21 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 19 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Bullshit jobs meta
This sounds oxymoronic until you realize that the government adds all kinds of modifications to business and free markets that require so much bs. Now, an argument can be made that these jobs aren't bs because they solve a problem. It is a problem that shouldn't exist but still.
In my experience the larger the institution the more likely there will be bs jobs and people milking money out of the beast. We often only focus on government agencies as being wasteful but there is plenty of waste in the business world. People have mentioned middle managers but there are more. The larger the company the easier it is to disappear.
I bet there are devs here including me that have spent months building applications for those apps to just be thrown away because of the whim of someone. Most people that work in large companies don't produce anything tangible and this can lead to people feeling like their job is totally bs.
I heard a story the other day from one of the game developers that got laid off recently.
It wasn't that they'd lost their job that upset them the most. It was the fact that the project they'd spent years working on got cancelled and it felt like all those nights and weekends working overtime, missing out on time with their family had gone to waste.
On the other hand, these layoffs are most likely because the company took out a lot of debt and now they can't afford it at the higher interest rates. So when you think about it, it's not so much at the whim of someone else, but simply people acting rationally in their own self interest. Trace it back far enough and it's remarkable how many times it comes back to centrally planned government decisions.
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