I think it would be more correct to say that is a part of the literature related to the theory of the firm. The theory of the firm covers a lot of ground and in some ways various branches have somewhat challenging relationships with their internal logic and approaches.
Indeed my understanding is that my mental model is pretty close to the standard economist one, thiugh I don’t have a formal academic background so don’t quote me as “this is the canonical form of the theory of the firm”.
I also wanted a slightly different emphasis from the standard framing I’ve seen, because the post says
The economists have some theorizing on the topic (google “theory of the firm”), but none of it makes me feel much less confused about the sort of large organizations I actually see in our world. The large organizations we see are clearly not even remotely economically efficient; for instance, they’re notoriously full of “bullshit jobs” which do not add to the bottom line, and it’s not like it’s particularly difficult to identify the bullshit jobs either. How is that a stable economic equilibrium?!?
so I wanted to especially emphasize the dynamic where jobs which are clearly inefficient and wouldn’t work at all in a small company (“bullshit jobs”) can still be net positive at a large enough company.
Your original comment does not seem like it is an explanation for why we see bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that would not be efficient at a small company. To quote from Graeber, they are
a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case
The employee doesn’t need to understand why their job is justified in order for their job to be justified. In particular, looking at the wikipedia article, it gives five examples of types of bullshit jobs:
Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;
Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage;
Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers;
Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.[4][2]
The thing I notice is that all five categories contain many soul-crushing jobs, and yet for all five categories I expect that the majority of people employed in those jobs are in fact a net positive to the companies they work for when they work in those roles.
Flunkies:
Receptionists + administrative assistants: a business has lots of boring administrative tasks to keep the lights on. Someone has to make sure the invoices are paid, the travel arrangements are made, and that meetings are scheduled without conflicts. For many of these tasks, there is no particular reason that the people keeping the lights on needs to be the same person as the person keeping the money fountain at the core of the business flowing.
Door attendants, store greeters: these are loss prevention jobs: people are less likely to just walk off with the merchandise if someone is at the door. Not “entirely prevented from walking out with the merchandise”, just “enough less likely to justify paying someone minimum wage to stand there”.
Goons:
Yep, there sure is a lot of zero- and negative-sum stuff that happens in the corporate world. I don’t particularly expect that 1000 small firms will have less zero-sum stuff going on than 10 large firms, though, except to the extent that 10 large firms have more surplus to expend on zero-sum games.
Duct tapers:
Programmers repairing shoddy code: It is said that there are two types of code: buggy hacked-together spaghetti code, and code that nobody uses. More seriously, the value of a bad fix later today is often higher than the value of a perfect fix next year. Management still sometimes makes poor decisions about technical debt, but also the optimal level of tech debt from the perspective of the firm is probably not the optimal level of tech debt for the happiness and job satisfaction of the development team. And I say this as a software developer who is frequently annoyed by tech debt.
airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage: I think the implication is supposed to be “it would be cheaper to have policies in place which prevent luggage from being lost than it is to hire people to deal with the fallout”, but that isn’t directly stated
Box tickers:
Yep, everyone hates doing compliance work. And there sure are some rules which fail a cost-benefit analysis. Still, given a regulatory environment, the firm will make cost-benefit calculations within that regulatory environment, and “hire someone to do the compliance work” is frequently a better option than “face the consequences for noncompliance”.
With regards to regulatory capture, see section “goons”.
Taskmasters:
A whole lot can be said here, but one thing that’s particularly salient to me is that some employees provide most of their value by being present during a few high-stakes moments per year where there’s a massive benefit of having someone available vs not. The rest of the time, for salaried employees, the business if going to be tempted to press them into any work that has nonzero value, even if the value of that work is much less than the salary of the employee divided by the annual number of hours they work.
That said, my position isn’t “busywork / bullshit doesn’t exist”, it’s “most employees provide net value to their employers relative to nobody being employed in that position, and this includes employees who think their job is bullshit”.
This is the “theory of the firm” that John mentioned in the post.
I think it would be more correct to say that is a part of the literature related to the theory of the firm. The theory of the firm covers a lot of ground and in some ways various branches have somewhat challenging relationships with their internal logic and approaches.
Indeed my understanding is that my mental model is pretty close to the standard economist one, thiugh I don’t have a formal academic background so don’t quote me as “this is the canonical form of the theory of the firm”.
I also wanted a slightly different emphasis from the standard framing I’ve seen, because the post says
so I wanted to especially emphasize the dynamic where jobs which are clearly inefficient and wouldn’t work at all in a small company (“bullshit jobs”) can still be net positive at a large enough company.
Your original comment does not seem like it is an explanation for why we see bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs are not just jobs that would not be efficient at a small company. To quote from Graeber, they are
For more information see the relevant wikipedia article, and book.
The employee doesn’t need to understand why their job is justified in order for their job to be justified. In particular, looking at the wikipedia article, it gives five examples of types of bullshit jobs:
The thing I notice is that all five categories contain many soul-crushing jobs, and yet for all five categories I expect that the majority of people employed in those jobs are in fact a net positive to the companies they work for when they work in those roles.
Flunkies:
Receptionists + administrative assistants: a business has lots of boring administrative tasks to keep the lights on. Someone has to make sure the invoices are paid, the travel arrangements are made, and that meetings are scheduled without conflicts. For many of these tasks, there is no particular reason that the people keeping the lights on needs to be the same person as the person keeping the money fountain at the core of the business flowing.
Door attendants, store greeters: these are loss prevention jobs: people are less likely to just walk off with the merchandise if someone is at the door. Not “entirely prevented from walking out with the merchandise”, just “enough less likely to justify paying someone minimum wage to stand there”.
Goons:
Yep, there sure is a lot of zero- and negative-sum stuff that happens in the corporate world. I don’t particularly expect that 1000 small firms will have less zero-sum stuff going on than 10 large firms, though, except to the extent that 10 large firms have more surplus to expend on zero-sum games.
Duct tapers:
Programmers repairing shoddy code: It is said that there are two types of code: buggy hacked-together spaghetti code, and code that nobody uses. More seriously, the value of a bad fix later today is often higher than the value of a perfect fix next year. Management still sometimes makes poor decisions about technical debt, but also the optimal level of tech debt from the perspective of the firm is probably not the optimal level of tech debt for the happiness and job satisfaction of the development team. And I say this as a software developer who is frequently annoyed by tech debt.
airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage: I think the implication is supposed to be “it would be cheaper to have policies in place which prevent luggage from being lost than it is to hire people to deal with the fallout”, but that isn’t directly stated
Box tickers:
Yep, everyone hates doing compliance work. And there sure are some rules which fail a cost-benefit analysis. Still, given a regulatory environment, the firm will make cost-benefit calculations within that regulatory environment, and “hire someone to do the compliance work” is frequently a better option than “face the consequences for noncompliance”.
With regards to regulatory capture, see section “goons”.
Taskmasters:
A whole lot can be said here, but one thing that’s particularly salient to me is that some employees provide most of their value by being present during a few high-stakes moments per year where there’s a massive benefit of having someone available vs not. The rest of the time, for salaried employees, the business if going to be tempted to press them into any work that has nonzero value, even if the value of that work is much less than the salary of the employee divided by the annual number of hours they work.
That said, my position isn’t “busywork / bullshit doesn’t exist”, it’s “most employees provide net value to their employers relative to nobody being employed in that position, and this includes employees who think their job is bullshit”.