This is very interesting to me...mainly because I've never seen anything like it? I work in finance...worked at one of the big Wall Street banks for over a decade, worked briefly at another one after that, have worked more than a decade at a company financing affordable housing, and I've never had a job where I wasn't doing useful work (one of my bosses used to go out of his way to tell everyone "if you're doing work and you don't understand what it's for, tell me about it, because we should probably stop doing it"). At my current job I'm busy constantly with work I would describe as important, and I don't know of anybody at my company that I wouldn't describe as working toward common goals. This story feels to me like it comes from a movie.
I am also curious about the story of the guy transforming on the commute. He gradually changed his clothes? On the train? From a hoodie into a suit? How did he change his pants?
I'm a software developer and like David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs. I have been thinking of this problem for many years. Here are some random thoughts
- As a developer, we have an unlimited amount of Real Work to do, there is a neverending stream of tickets and code to write. HOWEVER... I estimate that about 20% of the projects I have worked on in the past 15 years were useless/never adopted by customers/outright bad ideas
- As a developer, I can build a small-ish system to do a job for the customer and get it deployed in a few weeks; however, there is a huge push to "professionalize" and "standardize" everything on software teams once you get to the 20-30 person mark and this slows the team down on getting things done. Everyone looks busy and has stuff to do, though
- My own startup (Started in 2006 and still going, but I work on other things now) was always self-funded and has very little bullshit work. There is always a fire lit under everyone's butts to produce real customer value, because payroll is paid directly by revenue from the customers
- A large (1200 person) Canadian company I worked for recently had a lot of "glue work" or the kind of "enable decision-making" stuff. My team built an extremely important app for enterprise customers that opened a whole line of business, however we needed to get buy-in from 2-5 directors and execs. A HUGE amount of person-hours were spent validating our approach before writing code (like, maybe 30-50% of the person-hours required to build the application)
- The next company was a VC-funded, 350 person, AI-washed company that had 4 levels of management between "implementers" (builders, individual contributers/ICs) and the CEO. They fired the entire project management group at the company because their entire job was "enabling decision-making" and "stakeholder alignment." Next, this company laid ~30% of staff off because they were too slow and were losing customer contracts. There were a LOT of bullshit jobs at this company and those jobs were preventing people from getting stuff done
- IMHO, 2014-2018 were the golden years of SaaS software development. I have gone from working dev teams of ~30 (2014-2020), then 300 at that large company, then 100 at the layoff-bro company. Our 30-person dev team in 2016 was more productive than the 100-person team at the layoff company. Counter-example is that I think the ~300-person dev team at the large company was decently managed
- Large company had a lot of trouble collaborating across development teams and departments. There was a huge disconnect between data analysis/machine learning & application developers. I'm sure there were a lot of bullshit jobs involved.
This week I started a new position at a ~10 person startup and the level of getting stuff done feels wonderful even after a couple of days. Fingers crossed :D
That reminds me. One of my personal pet peeves in tech is design teams.
How much bullshit work is being done by design teams in tech companies where they essentially change the radius of the rounded corners on your Android notifications, or implement fancy glass effects on your iPhone? David Graeber's definition of bullshit jobs requires that the people doing the work consider the work to be meaningless.
I would love to do a study of the opinions of what tech designers talk about over drinks after their grueling days of implementing Dark Mode on every app in the world.
I have been retired for a few years, but I think it still holds that if you don't develop, produce, or sell a product or service, you are overhead, and when the time comes, unnecessary expense.
This is very interesting to me...mainly because I've never seen anything like it? I work in finance...worked at one of the big Wall Street banks for over a decade, worked briefly at another one after that, have worked more than a decade at a company financing affordable housing, and I've never had a job where I wasn't doing useful work (one of my bosses used to go out of his way to tell everyone "if you're doing work and you don't understand what it's for, tell me about it, because we should probably stop doing it"). At my current job I'm busy constantly with work I would describe as important, and I don't know of anybody at my company that I wouldn't describe as working toward common goals. This story feels to me like it comes from a movie.
I am also curious about the story of the guy transforming on the commute. He gradually changed his clothes? On the train? From a hoodie into a suit? How did he change his pants?
Did an LLM copy-edit an earlier draft of this? Something very odd about the pacing
I'm a software developer and like David Graeber's book Bullshit Jobs. I have been thinking of this problem for many years. Here are some random thoughts
- As a developer, we have an unlimited amount of Real Work to do, there is a neverending stream of tickets and code to write. HOWEVER... I estimate that about 20% of the projects I have worked on in the past 15 years were useless/never adopted by customers/outright bad ideas
- As a developer, I can build a small-ish system to do a job for the customer and get it deployed in a few weeks; however, there is a huge push to "professionalize" and "standardize" everything on software teams once you get to the 20-30 person mark and this slows the team down on getting things done. Everyone looks busy and has stuff to do, though
- My own startup (Started in 2006 and still going, but I work on other things now) was always self-funded and has very little bullshit work. There is always a fire lit under everyone's butts to produce real customer value, because payroll is paid directly by revenue from the customers
- A large (1200 person) Canadian company I worked for recently had a lot of "glue work" or the kind of "enable decision-making" stuff. My team built an extremely important app for enterprise customers that opened a whole line of business, however we needed to get buy-in from 2-5 directors and execs. A HUGE amount of person-hours were spent validating our approach before writing code (like, maybe 30-50% of the person-hours required to build the application)
- The next company was a VC-funded, 350 person, AI-washed company that had 4 levels of management between "implementers" (builders, individual contributers/ICs) and the CEO. They fired the entire project management group at the company because their entire job was "enabling decision-making" and "stakeholder alignment." Next, this company laid ~30% of staff off because they were too slow and were losing customer contracts. There were a LOT of bullshit jobs at this company and those jobs were preventing people from getting stuff done
- IMHO, 2014-2018 were the golden years of SaaS software development. I have gone from working dev teams of ~30 (2014-2020), then 300 at that large company, then 100 at the layoff-bro company. Our 30-person dev team in 2016 was more productive than the 100-person team at the layoff company. Counter-example is that I think the ~300-person dev team at the large company was decently managed
- Large company had a lot of trouble collaborating across development teams and departments. There was a huge disconnect between data analysis/machine learning & application developers. I'm sure there were a lot of bullshit jobs involved.
This week I started a new position at a ~10 person startup and the level of getting stuff done feels wonderful even after a couple of days. Fingers crossed :D
That reminds me. One of my personal pet peeves in tech is design teams.
How much bullshit work is being done by design teams in tech companies where they essentially change the radius of the rounded corners on your Android notifications, or implement fancy glass effects on your iPhone? David Graeber's definition of bullshit jobs requires that the people doing the work consider the work to be meaningless.
I would love to do a study of the opinions of what tech designers talk about over drinks after their grueling days of implementing Dark Mode on every app in the world.
*old man yells at cloud*
I have been retired for a few years, but I think it still holds that if you don't develop, produce, or sell a product or service, you are overhead, and when the time comes, unnecessary expense.
If the big corporations have a lot of bullshit jobs, how many BS jobs are there in government bureaucracies?
I had one of those bullshit jobs 20 years ago. I sure it goes back even further than my experience. It's just that it's been exposed.