What Do You Actually Do?
Forget your job title or your daily tasks for a second. The real question is: what do you actually do? What do you create, improve, or contribute?
For some folks, answering this is pretty straightforward. But if you’re, say, a middle manager overseeing a human resources team at an insurance underwriting company… well, that might be a bit harder to nail down.
The Rise of Service Jobs
Think about jobs over the last hundred years. Service jobs used to be less than a quarter of all jobs. Now, they make up nearly 80% of the workforce.
When we picture service jobs, we often think of things like:
- Serving coffee
- Finding clothes in the back room at a shop
- Carrying bags to a hotel room
These jobs create value you can easily see – a nice coffee, a new outfit, or luggage delivered without throwing out your back. They might feel like a luxury, but the value is clear.
Service Sector: Much Broader Than You Think
But here’s the thing: the service sector is way bigger than just those hands-on roles. It includes everyone from call center salespeople all the way up to CEOs.
In fact, these days it’s quite tough to find a job outside the service sector. Why? Because those non-service roles often require special certifications. Keep that in mind, it’s important later.
The Puzzle of Bull Jobs
So, we have this huge growth in the service sector. And with it comes a rise in what some call “bull jobs” – jobs that seem… pointless.
This seems odd, right? Shouldn’t the efficient free market just get rid of these jobs? Shouldn’t companies with employees who contribute nothing be at a disadvantage compared to leaner, more efficient organizations? You’d think so… but often, that’s not what happens.
To understand why, we need to look at how money and work function in modern advanced capitalism, especially how they allow people to have jobs just to justify their own existence.
A Look Back: Soviet Communism
To get a handle on this quirk, strangely enough, we need to start by looking at Soviet communism.
The Soviet Union was built on the idea of noble labor. The state said work was honorable and dignified. The word “soviet” itself roughly means “workers council.” People took immense pride in their work above almost everything else.
This led to a problem: what happens when there isn’t enough work for everyone? The drive for full employment meant some people ended up with tasks that were clearly redundant.
- Factory managers hired as many people as they possibly could because overseeing many workers was seen as honorable.
- They also feared that if they didn’t give people jobs now, they wouldn’t be able to get the workers they did need in the future.
This practice became known as “worker hoarding.” It meant some people were given jobs like counting endless inventories of nuts and bolts.
Now, obviously, the modern Western world is hugely different from 1950s Russia. But there are some similarities that are a bit concerning.
The Theory of Unnecessary Jobs
The idea that many jobs are fundamentally unnecessary really gained ground after the anthropologist David Graeber published his book, fittingly titled, “Bull Jobs.”
In his book, Graeber laid out five broad categories of jobs that have become increasingly common:
The Five Categories of Bull Jobs
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The Flunkies: These people exist mainly to make others feel important or special.
- Examples: Doormen, receptionists, chauffeurs, personal assistants.
- Often, these roles could easily be replaced by technology, or might not be needed at all.
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The Duct Tapers: These people fix problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place or could be fixed permanently.
- Example: An inventory manager whose main job is manually updating stock levels because the automated system is broken or permission isn’t shared with floor staff.
- Graeber shared an example of a duct taper whose entire job was fixing mistakes made by a supposedly brilliant statistician. This “star” employee was actually terrible, and the duct taper had to battle bureaucracy just to correct the errors before they caused damage.
- Nuance: This shows that sometimes the person in the “bull job” (the duct taper fixing mistakes) might be contributing value, but only because of a needless obstacle (the incompetent statistician and bureaucracy). Removing the obstacle would allow them to be more effective, whereas just getting rid of the duct taper wouldn’t solve the root issue.
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The Box Tickers: These are people who work purely to make an organization look legitimate to other organizations, often creating outputs nobody uses.
- Examples: People who create internal company newspapers full of stories about executives or… whatever else goes in there. Nobody reads them, but having one makes the company look “proper.”
- Other examples: Party planning committees, “culture coordinators.”
- If a company didn’t have these things, it might look like a small, unprofessional operation, not worth doing business with or working for. So, they exist purely for appearance.
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The Goons: Now we’re getting into jobs that can actually have a negative impact on society but make themselves necessary just by existing in one place, forcing others to hire similar roles defensively.
- Classic example: In-house corporate lawyers. They don’t produce goods or services, but if you don’t have them, it will cost you a lot more to hire external lawyers to fight lawsuits from companies that do have internal lawyers.
- A particularly stark example: Patent trolls. These companies buy up firms with generic patents and then sue other companies, hoping they’ll settle out of court rather than fight expensive legal battles. Think of the famous case where Apple sued Samsung over a patent for a rectangular phone with rounded corners. What value was created by the thousands of people whose full-time job was enforcing that ruling?
- Other examples: Lobbyists (who work to change rules purely for their employer’s advantage) and many salespeople (who just move business from one company to another, acting as a middleman). Goons are often seen as engaging in a negative-sum game.
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The Task Masters: These are people whose main job is to watch over and manage others who don’t really need managing or watching.
- Effective management exists, especially when coordinating diverse skills. But a sales manager overseeing a team where everyone has the exact same job title? That’s different.
- At best, they might be an overpaid cheerleader.
- At worst, they are distractions desperate to justify their existence by calling pointless meetings or creating meaningless “strategic mission statements,” pulling people away from work where they could potentially do something meaningful.
Combining Roles
These categories aren’t always separate. Some particularly pointless employees might find their role is a mix of several or all five. Many middle managers, for instance, oversee fundamentally useless departments and only have their job because a complex, multi-layered corporate structure makes people at the top feel important.
How Did We Get Here?
Okay, but why do these jobs exist, especially in capitalist systems that are supposed to be efficient?
- Bureaucracy: Like the Soviet Union which created bull jobs out of an obsession with full employment, our systems are also victims of bureaucracy. While capitalism is supposed to weed out inefficiency, incentives can get twisted.
- Misaligned Incentives: Just like Soviet factory managers hoarded staff to look important, modern middle managers might do the same to build their little empire.
- Appearance over Substance: Soviet factory walls were covered in propaganda celebrating labor. Modern LinkedIn pages are covered in self-promoting posts about “spearheading joint development projects” for “streamlining customer satisfaction” within elaborate, sometimes nonsensical, corporate structures. It’s about looking important and busy.
- The 40-Hour Obsession: Just as the Soviet Union was obsessed with everyone having a job, even if meaningless, modern workplaces are obsessed with everyone working a full 40 hours a week, even if it means… making up meaningless tasks to fill the time.
- Regulation and Complexity: Let’s be clear: countries like the USA aren’t purely “free markets.” There are laws and regulations governing pretty much everything. Want to build a factory? You need specific zoning, tenders, insurance, tariff compliance, etc. All these steps involve institutions that themselves can harbor bull jobs. This isn’t an argument for or against big government (some policies are crucial, some are bull), but it creates complexity.
- The Role of Companies: Companies themselves have significantly contributed. The massive growth in lobbying has led to more and more complex legislation. This complexity makes starting and running a business incredibly difficult without a team of accountants and lawyers just to navigate the bureaucracy. Some might argue this benefits large corporations by making it harder for small competitors, but the point is that the system itself generates these roles.
Is There a Solution?
So, can we fix this problem of bull jobs?
- As a society? Maybe. One step could be to embrace the idea that it’s okay not to work 40 hours a week. The line between a “bull” task and a “not bull” task isn’t always clear, and most jobs have some level of bull built in. If it were acceptable to say “my work is done, I’m leaving for the day,” it might become a lot easier to see who truly isn’t contributing.
- As an individual? Ah, probably not easily. If you find yourself in a role with a lot of bull tasks, you might just have to tough it out in the short term. Maybe work on a side project outside of work that feels less like bull. Or, you know, just lean into it. Plenty of people take pride in their fancy-sounding, superfluous titles. Maybe knowing it’s all a bit bull makes those pointless meetings and irrelevant PowerPoints easier to stomach.
Of course, if you really want to dive deep into bureaucracy and complex systems, so complex they generate their own bull jobs, you could explore something like the video game Eve Online. They’ve cultivated a financial system so intricate it mirrors some of these real-world issues.
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