routes, and not carrying the longer tail ones. Also society has changed a little bit so admittedly the model could adapt.
All of those thinks you mentioned could be improved, and can be risky, but without them we'd be much worse off.
They can be limited, though. Think of market economy as internal combustion engine. Burning fuel is inevitable - because that's how the engine works. But that doesn't imply you have to set your gas tank on fire.
It has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they’re the problem (though middle or senior management might accidentally lay off a bad manager or two on rare occasions, but again never lay off themselves). Also I’ve seen in larger companies, no division head wants to get a smaller headcount unless they’re a new person specifically brought in to be a wrecking ball.
Similarly, “the market” is a convenient fiction, a shorthand that occasionally exhibits describable collective behavior but ultimately is also composed of people. There is creative destruction but it takes place over decades, far too long for any individual activity to be pointed to and say that ruined the company except in the most extreme cases.
It's that businesses go out of business -- see Nokia, Blackberry, etc.
Public organizations can't be easily replaced by a competitor -- I think being replaced by a competitor is more of an occurrence than fixing it from the inside.
One, that has been pointed out already, is that companies are not hive minds. Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share. Bullshit jobs are a wealth (and status) redistribution mechanism that works almost as a force of nature under the current state of affairs.
The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become. Of course society cannot work like this, and democracies force politicians to align themselves with the interest of the general public -- to some small degree perhaps, but enough here to create enough pressure for such jobs to keep existing.
> Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share.
Sure, but there's competition there. If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
> The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become.
We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done. Remember that eliminating bullshit jobs wouldn't lower productivity (by definition), so redirecting that effort into productive work would massively boost overall productivity and be good for everyone. Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.
> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
If you can implement it. Building a large company, or redoing management structure in such, is a very long process requiring buy-in from many people. People, whose personal interests may oppose your goal of eliminating inefficiencies.
My guess is that most "low-hanging fruits" in management styles already got picked, and what remains are the cases where it's actually very hard to build (and maintain) a bullshit-free system.
> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.
Not if some significant chunk of those jobs are bullshit. Just because a job is bullshit, doesn't mean it won't make you - and your employer - money.
This is a different topic, but the view that if it makes money, it's good is a pretty antisocial and inhumane view - because markets themselves aren't humane, and often optimize for some pretty bad things.
> If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.
On the contrary, what is not stable is your more "efficient" situation, because it is only preferable from the perspective of the employer, and the managers/employees are also free agents. Ok, so you cut all the bullshit and create your efficient paradise. This will only make your managers look good. But you are making life uncomfortable for them by denying them status and future salary negotiation leverage. So they will use their current aura of success to look for a more comfortable place. Unless you pay them more to compensate, but then there goes your "efficiency". For a situation to be stable it has to be in the best interest of all the parties. Otherwise an upstart can explore that dissatisfaction to compete with you -- for example by snatching your star employees.
> We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done.
Making this claim in the context of this discussion is bizarre. It's like you are talking past the very thing being discussed.
> Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.
People are not fungible insects. There is plenty of productive work to be done, but unfortunately the majority of the people do not have the skills to do them. The very point of what is discussed here is that technology replaces the least qualified jobs first. I'm pretty sure that skill sophistication follows a power law. The more qualified a job is, the exponentially less people can do it. The more qualified a job is, the longer it will take for it to be replaced by AI. Nobody has a magic wand that makes full-grown adults useful again.
You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?
> You want empirical evidence of what I am saying? Remember the excitement around "let's teach everyone to code and they will become app-making entrepreneurs"? How did that go?
This is going extremely well, actually. There are more software engineers than ever in the world, and these software engineers are getting paid more than ever.
These efforts have been wildly successful, and this consistent progress just keeps marching on, even today (as more as more people choose to become successful engineers.).
You might counter by saying something like "but we taught a million people to code and only 100K of them became software engineer!".
And this is the wrong line of thinking because getting 100% of them to become software engineers was never the goal.
It was never the goal in the same way that teaching people to read and write never had the goal of causing 100% of literate people to become fiction writers, and yet we all agree that reading and writing is a good thing to teach people.
> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.
Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer.
IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations.
The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over.
Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful.
Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.
Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts.
I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor!
Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.
The way I typically understand this is by Dunbar’s number: that 150 or so persons who are “real” in any given person’s head. Any org larger than ~75 has this type of multipolar dynamic where different sub-units are pulling different ways.
It’s held together by the myth of money and/or organizational purpose, which is actually less immediately “real” than any one of those sub unit in-group people.
It’s not that explicit, but it is certainly innate: large orgs all suffer the same way.
True it takes a long time for formerly great organizations to die. I think a lot of the problems with this type of analysis are time scales and costs of switching. IBM is probably not the best solution for anything if you're starting something new; but if you already have something it's probably good enough and it would cost too much to change right now.
So IBM can limp along until new organizations develop products that are sufficiently cheaper or better that it makes switching the logical move. Or the companies tied to IBM eventually fail and replaced by more nimble organizations.
Large companies like to mimic each other. They're perpetually asking consultants to give the inside scoop on how the competition works, not to beat them, but to copy. They're afraid of being worse, not trying to be better.
"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would."
No, not in a lot of industries.
Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient.
For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified.
Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later.
Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves.
Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat.
Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams.
Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit.
The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue.
I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch.
I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.
I think working a bit as a consultant/contractor made me realize just how many very prominent companies are being held together by the equivalent of spit and glue.
I had that insight a while ago when I had to dig into a process that was sometimes brittle and supposed to be automated. There were probably 10 departments involved and we never found anybody who actually understood all the details. the thing just had evolved over the years and worked without anybody ever having designed it.
I worked initially as in-house for a doctor's office trying to break into medical software while running his solo practice. So I figured a little "spit and glue" is par for course. It's essentially a mom and pop.
Then I became a contractor and the first time I ran across a multi-million dollar company doing serious business off of a shoddy Access database that sometimes corrupted the data and needed to be reverted to a previous backup, I was legitimately horrified.
I thought it was a fluke. Then another. And another. Even hospitals and national chains. And I realized that none of us know what we're doing, so don't worry about it. The worst that could happen isn't actually so bad.
I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.