• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle




  • A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).

    Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).

    Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.

    A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.