I was once briefly hired as an ornamental coder. My job was to sit in an office and look incredibly busy and high-tech while investors where led through office after office of other people retained for, presumably, the same purpose. I was particularly good at it because I did a lot of my thesis stats there and nothing says productive like a well-used instance of RStudio.
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Yeah, I’m wondering if that wasn’t what was behind the apparently unneeded expenditure - from what I remember, it sounded like the office was frequently empty, so they may have felt they needed someone there (although that, in turn, raises the question of why they needed an office at all, if no business was being done there). There was clearly a certain amount of “fronting” going on - either it was a front for criminal activity as she thought, or just putting up a front of a “proper” business in the hopes that it would eventually become one.
There may have been some other signs that it wasn’t a real business, though. My recollection is that the boss and anyone else she met there (and the potential customers the business seemed to be catering to) spoke a language that she did not (and they knew she didn’t), so she was being excluded from understanding any discussions she may have overheard. Although that, too, may have had an innocent explanation - again, part of the “fronting,” where immigrant businessmen hired a native English speaker (and pretty blonde girl) as a prestige thing (or someone’s notion about how to be a “proper” local business), when it wasn’t necessary from a business perspective.
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In my experience, the majority of those people are called upper management.
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Oh man, did they let you go all out like a Hollywood movie hack scene with like a wall of monitors and various metrics graphs charting on them and stuff?
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I’ve read a theory that in the corporate structure they tend to up promote people to a point where they no longer are at the position for their key skill set. The promote them to ineptness, more or less.
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Not me, alas, but the chief network guy of my uni faced trouble because the then-dean (who was from the MBA program) could not see the reason why the network people needed so many people and space and gear and things when, surely, getting him his mail on time can’t possibly be that hard.
The perils of putting an ancient, maximally non-techy guy in charge I guess.
Well, the network guy called him to tour the offices and, beforehand, spent quite some time turning the networking team offices into—his words—NORAD. Projectors, flat screen TVs and bank after bank of monitor all showing scrolling logs and realtime updated graphs and in the middle of all that bedlam, the networking team looking harried and dramatic.
Naturally, their budget went up, not down.
So the closest I got to the coveted Hollywood Hacker setup was slightly helping rig some of it up. Didn’t even get to play with it, as I was a completely different department.
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Graeber is a cultural anthropologist not an economist.
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Barradeno beat me to it.
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I’m very interested in reading more of these anecdotes… but not enough interested in the social/economic ideas that they are wrapped in to actually read the whole book. Could everyone on the internet please head over to the mostly-defunct BullshitJobs subreddit and fill it with tales of woe for my amusement? Thanks!
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I think most of Wall Street falls into the pays a lot and produces nothing category.
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You nailed it and pretty much described my career thus far. I have a legit job that requires actual skill and effort, but most of my time is spent doing data entry. For every project they want me to copy a bunch of data in the clients Excel sheet to several pretty PDFs in InDesign.
a completely pointless meeting that costs your employer $300 in wages any time you like.
Ah yes, I figured out a meeting a boss had to complain about a single expensive meal on a business trip cost the company way more than the meal did.
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Stacking them by the 50, as was everyone else. Nobody told me there were two stacks, then someone said something offhanded about there being almost all one stack that day, and I was like, yeah totally. Making the most of the cheap food in the asian-food heavy cafeteria mostly. It was maybe 10 days of my life. QC in the candle factory was another notable one. Putting plastic jugs into boxes for 3 weeks was an existentially traumatic experience.
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Yeah, fundamentally the problem is that we need to redefine what “work” actually means.
But that won’t happen because it’s too much like, um, hard work…
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The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062092065/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_7417Ab52J7HZV
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Was that really the title? Ornamental coder? If not, a great opportunity was lost.
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David Graeber? The guy who wrote this?:
Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages…
I prefer someone without a history of talking out his ass.
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Oh my. That’s bad.
BTW, you seem to have replied to the wrong person.
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This is what one would expect with automation, BS jobs. We need maybe 2% of the workers to feed everyone and maybe 5% to make everything. That leaves a lot of jobs.
P.S. Don’t disrespect doormen. They keep randoms from wandering the halls of your apartment building, they help people with mobility issues and they deal with the plethora of deliveries that has gotten even more out of hand thanks to the likes of Amazon and dry cleaners. Did you know that there is specialized door management software for tracking appointments, packages and so on? The doormen at my sister’s building uses some software package or another. They have several hundred apartments. Oh, and the doormen are unionized. It’s a decent, useful job, and the tips can be quite good.
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