I hate this.
The assessment of what counts as “fake” and “not fake” work as determined by some CEO is worth less than nothing. If you’re doing it as part of your job, it’s work, end of story. The distinction of “fake” vs “non-fake” work is just a tool against worker solidarity, and making the distinction is only worth anything to business owners and management, because their job is to extract your surplus labor.
Agreed. In addition, this modern obsession with worker productivity, where you’re purposely not given any downtime to collect your thoughts or reflect on your achievements and failures is a big driver in creating this “fake” or perhaps better described as “unproductive” work in the first place.
I don’t know how or why capitalism ended up like this.
What is even the incentive for bullshit work?
I always assumed they were just “jobs” for the buddies of the capitalist that eventually just became part of the organization structure
But they don’t even like these “jobs”
You’d think they’d give their buddies bullshit jobs that were fun or something.
“Brad you are the new VP of Kickass Beach Parties”
That’s definitely one piece of the puzzle but I don’t think it’s really the whole picture, plenty of people get bullshit jobs without knowing any of the business owners directly.
I think it has more to do with people in liberal societies, especially capitalists, internalizing “great man theory” to the point where they apply it to everything, including their business. After all, they are a “great man” that built the business from the ground up, it only makes sense to hire a bunch of slightly less great men to wrangle the peons that do the dirty work. I’m oversimplifying of course but I think that’s the general idea.
Another part of it is that without all the smoke and mirrors of corporate organization a “emperor is naked” moment could potentially happen among the productive workforce.
I think it happens like this:
- An organization grows large enough to need a significant amount of management, planning, training, etc. It hires managers, who do what at this point is useful work.
- The organization grows by an order of magnitude. Your managers now have managers of their own – a lot of this is still useful work.
- Your managers start to hire people to do administrative tasks for them, or lower-level management work. Plenty of this is just plain-old division of labor, but you start to get more potential for useless tasks.
- The organization changes significantly over time. Restructures, shuttering departments, mergers, and the like. You wind up with vestigial parts of past organizational structures doing make work or marking time: bullshit jobs.
That’s probably what happened historically but nowadays I see even relatively small companies (100-200 people) create bullshit jobs.
My guess is this is just poor planning. They think they have work to do in an area, so they hire someone for it. Turns out there’s much less work in that area than they thought, or they don’t follow through on really developing it, or they assign the new hire some minor tasks du jour and when they’re done the original project has never gotten off the ground.
To add to other points in the thread, the concept of the 8 hour workday itself is flawed. It might have worked fine in a factory because you can actually have people work like slaves for 8 hours straight but it doesn’t work in a modern office job setup. Humans can’t focus for 8 hours straight. Fake work exists to basically to utilise the whole workday.
and 8 was a compromise when they were fighting for 6
I think about this a lot and to me, a large part of this is the fact that most tasks in a corporation need to be carried up and down the chain several times in order for them to actually get greenlit. At each stop, the person who wants the task to happen has to explain to someone who is hearing about it for the first time what needs doing and what they need. A giant game of telephone basically.
This makes it so that the boss of your boss only knows what your boss is telling him is happening. He doesn’t know what most of the actual work even is. And the CEO gets informed by the boss of your boss of your boss what the boss of your boss thinks is going on. So while the workers are in the trenches, making do with whatever the fuck the actual work is, some guy four or more steps removed from their reality decides how much budget they should get to do the work he doesn’t know shit about.
This is also why you can so easily pretend to do work in this system. If you can fool your boss, or ideally have several bosses you answer to, they won’t have time to talk to each other all the time. So if you got to do Four different tasks for four different bosses…you can tell all of them that it’s taking longer because of the other three tasks and goof off for half the day each day, deliver everything late and still get thanked for it.
The division of labour became so deep that you require a lot of people to coordinate the production, and this coordination apparatus grows so large that nobody knows who is doing what, what work is required and so on. Then you add office politics, alienation of labour and make-believe work as a replacement for welfare and everything turns into this bullshit.
You need to keep the proles engaged in wage slavery to prevent them from organizing. That way, they get invested in the capitalist system and are resistant to change via employer-provided health insurance, 401k, and so on. Make every worker a little capitalist so they never want to revolt. It also helps that the jobs are completely soul-sucking and reduce their will to live.
Idk if I and everyone else had plenty of free time and economic security I wouldn’t be all we have to change this.
In a capitalist system you wouldn’t have economic security, though. You would be begging in the streets without a wage. They try to keep a relatively stable amount of unemployed and unhoused people to scare the working class but not let it get too out of hand because then the people with idle hands might actually have the numbers to do something with them.
Office politics, i.e. power plays. Having information and deciding who gets it is a massively powerful position in an office. So Senior Manager Butt Dickdong who otherwise has nothing to do with the thing has to sign off on the slides because it allows him information before the rest and the chance to torpedo it or give some favours away. Of course having nothing to do with it, Butt doesn’t really know anything about it and as such needs constant explanation because he thinks if the slides are for an egyptian client you should use Papyrus font like they do over there.
It is also why these things are so hard to get rid off, it’d mix up power structures. I don’t think most of the people doing it are consciously aware of it in the Machiavellan sense but they do know it internally. Also partly why consultants are so common now, it gives the C-Level Suite an excuse to say “oh this is just objectively better” to Butt who can’t really argue against it. Now of course consultants also design the worst shit known to man because they depend on you coming back to them because otherwise they’d slowly work themselves out of a job, which they are accutely aware of and trained on.
I have been reading David Graeber’s Bullshit jobs and It does cover the process somewhat. I recommend checking it out.
People who have free time might think about better ways to organize society. Gotta find ways to keep people occupied so they don’t get their own ideas.
I have a personal conspiracy theory that this idea is behind the broader “content” push of tech companies. Nobody at the top actually cares about the quality issues inherent in “AI” because the goal is just to manufacture distractions, keep jacking up throughput to keep everyone in a state of cognitive overwhelm.
I don’t think this particular societal ill is capitalism (I know, I know, they usually are), but rather a symptom of tree-shaped hierarchical management structures. I saw the same shit working for the government.
Middle managers are judged by how important the stuff they manage is, which their bosses guess from reports and how many headcount they have, neither of which are actual work. The further you are from the executive board (who are directly exposed to the whims of capital) and the line-level workers (who are exposed to, you know, the material reality underpinning actually getting anything done), the further you are from any sort of grounding in fact, and all you have is reports by people trying to make themselves look important.
I’m sure I spend a good 2 hours per week checking slack messages that don’t matter to me.
I think I usually know when I do fake work, but you don’t get into trouble for doing your fake work, you get into trouble for being argumentative and calling out bullshit.
He seems to confuse survival strategies with ignorance.
People are calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they’re going to show in the big meeting, to get feedback on whether they should improve some of the slides,
You might get just one shot to convince people at the actual presentation. If the outcome is at all important, doing rehearsals seems quite reasonable. And the idea might impact your coworkers as well, so I think it’s good to clue them in.
edit: wait this is in news, not in slop
I’m responsible for a good amount of fake work/processes myself, which I originally suggested to defend the team from constant micro management, and it worked. But it’s impossible to convince my higher ups to give up or reduce on any of the processes I’ve introduced years ago.
I like making presentations
That was my life working for some NGO adjacent bullshit
Hello from within the NGO adjacent bullshit
I got out, thank fuck
I’m currently trying but it’s been slow going thanks to the fact that AI is eating the economy and my struggles to frame my accomplishments as something positive. Advice appreciated if you have any!
Sadly no. I crawled back to my old employer
no shit
Only because CEO’s exist…
