Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  On the other hand, my weekend role was a breeze. It was quite a sought-after position in the authority because of the high rate of overtime pay. In that office, we did nothing. We made Sunday dinners, and I even heard stories of someone bringing a sunbed-recliner into work so they could relax on it whilst we put the TV on. We surfed the internet, watched DVDs—but more often, we just went to sleep, as there was nothing to do. We would get some rest in before Monday morning started.

  In other cases, the rules are set out explicitly, but in such a way that they are clearly made to be broken.5 Robin, hired as a temp in North Carolina but not assigned any duties, managed to turn technical competence into a way to mitigate the experience—to a degree:

  Robin: I was told that it was very important that I stay busy, but I wasn’t to play games or surf the Web. My primary function seemed to be occupying a chair and contributing to the decorum of the office.

  At first, this seemed pretty easy, but I quickly discovered that looking busy when you aren’t is one of the least pleasant office activities imaginable. In fact, after two days, it was clear that this was going to be the worst job I had ever had.

  I installed Lynx, a text-only Web browser that basically looks like a DOS [disk operating system] window. No images, no Flash, no JavaScript—just monospaced text on an endless black background. My absentminded browsing of the internet now appeared to be the work of a skilled technician, the Web browser a terminal into which diligently typed commands signaled my endless productivity.

  This allowed Robin to spend most of his time editing Wikipedia pages.

  As far as temporary jobs are concerned, the worker is often effectively being tested for his or her ability to just sit there and pretend to work. In most cases, one is not, like Robin, told explicitly whether they are allowed to play computer games; but if there are a lot of temporary hires, it’s usually possible to make discreet inquiries of one’s fellows and get some sense of what the ground rules are and just how flagrantly one has to violate them to actually get fired.

  Sometimes in longer-term positions, there is enough camaraderie among employees that they can discuss the situation openly and find common strategies to use against supervisors. Solidarity in such circumstances can bring a sense of common purpose. Robert speaks of the legal aides at a crooked law firm:

  Robert: The weirdest thing about this job is how, in a twisted way, it was kind of enjoyable. The legal assistants were all smart and interesting people, and working a job that was so clearly meaningless led to a great deal of bonding and gallows humor among the team. I managed to maneuver my way into a desk with its back to the wall, so I could spend as much time as possible surfing the internet or teaching myself computer programming. Much of what we did was obviously inefficient, like manually relabeling thousands of files, so I’d automate it and then use the time it would have taken me to complete it manually to do whatever I wanted. I also always made sure to have at least two projects run by different bosses, so that I could tell both of them that I was spending a lot of time on the other project.

  At the very least, there can be a conspiracy of silence on such shirking strategies; sometimes, active cooperation. In other cases, one can be lucky enough to find a supervisor who is both willing to be fairly honest and agreeable enough to set almost explicit parameters for loafing. The emphasis here is on “almost.” One can never simply ask. Here’s someone who has an on-call job at a travel insurance company. He’s basically a duct taper, there to straighten out things once every month or two when something goes predictably awry in their relation to their partner company. Otherwise:

  Calvin: Any given week, there will be a few situations where [our partner company] is supposed to reach out to my team for advisory. So for up to twenty minutes a week, we have actual work to do. Ordinarily, though, I send five or eight fifteen-word emails a day, and every few days, there’s a ten-minute team meeting. The rest of the workweek is functionally mine, though not in any way I can flaunt. So I flit through social media, RSS aggregation, and coursework in a wide but short browser window I keep discreetly on the second of my two monitors. And every few hours, I’ll remember I’m at a workplace and respond to my one waiting email with something like: “We agree with the thing you said. Please proceed with the thing.” Then I only have to pretend to be visibly overworked for seven more hours each day.

  David: So if you didn’t look busy, who would notice? Does that person know there’s nothing really to do and just wants you to look busy, do you think, or do they actually believe it’s a real full-time job?

  Calvin: Our team manager seems to know what’s up, but she’s never let on to having problems with it. Occasionally, I will have days with zero work at all, so I’ll let her know that and volunteer to help out another department if they’re bogged down in some way. That help is never needed, it seems, so my letting her know is my way of declaring, “I’m going to be on Twitter a full eight hours, but I told you in advance, so it’s actually extremely noble of me.” She schedules hourlong weekly meetings that haven’t once had ten minutes of content—we spend the rest of them chatting casually. And since her bosses, up however high, are aware of the genuine problems the other company can cause, I think it’s presumed we’re wrangling their nonsense, or at least might have to at any given second.

  Not all supervisors, then, subscribe to the ideology of “You’re on my time.” Particularly in large organizations where managers don’t have much of a proprietary feeling anyway and don’t have reason to believe they’ll get in much trouble with their own superiors if they notice one of their subordinates slacking off, they might well let matters take their own course.6 This kind of polite, coded, mutual consideration is perhaps about as close to honesty in such situations as one is likely to get. But even in such maximally benevolent circumstances, there is a taboo on being too explicit. The one thing that could never, apparently, happen, is for anyone to actually say, “Basically, you’re just here in case of emergencies. Otherwise, do what you like and try not to get in anybody’s way.” And even Calvin feels obliged to pretend to be overworked, just as a reciprocal gesture of appreciation and respect.

  More typically supervisors simply find subtle ways to say “Just shut up and play along.”

  Maria: My first meeting on arriving to start this job was with my line manager, who was very quick to explain that she had absolutely no idea what the person who used to do my job actually did. But luckily for me, that predecessor was still around. She had just moved up inside the team and would be able to show me everything that she had done in her former role. She did. It took about an hour and a half.

  “Everything she had done” also turned out to be virtually nothing. Maria couldn’t handle the idleness. She begged her coworkers to let her do a share of their work; something to make herself feel she had some reason to be around. Driven to distraction, she finally made the mistake of openly complaining to her manager:

  Maria: I spoke to my manager, who very clearly told me not to “advertise the fact” that I wasn’t mega busy. I asked her to at least send any unclaimed work my way, and she told me she would show me a few of the things she does, but never did.

  This is as close to being told directly to pretend to work as one is likely to get. Even more dramatic, but in no way unusual, is the experience of Lilian, hired as Digital Product Project Manager in the IT department of a major publishing house. Despite the somewhat pretentious-sounding title, Lilian insists that such positions are not necessarily bullshit—she’d had a similar gig before, and while it was relatively undemanding, she did get to work with a small, friendly team solving genuine problems. “This new place, however . . .”

  As best she could reconstruct what happened (much of it had occurred just before she arrived), her immediate supervisor, an arrogant blowhard obsessed with the latest business fads and buzzwords, had sent out a series of bizarre and contradictory directives that had the unintended consequence of leaving Lilian with no responsibilities
at all. When she gently pointed out there was a problem, her concerns were brushed aside with eye rolls and similar gestures of impatient dismissal.

  Lilian: One would think that, as a Project Manager, I would somehow be “running” the process. Except there is no room in the process for that to happen. No one is running this process. Everyone is confused.

  Other people expect me to help them and organize things and give them the confidence that people usually look to a Project Manager for because I’ve been given that title. But I have no authority and no control over anything.

  So I read a lot. I watch TV. I have no idea what my boss thinks I do all day.

  As a result of her situation, Lilian has to come up with two quite difficult false fronts: one for her superior and another for her underlings. In the first case, because she can only speculate what, if anything, her supervisor actually wants her to do; in the second, in the fact that about the only positive contribution she is allowed to make is to adopt an air of cheerful confidence that might inspire her subordinates to do a better job. (“Cheer up the troops,” as Pauline might put it.) Or at least not infect them with her own desperation and confusion. Underneath, Lilian was riddled with anxiety. It’s worth quoting her comments at length because they give a sense of the spiritual toll such a situation can take:

  Lilian: What’s it like to have a job like this? Demoralizing. Depressing. I get most of the meaning in my life from my job, and now my job has no meaning or purpose.

  It gives me anxiety because I think that at any moment someone is actually going to realize that nothing would change if I were not here and they could save themselves the money.

  It also trashes my confidence. If I’m not constantly being met by challenges that I am overcoming, how do I know that I’m capable? Maybe all my ability to do good work has atrophied. Maybe I don’t know anything useful. I wanted to be able to handle bigger and more complex projects, but now I handle nothing. If I don’t exercise those skills, I’ll lose them.

  It also makes me afraid that other people in the office think the problem is me; that I’m choosing to slack off or I’m choosing to be useless, when nothing about this is my choice, and all my attempts to make myself more useful or give myself more work are met with rejection and not a small amount of derision for attempting to rock the boat and challenge my boss’s authority.

  I have never been paid so much to do so little, and I know I’m not earning it. I know my coworkers with other job titles do significantly more work. I might even get paid more than them! How bullshit would that be? I’d be lucky if they didn’t hate me on that basis alone.

  Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turned into a parasite and fraud. An employee would have to be confident indeed not to begin to doubt herself in such a situation. (And such confidence can be pernicious in itself: it was her boss’s idiotic cocksureness, after all, that created the situation to begin with.)

  Psychologists sometimes refer to the kind of dilemmas described in this section as “scriptlessness.” Psychological studies, for instance, find that men or women who had experienced unrequited love during adolescence were in most cases eventually able to come to terms with the experience and showed few permanent emotional scars. But for those who had been the objects of unrequited love, it was quite another matter. Many still struggled with guilt and confusion. One major reason, researchers concluded, was precisely the lack of cultural models. Anyone who falls in love with someone who does not return their affections has thousands of years’ worth of romantic literature to tell them exactly how they are supposed to feel; however, while this literature provides detailed insight on the experience of being Cyrano, it generally tells you very little about how you are supposed to feel—let alone what you’re supposed to do—if you’re Roxane.7

  Many, probably most, bullshit jobs involve a similar agonizing scriptlessness. Not only are the codes of behavior ambiguous, no one is even sure what they are supposed to say or how they are supposed to feel about their situation.

  on the misery of not being a cause

  Whatever the ambiguities, almost all sources concur that the worst thing about a bullshit job is simply the knowledge that it’s bullshit. As noted in chapter 3, much of our sense of being a self, a being discrete from its surrounding environment, comes from the joyful realization that we can have predictable effects on that environment. This is true for infants and remains true throughout life. To take away that joy entirely is to squash a human like a bug. Obviously, the ability to affect one’s environment cannot be taken away completely—rearranging objects in one’s backpack or playing Fruit Mahjong is still acting on the world in some way—but most people in the world today, certainly in wealthy countries, are now taught to see their work as their principal way of having an impact on the world, and the fact that they are paid to do it as proof that their efforts do indeed have some kind of meaningful effect. Ask someone “What do you do?” and he or she will assume you mean “for a living.”

  Many speak of the intense frustration of learning gradually that they are instead paid to do nothing. Charles, for instance, started out of college working in the video game industry. In his first job, at Sega, he began as a tester but was soon promoted to “localization,” only to discover it was a typical on-call job where he was expected to sit around pretending to work in between dealing with problems that came up only once a week, on average. Like Lilian, the situation made him doubt his own value: “Working for a company that essentially was paying me to sit around doing nothing made me feel completely worthless.” He quit after superiors bawled him out for being late to work and threw himself instead into a whirlwind romance. A month later, he tried again.

  At first, he thought the new job, also for a gaming company, was going to be different:

  Charles: In 2002 I was hired by [BigGameCo], in LA, as an associate producer. I was excited about this job because I was told I would be in charge of writing the design document that bridged the desires of the artists with the realities of what the programmers could do. For the first few months, though, there was nothing to do. My big duty every day was ordering dinner from a delivery place for the rest of the staff.

  Again, just sitting around, doing emails. Most days, I would go home early, because, why the fuck not?

  With so much time on my hands, I started dreaming of having my own business and began using all the free time to start making the website for it. Eventually the producer above me threatened to report me to the owner for doing this though. So I had to stop.

  Finally, I was allowed to start work on the sound design document. I threw myself into this work. I was so happy to be doing it. When it was done, the producer told me to upload it to the shared server for everyone working on the game.

  Immediately there was uproar. The producer who hired me hadn’t realized there was a sound design department a floor below us that makes these documents for each game. I had done someone else’s job. This producer had already made some other big mistake, so he asked me to take the blame for this so he wouldn’t get fired. Every ounce of my soul rebelled against doing this. My friends in programming, though, who were actually enjoying having an incompetent producer because it meant they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, asked me to take the bullet for them. They didn’t want the producer replaced by someone that would rein them in. So I accepted responsibility, quit the next day, and haven’t worked for someone else since then.

  Thus did Charles say farewell to the world of formal paid employment and began playing guitar for a living and sleeping in his van.

  Things are rarely quite as obvious as this: cases where t
he worker is basically doing nothing at all (though as we’ve seen, this certainly can happen). It’s more common for there to be at least a modicum of work, and for the worker to either immediately, or gradually, come to understand that work is pointless. Most employees do think about the social value of what they do, and whatever tacit yardstick they apply, once they judge their work to be pointless, this judgment cannot fail but affect the experience of doing that work—whatever the nature of the work or conditions of employment. Of course, when those conditions are also bad, matters often become intolerable.

  Let’s look at a worst-case scenario: unpleasant work, bad conditions, obvious uselessness. Nigel was a temp worker hired by a company that had won a contract to scan the application forms for hundreds of thousands of company loyalty cards. Since the scanning equipment the company used was imperfect, and since its contract stated that each form would be checked for errors no fewer than three times before being approved, the company was obliged to bus in a small army of temps every day to act as “Data Perfecters.” This is how he describes his work:

  Nigel: It is hard to explain what this level of entranced boredom was like. I found myself conversing with God, pleading for the next record to contain an error, or the next one, or the next. But the time seemed to pass quickly, like some kind of near-death experience.

  There was something about the sheer purity of the social uselessness of this job, combined with the crippling austerity of the process, that united the Data Perfecters. We all knew that this was bullshit. I really think that if we had been processing applications for something that had a more obvious social value—organ transplant registration, say, or tickets to [the] Glastonbury [rock festival]—then it would have felt different. I don’t mean that the process would have been any less tedious—an application form is an application form—but the knowledge that no one cared about this work, that there was really nothing of any value riding on how we did the job, made it feel like some sort of personal test of stamina, like Olympic endurance boredom for its own sake.