Bullshit jobs
Bullshit Jobs.
Keynes predicted that by around about now we would be able to get by working for a few hours a week
But what happened was that, although the part of work that is actually productive has been reduced, the amount of unproductive work has increased to an extraordinary degree; to the point were many, many jobs do not produce anything.
FI you can work from home, theres a good chance yours is a bullshit job.
Keynes predicted that by around about now we would be able to get by working for a few hours a week
But what happened was that, although the part of work that is actually productive has been reduced, the amount of unproductive work has increased to an extraordinary degree; to the point were many, many jobs do not produce anything.
If we suddenly eliminated teachers or garbage collectors or construction workers or law enforcement or whatever, it would really matter. We’d notice the absence. But if bullshit jobs go away, we’re no worse off.-Vox
FI you can work from home, theres a good chance yours is a bullshit job.
Comments (81)
Me? Or Graeber?
The problem, as always, is capitalism.
Quoting Banno
Again, what do YOU mean by ‘unproductive’ here? I don’t know what distinction you’re referring to. I’m assumed you wasn’t making a value judgement at first then you said ‘bullshit,’ so I’m wondering if you look at ‘unproductive work’ - whatever it loosely means in this case - as of no serious value (hence the ‘bullshit’ remark).
Not trying to be finicky, just trying see if you’re talking about a general ‘gist’ or something more rigid.
Thanks
EDIT: Didn’t notice there was a link! Taking away the garbage is doing something others don’t want to do. Due to red-tape as a result of alterations to laws, ‘control’ of ‘freedoms’ and such, there are just more non-physically directed jobs that people would rather not do. Are these in excess? I personally think there is at least too much momentum in thus direction.
One thing that annoyed me when I read some of Marx’s Das Capital was his blatant disregard for the ‘human value’ - fair enough as the work was essentially about economics.
This bring up all manner of issues such as whether or not a ‘belief’ in personal industry trumps any practical value for society - as with everything it very much depends on each individual situation AND because of these various nuances in social life the becomes more, protection of ‘freedoms’ replace personal responsibilities and freedom, and people end up oiling a machine that gnaws secretly at their sense of self-worth.
With more ‘leisure time’ comes more potential for introspection. Being faced with yourself is rarely an easy experience to deal with - with age it comes though, and for some it comes more readily than others.
How much traction the idea of UBI gets over the coming decades will be interesting to see.
The part that vexes me: is that a bad thing? I'm no Humean, but other thinkers (and feelers) cast their shadow...
One possibility: The 8 hour day, originally fought for as a ceiling, has become a floor. Full time work is not less than an 8 hour day, whether 8 hours is too much time, or not.
Another possibility: Workers, all levels from building cleaners to building designers, turn good jobs into bullshit jobs because they are what the bosses suspect that they are: lazy, sloppy, malingering, subversive, etc.
A third possibility: Many organizations have outlived their usefulness and have become bullshit operations. Everyone who works there is, ipso facto, doing a bullshit job, perhaps in an exemplary manner.
A fourth: Bullshit jobs are the fulfillment of Cyril Northcote Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." [A similar law: Paper expands to fill the available storage space.] Automation of many functions (like Xerox copiers which make excellent copies with little effort, as opposed to ink printing which requires preparing a master copy, dealing with messy ink, etc.) leaves more empty time during the day. The empty time is filled with what will inevitably be minimally productive activity.
And more!
I have occupied a few bullshit jobs. Usually the job could be done in less time than was available. But... 8 hours, and no less. I have sometimes fulfilled the boss's suspicion that workers are lazy, incompetent, sloppy, subversive, etc. And I certainly expected to be paid the same wage, on time, nonetheless.
I have worked for some organizations that had either outlived their usefulness or were never useful in the first place. Everyone working at these places (usually non-profits) was in earnest, hard working, devoted, and all that. Unfortunately, the work was futile--like shoveling wet bullshit with a pitchfork.
The 8 hour day exceeds the required time for many jobs. Because of the floor of 8 hours, one might have to fill 4-8 hours (or more) with activities that sort of resemble work-like activity--bullshit, in other words.
When workers are in jobs that are meaningful (where their executive agency actually has a positive effect on the world) they tend to work harder, more creatively, and more efficiently. A worker who was a total waste in one job might turn out to be a work-leader in a different job.
I can tell you frankly I'm not proud of my job; Still, I don't think it's bullshit, yet. I don't think current AI could do it. But that's not my main thing I want to say, because I agree with the thrust of your post.
Our company cut a lot of people. It lost massive value, even more so than the general stock market plunge. A lot of mid-level jobs got cut. I think I kept mine, not because my job is high-caliber, but exactly because it's low caliber. The top and the bottom stayed, the middle got thinned.
(biographical aside: this work-from-home thing has led the company to expand work-from-home even post-all-of-this. I lucked out - I've been wanting to get out of this city for a while and move back to my pretty rural home town, but there's been nowhere to work - now I can, and am about to move back, to work and finish my degree remotely in peace)
I think - I hope - that what this whole thing is ultimately going to do is accelerate the disjunction between jobs and physical location + cut out the fat, the bullshit. I think this is a really potent and exciting mix of two things happening and its hard to say in advance what the ramifications might be. But it could be good.
I'd go with this.
But see Economics of a four-day working week: research shows it can save businesses money
The problem IS capitalism. At least "capitalism" as we have managed to mold it.
And make no mistake about it...the factor of production that will ALWAYS take the greatest hit in this kid of capitalistic society...WILL BE LABOR.
Entrepreneurship, under this system is obligated to MAXIMIZE profit...and the easiest way to do that is to minimize payment to labor.
MY OPINION: The solution will not be found in lowering the working hours from 8 to 4 or to 2 or to 1.
The solution will involve getting rid of the "Protestant work ethic"...getting rid of the notion that one must earn one's living. Then...ONLY the truly productive should be allowed to work. ONLY people who can be more productive than machines, robots and computers should be allowed to work for the MORE that working people will get as a reward.
All the other people should be encouraged to find other things to do...like spend more time with family, tend to the garden, tend to the lawn, clean the house, do art, write, read, invent, play more golf, watch more movies, do more exercise...or if needs be, do nothing more productive than bend two trees in toward each other by lying in a hammock all day.
Most philosophers can work from home and teachers will later teach their ideas. So without some seemingly bullshit jobs, the non-bullshit jobs would have nothing to work with. There are many bullshit jobs that lead to great discoveries throughout history, sometimes seemingly outside their field. The one who decides which jobs are bullshit is the one to question which knowledge that definition is drawn from.
I'm having trouble thinking of a job that doesn't produce something of some kind. I think you're exaggerating so I have to wonder why you're exaggerating.
I can think of a bullshit job that I am paid to do that doesn't produce any kind of a "thing" and that is mucking horseshit. Technically in 105*f heat all animal shit is bullshit. :fire:
All jobs = ZERO. Nonetheless, I wouldn't call such an important number bullshit.
I was thinking less in terms of "things" - and more in terms of things.
In the 70s IBM was developing an Operating System for their new line of mainframes.
Brooks estimated that a single, talented programmer could have done this in about 120 or so years of work. IBM, of course, did not want to wait that long: The schedule was 3 years start to finish.
Over the course of this 3 years IBM spent a total of 5000 work-years on this project with 1000 to 2000 people working on it at all time. All due to the overhead of orginization of coordination.
For example, for every 2 programmers working on the actual code, there was a technical assistant whose sole purpose was to translate the comments made by the programmers into an intermediate form that could then be written down cleanly by the secretary assigned to those 2 programmers. So for every two programmers there were about two other people just for telling others what those two were doing. In total this resulted in about 1-2 inches of bound book every day documenting the official communication/coordination between work teams.
But that was clearly not enough. Those two programmers needed more assistance - for example someone whose sole purpose was to get those two the things they needed for their work: Things like software tools, finding out if or who was tackling or solved which problem and how and such things.
...
It's the tension between being evolved with a (for all practical purposes) "boundless" set of thoughts, reactions, behaviors, etc. yet an institutionalized, historically-developed, bounded set of institutional structures. The boundless thoughts can never quite go beyond the bounded institutions.
It's a form of suffering imposed on spark plugs that had not consented to be born in the first place, and having been born, have to work to keep body and soul together--though why anyone does that since we didn't want the deal in the first place, is a mystery.
Yes indeed. It happens on that granular level and also as a wider phenomena. For example, revolutions work as a sort of way to "break out" of historically-developed institutional patterns. So what happens? It sounds good but then when asked to give up their property (like house, land, capital), that doesn't seem to go down well in practice. So now you have simply force. The people with the guns will make you do it. Well, that just threw out the boundlessness with more boundaries. Then the famines, and the shortages of goods. Then a charismatic leader takes the reigns of the guys with the guns and it is just more boundaries than the previous institutions.
The problem is the comforts of life itself will lead us to this problem that cannot be solved. So therefore...
Quoting Bitter Crank
Exactly! Now you are speaking my language. The problem is intractable. It has to do with the human condition, not a specific socio-economic condition.
One must earn one's living, but that isn't the Protestant Work Ethic. The PWE says that all work is sacred, dignified, good. At the time that Martin Luther pronounced all work good, the prevailing assumption was that the work of clerics (priests, nuns, monks) was good, at the top of the heap. Mere laborers were at the bottom. Luther declared that the work of a manure collector, foundry worker, miner, baker, etc. was as sacred as priesthood.
Granted: just because one's labor was sacred didn't mean that one was going to get paid well for doing it, but at least one could look on one's sweat as ultimately worthwhile. Elevating the moral import of human labor as a good thing, worthy of respect, was a good thing.
Capitalism has no interest in the PWE except that it gives it ripped off moral cover for exploiting labor, alienating the workers' product from the worker. Capitalism perfected the Capitalist Work Ethic, which is "work for the lowest possible wage and be grateful you have a job." Capitalism is a system of acquisition and accumulation through exploitation.
Because people want bullshit products, so bullshit workers make sure that bullshit gets on the bullshit shelves.
If it were up to me, all that bullshit would disappear because I don't buy bullshit.
Okay. But whether the result of PWE or not...the exploitation of labor has got to stop. It has to stop dead in its tracks...and it must stop immediately.
And, as I said earlier, only the most capable should be ALLOWED to work. The remainder of the people must become Keep Out Of The Way specialists. The KOOW specialists will be the most important element of a new world order...and as such, should be paid handsomely. Enough so that hey can afford "plenty"...not just "enough."
Yes, yes, yes. I agree 1000%, unanimously. And thus the need for a revolution. Ceasing the exploitation of workers is not going to happen through any evolutionary process. (Maybe it will happen through a devolutionary process, where civilization collapses, masses die of starvation, and there is essentially no economy in which to exploit anyone. NOT something to look forward to.)
For instance, if Tiff complies with my suggestion that she dry her horse shit in the hot SW sun and sell it to gardeners in Chicago, would that be a... horse shit product?
Then the bullshit jobs that produce all the bullshit products would disappear and America would no longer be great. :sad:
I'm currently reading a book about the end of economic growth and in it the metaphor of a 2 lb hummingbird is used to express the point that degrowth is inevitable. Increased productivity and substitution (alternatives to fossil fuel, e.g.) can only go so far, and then there's toxic buildup, climate change, overpopulation, etc.
Hanover 2020
Sort of. They've been trained since an early age that their surface is vastly more important their experience of life and what they are. Hence the way cars, clothes, hair products and styles, make up, all other status products (or the idea that one should have the version of the product that gives you status) etc. A lot of created wants. With the best cognitive scientists getting highly expensive cracks at developing very plastic young minds.
Then we have financial products. Many of which are just a way for people who are not labouring (via these products) can make money, often even having others doing the purchasing of these products. A lot of jobs doing this selling and getting their cut off products that produce nothing.
Bullshit, by comparison, could be used as fuel, if a poor one, a weapon, once it dries...no, before too. And probably as fertilizers.
We have companies replacing foods that are doing fine, except they are not patented, so, where's the dependance in that.
We got lots of bullshit first setting up the wants, and then the bullshit products can be sold to meet the created demand.
Banks - money based on debt - and various financial instruments.
Also the chamberpots should be made of gold.
Thank you for sharing. As someone who has the leisure of working from home during this crisis and also secretly believes their job is mostly bullshit, this made a lot of sense.
I worked harder and got paid significantly less at my high school jobs than I do today in my post-graduate job. My job hardly requires a college degree; I have learned nearly everything I need to while on the job. And while I do enjoy many aspects of my job (such that at times it does not feel like a job), it isn't a job that really needs to get done.
How come I get paid more for less work, work that by all accounts has little-to-no, or even perhaps negative, value? I think I should be getting paid equal or even less than those with real jobs.
I think largely I continue to work at my job because I am afraid of the consequences if I didn't. To a certain extent, I have to look out for myself.
That was sort of the point I was trying to make here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
The system we have now relies on jobs. It doesn't discriminate on what kind. The way resources are supposed to be distributed is something like this: Most legitimate = Resources are distributed by working for pay or owning a business and using recognized currency (or living off social security that you paid for with taxes from working). Least legitimate = Resources are distributed from government or charity without working.
I don't see a society where this can be set up differently based on how we have rooted human labor for 10,000 years or so. Even communism as it was applied used currency and jobs to distribute resources. It's just it was centralized, planned, etc.
Resources have to be culled, produced and distributed. Robots are probably not the ubiquitous answer. No change will occur on this front as it would have to be a complete overhaul. An aggregate overhaul from every sector of the economy would be ridiculous to implement outside a thought experiment or conversations like "wouldn't it be cool if...". So for example, I don't think all of humanity will stop procreating. I don't even think I'll change many people's minds. But I do think it the position to not procreate is the right one, despite it's not coming to fruition. So it could be the same here in regards to work. However, interestingly, this too is solved via antinatalism. No new people means no new laborers laboring for no reason except to keep themselves alive and the system functioning.
@Bitter Crank@Banno
Keynes was right, the number of hours needed to produce the stuff we need has been reduced to a fraction of that in his time.
But the number of hours of paid work as stayed much the same or increased.
The difference is that the extra paid work does not produce anything. It consists in completing timesheets and productivity reports and attending meetings and answering emails and phones.
Quoting I like sushi
As with all such requests , the answer is found in the discussion, not in an explicitly stated definition.
Quoting Pneumenon
In order to attend to timesheets and productivity reports and attending meetings and answering emails and phones. These are now how their worth is assessed.
Quoting Pfhorrest; Quoting Frank Apisa; Quoting Frank Apisa
That's a bit too simple. Take a look at my thread on the tragedy of the commons or more recently @unenlightened's Trust. It's not an economic issue, it's a ethical one.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Plenty of what happens in non-profits feels like beating one's head against a wall. Progress in reform is so bloody slow. So they end up doing another survey or having another conference or developing another action plan. Yes, it's bullshit work, marking time in between small victories. The difference is that those involved are "earnest, hard working, devoted, and all that". They are marking time for a purpose. In a bullshit job per se, this is not the case; the worker recognises that they are not doing anything of use. That's a huge difference.
SO see In Praise of Idleness. Again, such idleness is not always bullshit work, although it can be.
Quoting ArguingWAristotleTiff
Use it to produce flowers.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Balls. Happens all the time. It's just your attitude, again. Indeed, you strait-faced point out the roll of revolution in your next post. Things change, sometimes for the better.
Quoting NOS4A2
How's it going in your Moscow basement?
Quoting Hanover
Rundgren engineers the bass out of his music. It's tinny.
Quoting Hanover
Ableist myths. Ask Adam Hills.
It's not about products. Looks to me as if you have missed the point of the OP article entirely.
Quoting Banno
I was once given the job of producing a standardised report format for a large organisation - thousands of folk would have to complete the form in order to report on tens of thousands of other folk; and it was obvious that the result would be of absolutely no use. So I spent the time finding as many problems with the process as possible, setting up meetings, doing surveys - until I could find a better job in another organisation.
Bullshit work in the service of sanity.
It's about twelve years since I changed jobs, and that form was finally trialed; then shelved; then trialed in a new format. And is at present on hold because of Covid-19
Not really. You're referenced inefficiencies that could result in fewer jobs if eliminated. The corporate America I worked for measured every move until we all became efficient mindless robots devoid of personal authority because that would de-systemetize the machine. The bullshit was that people were treated as cogs. It was dehumanizing and tragic if one ponders these are people who are dedicating their lives to this.
Finding and eliminating inefficiencies is corporate speak for creating a dystopia. It won't result in shorter days, just more tasks during the day monitoring efficiencies and chasing away inefficiencies. The reason for squeezing the most from the worker is because people want more bullshit products and there's no way to predictably get people to do what you need them to than by endless forms, datasets, and numeric monitoring.
Want shorter workdays? Give workers more autonomy, get more variation in product quality, and have less bullshit products. When you make 10 widgets a day in your garage, there's no bullshit. When you have to make 10,000, the efficiency experts come in and destroy the place, but 10,000 do get cranked out.
“[…] the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.”
– Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905
yep.
Of course, the most bullshit of all jobs is celebrity.
And the most bullshit of bullshit products are found on celebrity television.
Do you hear the clamor?
The notion of a bullshit product is highly subjective.
Unless you want to draw the line at food, clothing, shelter and healthcare and say the rest (this bullshit laptop and this bullshit website) are bullshit products.
I vividly distinguish the sacred from the profane.
It reminded me of this song. Don't know why, but it's not the sort of song that would make you want to work hard, so maybe it ought be posted here.
The notion of bullshit jobs is no different: highly subjective. What celebrities give to their fans their fans would more likely call sacred than bullshit.
Celebrities have a kind of divinity in the eyes their adorers. Were those shrilling Beatles fans not in the throes of some earth-shaking mystical illumination?
Who doesn't?
To me your MAGA hat is the height of the profane.
To you your MAGA hat has the sacred luminance of the king.
There's nothing sacred about the MAGA hat I don't own.
Yes, there is.
wait, really do you think it's like this?
I think this gives too much credit to corporations. In my experience of corporations, they're more like badly run local government: bureaucratic and stupid. I think Graeber's idea is that corporations are not, in fact, particularly good at capitalism, at least according to how it is imagined by its advocates, i.e., as the most efficient and productive economic system possible.
He thinks that (1) "financial services or telemarketing", "corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations", are pointless and unproductive, and (2) that their existence doesn't have an economic basis, but a moral and political one.
[quote=Graeber]
It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
[/quote]
The Soviet Union hasn't been around for a while, but since I've been living in Moscow I've been struck by the number of workers doing jobs that could be done by fewer people. Apartment buildings with six security guards, small shops staffed by four people, that kind of thing. The explanation can't be strong trade unions fighting for full employment, because the unions are weak (or effectively part of the state). And the Russians, or a class of them, embraced a predatory capitalism in the nineties that still largely exists, though now combined with authoritarian government. The underlying explanation might be cultural, which is similar to part of Graeber's diagnosis when he explains the moral and political reasons for the growth of bullshit jobs:
[quote=Graeber]... the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing[/quote]
And this is convenient for a ruling class that won't share its wealth.
Quoting Banno
My case might be interesting. I work from home, I'm the co-founder of a very small company, and everyone who works for the company is working very productively. I'm a software developer and my work isn't bullshit. Or, it certainly doesn't feel like it. On the other hand, Graeber might argue that the thing we're working on, the web application we're running, is bullshit, because it's not in itself productive, but merely makes the lives of our customers easier in some ways. So, unlike the paper-pushers, I'm actually making something, it's just that what I'm making might be bullshit.
And from a strict economic perspective also totally wrong. Unemployment is the lubricant of our labour market. Without a pool of willing employees, you can never get rid of badly performing employees because there's no alternative. The unemployed therefore fulfil a very important economic function in society and deserve good pay from the very corporations that stand to benefit from this function as a result!
Everything not absolutely needed, essentially is a bullshit product.
Anyway...not only should we all have shorter work weeks...some people should NOT be allowed to work at all. Some people help productivity best by staying the hell out of the way. (They are the people who often hear other people telling them, "You wanna help...don't help."
Those people should be provided for...paid for "staying the hell out of the way." And as Benkei just suggested, they should be paid well.
Everyone has finally got to grok that.
Only then will the amalgam of Capitalism tempered by Socialism finally work properly.
Im retired but my erstwhile career was in IT. I could do my job just as well from home as when i the office. By your estimation, mine was a bullshit job. I beg to differ.
The funny thing is that I seem to be getting better results than actual classroom work. And I don't have to leave the house.
I don't know if teaching is a bullshit job, but I cannot imagine anyone getting very far in life without going to school, at least until he can read and write.
Quoting Sir2u
It depends what you are teaching. The crucial point is that the person doing the job sees that it is bullshit.
I spoke to someone once who said he was an engineer. I asked what that meant and what his usual day looked like. He replied that he checked schematics, hesitated, then said that he probably spent the majority of his day on the phone talking to clients, writing letters and/or checking stock and supplies.
Do think it’s a good thing to tell people their job is BS for the sake of everyone else, or just let them be?
Depends how boring the Dinner Party is.
I'm finding it difficult to discern the issue you're focusing on here. Is it a) there are jobs which produce nothing of use, everyone knows this but it serves the wealthy to maintain such, or is it b) people have a perception of their jobs as having no value, or producing little of use?
When talking about the cause of this state of affairs, you seem to assume (a), but when drawn on the apparent subjectivity of 'producing nothing of value' you revert to (b).
Both issues are equally meritorious of discussion, but I don't think they're the same thing at all. One is political/economic, the other psychological. Which is it you're focusing on - or do you disagree with my separation?
Exactly.
Marx differentiates "productive labour" from "socially necessary labour," and considers average socially necessary labour to be the aggregate total, divided by the number of labourers. In that schema, the criterion of being socially necessary could be expanded to any labour that allows a person to earn the means of purchasing the necessities of life. So some people might not be engaged in "productive labour," in that they are not generating surplus value, but their labour probably should be considered socially necessary.
The reason why the work week is not decreasing as productivity increases with mechanization is due to the imperative of capitalism to always increase the exploitation of the labourer in the quest for increased surplus value (aka profits).
I was more re-affirming your question to Banno, and agreeing with your question.
In order to meet the needs and wants of society...MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY should be the main focus of attention for everyone.
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society such as we have become...PROFIT becomes more important...and there often is a disconnect between profit and maximum productivity.
I think the question being bruited is, is this a material value, or a social value?
I can work from home, but it is more work with less travel. Sort of balances out in the end. Could or should it be done on a permanent basis, who knows.
Quoting Banno
Why would that make a difference? Are some subjects more worthy of being none bullshit than others? I suppose that it would depend on what your philosophy of teaching/learning is. My basic idea is that student should learn how to learn regardless of and sometimes even despite the subject.
Quoting Banno
My job normally would include between 3-4 hours of travel everyday, the work itself takes about 20 hours. But the paper work, checking and reviewing and the other dozens of little things take up the rest of the time. But this load of not actually my work is mostly necessary to be able to do my job properly.
I have worked at many different jobs, but I cannot remember many that time was actually wasted. Probably because not many were actually task specific, usually there were a series of tasks set for the day, week or month, but few were actually accomplished in the estimated time set for them.
Any mid-level and up IT person can probably work from home (I can with no loss of productivity). Pretty sure that none of those are bullshit jobs.
Currently I keep the Covid public health test forms updated (they have been evolving quickly) and keep the doctors and nurses who we set up to work from home running smoothly. Pretty sure none of those are bullshit jobs either.