Your Job Achieves Nothing... (probably) - How Money Works

What do you do for a living? I'm not talking about

your

job or

your

daily tasks, I'm talking about what you really do, what you really create, what you improve, what you contribute... For some of you, seeing this question can be quite easy to understand. reply. But for those of you who work as a middle manager, overseeing a human resources team at an insurance underwriting company, well… it might be a little more difficult. Over the last century, service sector jobs have gone from representing less than a quarter of all jobs to now representing almost 80% of workers.

Now when we think of service jobs, we think of people serving us coffee, searching for a pair of pants in the back, or carrying bags to our hotel room. Sure, they may be an unnecessary luxury for the people who use these services, but it's still pretty easy to see that they do produce value, whether in the form of a good cup of coffee, a new suit, or luggage delivered on time (without the ( need an appointment with the physical therapist the next day) But, as you will see, the service sector is much broader than its name suggests: it encompasses everyone from call center salespeople to CEOs, in fact, today.

Nowadays it is quite difficult to find a job outside of the service sector specifically because those roles require special certifications, remember that for later because it is important But the growth of the self-service sector and the subsequent bullish job growth that accompanied it seems a bit. Surely the efficient free market would eliminate these individuals who contribute

nothing

, punish the companies that bear their salary costs and reward the most efficient organizations that do without them... right? Well no, and to understand why it is time to learn “how

money

works

” today to perpetuate the existence of people who work for

nothing

more than justifying their own existence.

And to begin with this peculiarity of advanced modern capitalism, we must first look at Soviet communism. The Soviet Union was built on the idea of ​​noble work. The State said that work was honorable and dignified! The word "Soviet" loosely translates as a workers' council, and the people took pride in their work above all else. This caused problems when there wasn't enough work to go around. The push towards full employment meant that some people were given tasks that were obviously totally redundant for us. Factory managers hired as many people as they could because it was an honor to supervise the work of so many of their comrades.

They also feared that if they didn't give people jobs now, they wouldn't be able to get the people they needed in the future. This “worker hoarding,” as it became known, meant that some people were assigned jobs such as counting endless inventories of nuts and bolts. There are clearly huge differences between the modern Western world and 1950s Russia, but there are also some worrying similarities. The theory of totally unnecessary jobs really began to gain traction after anthropologist David Graeber published the book Bull Jobs in which he described five broad categories of jobs that had become increasingly common.

The first are what he called the lackeys, people like doormen, receptionists, drivers and assistants. These people exist to make other people feel better about themselves and they could all easily be replaced with some kind of technology, if they are truly necessary. Then there are conduit cones, who are people who work to alleviate problems that could very easily be fixed permanently. Think of someone like an inventory manager who has system permissions to update stock levels in a warehouse, where that could be done automatically or at least shared among floor staff. In his book, Graeber tells of a contractor whose job was solely to correct errors made by an apparently brilliant statistician.

In reality, this star employee was hopeless and the pipeline manager had to fight through the bureaucracy to correct his mistakes before they could cause any damage. This example shows that the solution to the problem is not always to get rid of the person doing the bull work, because the conduit cone itself was

probably

providing some value, but would be able to create value much more effectively if it had been removed. an unnecessary obstacle. The same cannot be said for the next category of bulls on the list of bullish jobs, and they are the box tickers. The mindless army of drones that exist in large companies around the world, because they make said companies appear legitimate to other large companies.

Think about the people who create internal company newspapers with stories about key executives or... whatever gets reported in those things... I mean... no one really reads them, and that's the point. But if a company didn't have an in-house newspaper, party planning committee, or cultural coordinator, then it might seem like a small company not worth doing business with or working with. Now is the time to delve into the true demons of the world of bullish work. The GOONS… Goons are the affectionate name given to a type of work that actually has a negative impact on society, but is made necessary simply by existing.

The classic example of this is in-house corporate lawyers. They don't really produce anything, but if you don't have them, it will end up costing you a lot more to hire outside counsel to defend against lawsuits from companies that DO have in-house corporate lawyers. Perhaps the best example of this is patent trolls, which are basically companies that buy other companies with lots of generic patents and then try to sue other companies in the hopes that they will agree to settle out of court. Even the world's largest companies are guilty of perpetuating this negative sum game... Apple sued Samsung over a patent on a rectangular phone with rounded corners.

Now ask yourself, despite what it makes you think about patents and intellectual property, what value were being created by the thousands of people working full time to enforce that rule? Beyond lawyers, there are people like lobbyists who fight simply to change the rules of the game and salespeople who exist solely to move business transactions from one company to another while also being the definition of middlemen in the process. Now you might think bullies are bad, but they have none of the worst of the worst among this group of useless workers... The Task Masters!! These are the people assigned to watch over and manage the people who don't really need to be watched or managed.

There is such a thing as effective management, especially when it comes to coordinating a team with a broad skill set, but someone like a sales manager dominating a team of people with the exact same job title is a little different. At BEST they will be overpaid cheerleaders who encourage people to work harder in roles that themselves can be silly. At worst, they will be distractions desperate to justify their existence by calling meetings and creating “strategic mission statements” that do nothing but drive people away from a job where they actually have the opportunity to do something meaningful.

These roles are not singular prescriptions; In fact, some particularly useless employees may find that their role is a combination of these five factors. Many middle managers exist to oversee fundamentally useless departments, and they only have a job because a highly stratified corporate hierarchy makes the bigwigs at the top of the food chain feel good about themselves. But this doesn't answer the question... how did we get here? The Soviet Union created bull jobs because it was obsessed with having a job for everyone, and the nation took pride in work. But our capitalist systems are supposed to be better than that, right?

Well, more or less... but we are still victims of the same bureaucracy. Sure, companies would do well by reducing these tasks, but sometimes these incentives may not be aligned with decision makers. In the same way that a Soviet factory worker might assemble staff to appear important, modern middle managers will do the same. In the same way that factory walls were covered with propaganda about the brilliance of Soviet workers, LinkedIn pages are covered with self-serving propaganda about what a great honor it was for some analyst to head the joint development project to optimize satisfaction of the client in the bullish corporation.

Multiplatform digital sales ecosystem. In the same way that the Soviet Union was obsessed with everyone having work to do, even if that meant taking back meaningless jobs, modern workplaces are obsessed with everyone working their full 40-hour weeks... even if that means ...well...recover meaningless tasks. . This is before considering the bureaucracy. Let's get one thing out of the way: countries like the United States are not home to completely free markets, there are laws and regulations on how to do...just about everything. Do you want to build a factory? Well, you'd better make sure it's in an area meant for heavy industry, and you'd better put out a proper tender for the contract to build that factory and have proper insurance, and if you ship your products overseas, you'd better make sure to pay the appropriate rates. and special taxes.

All of these steps involve other large institutions that will in turn house bullish jobs. Now, this is not an argument for big government or small government; some policies are really important and of course some are bullish, but businesses have also had a very important role to play in this whole system. The growth of the lobby has led to the creation of more and more legislation that has made starting and maintaining a successful business of any size nearly impossible without a team of accountants and lawyers to help a business owner navigate this bureaucracy. You could say this is best for large corporations because it makes it harder for potential competitors to get off the ground, but we don't want to point fingers here.

Anyway, is there any solution for this? Like a society? Sure, accept the idea that it's okay to not work 40 hours a week. The idea that a job is bull or not is entirely correct; In reality, almost all jobs will have some level of bull built into the daily tasks. If it were acceptable to say that my work is done, that I'm done for today, then it would be much easier to see who is not contributing anything. As an individual? Ahh, not really, the truth is that if you find yourself in a bull-heavy role, you may have to tough it out in the short term, maybe work a bull-free side job in your spare time.

Or you know, embrace it, there are plenty of people who are very proud of their superfluous but important sounding degrees, maybe that makes useless meetings or irrelevant PowerPoints easier to complete now that you know it's all nonsense. Of course, if you really want to really dive into... umm well... bureaucracy and decide that an accounting job isn't good enough for you, then go and watch our online videos to find out how a video game has cultivated a financial system so complex that it houses its own bulls. If you liked this video, consider liking and subscribing to continue learning how

money

works

.