A Taxonomy of Bullshit Jobs

Classic Bullshit Jobs are defined by their complete universal uselessness, their lack of connection to any kind of productive workstream.  If you have a Classic Bullshit Job, you could just stop doing your work, and that wouldn’t cause a genuine problem for anyone – not even your employer. 

These are usually found within very large bureaucracies, like global conglomerate corporations and government agencies, where [a] institutional empire-building for its own sake is a thing, [b] the machine of productivity is so vast and complicated that it’s hard to tell what anyone’s true value-add is, and [c] there’s so much money sloshing around that it often makes more sense just to keep paying someone for totally useless work [or even a whole office of people doing totally useless work] rather than going to the effort of figuring out where all those people are and getting rid of them or finding them other things to do. 

Bigger-Picture Bullshit Jobs are important to a workstream, but that workstream is itself useless, in some kind of notional objective sense.  You’re valuable to your employer – but if your employer disappeared, or discontinued the thing you’re working on, it wouldn’t be any kind of real loss.  The clearest case here is “your company’s product is a scam.”  But the concept probably should be extended to cover employers who aren’t selling scams, as such, just…products that don’t offer any genuine value to the consumer, and make sales by exploiting cognitive errors.  Also government agencies whose mission is completely pointless or actively harmful. 

This may also be the correct category in which to put work on individual products and projects that are obviously ill-conceived, enough so that the actual humans tasked with creating them have no capacity for faith in them.

Zero-Sum Bullshit Jobs are one more meta-abstracted-layer up the conceptual ladder of bullshit.  These are jobs where you’re doing useful work for an employer who is, itself, providing something useful – but where that “useful work” involves helping your employer win zero-sum market-share games against other similar companies who are providing similar products.  Breakfast cereal is good, and it’s good that the world contains people making and distributing breakfast cereal, and yet you’re likely to feel like you’re wasting your time if you spend it trying to help Kellogg’s beat out Post for consumer dollars.  Many jobs in the advertising and marketing sectors are like this.  So, sadly, are a lot of research and design jobs. 

(This one gets a little tricky on a theoretical level.  If you’re helping your employer to stay competitive in a competitive market, then it’s at least possible that you’re doing good for the world by fostering competition and helping to keep consumer prices down.  But that is a thin thread on which to hang the value of a human being’s work.  And, uh, well, much of the time, in jobs like that, you’re trying as hard as you can to kill competition and put your employer in a monopoly situation.) 

Regulatory Bullshit Jobs are jobs where you’re doing something useful for an employer who is, itself, providing something useful – but the work you’re doing is “useful” only because of an arbitrary, coercively-enforced rule.  The state demands that someone fill out the pointless form, and so your employer pays you to do that, so that other people can continue doing the actually-valuable thing.  But in a saner world, the pointless form wouldn’t be required, and so your job wouldn’t exist.  (Note that not all Regulatory-Bullshit-Job-creating rules come from the state; often they’re generated by company-internal policies or social pressures.)  This covers a tremendous amount of bureaucratic and legal work.

Worthy Work Made Bullshit is perhaps the trickiest and most controversial category, but as far as I’m concerned it’s one of the most important.  This is meant to cover jobs where you’re doing something that is obviously and directly worthwhile…at least in theory…but the structure of the job, and the institutional demands that are imposed on you, turn your work into bullshit.   

The conceptual archetype here is the Soviet tire factory that produces millions of tiny useless toy-sized tires instead of a somewhat-smaller number of actually-valuable tires that could be put on actual vehicles, because the quota scheme is badly designed.  Everyone in that factory has a Worthy Work Made Bullshit job.  Making tires is something you can be proud of, at least hypothetically.  Making tiny useless tires to game a quota system is…not. 

Nowadays we don’t have Soviet central planners producing insane demands, but we do have a marketplace that produces comparably-insane demands, especially in certain fields. 

This is especially poignant, and especially relevant, in certain elite/creative fields where you don’t need market discipline in order to get people to produce.  All those writers who are churning out garbage clickbait?  They don’t want to be writing clickbait, any more than you want them to be writing clickbait.  If you just handed them checks and told them “go do whatever”…well, some of them would take the money and do nothing, some of them would produce worthless product that appealed to no one, but a lot of them would generate work considerably more worthwhile than clickbait.  Almost certainly not as easily monetizable, but – better, by the standards of anyone who actually cared.  Their writing has been made bullshit by the demands of an advertisement-driven system.

Academia is the ground-zero locus of this.  Academia is a world that is designed around a model of “here’s enough money to live on, go do some abstractly worthwhile thing.”  It selects for people who have the talent, and the temperament, to thrive under that kind of system.  But nowadays it mostly can’t be that, because of competitive pressures and drastic funding cuts, so it demands an ever-increasing share of bullshit from the inmates.  Thus we get the grant application circus, the publishing treadmill, etc. etc. 

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Honestly: the specifics here don’t matter all that much.

The point is mostly to show how much territory can be meaningfully covered by the concept of “bullshit job.”  This will be important later.