Why do so many people think they are in a bullshit job? | Psyche Ideas
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Researchers continue to debate whether some jobs are inherently useless – but all agree it’s harmful to see your job this way
  •  davehtaylor   ( @davehtaylor@beehaw.org ) English
    43•8 months ago

    Because they are.

    We have a puritanical idea burned into our society that you have to suffer to live, that you have to work your fingers to the bone to deserve even the most basic necessities of life, and can’t imagine a non-capitalist society where we just provide everything people need to live and not force people to do bullshit busywork just to prove they “deserve” the basics of life

    •  bermuda   ( @bermuda@beehaw.org ) English
      16•8 months ago

      Plus a lot of companies seem to think that customers prefer to witness workers “seem busy” as opposed to them actually being busy. I do deliveries for a restaurant, and there is a lot of downtime between 1 pm - 3 pm and 8 pm - 10 pm because people just aren’t ordering food at those times, so management usually makes us do pointless busy work. A lot of our busy work does have a point when the store itself is busy, but it would be really nice to just sit around and chat when we have nothing going on.

      I remember I used to work at a grocery store and we had the same problem. After about 9 pm we usually only had the night shift people, with a minor rush at 11 pm or so, and our store closed at 1 am, so a lot of that time was just spent sitting around chatting. If you were a stocker you were probably busy, but us cashiers had nothing to do. Management seemed to think this was a horrible thing so instead they made us “look busy” by literally telling us to act like we were cleaning things.

      I have had the rare few customers get mad at me in service jobs for not “working” when I was “supposed to be,” but I feel like deep down nobody really gives a shit. As a customer myself I much prefer somebody doing things timely and in a friendly manner than them just looking like a busy bee.

  •  Pons_Aelius   ( @Pons_Aelius@kbin.social ) 
    13•8 months ago

    The telling part for me was when I was in a very high stress job that had so many people depending on me being there everyday and working my arse of and stressing the fuck out about it night and day.

    Then I got hit by a car while cycling home from work.

    I was in hospital for a couple of weeks and it was months before I could return to work.

    Guess what?

    The business kept running.

    Shit still got done.

    When I returned, everyone was still as stressed as fuck, thinking they were vital to the business.

    None of us were.

    TLDR: Even when you don’t think you are in a bullshit job, you probably are.

  •  anon6789   ( @anon6789@beehaw.org ) 
    10•8 months ago

    I’ll share my experience regarding to a few choices quotes from the article.

    Working as a senior quality and performance officer in a local council in the UK involved ‘pretending things are great to senior managers, and generally “feeding the beast” with meaningless numbers that give the illusion of control,’

    My most recent job involved a bunch of auditing, mainly inventory. When you are tasked with finding errors and flaws, but are treated negatively when you present your findings, how does that make you value your work?

    Management was relatively good at this job, but in my former one, I was treated poorly for sitting how we were operating wasnt working either as accurately or efficiently at it could. We were doing more work to deliver an inferior product. How to I feel I’m doing my best there?

    Employed by a digital consultancy for a pharmaceutical company’s marketing department, he called his work ‘pure, unadulterated bullshit’, which ‘serves no purpose’.

    I’ve been in various roles supporting pharma research for near 20 years now with a few companies in the data side of things. I mainly email results to people who only talk to me when there’s a problem. That’s somewhat fine, because I’m an introvert, but it doesn’t build a bond between me and the people I’m supporting, and if we only speak when you’re annoyed at me for sending you bad news when I’m just the messenger, or even more so if I find something more qualified people missed, it makes me feel like crap.

    In my previous role, I would compile test results for lab inspections and get calls 6 or 12 months or more after sending the results from angry lab managers demanding I speak to their auditor about why they failed it to explain things they didn’t understand. Way to prove my work want even important enough to flip through when you got it.

    Empirical data suggested that, in fact, relatively few people appear to consider their jobs as useless – leading to pushback against the real-life applicability of Graeber’s concept.

    None of my jobs, from the one I have, well, had, my job lost the bid to renew our contract, to the ones I had as a kid were useless. People generally don’t pay for things they don’t need. But some people definitely made me feel useless about the work I did for them. When I was a teen in food service, people needed to eat, both quickly and safely, and I wanted them to have a nice night out. But most people won’t make you feel good for having that job. Now I turn stuff in to people I never see it great from it get to learn what happens from things I find, if the company makes changes based on my data, or if it just gets deleted. I’ll never know.

    ‘I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting,’ he said. ‘The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point.’

    Looking at jobs now, I feel the bar is very high in minimum qualifications and mandatory skills for roles that I feel I would have been able to successfully do years ago in my career that I don’t even begin to “qualify” to do now.

    Jobs way harder than the just few I have are offering less than I made 10 years ago at places that treated me poorly back then.

    I’ve been hired where they demanded I know skills X, Y, and Z, but the only thing they ever asked me to do was some intermediate X, some noob Y, and no Z ever came up because the boss doesn’t understand half of it anyway and showing them how actually using Z can save time and money, but switching stuff over to that would take too much time or whatever.

    I’ve always loved my jobs in the sense of what the duties were, or else I wouldn’t do it, but seldom have I felt value in my job in the sense of doing that for the people I was doing it for.