The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Intended for constructive conversations. Exhibits of polarizing tribalism will be deleted.
tonyedgecombe
Posts: 450
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2012 2:11 pm
Location: Oxford, UK Walkscore: 3

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by tonyedgecombe »

I'm not sure that will ever change, we seem to have a desire for fairness built into us. Seeing someone else having a comfortable life without putting in any obvious effort is disturbing to most people.

The point about QE is interesting, I do wonder if all this cheap money is keeping some businesses alive that would under normal circumstances have failed. Perhaps the business world isn't as competitive and cutthroat as we have been led to believe.

BRUTE
Posts: 3797
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:20 pm

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by BRUTE »

brute can report that there seems to be something true to the protestant work ethic. he was not a big believer in it, but then he spent about a year doing absolutely nothing - it's not fun.

brute now believes that there needs to be something an individual can fill his life with. the default for most humans these days is work. taking that away without providing something else relies on the ability of most humans to find their own meaning in life. brute can report that, for himself, this is very difficult.

brute is against UBI mostly for other reasons, but he totally gets the sentiment. he doesn't think work is dignifying, but it is a waste of time. and without wasting their time, humans would realize how boring and grey life really is, which is not in general an insight humans handle well.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9369
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Being the only adult in a room full of 28 7 year old children is NOT a bullshit job. You can't even walk out into the hallway for 30 seconds without risking catastrophe.

Also, women with 7 or more children are the least likely to commit suicide humans. I think this is because they never get 30 free seconds to think about whether or not their life has purpose beyond the next poopy diaper.

daylen
Posts: 2528
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2015 4:17 am
Location: Lawrence, KS

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by daylen »

BRUTE wrote:
Mon Nov 19, 2018 1:34 pm
brute now believes that there needs to be something an individual can fill his life with. the default for most humans these days is work. taking that away without providing something else relies on the ability of most humans to find their own meaning in life. brute can report that, for himself, this is very difficult.
My current take on this is that a human needs some form of consistency in their lives to be able to contextualize what is meaningful. I find that my past experience (Si) is the primary source of meaning, since otherwise I do not have any basis for my metaphysical framework. The past has given me a sense of direction, and this is allowing me to determine my duty (or how I should act to generate the future I want).

For a (Ni-Se) dominate personality such as yourself, meaning is likely to be anchored more to the future or to discovering your destiny one goal at a time.

BRUTE
Posts: 3797
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:20 pm

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by BRUTE »

Si/Ni-Se - is that Myers-Briggs?

brute doesn't find a ton of meaning in his past. brute past appears to him as a random conglomeration of accidental facts. were it written down, it would hardly constitute a plot or a story. brute is not sure if he finds meaning in the future or discovering destiny (whatever that means). so far he hasn't found much meaning at all - merely distractions. hence his theory that they are one and the same.

daylen
Posts: 2528
Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2015 4:17 am
Location: Lawrence, KS

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by daylen »

These are some of the cognitive functions which extend on the Myers-Briggs type system. MB-Types are modes of operation, and the cognitive functions are specific patterns of brain activity. I think that you are an INFJ, so your function stack is (Ni, Fe, Ti, Se, Ne, Fi, Te, Si)(*).

Let me rephrase using your terminology: While you find distractions in the present, you will get better at constructing a hierarchy of cyclic distractions where each level triggers your attention based on some set of conditions. Eventually, BRUTE will never truly be bored, because he will not be able to recognize the overall meta-pattern of distractions as merely a distraction itself.

Maybe brute has already distracted himself so well that he cannot distinguish the micro-distractions from the larger distraction his unconscious mind has already initiated.

All I meant by destiny is the path that you end up taking before you die, ha.

(*) The function stack is an ordering of how much time a human with that type spends in these patterns of activity. You can deduce your type more accurately by reading about the cognitive functions and reflecting on which are dominate.

BRUTE
Posts: 3797
Joined: Sat Dec 26, 2015 5:20 pm

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by BRUTE »

brute forgets what exactly his MB types are, but 2 of the letters often flip and are typically close. might have been I/E-N-F/T-J or something.

yea, the cyclical pattern thing describes it pretty well. the fun part is that it works even if the meta-pattern is recognized. in fact, brute's current framework for life is basically trying to discover and construct a local optimum of such a meta-pattern that is sustainable. so far, brute has fluctuated through various patterns that worked well for a time, but none of them have been stable. the frequency of fluctuation has been somewhat stable, but each swing has ended in a pretty bad way, indicating that there is room for improvement. brute has thought of increasing the frequency, finding a greater number of patterns to cycle through, and how to enable these in a more sustainable way.

latearlyFI
Posts: 40
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2019 9:24 am

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by latearlyFI »

Check out this article in the WSJ about Accenture retraining a slew of white collar jobs becoming automated, they're actually training them for Bullshit jobs!

https://www.marketscreener.com/ACCENTUR ... -28800182/


I appreciate what they're doing, I really do, but this is another sign of what is in the job pipeline.

SavingWithBabies
Posts: 882
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2015 2:50 pm
Location: Midwest, USA

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by SavingWithBabies »

Software testing is an important job in software development. Mostly because software developers are expensive and testers are less expensive. Then there is the whole thing about determining what we are building which is where most of the friction and inefficiencies are in software development. For example, a project might have:

* business person
* project manager
* tester/quality assurance person
* developer operations (for deploying/running in production)
* some software developers
* perhaps someone focused on delivery management

Somehow, what we need to build has to get communicated effectively to the developers from the business side and make it through the funnel of the project manager trying to divide things up into packets that they can manager in order to predict the future (ie when the work will get finished). Inevitably, what we are building isn't communicated effectively or is unknown until we build it and then the testers push on the ambiguous areas and bugs/defects emerge that aren't really true bugs but are instead the result of ironing out the details to the point that a decision has been made in a specific area.

That all takes time. So it seems the current approach is to do most of the development without really ironing out the details (which is understandable, that takes a lot of time too) and then coming back around to fix the 10-20% part that wasn't clear the first time around. And it's cheaper paying non-developers to figure out these parts. So that is why I'd say it's not a bullshit job. However, if we're stepping back and saying it's all bullshit...

latearlyFI
Posts: 40
Joined: Sat Jan 12, 2019 9:24 am

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by latearlyFI »

okay, point taken. Once it is all tested, I'm guessing the need for testers reduces and how much does it pay. Are previously high income Underwriters sitting down clicking digital buttons over and over all day and making minimum wage now?

I actually googled pay for website testers and this came up: Website offering automated website testing ugh

https://www.ranorex.com/web-test-automa ... %20Testing

And oh the irony. We've automated your job away forever, but good news, now you can become a tester and help make it even better, (even though it is already better than you)!

SavingWithBabies
Posts: 882
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2015 2:50 pm
Location: Midwest, USA

Re: The Rise of Bullshit Jobs

Post by SavingWithBabies »

Oh, yeah, most of the testing now is around writing the automated tests. But that is custom to the project so it's not really less work. It just makes the job less drudgery. For example, say you want to test that when you click a specific button that some other thing happens. You can test that manually and do that every time code changes or you can setup a test to automatically do that. Software developers often write tests sort of like that at a lower level (and sometimes at that higher level) but the tester would most likely focus at that higher level and write tests for it. By writing a test that can be run over and over, they don't have to manually do it which is a pretty annoying task.

The pay isn't bad for software testing. I don't know how it compares to insurance underwriting though. And to be clear, I work in software and I kind of think my job ends up being BS in the end. So I'm not really disagreeing it's not BS at a higher level.

In software though, the focus is around automating as much as possible. So automating testing. Automating deployment. And so forth. But setting all of that up takes time so it's just kind of moving the work from one place to another. For the most part. It might slightly lower the employee costs and/or increase overall quality. It does reduce the domain knowledge in employee's heads so it makes it easier to lay off employees.

Locked