Perfect username/post combo (for those unaware, in the original UK The Office, Wernham Hogg is the name of the company).
You would think so, but many management teams don’t see it that way - instead they will hire the bare minimum to do the work, then expect everyone to cover for unplanned absences by working extra hours (often unpaid).
Since I don’t have direct management experience, I speak from “the trenches”, and my experience with the topic of overstaffing seems to be very different from everyone else’s. My experience is that due to a couple decades of downsizing, corporate non-management employee teams are now so “lean” that everybody’s assigned to work 5-10 simultaneous projects. And despite collaboration being the buzzword of the day, we just don’t really have time for each other. Now that I’m in a job that requires heavy collaboration (business analysis), this affects me a lot. I am not as productive as I could/should be because I spend too much time waiting to be able to get with the people I need to talk to. And I, too, am always working on many simultaneous projects.
In terms of BS jobs, I think business analyst is one of them. It has it’s uses, but what I’ve seen is that although companies hire them, they don’t really want them to do what they’re hired for. If you’re a business process analyst, they want you to look for ways to improve business processes, which nobody likes because that means change. If you’re an IT analyst doing software requirements, there’s no respect because you slow things down by having meetings and writing documentation before the developers can actually code. I’ve also seen other types of jobs that really ARE useful to a company but don’t get any respect so tend to be sidelined/downsized first: UI/UX experts, technical writers… oh and OMG, administrative assistants. A good admin keeps a company running, but they seem to be the first to feel the corporate axe. (For example, years ago each manager had one. Then a group of managers had to share one, then only the C-suite could share one.)
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From what I can see after 30+ years in corporate jobs is that many jobs are BS primarily because of enormous inefficiencies in trying to get too many people to work toward a common goal. Also because too many people wrap their egos around their work so others have to tiptoe around them. You’re powerless to remove the BS inefficiencies because Bob Manager might be offended. Also since training disappeared long ago, I’m noticing that people often lack the skills needed to do their jobs. I’ve known a project manager who didn’t know how to use MS Project (or any PM software), managers and analysts who didn’t know how to use Excel, and just tons and tons of people (including managers) with really abysmal organizational skills. As a result we end up having to work around each other’s weaknesses.
I remember comparisons between US auto companies like Ford and Japanese ones in the 1990s.
The number of factory workers, etc. were comparable. But Ford had an immense white collar cohort. Worse, the pension obligations of the white collar workers outweighed that of the blue collar workers despite the blue collar workers outnumbering them. The salaries and the sweetness of the pensions for the white collar workers are amazing*. Ford could probably fire over half their managers and not see a blip in operations.
FtGKid2 worked at a small start up. When it was time to sell the company they let go a lot of people to make themselves more attractive. Of course they fired the real workers. Managers had a “division” with one worker. They couldn’t fire the managers since those were the “key” people in the startup. Right.
Anyway, they didn’t sell, and didn’t sell and it got ridiculous. Most managers had literally nothing to do.
Dewey Finn:
I think you misinterpreted the scene - his job is necessary - he acts as a liaison between the techies and the end-users, and basically translates between the two groups, who tend to speak to different concerns, but the Bobs take his job description absolutely literally and make him SOUND useless. I’m willing to bet that in any tech company, people with these jobs exist, and they are definitely necessary. I know mine does. But the Bobs are bean-counters, and looking to cut whatever they can, even if they don’t understand it.
Of course, with the underlying joke being his inability to communicate that to them, and losing his cool with them while claiming interpersonal skills. I’m not downplaying the value of that whole sequence in the movie, but I think the movie is written to portray him, not the Bobs, as being more correct. He’s a fellow Peter, the Bobs are Lumberghs.
@DeweyFinn “…yet it was clear that his job was unnecessary.” What was unclear was his job itself, as cmkeller thoroughly explains. And is also exactly why the notion that up to 40% of all jobs are bullshit comes to realization. The old adage that management is myth rings true. Nobody that matters really knows what is going on deep in the bowels of any large organization.
At least nowhere near enough of them. There certainly are a few bright stars out there effectively guiding industry. But they are the infinitesimally small minority in the management community.
Forty percent is ludicrously high, the sort of conveniently round number a person would barf out only if they didn’t really have much of an understanding of businesses outside of their own.
It is worth noting that everyone sort of agreeing with the idea seems to work in an office job in a big company. A truly immense number of jobs are not in an office, though, and the fact is that even in a lot of offices almost all the employees are doing something that really, really needs to get done.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if two out of every five working people wasn’t doing something of economic value, I don’t think the economy could stay afloat.
As a counterpoint, given the fact that the cost of living always goes up (and never down), and we all need a way to pay the rent/mortgage, I’d say that the economy is largely comprised of make-work. Remember that back in the 70’s economists were projecting that automation would make us so efficient in the future that we’d all be working 4 hours a week by now. (Not exactly, I’m sure I’m butchering it, but maybe someone can find the quote.) That hasn’t happened simply because nobody can live on a 4-hour/week job.
Ah, found my own cite. Here is a Planet Money article with it. It was Keynes, apparently, and it was 15 hours/week.
When I was at Bell Labs, the manager of our Center brought in a pair of change consultants, and all of us managers were subjected to endless off-sites where we did mission statements and where are we going statements and all the typical crap.
Which was fine until they started recommending things the boss didn’t like. They were out on their ears in no time.
Management consultants seem to know who signs the checks.
The amount of meaningless paperwork - and the time to do it - has gone down a lot in the 37 years I worked in industry. When I started as a manager a lot of my secretary’s job was dealing with tons of paperwork. The automation and reduction of paperwork is one of the reasons the number of admins has gone down.
That paperwork is necessary doesn’t mean it isn’t painful. The worst example I can remember is filling out the supporting information for our R&D tax credit. Soul-deadening - but required.
That’s a cool theory, but, again, fails to look at the other side - the fact that there needs to be some productivity or else we’d start to see mass starvation. The maintenance of a standard of living is dependent upon work. Nothing else feeds us. “Make work” accomplishes nothing.
I haven’t even gotten into the fact that plain common sense dictates that if there ARE workplaces where a huge percentage of the employees are doing nothing of value, the businesses where that is not true will simply wipe the inefficient once from the fact of the earth. I work in a business with 110 employees and literally 100 of them are doing actual billable, productive work almost all the time (and the 10 that aren’t are doing internal work we cannot do without.) No business simply blowing half its workforce would have a hope in hell of competing with us. We’d just murder them; we could charge prices they could not hope to match, steal all their clients, and still make margins they could not dream of. And yet that does not happen; our competition is ferocious. \I must conclude their workforces are quite productive.
As it happens, I have also had the privilege of working with literally hundreds of other businesses and seeing how they function, and if I may be absolutely frank, the idea that a lot of people do unnecessary work is incredibly ridiculous. I have never, ever seen a business where I got even the slightest impression that they had a really high percentage of totally pointless employees. Walk into a hospital; EVERYONE there is doing necessary work. A grocery store? Everyone there is needed. A welding shop? Everyone there is needed. A trucking company? They need everyone. A dairy farm? They need everyone. My company needs everyone. A school needs everyone, or do you think classes will prosper if there’s just no teacher? Who in an airline strikes you as unnecessary?
Yeah, there’s the odd deadweight employee here and there; that does happen even in good times. If we want to question the value of management consultants, I’m fine with that. But forty percent of ALL jobs? Horseshit. It isn’t fourteen percent, and I am skeptical it’s four percent.
I do not remember that, no, and to be honest it doesn’t even sound like an economics argument.
Automation absolutely has made us more productive, but to assume this means we’d all work four hours a week is in defiance of about seven major Economics 101 learning points.
How true is that, though? In a large-business environment, most of the people working for the company (apart from commissioned sales staff) get a salary/wage that is relatively constant and not really tied to the health of the actual business. There is typically minimal incentive for most employees to become more productive, because their compensation is not likely to change, and I am not convinced that reducing the hours of wage-based workers improves productivity.
Bonuses and optional perquisites are too removed from the cause/effect dynamic to be truly pertinent. The only people who feel the effects of the health of the company are the owners/stockholders, which is one reason a CEO’s compensation package can include stock in the company, but for most of the working staff, the health of the company is obfuscated to them.
RickJay:
I think the economists in question were Messrs. Hanna and Barbera, who predicted that in the future, a man could support a family of four and a dog and hire a robot maid with a two-hours-per-week button-pushing job.
Guys, I posted the cite immediately after the post you’re making fun of.
I say all the people with bullshit jobs should be put on a ship and sent somewhere. Especially the telephone sanitizers.
The biggest thing it’s in defiance of is the difference between normative and positive economics.
Positive economics attempts to describe how the world works. Normative economics attempts to create how the world ought to work. So, as a statement of positive economics, it’s entirely feasible to say that, if automation increases productivity by Y amount we can maintain output O with H work hours per week after a certain amount of time, where H < 80. Positive economics would have an opinion on whether that’s a good thing to pursue, or whether we should improve O or do something else.
Saying that “In the future, we will do this!” is, therefore, a miscegenation, an improper mixture of Positive and Normative statements; different kinds of economics can give you a bead on what’s feasible and what’s desirable, but none of them are going to predict the future for you.
I think the model ought to be that the person should be about as concerned as their level of influence. In other words, I think the CEO’s compensation should be overwhelmingly tied to the health of the company- he’s the guy at the tiller after all. But Joe Six-Pack who puts the right-hand gizmo into the widget on the assembly line? He can’t do much outside of putting gizmos into widgets, so his compensation should be tied more directly to his gizmo-putting prowess, not to the company’s health as a whole.
Sounds like you have that backwards: normative economics would have an opinion but positive economics would say “it is what it is”. And, really, normative economics would have to have some component of positive economics: “this is how it works right now, but it really ought to work this other way.”
(And, quite frankly, “miscegenation” is a disturbingly odd word to use there.)
JcWoman:
Sorry, don’t take it personally. I did see your cite. I just thought it resembled the vision of the future from that old cartoon and saw an opportunity for a joke, that’s all.