From The Guardian
One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I’m a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I would have to stack the books and not touch anything else, whereupon he would return at the earliest available opportunity.Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-jobThe carpenter never reappeared. Each day, someone in the anthropology department would call, often multiple times, to ask about the fate of the carpenter, who always turned out to have something extremely pressing to do. By the time a week was out, it had become apparent that there was one man employed by buildings and grounds whose entire job it was to apologise for the fact that the carpenter hadn’t come. He seemed a nice man. Still, it’s hard to imagine he was particularly happy with his work life.
A bullshit job is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee can't justify its existence
Everyone is familiar with the sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, really to do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. What if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are actually aware of it? Could there be anything more demoralising than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse? There are plenty of surveys about whether people are happy at work, but what about whether people feel their jobs have any good reason to exist? I decided to investigate this phenomenon by drawing on more than 250 testimonies from people around the world who felt they once had, or now have, what I call a bullshit job.
Most of my career I've spent in the startup technology space where companies are lean and most employees have to wear a few hats to the job done. I never really came into contact with these types of jobs. However lately I've been doing contracting for larger organizations and can definitely attest to the existence of these jobs and the employees knowledge of it. Most I've talked to are just riding the gravy train as long as they can until the eventual day comes that technology will replace much of what they do and they just hope there will be a different role within the massive organization that they can shuffle into. Its also not uncommon to only be in these roles briefly. If you don't like being in one of these jobs you often have the opportunity to transfer out to a different role.
Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Follow @contentjunkie to stay up to date on more great posts like this one.
Click one of the links below to signup for a free crypto trading account
So true I have had both types of jobs over the years and there is overlap now ..even the useful needed jobs have been infiltrated with these people and jobs ..slowing ones work to the point of endless frustration .... got your permit license permission from a dozen different pointless places ... Ahhhhh
This post has received a 9.49 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @contentjunkie.
You got a 3.14% upvote from @postpromoter courtesy of @contentjunkie!
Want to promote your posts too? Check out the Steem Bot Tracker website for more info. If you would like to support the development of @postpromoter and the bot tracker please vote for @yabapmatt for witness!
Most bureaucrats have university degrees. Red tape is how we in America associate government waste. But, unless one has paid attention to graduate education, they have missed how universities decide which courses to offer. They use statistics to determine which parts of the economy will be in most need a generation down the road. From there, jobs and the necessary education curriculum is planned.
This is not a perfect system. Universities make mistakes, just much less so than the risky ventures of large corporations and their associated training programs. The Internet has changed how we are educated. The speed it adds to innovation makes a lot of traditional statistical methods outdated. Computer programming has developed a inner-circle that has a strong distaste for the way universities teach computer science. It was found that the suppliers of hardware determined much of a curriculum. This lead to narrow skilled programmers with degrees.
But college is not all about acquiring skills. Technical schools, and certainly certificates, are. Higher education teaches one how to learn. It ensures an individual's success in completing professional curriculum. At least that is what a well rounded education is supposed to be for a workforce that spends most of their life specializing in a narrow skilled profession.
So finally, my opinions about the rise of the pointless job. Are we overwhelmed by the computer that we respond to what we believe most threatens us? For instance, if the IRS needs to put out a statement about cryptocurrencies, do go out and hire an army of lawyers if we are IBM working on our own blockchain. Or do we move our operations outside of the US and hire a team of translators? Before the blockchain: can we honestly say that English and Math are still fundamental skills, or should we be teach social engineering (note: see the American President)?
OK, so yes some fo the articles and social media influencers out there are pretty bad. Some are rushing to churn out material and others just never valued education beyond it making them a quick buck. And mathematics are an asset for computer programming. But, artificial intelligence plans further advances into automating both. In fact, Disney is working on AI that can recognize and score short stories. DARPA is working on Explainable AI that can answer questions about the decisions it has made.
There is just so much change coming to a close-minded world with internal biases that pointless jobs are inevitable as administrations hope to press their agenda to be the first.
Thanks for bringing up a topic that festered under my conscious for some time. I have a Masters in Aeronautics and have learned to land an aircraft. I never had the money to obtain the certificates to get paid as a pilot (costs about a new car), but did get to spend a couple of years critically examining all the world's agencies, departments, and corporations that came/come together to implement the Next Generation Air Transportation System (basically, transitioning to satellite technology). Ever notice how "a pilot shortage" makes news once in a while (especially during the holidays)? It is worse for ATC, though its outsourcing has been predicted while pilot shortages were warned for about a decade now. I suppose drone airliners are not yet capable of demonstrating to insurance carriers a lower incidence potential than pilot flown.
Thanks again. Hope it did not seem like I was rambling on or that these words were pointless:)
from pixabay
https://pixabay.com/en/brainstorming-business-businessman-3382789/
let's all share a vote on our blog @zuhrafriska