Bullshit careers: are you a flunky, a goon, a duct taper, a box ticker or a taskmaster?
Are you a flunky, a goon, a duct taper, a box ticker or a taskmaster? An experiment into how many of us are employed in completely useless jobs has unearthed some inconvenient truths.
This article was first published in 2018.
In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation. It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with people who don’t seem, to the outsider, to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications co-ordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or middle managers who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless.
What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them know it? In a way, I wrote the piece as an experiment. I wanted to see what sort of response it would elicit.
If ever an essay’s hypothesis was confirmed by its reception, this was it. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs produced an explosion. Within weeks it had been translated into at least a dozen languages and was reprinted in newspapers from Switzerland to Australia. The online version on Strike! got more than a million hits and crashed the website repeatedly from too much traffic. Blogs sprouted. Comments sections filled up with confessions from white-collar professionals; people wrote to me asking for guidance, or to tell me I had inspired them to quit their jobs to find something more meaningful.
Here is one enthusiastic response (I’ve collected hundreds), from the comments section of The Canberra Times: “Wow! Nail on the head! I am a corporate lawyer (tax litigator, to be specific). I contribute nothing to this world and am utterly miserable all of the time. I don’t like it when people have the nerve to say, ‘Why do it, then?’ because it is so clearly not that simple. It happens to be the only way right now for me to contribute to the [top] 1 per cent in such a significant way so as to reward me with a house in Sydney to raise my future kids …”
None of the responses answered the question of how many people really felt that way about their jobs — but before long, statistical evidence did indeed surface. Polling agency YouGov took it upon itself to test the hypothesis and conducted a poll of Britons using language taken directly from the essay: Does your job “make a meaningful contribution to the world”? Astonishingly, 37 per cent said it didn’t (whereas 50 per cent said it did, and 13 per cent were uncertain). A later poll in Holland came up with similar results: in fact, a little higher, as 40 per cent of Dutch workers reported that their jobs had no good reason to exist.
What I am calling “bullshit jobs” are jobs that are primarily or entirely made up of tasks that the person doing that job considers to be pointless, unnecessary or even pernicious. Jobs that, were they to disappear, would make no difference whatsoever. Above all, they’re jobs that the holders themselves feel shouldn’t exist. My research has revealed five basic types of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers and taskmasters.
Flunkies
Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. Another term for this category might be “feudal retainers”. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants and minions of one sort or another. Many of those are expected to do at least some actual work; but at the top of the pyramid, there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive. And you can’t be magnificent without an entourage.
Some old-fashioned retainer jobs still exist. Doormen are an obvious example, performing the same function in the houses of the very rich that intercoms have performed for everyone else for decades. There is a continuum from explicit feudal leftovers of this type to front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them.
Here’s a comment from a female respondent named Gerte: “In 2010 I was a receptionist at a Dutch publishing company. The phone rang maybe once a day, so I was given a couple of other tasks — keep the candy dish full of mints; once a week, go to the conference room and wind a grandfather clock. The task that took the most time was managing another receptionist’s Avon sales …”
Clearly, one call a day could be handled by someone else at the firm. Why shell out a full-time salary and benefits for a woman — actually, it would seem, in this case, two women — just to sit at the front desk all day doing nothing? The answer is that no one would take a company seriously if it had no one sitting at the front desk. Receptionists are required as a Badge of Seriousness even if there’s nothing else for them to do.
Here’s Ophelia, who works for a firm that runs social marketing campaigns: “My job title is ‘portfolio co-ordinator’ and everyone always asks what that means or what it is I actually do? I have no idea. My job description says all sorts of stuff about facilitating relationships between partners etc, [but] the reality of my working life is functioning as a personal assistant to the director. And in that role I do have actual tasks that need doing simply because the people I assist are either too “busy” or too important to do this stuff themselves. Some days I run around frantically while most of the mid-level managers sit around and stare at a wall seemingly bored to death and just trying to kill time doing pointless things (like the guy who rearranged his backpack for a half-hour every day…)”
Ophelia suspects her job was originally just an empty place-filler, created so that someone could boast about the number of employees he had working under him. But once it was created, a perverse dynamic set in whereby managers offloaded more and more of their responsibilities onto the female subordinate (her) to give the impression that they were too busy to do such things — leading, of course, to their having even less to do than previously. Ophelia’s example highlights a common ambiguity: whose job is really bullshit, that of the flunky or the boss?
Goons
The use of this term is, of course, metaphorical: I don’t mean actual gangsters or hired muscle. Rather, I’m referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them: most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society.
I received a very large number of testimonies from call centre employees. Many considered their job bullshit because it involved tricking or pressuring people into doing things that weren’t really in their best interest. Here’s a sampling:
“I had a bunch of call centre jobs selling things people didn’t really want/need, taking insurance claims, conducting pointless market research.”
“It’s not just a lack of positive contribution, but you’re making an active negative contribution to people’s day. I called people up to hock them useless shit they didn’t need: specifically, access to their ‘credit score’ that they could obtain for free elsewhere, but that we were offering (with some mindless add-ons) for £6.99 a month.”
“Our call centre’s resources are almost wholly devoted to coaching agents on how to talk people into things they don’t need as opposed to solving the real problems they are calling about.”
So once again, what really irks is (1) the aggression and (2) the deception. Here I can speak from personal experience, having done such jobs, albeit usually very, very briefly: there are few things less pleasant than being forced against your better nature to try to convince others to do things that defy their common sense.
Duct tapers
Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organisation; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. The most obvious examples of duct tapers are underlings employed to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.
Magda: “I once worked for an [organisation] where I was the ‘tester’. I was required to proofread research reports written by their posh star researcher-statistician. The man didn’t know the first thing about statistics, and he struggled to produce grammatically correct sentences. My job was to convince him to undertake a major reworking of every report he produced. Of course, he would never agree to correct anything, let alone undertake a rework, so I would then have to take the report to the company directors. They were statistically illiterate too, but being the directors, they could drag things out even more …”
Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct — tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven’t been either because no one has got around to it, or because the manager wants to be surrounded by subordinates, or because of some structural confusion, or because of some combination of the three. I have any number of testimonies of this sort. Here’s a sampling:
“I worked as a programmer for a travel company. Some poor person’s job was to receive updated plane timetables via email several times a week and copy them by hand into Excel.”
“My job was to transfer information about the state’s oil wells into a different set of notebooks than they were currently in.”
“I was given one responsibility: watching an inbox that received emails in a certain form from employees in the company asking for tech help, and copy and paste it into a different form. Not only was this a textbook example of an automatable job, it actually used to be automated!”
Box tickers
This term refers to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organisation to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it isn’t. The following testimony is from a woman hired to co-ordinate leisure activities in a care home:
Betsy: “Most of my job was to interview residents and fill out a recreation form that listed their preferences. That form was then logged on a computer and promptly forgotten about forever. A lot of the time, I would complete a form for a short-term resident, and they would check out the next day. I threw away mountains of paper. The interviews mostly just annoyed the residents, as they knew it was just bullshit paperwork, and no one was going to care about their preferences.”
The most miserable thing about box-ticking jobs is that the employee is usually aware that not only does the box-ticking exercise do nothing towards accomplishing its ostensible purpose, it actually undermines it, since it diverts time and resources away from the purpose itself. So here Betsy was aware that the time she spent processing forms about how residents might wish to be entertained was time not spent entertaining them.
Taskmasters
Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 are those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. While their role is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. Type 2s are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. One might also refer to them as bullshit generators.
Ben, a middle manager, is a classic example of Type 1. “Ten people work for me, but from what I can tell they can all do the work without my oversight,” he says. “My only function is to hand them work, which I suppose the people that actually generate the work could do themselves.”
Ben reckons he spends at least 75 per cent of his time allocating tasks and then monitoring if the underling is doing them, even though, he insists, he has absolutely no reason to believe they would behave any differently if he weren’t there.
A typical example of a Type 2 taskmaster is Chloe, who held the post of academic dean at a prominent British university, with a specific responsibility to provide “strategic leadership” to a troubled campus. Now, those of us in academia who like to think of ourselves as teachers and scholars before all else have come to fear the word “strategic”. “Strategic mission statements” (or even worse, “strategic vision documents”) instil a particular terror, since these are the primary means by which corporate management techniques — setting up quantifiable methods for assessing performance, forcing teachers and scholars to spend more and more of their time assessing and justifying what they do and less and less time actually doing it — are insinuated into academic life.
The same suspicions hold for any document that repeatedly uses the words “quality”, “excellence”, “leadership” or “stakeholder”. My immediate reaction upon hearing that Chloe was in a “strategic leadership” position was to suspect that not only was her job bullshit, it actively inserted bullshit into others’ lives as well.
Chloe: “I had no budget. I had no authority over the buildings, the timetable or any other operational matters. All I could do was come up with a new strategy that was in effect a re-spin of [existing] strategies.” So her primary role was to come up with yet another strategic vision statement, of the kind that are regularly deployed to justify the number-crunching and box-ticking that has become so central to academic life. But since Chloe had no actual power, it was all meaningless shadow play. What she did get was what all high-level university administrators now receive as their primary badge of honour: her own tiny empire of administrative staff.
There is really only one class of people who notonly deny their jobs are pointless but also express outright hostility to the very idea that our economy is rife with bullshit jobs. For many years I have been receiving periodic, unsolicited communications from indignant entrepreneurs and executives telling me that my entire premise is wrong. No one, they insist, would ever spend company money on an employee who wasn’t needed.
Such communications rarely offer particularly sophisticated arguments. Most just employ the circular argument that since none of the things I’ve described could have occurred in a market economy, they don’t occur — so all the people who are convinced their jobs are worthless must be deluded, or self-important, or simply don’t understand their real function, which is fully visible only to those above.
One might be tempted to conclude from these responses that there is at least one class of people who genuinely don’t realise their jobs are bullshit. Except, of course, what CEOs do isn’t really bullshit. For better or for worse, their actions do make a difference in the world. They’re just blind to all the bullshit they create.
Edited extract from Bullshit Jobs — A Theory, by David Graeber, (Allen Lane) $49.99, out May 14