alt Hacker NewsI'm overwhelmingly convinced that this not uncommon perspective is the "what are all those construction workers even doing?!" fallacy.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
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no i think there are alot of people inside companies that are essentially playing telephone. they are communicating, writing documents and emails, "working". but really they actually produce nothing
It's also a terribly foolish idea to try and drive endless efficiency out of scenarios like this. People have tried this with bureaucracies many times, and then one day a disaster happens or they have a huge project with a deadline or whatever, and the flexibility/inefficiency of the organization has been driven out to the point that previously achievable goals become impossible. Slack in systems is a _good_ thing.
I guess we can evaluate this claim by looking at profit margins. In industries with thin margins (eg., retail often has 1-2%) then there is significant competitive pressure. There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
Yep, the "bullshit jobs" narrative sounds like an elegant description of corporate reality at the macro level, but always seems to fall apart whenever I've seen specific examples given which do in fact serve a useful purpose when interrogated.
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
The thing with those jobs where its like 1 guy operating the skid steer and six guys watching with arms folded, is those other six guys are just waiting their turn to do something specialized on the job. The skid steer work is the limiting factor, and that idle labor is worth paying to have on call on site essentially for when the specific needed task is done. To an extent for sure, but that is the idea of more specialized jobs. There isn't always enough work in front of you to have a specialist work 100% 24/7 like some CPU, but you want them around for when there is work for them to do.