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John Carmack's Review of Bullshit Jobs (twitter.com/id_aa_carmack)
31 points by Michelangelo11 5 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



Bullshit jobs exist because

- people need to have a salary to eat,

- compagnies/ceos who have the actual cash think "head count" is a valuable metric enough to invest in more people without assessing their efficiency (which is arguably not easy).

If you want to automate society these are the two main axioms you need to fight. Which mean you need

- ubi. This one is obvious

- make compagnies more efficient in terms of productivity pzr person and / or dissassociate the size of your compagny to your ego and / or the opinion of vc about it. Which is arguably not easy.

Another issue is that sometimes some people who work 4h a week are still actually valuable in a society (same as some small part in an engines that are not used a lot, or even your brain that is not used 90% of the time).

In that case its more about making those people freelance so they can still be useful and be paid w.r.t. their time whil they themselves are useful in several compagnies at once.


> people need to have a salary to eat

Or to put a bit more iconoclastic point on it, if the people who have all the goods don't find some excuses to distribute at least a little, starving people turn to violence.

That said, sinecures for the well-off are also a kind of BS job.


I think I agree with this that a lot of jobs aren't actually as bullshit as some people believe they are, including the people who have those jobs.

Some of those jobs might be doable in less time, but I don't mind that - as I mostly think that jobs shouldn't be intensive and the system should have some slack in it so that when there is crunch it's manageable.


Forewarning, I don't have a ton to say about the core of Carmack's criticism. But there's various points that I think show color, that are worth highlighting.

> Burdensome regulations are put in place because the regulators feel rich enough to impose the costs of the “box tickers” necessary to comply with them. We have hosts of food regulations because there is no danger of starvation.

It's wild to me that libertarians can believe such shit as this. Maybe perhaps we can get better about reducing what Master of Orion 3 referred to & which has stuck for me as "the heavy foot of governance", but this just seems like such a minor factor in the world, and it feels like this oppressive regulation but makes up the majority of so many people's entire personality, being affronted that our milk won't maybe start one day killing you.

I like to ask, who has it better? What programming languages are so exceedingly better that their coders exist in some entirely different sphere, are clearly better able to live the core value and/or duct-tape lives described here? There's ups and downs around but largely it feels like most devs are living in some vague form of parity, somewhat more or less encumbered but generally everyone somewhat in the same realms of possibility & success: im unconvinced languages matter all that much. What about regulation? We have some very low regulation places in the world. Are they killing it? Is their world radically better, and better for whom? It just doesn't seem like regulation is dogging us as bad as JC's/libertarian's world view wants to believe.

And we can safely drink milk.

> For a lot of people, the number of "heads" below them in an org chart is a measure of their self worth.

Striking a strong chord with my cynical side on this one though.

I think this is the other cancer within capitalism. Ideally we'd have metrics & measures, be able to assess how well people are worked at a lower level, but orgs just judge by the market adoption not actual productivity or innovation or use, and we kind of promote arbitrarily as a result, aggregating up.

Ideally I think we'd have smaller teams, smaller focuses. More different modest-scoped pokers in the fire rather than ever amassing fiefs of greater scope.

> Bullshit jobs are a luxury good, and we are only going to see more of them as society continues to become wealthier.

300% not the trend I see happening. We seem to be in a massive "fire by default" mode, the stock price will probably go up.




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