2025-09-17
To practice writting english, I have decided that I will be updating this blog every day with some random content until next week, when my English test happens.
Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber is indeed a piece of interesting and daring work to challenge the assumption of capitalism, where it's assumed that every employee must be carrying out useful work since "a profit seeking firm will never spend their precious money and human resource hiring people who is actually not really needed"
He started the book with his hunch, that there are many jobs that seems useless, in a sense that if the employees would evaporate one day, no one would notice, and the society will function as normal, or even better. He mentioned some evil ones like the huge amount of lawyers that Nintendo and Disney hired to make sure no one is posting a "unauthorized" image of mikey mouse, the advertising agencies that make up the needs for customers, and some not evil but certainly useless jobs like managers that manages a team of managers who then manage a team of middle managers that manages a team of totally competent and smart adults who doesn't actually need any management. Given such large amount of examples, his hunch is proven to be real and legible. Now bullshit jobs are real, he followed up his statement by categorizing the types of "bullshit jobs".
The first one is the "Flunkies", whose sole existence is to make their superiors look more important. Having a receptionist for a company with only a dozen of people doesn't make much sense, but they need the receptionist so that others can take this company seriously.
Similar to flunkies, but aggressive in nature, "Goons" is used by the author for the second type of BS jobs. The employees usually feel they are unnecessarily aggressive, and the content of the job is manipulative by purpose, thus contributing negatively to the society.
Then, the "Duct Tapers", which literally means someone who is hired to fix a problem. There is nothing wrong inherently with hiring people to fix problems. The "problem" is, when the system is unstable enough and is in dire need of fixing the core cause or a whole reconstruction, hiring "Duct tapers" can only indefinitely delay the final apocalypse, thus the name. Sometimes the problem isn't even that severe, and are instead caused by upper levels simply being lazy, who are either too self-rightous to acknowledge the problem or fix themselves.
"Box tickers" refers to people who are hired not to fix anything that should be fixed by a lazy superior, but to complete utterly meaningless tasks that their superiors have created from out of thin air.
"Taskmasters" are people who in turn make up the jobs for the box tickers. According to the author's note, the examples mentioned are usually creating tasks unwillingly, either under pressure from upper levels or to defend their job titles.
Note to self: After a proofreading, some grammartical problems have been caught. I should never skip proofreading if there's sufficient time left.