Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs asserts that roughly two out of every five people are stuck in work that is bereft of purpose, and these workers could suffer psychological damage as a result.

When I think about the term bullshit jobs, what immediately comes to my mind is the deceptive salespeople who frequently called our office, attempting to unload toner for our high speed printers.

They’d first call our receptionist to trick her into getting a contact person in charge of that equipment. Then they would find out what brand of printers we had in our office.

They would call back later, posing as one of our equipment reps. Since they had a contact name and just enough information about our printers, it was easy to get a naive person to buy into their lies.

How these people can go home at the end of the day, fulfilled in their work, when their measure of success rests on how many people they were able to deceive that day? This is the epitome of a bullshit job!

The truth is, most of them probably are not happy with their job. Falsity is one thing, but what’s even worse is the total lack of purpose.

According to a YouGov polling survey, one quarter of Americans think their jobs are meaningless.

There is plenty of real world experience to support this. Consider lottery winners who have no need to work yet feel an urge to do so in order to have some purpose.

According to the laws that govern basic economic principles, bullshit jobs shouldn’t even exist. Governments are known to be wasteful, so it seems logical that these types of jobs would be more common in the public sector. But in the private sector it makes no sense. Afterall, why would any business hire and pay people to do nothing? It’s because there exists a strong cultural and political bias at work when it comes to employment. Politicians on the left demand more jobs, while those on the right call for more tax cuts – and thereby putting more money in the hands of the job creators. A political bias towards employment plays a distinct role in the perpetuation of bullshit jobs. There are clearly dynamics at work to keep these BS jobs in place, despite their economic inefficiencies. But whoever accused businesses of behaving in an efficient manner? There’s a story about Simon who was employed as a “problem solver” for a major bank. Simon created some software to fix a security risk relating to a system error. When he presented the solution to a bank executive and his team of 25 people, their reaction was a negative one. Why? Because Simon’s program was…