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As businesses grow they accumulate more and more jobs that don't obviously create product for two main reasons.
1. The laws of cruft, kludge and blood means Shit Happens and it's too expensive to fix compared to other stuff.
2. They can afford it now and it still has positive risk-adjusted ROI
Also this appears to be someone who hasn't figured out even the most basic kind of economic thinking which is I dunno relevant to why businesses are the way they are.
I've had people defend this book and/or its thesis to me before but not one person has shown this to me presumably because they know it doesn't survive the briefest contact with reality.
All of it is wrong but I can definitely see why a 20 something programmer who wants to ship a feature straight to prod would find it enticing. The flunky bit, especially is just sexist claptrap.
This (Graeber's taxonomy) is one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever seen in my life and also proof for my theory that academics need to work a regular corporate job once in their life.
all the examples I’ve seen from this book are so funny. his publisher should have had it fact checked by anyone who has ever had a real job outside academia
all the examples I’ve seen from this book are so funny. his publisher should have had it fact checked by anyone who has ever had a real job outside academia
Bullshit Jobs is truly one of the worst books ever written, not just for the abominable influence it’s had on the world (the worst since The Population Bomb in this respect) but because of how incredibly poorly written it is
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the old analog telephone system strived for 5 nines uptime (99.999%) because the marginal cost of getting past that was so high as to be essentially unobtainable, and at 5 nines thats 5 minutes of unavailability per year
even at 5x9s, for 750m bags a year (860m us pax/yr), that's 7500 lost bags/yr
he argues in the book that its possible to fix lost airline luggage permanently but They Just Don't Want To Fix Their Systems so we end up with "duct tapers" temporarily patching over the problem
This idea - that any system will have 100% reliability - is quite literally deranged.
no problems that matter are ever fully and permanently fixable! much of society’s work is maintenance, and maintenance is creative design
