You kind of make the authors point for us. Hospitals, grocery stores, welding shop, trucking companies and dairy farms are “make things and do stuff”. The people who work for them also tend to get paid a lot lower than investment bankers, lawyers, middle managers and consultants.
Like I don’t expect a welding shop to have one or two welders watched by “project manager”, five or six “welder/analysts” collecting welding specs and building Powerpoints, a “PMO” setting up “best practices” and providing “governance” with a half dozen “relationship managers” who do nothing but take clients out to lunch and sell welding services, all led by a Vice President of Welding.
In theory some of that stuff is useful, at least when it’s given the authority and enough free rein to do what they’re supposed to do.
Most of the time though, PMOs are usually at least half-hamstrung by the business and the product owners being not willing to relinquish control over “their” systems or projects.
Otherwise, you’re absolutely right - the big problem is that the “tooth to tail” ratio at a lot of places is severely skewed upward- you’d think there ought to be 40-50 welders for maybe 1 or two welder/analysts, one PM, no PMO and maybe one relationship manager (fancy term for ‘salesman’).
That said, in most places I’ve worked, the “<whatever>analyst” has translated into being a catch-all position for people who aren’t strictly technical, but who aren’t management either. I mean, my last job had probably fifteen “business analysts”, of which *maybe *two of us were actual, classical business analysts who can actually figure out the actual problem the business is trying to articulate, analyze that business unit, their systems and processes, and define a set of requirements for the developers to work from in order to solve that problem. Most of the rest were just catch-all responsible people who were decent with computers, knew the lingo and could handle small to medium stuff without hands-on management.
So it’s not like their jobs were superfluous- if anything, they kept everything going by being the day-to-day project management people and primary coordinators of support efforts when stuff broke. But their titles weren’t really reflective of what they did- if they were to give them an appropriate title, they’d probably expect more money than what business analysts make- this was basically low level managerial work.
The next level analysis that the article doesn’t quite address is that not only are there bullshit jobs, there are entire bullshit companies or industries.
You might be truly essential to keeping your company afloat, but if your company is not fundamentally productive/essential (for my own arbitrary definitions of productive/essential, I guess), then I’d argue that your job is just as bullshit as a desk-warming position.
As time goes on we continue to need fewer and fewer human labor hours and human resources to maintain a basic standard of living, and yet the number of jobs continues to grow. I’ll be flippant and say that, numbers wise, there hasn’t been a non-bullshit job added to the economy in decades.
That’s really cool but just throwing out job titles doesn’t tell us anything.
Bankers, lawyers, “middle managers” and consultants don’t make up forty percent of the work force. Lawyers and investment bankers - to use those because those are the only well defined jobs you named - combined might be one percent of the American workforce, and the USA is a country with an oddly high number of lawyers (though that is slowing down.) And the thing is, you gotta have at least SOME of them. You have to have bankers or else money doesn’t move around, and money moving around is a thing that has to happen. You have to have lawyers or else you can’t run the legal system of a large country, and without the rule of law everything falls apart. A lot of “middle managers” - most, really - are doing necessary work, and “consultant” is so vague as to mean nothing at all.
I think it’s very regional. In the D.C metro area where I am, there are a LOT more BS jobs (and companies!) than there are plumbers, welders, nurses, teachers and other hands-on jobs.
Having said that, maybe the distinction is whether a job is hands-on, with visible results or not. Just for an example, when I was job hunting last summer, one of the interviewers I met with asked a really targeted (and good IMO) question. He asked me what legacy I was leaving my current company with. Not “made a lot of friends” or any project that will get dismantled after I leave, but some actual change to the company that will persist after I’m gone. I am a professional with a high work ethic, but I sadly had no answer to that. I wasn’t able to make any impact at that company, so… why did they hire me? This has been kind of a frustration of mine with all my corporate jobs, and one of the main reasons I started my own business.
Eh, I think what people think of their own jobs is pretty small picture and not a good metric. A lot of people feel like they’re frauds, even when it is not so.
There are some jobs which are absolutely essential for their industry to function… but which are still bullshit, because their entire industry is bullshit. Like, the folks at an insurance company whose job is to figure out reasons why their policies won’t cover whatever: They’re making a lot of money for the company, but we’d all (except for the insurance company themselves) be better off if they didn’t exist.
Something just made me think of another anecdotal example: my job as a business analyst is often just bs. By strict definition, it’s an important job. But sometimes the value gets removed and it turns into a box-checking exercise that adds no value to the company. For example, sometimes what I actually end up doing is rewriting one document into the format of another document, without adding any new information. A lot of the “perversion” of the documentation is because (IMO) my audience is supposed to be the developers, but in unspoken reality the audience is management. There’s no other reason to dumb things down to the extent that we do. (What developer would be confused by the requirement “the user should click on the submit button to save the data” so much that it needs to be changed to “the user shall click on the submit button to save the data”?)
The current job isn’t too bad about this, but one short term contract I had a few years ago was almost entirely 100% bs. At that job my title was “system analyst”. It was described to me that my role was to translate the high level business requirements that were written (by a business analyst) from the user’s perspective into detailed requirements written from the perspective of the system. Sometimes that was okay but there were many, many occasions where I was required to figure out how to rewrite dead-simple things like “The window title shall be ‘Schmoo’”. I got scolded a lot at that job for not correctly changing the perspective (from user to system) of things like that.
Certainly some lawyers and even bankers are needed in a modern economy. But I think these industries, really all industries, have a tendency to create ecosystems of “bullshit” jobs. People spend a lot of money going to law or business school and not everyone can get jobs with a top law firm or investment bank. So there is a tendency to invent jobs IMHO. Like how many “Agile coaches” or “Six-Sigma Black Belts” does the world need?
If it doesn’t need any, there will soon be none. We’re a few years away from that for Six Sigma, which peaked in what, 2005? The market has spoken, and found it wanting; it’s been on its way out for some time now and will be pretty much dead in five or six (ha!) years.
Ouch - that hits close to home! I’m pretty close to the top of the heap in a HUGE bureaucracy, and for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you what societal goals our organization furthers, other than that we administer a complex regulatory framework. Sounds pretty much like BS to me! Sure, the outcome makes a difference for each individual involved, but for the life of me I can’t see how essentially the same results couldn’t be achieved through some pretty basic software - essentially coin-flipping.
I’ve long questioned the assumption that “the economy” or “society” ought to be expected to create as many “jobs” as there are people of working age or reasonably sound mind and body. But how else do average people obtain self worth if not through work? (Yes, we brilliant dopers will all be writing plays and learning third-fourth languages, but we’re special!)
After 25 years as a successful consultant in a non-IT industry, preceded by 15 years actually doing work in that industry, I have to confess that you are absolutely correct. For many years, I would describe (when asked) what I did for a living. I would invariably get a surprised look and “People actually pay for you to do that?” Yes…they did. And they continue to do it, though I’m semi-retired and work much less than I used to.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fought the urge to tell clients, “This isn’t rocket science. Why don’t you just do this [or figure this out] yourself? It just takes common sense.”
Why is that? Insurance is a valuable thing to have- I know that if my house burns down, I’ll be glad to have the homeowners policy rather than just being cast to the wolves. And the people who define those policies are valuable as well- their goal is a multifaceted one- to limit what the policies pay out for (to not cause premiums to rise too fast and to ensure the company makes money), to provide reasonable coverage for the price of the premiums to the policyholder.
I’ve long thought management consultants perform two useful roles. One, they’re the specialists that they purport to be, and as a result of that and being widely exposed to various clients, they’re in a good position to impart best practices and new innovations to their clients.
Second (and often more important), they’re presumably impartial outsiders. A CEO or executive can hire them to come in and recommend something that the sensible people in the company already knew needed doing, but either didn’t have the clout to get it done, or the ear of someone who could. At my last job, we’d long since figured out the problems with the company, who needed to be fired, and what needed to be done. But it finally took someone hiring an outside company to come in and actually suggest the same damn things before anything changed.
Sure, insurance is valuable. The way it’s supposed to work, is I pay a premium every month, and my premium, and those of others like me, go to help out someone else who’s just had a catastrophe of some sort. And that’s a good thing, because maybe I’ll be the one to have the catastrophe, and then everyone else’s premiums will go to helping me out.
Except that, largely, the way it works is that I pay a premium every month, and then, if I suffer a catastrophe, the insurance company folks figure out some reason why my insurance isn’t valid after all, and so I don’t get anything in return for all of those premiums I paid. So where is that money going? It’s going to the people at the insurance company, like the guy whose job it was to figure out why my insurance wasn’t valid. So in that case, I literally paid someone to screw me over.
It starts getting a little awkward after you begin to realize that successful business driving the economy fundamentally boils down to beating the other guys to next big screw-over payday. All you gotta do is figure out how to be on the fat end of the right screw.
I’ll wager that the incidence of BS jobs increases directly as the company in question is more and more bureaucratic in its structure, and its output (think production function) is less and less directly measurable. So- health (despite the claims that everyone in a hospital has something to do, those are the people you SEE- there’s ranks of folks filling out mindless paperwork, and, more importantly, minimizing risk- I ran a department in one at a point in my career). Same with education- the most risk adverse bureaucratic system imaginable. Keep in mind a buearcrat can be fired for only two things- saying yes, or failing to anticipate a disaster. There is never a penalty for saying NO. Which breeds layers of mid-management types who exist for “just in case” scenarios, and are the sacrificial goats should something go to hell in a canoe. My employer has 5000+ Ph.D.s on the payroll. Someone noticed that paper recycling paid 25 cents a pound for unsorted paper waste, and $1.25/lb for sorted letter quality paper. We all soon had two compartment waste cans, so each and ever Ph.D. could spend some time separating junk paper from quality paper to increase the recycling return by $1 a pound. Given the approximate cost of an hour of a Ph.D.s time, there’s no way the paper turned a profit. BUT- it justified the existence of a whole division of bureaucracy, and a whole lot of meetings, powerpoint poisoning, and the salaries of who knows how many mid-managers. That’s the sort of B.S. job I think the point is being made about. And it, and a thousand kinds of certifications, yearly re-trainings, rah-rah meetings, and just general posturing by mid-level managers who are technically my superiors substantially interferes with me doing my actual job, teaching young people. I can’t say 40% is a precise estimate, but I would say its a reasonable “ballpark” figure in bureaucracies. And that’s business bureaucracies. Government? OMG!
Except, of course, that if you legitimately suffer a catastrophe, it is very unlikely you’ll be turned down. We’ve all heard horror stories, but they’re outnumbered a thousand to one by the much more boring “got a check from the insurance company” stories you don’t hear because why would you?
Hell, a lot of insurance companies are actually mutuals. They literally don’t save a penny if they turn down a claim. Get your insurance from them if you’re worried about this.