I sometimes think calling jobs in a large company “bullshit” or “useless” is akin to calling tonsils and the appendix bullshit and useless because you can live without them. Well, yes you can - you can also live without the “waste of resources” to maintain two kidneys, two lungs, two eyes, etc. At some point the "increased efficiency” becomes intolerable and inefficient. Turns out that all of that served some use after all.
Not a perfect analogy but then they never are. But you get my drift - what you think of as useless bullshit might have a purpose after all. Be careful how you prune.
Being in the same space, I would say that commercial enterprises are awash with huge inefficiencies. And these inefficiencies can often be hidden behind busywork and pretty PowerPoint decks.
I might even go so far as to argue these inefficiencies and “bullshit jobs” are necessary for companies, indeed society to function. People aren’t robots and I for one don’t want to work for a company where I am constantly monitored to ensure that I’m 100% efficiently carrying out tasks with no slack time. I feel like my dad’s generation, it was sort of an unspoken rule that as you rose up and gained tenure in an organization, it was understood that they sort of let you ride it out until retirement. Now companies are quick to eliminate positions if they think it will save a few bucks. But there is a cost to all that churn. There is often value in retaining that institutional knowledge, even if the people retaining it aren’t super busy every second of the day.
A few years back, one of my junior project managers asked me why our director thought I was such a great project manager as I never seemed “busy”. My response was “Is the captain doing anything when he’s just standing on the bridge ‘not looking busy’. I’ll bet Edward Smith (captain of the Titanic) was really busy for the last 90 minutes of that voyage. Busy doesn’t mean things are going well.”
Which seems to be a trend now in Corporate America that everyone has to look busy busy busy all the time even if what they are doing isn’t particularly productive.
I’ve noticed this at some of my clients at my last firm. Even though I was one of the most senior and expensive resources on the project, clients would pay my billable time much less scrutiny than the technical resources. They were fine with me providing “managerial oversight” but would nickel and dime the devs and architects and other resources who actually did the work.