Corporate jobs are not bullshit, but they might not be for everyone
Revisiting Bullshit Jobs and meaning in work after a seeing a bullshit post on Substack.
I came across a note on Substack:
Which led me to read the mentioned post:
As long-time readers know, I have dipped into meaning and purpose in work regularly, and directly made the case against the idea of bullshit jobs in the post linked just below.
So, the re-emergence on my timeline of the idea that many, if not most jobs, are bullshit inspired me to revisit it. A few quotes from Still Wandering’s post, to set the stage:
The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they've had time to decompress, they'll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They're professional email forwards. They're human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other.
Walk through the City or Canary Wharf at 8am and you'll see thousands of people who look purposeful. Sharp suits, coffee in hand, calls already starting. The whole thing looks impressively important.
But talk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges. They're in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They're managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They're creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.
A friend at a major bank recently told me about his typical day. He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn't point to a single tangible thing. "I enable decision-making," he said, then caught himself. "Whatever that means."
[Emphasis mine]
So far, I’m still quite on board. I realize that the writer, Alex, is running a business on career advice. I realize that many people have ended up on the Default Path, (see Pathless by Paul Millerd) without giving much thought to what they’d like to do with their life. That certainly can lead to existential doubts, which I have experienced many times myself and don’t want to trivialize that experience. I am also drawn to startups because there is less alignment needed, and a lower degree of performative work needed to succeed.
My only complaint so far is that Alex generalizes from the people he has been speaking with, AS A CAREER COACH FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN’T FOUND MEANING IN THEIR CAREER, to assuming that all those thousands of people are doing nothing they find meaningful at work. Do you think you’re speaking with a representative sample, Alex? People should really pay a lot more attention to Selection Bias.
But, of course, it gets worse. Can’t write on Substack without intellectualizing and generalizing everything to the whole of society! And that’s where David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ book rears its ugly head again.
Name me one actual bullshit job
Alex writes this passage:
Consider the average corporate decision. It starts with someone identifying a "opportunity" (usually a non-problem). This triggers a cascade: analysts analyse, consultants consult, middle managers manage the consultation of the analysis. Workshops are held. Stakeholders are engaged. Decks are created.
Months later, something might happen. Usually, it's a minor adjustment that could have been made in an afternoon by anyone with common sense.
Everyone involved knows this. The analyst knows their model is largely guesswork. The consultant knows their framework is just common sense in a matrix. The manager knows the workshop is theatre. But they all need each other to maintain the illusion. [emphasis mine again]
There are three emphasized things here that sound off. The first is that most of the problems and opportunities identified by white collar workers are “non-problems”. That’s a bold claim! Might need some kind of substantiation? The second is that the resulting changes could have been made in an afternoon by anyone with common sense. And the last one is that everyone knows this. Sometimes, this may be true, but not “usually”. People who join meetings in a state of total disengagement with their company, THINK they know what obviously needs to be done. But that doesn’t mean their ideas are good.
Unfortunately, common sense ideas really do need to be checked against constraints. So, those ‘bullshit’ managers and consultants will say things like:
Have you checked if regulations allow us to do this?
What would it cost to implement this?
What work have you done to estimate the additional revenue this would generate?
Companies make attempts all. the. time. to surface great ideas from their employees that would generate lots of money for the company with limited risk. But by and large employees don’t have such ideas. Ideas get killed for good reasons. What percentage? Some? Most? I don’t know. It’s not so easy to research this:
Analogy to writing
When writing, a piece can be so clear in the writer’s mind. The subject seemingly so obvious that it will almost write itself. But get started, and the nuances emerge. That premise is actually not quite right, this assumption doesn’t hold, that reasoning is circular. It takes a lot of work to sharpen that up, and many ideas get discarded1. The people who are unhappy at work and and tell a career coach that their company is so stupid, and it’s so obvious what should be done, might not be the people who sit down to work out the details of how their ideas would get implemented. They’re not the ones who map out constraints, and how they might be overcome.
But research indicates job satisfaction is at the highest point since 1987. Even the statistic that Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ is built on, that 40% of people find no meaning in their work, suggests that 60% actually do!
Cynical rejection of the system is not the path to find meaning
While Still Wandering was short-sighted in this piece by falling victim to selection bias, the book ‘Bullshit Jobs’ is so obviously stupid that it’s hard to believe it still gets traction these days. The first failure of Bullshit Jobs is to ask people if they feel their job is meaningful2, and if they say no, then assume those jobs actually are bullshit. That’s quite a leap! But the bigger failure is to assume that there is a cascade of bullshit jobs. Here is how the argument goes and why it’s bullshit:
Within big organizations there is a lot of unnecessary work and performance art being done (TRUE)
40% of the people doing jobs feel their jobs are not making a meaningful contribution to the world (TRUE)
Therefore, those jobs are bullshit (FALSE)
In addition, some 10% or more jobs that only exist to support those bullshit jobs are also bullshit (…)
Therefore, half of companies shouldn’t even exist (…….)
And if those companies didn’t exist, lots of extra jobs would then become bullshit too; like food delivery, hair dressers, coffee places at business districts, travel for meetings, meeting software, architects, interior designers, all bullshit (WAIT A MINUTE NOW…)
Yeah! If people didn’t need to work in a bullshit job they would have time to grow their own food, cut their own hair, wouldn’t need childcare anymore… (WHAT???)
‘Bullshit Jobs’, at some point reveals itself to be nothing but an Anarchist’s fantasy. Defining as bullshit jobs those that the people doing them feel don’t contribute is the first big mistake. Those 40% of people didn’t say their job was bullshit. They didn’t say they were unhappy. All they did was answer “no” to the question: “is your job making a meaningful contribution to the world?”.
What is the definition of meaningful? What is the standard? It might be interpreted as contributing to doing something deeply impactful like curing cancer.
And how are you supposed to interpret “the world”? Is a local dentist making a meaningful contribution to THE WORLD?
But the book never even acknowledges this, let alone try to work out some way to define more objectively what jobs are actually bullshit.
Capitalism is the worst economic system, apart from all the others that have been tried
The economy is not bullshit. And capitalism isn’t evil. Organizations and economies have a certain alignment cost, and:
…standard economic concepts like perverse incentives, principle agent problems, market failures, information asymmetries, transaction costs, rent seeking and public choice theory lead to a certain amount of wasted labor.
This more detailed and kinder critical review of Bullshit Jobs is worth a read
We can work on many of these issues. People are trying to make progress on policy in many places in the world. But instead of rallying around opportunities, the (social) media discourse just keeps trying to convince people to overthrow the whole system. From a policy standpoint, a great many things are known about how to fix housing and energy shortages, and how to reduce global warming. Similarly, quite a lot is known about how to find meaning in work.
A list of things that help with finding meaningful work (repost)
Based on a fairly digestible reading list, I believe the recipe for finding meaning in work is fairly well know. The choice people have is to either find meaning in their contribution, or try something else. Here is a short list of what I think we know as a species about the recipe for finding meaningful and enjoyable work:
Everyone has to figure it out for themselves. For a Type A Insecure Overachiever it is likely that they will have to let go of tying their self-worth to external medals and diplomas. For someone like me it might be more like finding ways to keep curiosity and renewal going in my work.
If you are 20, stop looking for meaning and just get to work. Go work anywhere that seems fun and makes good money and learn as much as you can from the job and about yourself.
Know that huge step changes in overall happiness are possible. One of the best ways is changing where you live. Move to the other side of the country, or better yet, the other side of the world. Moving anywhere is a two-way door (you can backtrack easily).
Concentration on and finishing tasks are inherently satisfying. If you manage to resist the instant gratification of instagram or netflix and do literally anything productive, you will become happier. I think that’s why it’s so easy to get into a flow state with writing or video games. Both are easy1, quick feedback, and automatically suck in 100% of your attention.
Try to be goal oriented only every now and then. It becomes hard to find enjoyment in work if you’re trying to achieve something with it. Writing for engagement as I tried briefly on LinkedIn sucks all the joy out of it. Focus on the process. Chop wood and carry water.
Aim for mastery as a craftsperson. Without committing and trying to actually get good at something, passion won’t have a chance to emerge. Passion and enjoyment of an activity often follow a process of getting good at it, not the other way around. I'm often inspired by Seth Godin’s short post on what it means to be professional.
Try to do something creative. For many people, creating is very rewarding, although born sales people2 and born managers3 also clearly exist. Odds are you’ll get to try your hand at sales and management anyway. Try to write, paint, or program something because the creative act itself has an element of purpose which may attract you or at least teach something.
Read and talk to lots of people about life and work. Try to gain perspective from interesting people. Something you like might be hidden away. Nobody outside of the industry knows anything about Cybersecurity but it is a large, profitable, interesting, and certainly meaningful field.
Final thoughts — is this a real thing?
The post that started this rant, which took 2 hours of my life to create, is (I am almost certain) written with extensive AI assistance. It could be that once again I have been sucked into spending a lot of time thinking about something that only exists on the internet. But I don’t think so. I really do believe that Alex is speaking with people who believe their job to be bullshit. 40% (who think their job is not meaningful) is a very significant share of workers. What I do believe is that, for those 40% of people, lashing out at the system is not the answer they are looking for. Graeber seems to want society to regress to a hunter-gatherer system where everyone grows their own food and jobs don’t exist. This is the end-state of the ‘de-growth’ set of ideas. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing that. Anyone who wants to live like a hunter gatherer can go and do so in various large natural areas in the world. The system does not need to be overthrown. The core strength, and beauty of the democratic, capitalist system is its unique level of freedom. The fact that people have the luxury to ponder the meaningfulness of their careers has never happened before the widespread adoption of capitalism, property rights, and the improved welfare made possible by economic growth. It pains me every time I read or hear people reject the system in its entirety for being unhappy with some parts of it.
I have something like 20 drafts that don’t seem to be going anywhere for this reason.
There will be more detail on how this was asked later, but for now, consider already that ‘meaningful’ could mean different things to different people. Personally meaningful vs. societally useful vs. economically necessary are different things.
Agree with this. Rejection of a thing just lands you in a ditch with everyone else