Bullshit Jobs
Review of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Have you ever worked a job that was utterly meaningless? Maybe it was a call center with no calls, or you oversaw a project that would never see the light of day, or worse… data entry. As bizarre as it seems, it’s a phenomenon that has become more and more common. In fact, recently laid off tech workers spoke out on how they were paid exorbitant sums of money to do very little. Now, while few of us are getting paid millions to sit around, many are earning modest salaries for work whose purpose has become hazy. It has contributed to the general malaise that haunts the collective consciousness and leads us to the question, has work and perhaps life become more meaningless? Are we becoming more pessimistic? Maybe a bit of both.
I struggled with this question of meaning and work early on in my career and it led me to the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. I believe this book, more than any other, captures the spirit of modern capitalism. In it, Graeber analyzes the testimonies of lawyers, consultants, and marketing experts as they describe their experience working in a job that has a zero or negative impact on society as a whole, aka a bullshit job. The type of job that if it ceased to exist, hardly anyone would notice. Unfortunately, a bullshit job is exactly the first job I had right out of college.
My first job in the “real world” was at a multinational consulting company, whose name shall not be named. I was hired as a software engineer to help on one of their largest projects. It was an exciting time. I never worked in an environment such as that before and I had little understanding of the inner workings of corporate America. Like many other ill-prepared young people, I was unreasonably optimistic only because I didn’t know what lay ahead of me. I believed that I’d be utilizing the best of my abilities, that I would finally be able to show off the full extent of my years of schooling to solve challenging technical problems. Little did I know I wouldn’t be solving any problems, in fact, when I was hired there wasn’t actually any work to do.
I was brought in with a cohort of a dozen or so bright-eyed twenty-somethings that were as clueless as I was. During our first week of training, we were told that only some of us would have something to do, others would have to wait (or sit on the bench as they called it because corporate America loves sports metaphors). Eager to get started, I asked how long I’d be waiting around and was told it could take days or even months before I was given something to do. In the meantime, I was encouraged to finish our technical training (which consisted of a dozen or so youtube videos) to prepare for the project.
I quickly watched the videos, then found myself at my desk with more time than I knew what to do with. I scrolled through Twitter, stared out the window, and tried convincing myself how good I had it. This was it. I would be able to sit around for months and get paid to do nothing. It was the dream, right? A sort of retirement, before retirement.
While sitting there, I had plenty of time to think and it became increasingly clear that my work, my time, and in a way my existence had little importance on a cosmic scale. While I understand that work serves as a flimsy guardrail for spiritual decline, some jobs are accelerants for internal combustion. I’ve worked low wage jobs where I’m treated like dirt, and I’ve worked high wage jobs that are meaningless (and I feel like dirt), but honestly I can’t tell you which is worse for the soul. There’s no dignity in poverty, but I doubt Sisyphus would have been happier if he made a few grand every time the rock reached the top of the hill. After two weeks I quit, but because no one knew I existed, it took about another week before anyone realized that I wasn’t there. Tragic.
I shared my experience with a few other friends and mentors. Some told me to take advantage, sit around and collect a check, others congratulated me on my decision, but overall few were surprised to hear about my predicament. Turns out this kind of thing happens everywhere, but why?
The late David Graeber was an anthropologist that spent a lot of time researching the contradictions of capitalism like the idea of profit. One of the basic tenets of capitalism is that all economic activities are in pursuit of profit. It’s a simple idea, but it fails to hold up in the real world. Myself and many others have occupied roles that have little to no value, roles that cost more than they produce. In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber explains that in large bureaucracies the inefficiencies arise because the purpose of a bureaucracy isn’t to innovate or even to produce a profit, at a certain scale the bureaucracy exists to serve itself.
In small environments, it becomes easy to measure the value or output of an individual. If you’ve ever worked on a small team of people, then you know you don’t need to rely on metrics or KPIs or any other asinine statistic to determine someone’s value, just look at the work they do. But as organizations scale, this idea of value becomes much harder to gauge.
At its lowest level, value is tangible and apparent. Whether the person fills in potholes, writes code, or teaches children, you can easily see their work and its impact on the material world. But as individuals move up to mid-level management or even executive roles, their value is decided not by what they produce, but by the sum of all the people under them. Management exists to take credit for the value created by those below. They have no inherent value in themselves, they must instead capture the value of others. It is here, at the mid-level and executive roles that the bullshit is manufactured.
Graeber goes on to explain that the power of a manager is directly proportional to the amount of people underneath them. This means that managers almost always have an incentive to hire more than they fire. The more underlings they control, the more entrenched they become inside of an organization, and the harder they become to fire or get rid of. This is why even underperforming bosses or managers are notoriously difficult to replace and are given disgustingly large severance packages, because they’ve amassed so much political capital within an organization that their removal is no easy feat.
The savvy and power-hungry are then incentivized to hire and create jobs, even where none existed before. Assistant marketing director, junior compliance officer, product QA analyst, the more vague the title and description, the better. Whoever fulfills the role will be beholden to whoever created it, because they were the ones that determined the usefulness and value of the job in the first place. The individual’s purpose then becomes whatever their boss says it is, and though it is under the guise of productivity and profit, in reality it is often arbitrary, leaving you subject to the whims of your new master.
This is not to say that this will be the fate of all jobs. There are still plenty of roles critical for the functioning of a society. If we didn’t have teachers, construction workers, or doctors, then society may very well collapse. But as we continue to privatize our schools, hospitals, and basic infrastructure, we can expect that the corporate entities responsible will reproduce the same inefficiencies that they blast the government for. We will live in a future where there are more, and more bullshit jobs.
P.S. If you’re interested in other anti-work readings I put together a short reading list here.
Enjoy!