Bullshit Jobs

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Doing something fun for free makes you an enthusiast. Doing something fun for money makes you whore. Doing something shitty for money makes you either unfortunate or a fool.

You’re a real “glass is half empty” kinda guy.

Man's inhumanity to man and such.

[Fife]

I half-suspected for some time that large corporations agree how many bullshit jobs they will create to keep the system going.

What is a Walmart greeter if not corporate welfare?

What is your context for "corporate welfare" in your question? I haven't thought about corporate welfare as a corporation giving away welfare before; only as the corporation receiving welfare from the taxpayers.

Anyway, a Walmart greeter performs a very important function for the store's goodwill. In recent years, they have become important in loss prevention also. Just having any kind of watcher, even an 85 year old grandpa, at the front door will discourage the really lazy thieves.

Plus, that old fucker won't be wasting company time on his phone. He's just damn happy to be upright and talking to people.

[Speaker to Animals]

Doing something fun for free makes you an enthusiast. Doing something fun for money makes you whore. Doing something shitty for money makes you either unfortunate or a fool.

But doing something shitty for free is enlightenment.

[Speaker to Animals]

I half-suspected for some time that large corporations agree how many bullshit jobs they will create to keep the system going.

What is a Walmart greeter if not corporate welfare?

What is your context for "corporate welfare" in your question? I haven't thought about corporate welfare as a corporation giving away welfare before; only as the corporation receiving welfare from the taxpayers.

Anyway, a Walmart greeter performs a very important function for the store's goodwill. In recent years, they have become important in loss prevention also. Just having any kind of watcher, even an 85 year old grandpa, at the front door will discourage the really lazy thieves.

Plus, that old fucker won't be wasting company time on his phone. He's just damn happy to be upright and talking to people.

I guess you have to have worked in a very large corporation to see it. Office Space wasn't just a comedy. That shit is real. Probably half the workers in the Fortune 500 companies are bullshit or superfluous.

I know the executives know this. I am not sure why it continues.

I mean.. I know why the reign of terror perpetrated by HR departments continues. That's affirmative action and "diversity". But that's only part of the problem.

[DBTrek]

When one adopts a workdview completely driven by selfishness, then doing ANYTHING that doesn’t directly release ones own endorphins is stupid and useless.

/shrug

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Doing something fun for free makes you an enthusiast. Doing something fun for money makes you whore. Doing something shitty for money makes you either unfortunate or a fool.

But doing something shitty for free is enlightenment.

mind
blown

[Speaker to Animals]

When one adopts a workdview completely driven by selfishness, then doing ANYTHING that doesn’t directly release ones own endorphins is stupid and useless.

/shrug

You are straw manning the issue again. There really are huge numbers of people performing duplicated jobs, bullshit jobs, useless middle management, HR nonsense, or now there's even jobs for rightthink enforcement.

These people don't actually directly contribute anything to corporate productivity. I'd venture to guess probably 2/3 of middle management at any large corporation are joke jobs. Most of the HR department is there to support the jobs programs and smooth out the drama bringing in these people inevitably creates.

You have people who's entire job is just measuring pointless metrics. They hold meetings to let everybody know what the metrics are. They publish results. Everybody goes on with life. We all pretend like this is normal.

[DBTrek]

There is tremendous value in doing work, even duplicate work, for ones own income. The psychological benefits strengthen both the individual and the community. Economically it’s stupid, but the world is bigger than economics. You want to find your chronically depressed, your despondent, and your high risk suicide groups - look at people who don’t earn for themselves or give back to the tribe. Disabled vets, lifetime SS recipients, third generation welfare families ... there’s your pit of despair people.

Redundant FAA admin assistant #5183 is pretty chipper by comparison.

[Kath]

Having worked for the same (very large) corporation for 17 years, I can tell you it's cyclical.

Whenever a "re-organization" happens, the corporation figures out there's 100 directors who aren't doing anything to add value, so out they go. Over time, for seemingly very rational reasons, the number of directors slowly increases until a few years later, when some new VP questions why we need 400 directors, and around and around we go.

We go through years where there's no employee RAH RAH group, and then the RAH RAH shows up next year in a new form.

I would say that filling out my required number of fellow employee recognition cards is one of the most useless tasks I've ever had to do at any job. Other useless things are government mandated training on ethics and such, and filling out time-sheet like paperwork. Pretty much anything that doesn't involve enhancing GUI to improve my team's productivity is useless.

PS - I absolutely love my job. I have so much flexibility and the work keeps changing, because technology changes, so no two years are ever redundant.

[SuburbanFarmer]

+1 to this thread.

This is the inherent problem with the 'megacorp' over mom & pop employers. Lazy executives and beaurocrats have been convinced that 'economy of scale' works in all things, but it's counter-balanced by the incredible waste of human potential in the organization.

The name of the game is centralized profits. Things may appear to be more efficient, but they are not. The shareholders benefit, but society does not. Yet, we can conglomerate and 'synergize' our few thousand companies into a 'market', and justify absurd financial games with it, so it goes on.