21 Comments

Great post. I had similar notions when I realized as much as I may poor over web traffic reports google analytics offers and value how it informed me what content or feature was better it probably, rarely dictated a decision on what to try next. And I half figured that as much as execs love all those fancy charts how often do they see a specific graphic and go...hold up...let's completely change course. I'm sure it happens sometimes but I bet for every time it happens there are 5 others where the decision was made and these graphs just make everybody feel better about it.

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The sad truth is that a lot of work goes nowhere.

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"White collar work tends to bloat and metastasize." That's the truth. I've watched layers and levels of administration get bigger and bigger. The solution to every problem is either "hire more people" or "schedule more meetings" or "do more reports."

Also true: "white-collar workers often gain prestige and salary from obtaining more direct reports."

My team is about a quarter of the size of comparable teams in other departments, but we serve the same number of people, doing the same amount of work. How do we do that? Simple: We cut out all the bullshit. It's considered a "smaller department." Well, yes and no, right? How much work do we accomplish? People are always surprised when they learn how many people we serve with that smaller team.

But my "prestige" as a "manager" is about a quarter of the prestige of the managers who have bloated teams (with levels of supervisors in between) doing the same work. I of course feel like I deserve the inverse -- four times the prestige for leading a team that accomplishes the same work with a quarter of the people. :P And I want more money. People with more direct reports get more money. Don't get me started on the money. My team provides a shit-ton of value.

I must be in a braggy mood today. Whatever -- don't care! Your post really struck a chord! It's one of my favorite topics -- how much pointless work there is at most workplaces, which doesn't help anyone do anything important.

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Bullshit jobs is one of my favorite topics. I talked about it a lot with colleagues and direct reports at work. While I don't give a shit "productivity," I think it's pretty important that we all feel useful on the thing we spend most of our waking hours doing.

And, yes, a former boss once told me, pretty explicitly, that they wanted to add more people partially so that the people currently their could promoted. You need junior to have senior, and you need seniors to have managers, and you need managers to have directors/VPs/etc. The incentive is bloat and bloat and bloat. The one thing I always remember is that productivity only gets you so far. You have to exposure and gain visibility if you really want to move up in an organization. My advice: sacrifice some productivity for some prestige.

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Probably good advice. I hate the bloat though!!!!!!!

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Dropping this in here so I don't forget. These are some initial thoughts before reading (I DO have a job to get back to after lunch)

What if we interviewed 10k or 100k people deeply about their jobs. It would be hard interviewing, but we asked about daily duties, how much time they spend on Instagram, time spent stealing a few extra minutes on the crapper because they're tired from their 2 hour commute.

Add their own speculations about what their work output is used for (they're better experts than us; a Graeber conclusion that I'm kind of okay with) and try to figure out whether the output of their work holds value. My coworker scrapes Linkedin for contact information we can use to target our marketing efforts to. I think this has clear business utility to my company, and I can also make an argument for why this is borderline pernicious. Our product is actually really useful (one of the top fund raising tools in North America for certain industries).

Trying to construct a causal map or diagram for whether some work is useful in the grand scheme of things is really difficult. My company helps raise funds for political and NGOs. I think money in politics is on-balance negative, so are the jobs my coworkers and I hold bullshit?

I think the human brain is good at performing these calculations. A lot of people know whether their company does good things in the world, at least after a year or two on the job. And we apply ourselves appropriately.

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Came into this really late, but oof, the "tradition keeper" pretty much sums up half of my career.

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I'd be curious to hear more, if you're interested in telling

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Business Intelligence in Agribusinesses. Dozens of dashboards and reports sent in legacy systems that existed just because people long-retired wanted them, and it's a industry generally not in tech-hubs, so people will continue doing them just because they don't want to leave the midwest. You just kind of don't think of it when you're getting paid and lapse into habit, I guess.

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you say, "VBA, or another high-level language." I understand the job characterizations but what is VBA and what are other high-level languages? At one point in my life I had to learn Fortran so that is where I stopped.

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High-level being the ones that are easy for people to read and write- FORTRAN, C, Python, etc. This is contrast to assembly language, which few programmer write directly.

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In my academic life the SPSS packages came in for data analysis and then it (how to program) all receded for me...so I didn't keep up...but don't underestimate the lack of general knowledge of readers. I have to try hard not to throw around librarian tech. Can't tell you how many times I've started a sentence with OCLC as the lede....then realized that's not known to people generally though they may know Worldcat.

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I've had this particular piece sitting around in my Google docs for a while, so it's a bit of an exception. Going forward, I'll make sure it's all newb-friendly, unless I explicitly state otherwise

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Yes, I think a place to talk about analytics for the non-analytical is good, but you might bore the ones who know the basics. Also, universities set up stat services where one could go and say..I want to do this and they would set it up. Looking back it was maybe a mistake to give up learning how to do it---sort of like not knowing how to change the oil anymore.

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Anything in particular you'd like to know about?

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Not this minute, but the next time I see something about DA I won't ignore it & will ask for your observation.

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hi, would just like to say that to some people, data analysis amounts to compiling columns in excel to do mail merge. I'm currently under conscription in singapore, and thankfully works a office job, but they are so stingy with money that they used open office up till 5 years ago as it's free (until a security flaw was discovered) and expect below minimum wage conscripts to copy 5000 points of data in one day, but don't mind paying old ladies whose one source of professional accomplishment is knowing mail merge 4k usd a month.

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morale of the story. if you have a perpetual underclass with artificially depressed wages and legal action against them at every moment, you dont feel the need to innovate. apparently the system causing me great mental and sometime physical desteress is after innovation according to some high level military regulars I interact with.

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Thank you for the input. I appreciate hearing your experience, though I can't say I completely relate to it.

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sorry, I was ranting. This posts justs speaks to me as the "job" I currently am forced to do is extremely bullshit and can be identitified with all types of bullshit jobs according to Graeber and doing endless data sheets (with almost primeval tools such as the early 2000s SAP program) that are printed out in bulk, wasting boxes of paper every meeting because no one in their right mind would read the bullshit I produce. Also apologies for possible bad writing, two years of brain rot does that to you.

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I love the topic of bullshit jobs and really appreciate your feedback. My most recent concerns some actual data science, so you might enjoy that as well.

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