Eliminate bullshit jobs
David Graeber defines “bullshit” jobs as “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” In fact, he makes a distinction between “shit jobs” and “bullshit jobs”.
“Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried… Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honour and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers - as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do.”
The table below has the original five categories from Graeber’s book. As a leader, you must strive to eliminate such jobs so your people can do real work. And you too must free up your time, if you see yourself in a bullshit job. Remember, you’re eliminating the job, not the people.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Flunkies | Their purpose is to make others feel important. |
| Goons | The only reason for their existence is that other companies also hire them. |
| Duct-tapers | They exist because the system is broken and their bosses would rather have a human being bridge those flaws than make a systemic change. |
| Box-tickers | They allow organisations to claim that a lot is happening; often through paperwork, reports, surveys, newsletters and what have you; when in truth they’re not creating much value. |
| Taskmasters | Their entire responsibility is delegating work to others. They manage people who don’t need management, and create more unnecessary work for others to do. |
From my experience, I’d like to add three other categories to Graeber’s list.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Empire builders | Like task masters, they too delegate work to others. Unlike task masters, the importance of people in these jobs depends on how many layers of people work under them and how big each layer is. |
| Hand wavers | These jobs may not create anything of value themselves, but people who play them are articulate, smart and can make convincing points in a boardroom or for that matter, a video conference. |
| Gatekeepers | Their existence is all about approving things that others need to do. If it wasn’t for the fear of a very unlikely adverse event, these jobs wouldn’t exist. Yet they do, and they bottleneck people who might actually create something of value. |
Let’s check out a few examples.
Many project managers have to communicate for their teams. However, if the team has effective communication patterns already in place, the project manager can focus on something else.
How can you remove pointless approvals and hand discretion back to your team(s)?
When you have to do a lot of support and investigation calls, does that mean something’s wrong with the quality or user experience of your product? Shouldn’t you be paying more attention there?
Why be the internal journalist who consumes updates from the team and radiates it to others? How about championing an enterprise social network? That way, everyone is their own journalist!
Jobs that create nothing valuable need more meetings and calls than otherwise. The meetings are a proxy for importance and the jobs just mask problems in the system. Most people want to do something meaningful instead - I’m sure you do too.