Source: http://progressivepodcastaustralia.com/2015/10/26/114/
This appeared first on Linkedin.
This article by David Graeber hits the nail on the head, albeit in some roundabout way.
There are jobs being created (and recruited for, trained in, and paid for) that only exist because others are doing jobs that don’t require to be done, in a mother of all vicious cycles!
Having run a large organisation, I am convinced that many, many jobs in administration, accounts, finance, human resources, training, staffing, recruitment, legal, compliance, risk, and supervision & management (at all levels) are totally unnecessary and exist only because others in more productive functions are spending too much time doing non-productive things to be able to do the secondary & tertiary stuff these functions pretend to do.
Especially with the coming of technology that can help manage, record, monitor, supervise, and audit (sometimes even run autonomously) large, complex processes and activities, I foresee even more jobs becoming redundant, but continuing to be done by humans, who will increasingly become more and more dissatisfied and emotionally, morally, and psychologically scarred, thus affecting the next generation with this infection, and on and on it would go.
Note: Please do not pick on the author’s particular choices of what he may think are bullshit jobs. I understand that a beautiful case can be made for private equity CEOs and corporate lawyers, and that it involves invoking the same Keynesian logic as the gentleman named in the article. I do understand that you may personally think that learning & development, or marketing strategy, or internal communications (just to name 3) are jobs worth doing, or add any value to an enterprise or to the lives of those engaged in them. Personally, though, I still think they are totally irrelevant jobs that shouldn’t exist except to do activities that are required to be done because of other irrelevant jobs being done by the people these jobs purport to serve. And yes, before you jump on me, I admit to having done (at some point in my life) some jobs that I have myself thought are bullshit, or perhaps even my current occupation is irrelevant. Be that as it may, and I cannot emphasise this enough: That. Does. Not. Change. The. Argument.
On another note: The brilliant Douglas Adams had seen this way back in 1978 when he thought of the Ark B people from Golgafrincham. Perhaps, as SpaceX starts the colonisation of Mars, we could do the same? <Sigh> How I wish!
And before I go: Here’s an interesting article by Ian Hunter, a senior solutions architect in Microsoft about how he sorts people to employ on his projects.
