Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  Cleaning is a necessary function: things get dusty even if they just sit there, and the ordinary conduct of life tends to leave traces that need to be tidied up. But cleaning up after someone who makes a completely gratuitous and unnecessary mess is always irritating. Having a full-time occupation cleaning up after such a person can only breed resentment. Sigmund Freud even spoke of “housewife’s neurosis”: a condition that he believed affected women forced to limit their life horizons to tidying up after others, and who therefore became fanatical about domestic hygiene as a form of revenge. This is often the moral agony of the duct taper: to be forced to organize one’s working life around caring about a certain value (say, cleanliness) precisely because more important people could not care less.

  The most obvious examples of duct tapers are underlings whose jobs are to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors.

  Magda: I once worked for an SME [a small or medium-size enterprise] where I was the “tester.” I was required to proofread research reports written by their posh star researcher-statistician.

  The man didn’t know the first thing about statistics, and he struggled to produce grammatically correct sentences. He tended to avoid using verbs. He was so bad, I’d reward myself with a cake if I found a coherent paragraph. I lost twelve pounds working in that company. My job was to convince him to undertake a major reworking of every report he produced. Of course, he would never agree to correct anything, let alone undertake a rework, so I would then have to take the report to the company directors. They were statistically illiterate too, but being the directors, they could drag things out even more.

  There is, it seems, a whole genre of jobs that involve correcting the damage done by a superior who holds his position for reasons unrelated to ability to do the work. (This overlaps somewhat with flunky positions where the jobholder has to do the superior’s work, but it’s not exactly the same thing.) Here’s another example, of a programmer who got a job for a firm run by a Viennese psychologist who fancied himself an old-style scientific revolutionary, and who had invented what was, in the company, referred to simply as “the algorithm.” The algorithm aimed to reproduce human speech. The company sold it to pharmacists to use on their websites. Except it didn’t work:

  Nouri: The company’s founding “genius” was this Viennese research psychologist, who claimed to have discovered the Algorithm. For many months, I was never allowed to see it. I just wrote stuff that used it.

  The psychologist’s code kept failing to give sensible results. Typical cycle:

  • I demonstrate his code barfs on a ridiculously basic sentence.

  • He’d wear Confused Frown: “Oh . . . how strange . . .” like I just discovered the Death Star’s one tiny weakness.

  • He’d disappear into his cave for two hours . . .

  • Triumphantly emerges with bug fix—now it’s perfect!

  • Go to step one.

  In the end, the programmer was reduced to writing very primitive Eliza scripts14 to mimic speech for the Web pages just to cover up the fact that the Algorithm was basically gibberish, and the company, it turned out, was a pure vanity project run by a rented CEO who used to manage a gym.

  Many duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct—tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven’t been either because no one has gotten around to it, or because the manager wants to maintain as many subordinates as possible, or because of some structural confusion, or because of some combination of the three. I have any number of testimonies of this sort. Here’s a sampling:

  • “I worked as a programmer for a travel company. Some poor person’s job was to receive updated plane timetables via email several times a week and copy them by hand into Excel.”

  • “My job was to transfer information about the state’s oil wells into a different set of notebooks than they were currently in.”

  • “My day consisted of photocopying veterans’ health records for seven and a half hours a day . . . Workers were told time and again that it was too costly to buy the machines for digitizing.”

  • “I was given one responsibility: watching an in-box that received emails in a certain form from employees in the company asking for tech help, and copy and paste it into a different form. Not only was this a textbook example of an automatable job, it actually used to be automated! There was some kind of disagreement between various managers that led to higher-ups issuing a standardization that nullified the automation.”

  On the social level, duct taping has traditionally been women’s work. Throughout history, prominent men have wandered about oblivious to half of what’s going on around them, treading on a thousand toes; it was typically their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters who were left with the responsibility of performing the emotional labor of soothing egos, calming nerves, and negotiating solutions to the problems they created. In a more material sense, duct taping might be considered a classic working-class function. The architect may come up with a plan that looks stunning on paper, but it’s the builder who has to figure out how to actually install electrical sockets in a circular room or to use real duct tape to hold things together that in reality simply don’t fit together the way the blueprints say they should.

  In this latter case, we’re not really talking about a bullshit job at all, any more than we’re talking about a bullshit job when an orchestra conductor interprets the score of a Beethoven symphony or an actress plays Lady Macbeth. There will always be a certain gap between blueprints, schemas, and plans and their real-world implementation; therefore, there will always be people charged with making the necessary adjustments. What makes such a role bullshit is when the plan obviously can’t work and any competent architect should have known it; when the system is so stupidly designed that it will fail in completely predictable ways, but rather than fix the problem, the organization prefers to hire full-time employees whose main or entire job is to deal with the damage. It’s as if a homeowner, upon discovering a leak in the roof, decided it was too much bother to hire a roofer to reshingle it, and instead stuck a bucket underneath and hired someone whose full-time job was to periodically dump the water.

  It goes without saying that duct tapers are almost always aware they have a bullshit job and are usually quite angry about it.

  I encountered a classic example of a duct taper while working as a lecturer at a prominent British university. One day the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor, and a jagged half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling cheerfully over my desk. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage but announced gravely that, since there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I would have to stack the books and then not touch anything else, whereupon he would return at the earliest available opportunity to remove the dangling frame.

  I duly stacked the books, but the carpenter never reappeared. There ensued a series of daily calls from Anthropology to Buildings and Grounds. Each day someone in the Anthropology Department would call, often multiple times, to ask about the fate of the carpenter, who always turned out to have something extremely pressing to do. By the time a week was out, I had taken to doing my work on the floor in a kind of little nest assembled from fallen books, and it had become apparent that there was one man employed by Buildings and Grounds whose entire job it was to apologize for the fact that the carpenter hadn’t come. He seemed like a nice man. He was exceedingly polite and even-tempered, and always had just a slight trace of wistful melancholy about him, which made him quite well suited for the job. Still, it’s hard to imagine he was particularly happy with his choice of career. Most of all: there didn’t seem any obvious reason the school couldn’t simply get rid of the position and use the money to hire another carpenter, in which case his job would not be needed anyway.

  4. what box tickers do

>   I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. The following testimony is from a woman hired to coordinate leisure activities in a care home:

  Betsy: Most of my job was to interview residents and fill out a recreation form that listed their preferences. That form was then logged on a computer and promptly forgotten about forever. The paper form was also kept in a binder, for some reason. Completion of the forms was by far the most important part of my job in the eyes of my boss, and I would catch hell if I got behind on them. A lot of the time, I would complete a form for a short-term resident, and they would check out the next day. I threw away mountains of paper. The interviews mostly just annoyed the residents, as they knew it was just bullshit paperwork, and no one was going to care about their individual preferences.

  The most miserable thing about box-ticking jobs is that the employee is usually aware that not only does the box-ticking exercise do nothing toward accomplishing its ostensible purpose, it actually undermines it, since it diverts time and resources away from the purpose itself. So here Betsy was aware that the time she spent processing forms about how residents might wish to be entertained was time not spent entertaining them. She did manage to engage in some leisure activities with the residents (“Fortunately, I was able to play the piano for the residents every day before dinner, and that was a beautiful time, with singing, smiling, and tears”), but as so often in such situations, there was a sense that these moments were indulgences granted her as a reward for carrying out her primary duties, which consisted of the filling out and proper disposition of forms.15

  We’re all familiar with box ticking as a form of government. If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad—taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops—the first reaction is invariably to create a “fact-finding commission” to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it’s a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that any of this was happening (this, of course, is rarely true); second of all, it’s a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it. (This is usually not true, either.) A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not. But large corporations will behave in exactly the same way if, say, they are revealed to be employing slaves or child laborers in their garment factories or dumping toxic waste. All of this is bullshit, but the true bullshit job category applies to those who are not just there to stave off the public (this at least could be said to serve some kind of useful purpose for the company) but to those who do so within the organization itself.16

  The corporate compliance industry might be considered an intermediary form. It is explicitly created by (US) government regulation:

  Layla: I work in a growing industry born out of the federal regulation the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

  Basically US companies have to do due diligence to make sure they aren’t doing business with corrupt overseas firms. Clients are big companies—tech, auto companies, etc.—who might have myriad smallish businesses they supply or work with in places like China (my region).

  Our company creates due diligence reports for our clients: basically one to two hours of internet research that is then edited into a report. There is a lot of jargon and training that goes into making sure every report is consistent.

  Sometimes the internet reveals something that’s an easy red flag—like a company’s boss had a criminal case—but I would say the realness/bullshit factor is 20/80. Unless someone has been criminally charged, I have no way of knowing from my apartment in Brooklyn if they’ve been handed an envelope full of cash in Guangzhou.17

  Of course, on some level, all bureaucracies work on this principle: once you introduce formal measures of success, “reality”—for the organization—becomes that which exists on paper, and the human reality that lies behind it is a secondary consideration at best. I vividly remember the endless discussions that ensued, when I was a junior professor at Yale University, about a first-year archaeology graduate student whose husband had died in a car crash on the first day of the term. For some reason, the shock caused her to develop a mental block on doing paperwork. She still attended lectures and was an avid participant in class discussions; and she turned in papers and got excellent grades. But eventually the professor would always discover she hadn’t formally signed up for the class. As the éminence grise of the department would point out during faculty meetings, that was all that really mattered.

  “As far as the guys in Registration are concerned, if you don’t get the forms in on time, you didn’t take the course. So your performance is completely irrelevant.” Other professors would mumble and fuss, and there would be occasional careful allusions to her “personal tragedy”—the exact nature of which was never specified. (I had to learn about it from other students later on.) But no one raised any fundamental objections to Registration’s attitude. That was just reality—from an administrative point of view.

  Eventually, after last-minute attempts to have her fill out a sheaf of late-application appeal documents also met with no response, and after numerous long soliloquies from the Director of Graduate Studies about just how inconsiderate it was of her to make things so difficult for those who were only trying to help her,18 the student was expelled from the program on the grounds that anyone so incapable of handling paperwork was obviously not suited for an academic career.

  This mentality seems to increase, not decrease, when government functions are reorganized to be more like a business, and citizens, for example, are redefined as “customers.” Mark is Senior Quality and Performance Officer in a local council in the United Kingdom:

  Mark: Most of what I do—especially since moving away from frontline customer-facing roles—involves ticking boxes, pretending things are great to senior managers, and generally “feeding the beast” with meaningless numbers that give the illusion of control. None of which helps the citizens of that council in the slightest.

  I’ve heard an apocryphal story about a Chief Executive who turned on the fire alarm, so all the staff gathered in the car park. He then told all the employees who were with a customer when the alarm went off to return to the building immediately. The other employees could return when one of the people dealing with a customer needed them for something, and so on and so forth. If this had happened when I was at that council, I would have been in the car park for a very long time!

  Mark goes on to describe local government as little more than an endless sequence of box-ticking rituals revolving around monthly “target figures.” These were put up on posters in the office and coded green for “improving,” amber for “stable,” and red for “decline.” Supervisors appeared innocent even of the basic concept of random statistical variation—or at least, pretended to be—as each month, those with green-coded figures were rewarded, while those with red urged to do a better job. Almost none of this had any real bearing on providing services:

  Mark: One project I worked on was to come up with some housing “service standards.” The project involved playing lip service to customers, and having long discussions with managers at meetings, before finally writing up a report that got praised (mainly because it was presented and laid out attractively) by managers in the meeting. The report then got filed away—making absolutely no difference to the residents but still somehow requiring many hours of staff time, not to mention all the hours the residents themselves spent filling in surveys or attending focus groups. In my experience, this is how most policy works in local government.19

  Note here the importance of the physical attractiveness of the report. This is a theme that comes up frequently in testimonies about box-ticking operations and even more so in the corporate sector than in government. If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured b
y how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world. And just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role20 was to polish his horses’ armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so may present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports. Many of these reports are nothing more than props in a Kabuki-like corporate theater—no one actually reads them all the way through.21 But this doesn’t stop ambitious executives from cheerfully shelling out half a workman’s yearly wages of company money just to be able to say, “Ooh yes, we commissioned a report on that.”

  Hannibal: I do digital consultancy for global pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments. I often work with global PR agencies on this, and write reports with titles like How to Improve Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders. It is pure, unadulterated bullshit, and serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing departments. But it is very easy to charge a very large amount of money to write bullshit reports. I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point during their allotted meeting time, but the team I wrote it for was very happy with it nonetheless.