The theory is that business analysts and 90% of the IT industry in general is “bullshit” in the sense that it really serves no other purpose to society than to exert more controls, monitoring and oversight on a shrinking productive class of workers by their feudalistic managerial overlords. “Productive” meaning the people who actually physically make the stuff we buy and use. It’s not like Jeff Bezos invented “mail order”.
I’m sure there are “skills” involved in being a business analysts, project manager, engagement manager, delivery manager, agile coach, product manager, program manager, portfolio manager, so on and so forth. I just don’t “get it”. Why do companies have all these layers and matrices of people who don’t really know how the stuff in their company works and needs someone to articulate it for them?
I don’t mind it when I’m working. It still seems silly to me, but at least I kind of understand what I’m supposed to be doing in the context of what the company does. It becomes frustrated when looking for a job. Applying to companies and going on interviews where they are like “we need an engagement director, you seem to be more of a program manager” or “you seem like you would be a good fit for a delivery executive role, unfortunately we need a customer success manager”. Like is there some ISO standard for bullshit job titles I’m not aligned to?
I have a sister who has never had any significant period of unemployment, despite having worked at a million places over the course of her life. She was fired from some of those places. But I suspect she’d say she has never had a hard time finding a job. I say this only because she has a hard time relating to folks who complain about their struggles. She is solidly in the “Get a job, any job” camp.
She’s very assertive and extroverted and she can convince you she’s the solution to all your problems, past, present and future. She’s also willing to do just about anything to make a buck. So it’s not surprising that she has never been unemployed.
From a young age I wanted to be a scientist. I’ve been on the “scientist” path my whole life. It’s been my identity for as long as I can remember. But my sister’s identity isn’t tied to her work. She can handle baggage at an airliner in the morning and then hold a training for new employees at the same airliner in the afternoon and then run the vacuum cleaner at the property she manages in the evening, all the while feeling absolutely wonderful about life and her place within it. I always tell myself if my I ever lose my good gubmint job, I’ll just try to be like her and embrace whatever work I can put my hand to. But I don’t know if I’d be as good as it as she is. I don’t have her energy or her personality.
Doesn’t that kind of prove my point? As a government scientist with years (decades?) of experience, why would you consider some bullshit job tossing luggage at the airport or managing rental properties (assuming you don’t own them)?
Since my post was not intended to refute anything you’ve said, I don’t get why you’ve framed this question the way you have.
As a government scientist with years (decades?) of experience, why would you consider some bullshit job tossing luggage at the airport or managing rental properties (assuming you don’t own them)?
If I were unemployed and had been so for a long time and I were to ask my sister why I should take bullshit jobs like hers, I’m almost 100% sure she’d come back with, “Well, do you want to eat or not?” I’m sure she’d tell me that if she is able to find happiness in her collection of joe jobs, my pretentious ass can too. She’d probably point to our family’s occupational legacy as proof that we can thrive in any line of work. I’d have a hard time arguing against this.
I mean, I totally get what you are saying. I wouldn’t want to work as a baggage handler or a AirBnB property manager (for properties I don’t own). But if I couldn’t find a job doing the kind of stuff I’ve done for the past 15 years and only “bullshit” jobs were offered to me, then I would have to take them eventually. I might be a pretentious ass, but I do have to eat.
I find this post rather insulting. Next time your suitcase shows up at the right carousel, or you arrive at a hotel to find a nice clean room, you can thank somebody with a “bullshit” job.
As for myself, after decades of building up my retirement savings by sitting behind various computer screens for various companies at various levels on the totem pole, I’m riding out the rest of my working years in a low-stress hourly job that you’d probably consider “bullshit.” But I like it. I help a lot of people enjoy their leisure time, and at the end of the day I don’t take my work home with me. There’s nothing bullshit about that to me.
“Bullshit” jobs can certainly have their perks. My sister gets to fly everywhere in the world for free, frequently in first class. This perk totally makes up for the low pay and low status of her work, in her opinion.
A lot of jobs that seem awful to outside observers have their silver linings. I work in a boring cube farm. But (crossing fingers) I’ll be able to retire with a good pension one day. I envy my sister for being able to travel. She envies me for not having to worry (so much) about retirement.
If and when that happens at JFK, LGA or EWR, I will.
I’ve been using the term “bullshit jobs” and “crappy jobs” interchangeably. Or maybe we call them something less disparaging like “dirty jobs”. Jobs like baggage handler and hotel maid are hard, dirty jobs. But they are also necessary. “Bullshit jobs” in my mind are the various marketing reps, agile coaches, Accenture consultants, VPs of Social Media and other assorted corporate jobs you see travelling through the airport with their roller suitcases. They are highly paid, but if 90% of them disappeared off the Earth tomorrow, I doubt it would have much affect on their company, let alone society as a whole.
Truth be told, I would probably be a lot happier in a job dealing with the operations of an airport or some other complex facility than the string of esoteric IT and business projects I’ve managed over the years.
That’s ultimately the difference between a career and merely having a job. Having a career means you’re trying to work in roughly the same industry or same sort of job over most of your working life, and advancing within that job/industry in line with your experience. To that end, there’s some gaming to be done with not taking jobs that are below your experience or pay rate, in that it can often be interpreted as that being your “level” by hiring people, even though you’re just trying to pay the bills.
Just having a job is less… demanding. If that’s all you’re trying to do, it doesn’t matter whether or not it advances your career, or telegraphs the right/wrong information, etc… it’s just a vehicle to get paid.
I think a thorough determination of the income of lawyers would show a very polarized distribution. A few people do really well; others do pretty well; a lot do much worse (including part-time and ‘gig-economy’ self employment). Contrast this with medicine or engineering. If you work in those fields, you’re more likely to be pulling down at least a middle-class income. Even if the mean income for lawyers is comparable. the median may be very different.
Connections seem to play a larger role than in many fields. It’s easier to contemplate going to law school if you know you’ll at least have an entry-level job at the family’s firm when you get out.
I considered law school thirty years ago after I’d been working as an engineer for a few years. I decided against it for various reasons, which included warning signs of the early-1990s recession, and the fact that I held a secure government job. Based on anecdotal assessments of people I became friends with during the LSAT prep and application process, I made the right decision.
And this is also anecdotal, but over the years, I’ve been amazed at how many people I’ve met who had law degrees and either never practiced, or only practiced briefly. Sometimes the law education helps them in the job they had before they went to law school. But sometimes they just graduated and couldn’t find a job as a lawyer. Any such assessment should include these ‘zero-income’ lawyers.
Lawyers are kind of like MBAs in that people often choose those degrees as paths to high paying careers. But not only do you have to land a job at a top law firm (or investment bank, management consultancy, or tech startup in the case of MBAs) the firm also needs to have work to feed you.
Unless you mean computer engineering, most of the other engineers I knew in college (including myself) ended up going into some other field.
I think very few careers are a straight linear progression these days. I think it’s harder to have a proper “career” as opposed to a string of related “jobs”.
Like some years ago, I was a “manager” in the IT department of an insurance company with a group of PMs reporting to me. Ideally, after a few years I’d be promoted to Director. Maybe a promotion to VP some years after that. What would have been nice is if they promoted me to Director immediately after mine quit the week before I was to start.
Instead, they just brought in someone else after I had been effectively doing the old director’s job for nine months, without the benefit of our unpleasant VP (who “retired” a few months after I joined). And then I got laid off a few months later, along with most of the other PMs, managers and directors in our group. The new director stayed on for a few more years until she got fired or laid off or something.
I never figured out who was actually running that department though. Clearly it was no one in management that I actually met.
Same thing at a lot of places I’ve worked. Maybe I get a title bump after a year or so. But mostly it just seems like a revolving door of managers and employees and not a whole lot of work to do.
The income levels of lawyers given in the cite I did on a different thread was for lawyers working in their law fields of specialty. The median income was not lowered by “zero sum” law graduates.
IME that varies by engineering discipline. I knew a lot of aerospace engineers who worked little or none in that specific field. That may be because the industry is very volatile and competitive. Mineral industries engineers (mining, petroleum, etc.) were also subject to what the energy markets were like when they graduated, or every few years when there were layoffs.
My degree was in electrical engineering, which seems over the last several decades to have been pretty durable and versatile. Lots of computer engineers I know had EE degrees. My college had just begun offering CE degrees, and a lot of my classmates fashioned themselves ‘proto’-CEs by taking their electives in the computer science department. More recently, I’ve had younger colleagues with EE backgrounds who were cyber and networking experts.
The corporate world where you’ve spent your career is more competitive and faster-changing than where I worked (civil service/defense/intelligence). As such, it’s more feasible for us to plan on longer-focused careers, even for the contractors we hire. I was using skills I’d acquired back in the 1980s in the last years of my career (although I did get two degrees in night school to keep current with technology).
Sure, but a string of related jobs is still much more of a career than merely having a series of unrelated jobs. I mean, I know some people who don’t really have “careers” per se, but just have held a succession of jobs- they might have worked as a restaurant manager, then as a realtor, and then as a salesman selling computer stuff. All reasonably well paying jobs, but not a “career” as is commonly described.
Meanwhile, you and I have more or less stayed at least within the confines of our broader industries- in my case, “IT”. That said, I’ve done manufacturing, healthcare, government, and a stint as a computer forensics guy. And it sounds like you’ve done more or less the same sort of thing.
I got hired 35 years ago and never left. I’ve put in for some promotions/transfers and got some, didn’t get others.
I feel like alot of (non STEM/technical) White Collar jobs are extremely subjective in what they want in a person. And i agree that internal applicants often have the inside track on any management positions that come up in a company. So you see 100 job openings for 100 entry level management jobs, think to yourself well i got a management degree from State U, why wouldn’t they hire me. It’s because Susan, who is a bang up employee and has been the de facto leadership in the unit, got the job.
Need someone who can fix small engines? You’d like a guy who has experience but you might take someone who just came out of trade school.
A job interview for a more technical/skilled labor job might focus more qualifications/experience.
Vague White Collar jobs (management/sales/etc) interviews have those “tell me about a situation you solved a problem” “how do you deal with difficult people”
Plus you not only competing with the Business management majors from State U, but pretty much everyone with a college degree, who as turns out, can’t find a job as Psychologist even though they have a Psychology degree. Alot of employers find any liberal arts degree sufficient for an entry level job. My degree is in Political Science. I am not a Political Scientist…
I’ve served on several hiring panels for technical positions. Most of the interview questions that we come up with are usually along those lines. We will have a few questions that pertain to technical background/skills. But most of the questions are more designed to gauge the candidates’ experience with difficult situations and difficult people.
The technical stuff is super important. But if your definition of “standard deviation” isn’t exactly what a statistician would come up with, no biggie. Excel can calculate standard deviations for you. If an uber nerd was what we were looking for, we could just hire a part-time contractor. People with good social skills will have the advantage even in technical jobs nowadays, because there aren’t a whole lot of good technical jobs where all you do is “technical stuff”. Everyone nowadays is expected to wear multiple hats, sometimes all at the same time, without skipping a beat or complaining. Nerds don’t do this as well as “people persons.” Few of us are spared from managing difficult situations and different people.
Right before the pandemic, I spoke to a bunch of college grads coming out of in my subject area (marine biology) and advised them to go hard on developing compelling personal narratives and on telling their stories. I felt like a corporate trainer telling them this, but I was just being real. I told them if you don’t have a genuine story that shows you have successfully navigated a different situation or different person, you’ll be perceived as someone who will crumble when shit starts getting real on the job. And if you can’t talk about those difficult experiences without some eloquence and feeling, you might as well not have that experience at all. I told them that being an introvert wouldn’t spare them from this. It’s a shame that being quiet, timid, and/or introverted are such big disadvantages now. I blame automation. When computer programs can do you much of your job, you’ve got to sing, dance, tell jokes, and put out fires to demonstrate your worth.
I remember one time I was interviewing a candidate and was going through the list of “behavioral questions” our Head of Recruiting gave me. I got through the first “tell me about a time when…” question and then abruptly started flipping through my papers as if something was missing.
“Is that a good answer?” asked the candidate.
“I have no idea” I said. “HR just gave me interview questions. She didn’t tell me anything about the answers.”
So instead we just spent an hour talking about the company, this person’s background, and just seeing if there was a good fit.
But the moral is, interviewing is very subjective and few people are really trained to do it well.
In my experience (on both sides of the interviewing table), what really sells people is demonstrating passion. Clients and interviewers really respond to it.
I was representing “government sector professionals” at the career symposium I was invited to speak at, so my advice to the new marine biology grads was coming from that perspective
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your bent), government interviews are designed to minimize subjectivity. That’s one reason we use hiring panels. We have scoring sheets for each answer to an interview question. Hiring panel members are required to take notes summarizing how the candidate answered a question. The notes in aggregate must demonstrate why a candidate was recommended for hiring. Just writing “Candidate was the most passionate” isn’t going to past HR muster!
That’s why I was telling the new grads they’ve got to practice being eloquent and have a story they can whip out semi-spontaneously Our interview process favors folks who speak well, in a linear fashion, and who drop all the buzz words and phrases we’re looking for–including industry jargon. This doesn’t work against passionate people, but it does mean you can’t go into an interview thinking you’ll charm the socks off the panel and get the job. I think that’s the point of doing it this way–to prevent candidates from being chosen merely because they vibed with the hiring panel in ways unrelated to work. This tends to work against diversity.
My boss (a 65-year-old white guy) hates that we can’t hire folks like the agency did "in the good ole days’ when he was hired. He thinks we’re missing out on good candidates. While I agree with him that we reject a lot of good candidates in our current process, I think we frequently pick excellent ones who might have been rejected if we had gone with a more subjective process. So to me it’s a wash.
Ugh. In my experience, the more buzzwords and jargon one uses, the less they actually understand about their job. This applies to employees and management alike.
I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but it’s no wonder most interviews are useless if this is a big criteria.
