A bit beside the point, but I’m a bit skeptical of the idea of bullshit jobs in general. From my experience, many times, people describe jobs that have illegible or complex contributions to the value chain as bullshit, for example, investment bankers (although efficient capital allocation has a huge contribution) or lawyers as bullshit jobs.
I agree governments have a lot of inefficiency and superfluous positions, but wondering how big are bullshit jobs really as % of GDP.
Agreed. I think the two theories of bullshit jobs miss how bullshit comes into existence.
Bullshit is actually just the fallout of Goodhart’s Curse.
(note: it’s possible this is what Zvi means by 2 but he’s saying it in a weird way)
You start out wanting something, like to maximize profits. You do everything reasonable in your power to increase profits. You hit a wall and don’t realize it and keep applying optimization. You throw more resources after marginally worse returns until you start actively making things worse by trying to earn more.
One of the consequences of this is bullshit jobs.
Let me give you an example. Jon works for a SaaS startup. His job is to maximize reliability. The product is already achieving 3 9s, but customers want 4 because they have some vague sense that more is better and your competitor is offering 4. Jon knows that going from 3 to 4 will 10x COGS and tells the executives as much, but they really want to close those deals. Everyone knows 3 9s is actually enough for the customers, but they want 4 so Jon has to give it to them because otherwise they can’t close deals.
Now Jon has to spend on bullshit. He quadruples the size of his team and they start building all kinds of things to eek out more reliability. In order to pull this off they make tradeoffs that slow down product development. The company is now able to offer 4 9s and close deals, but suffers deadweight loss from paying for 4 9s when customers only really need 3 (if only customers would understand they would suffer no material loss by living with 3).
This same story plays out in every function across the company. Marketing and sales are full of folks chasing deals that will never pay back their cost of acquisition. HR and legal are full of folks protecting the company against threats that will never materialize. Support is full of reps who help low revenue customers who end up costing the company money to keep on the books. And on and on.
By the time anyone realizes the company has suffered several quarters of losses. They do a layoff, restructure, and refocus on the business that’s actually profitable. Everyone is happy for a while, but then demand more growth, restarting the business cycle.
Bullshit jobs are not mysterious. They are literally just Goodharting.
Thus, we should not expect them to go away thanks to AI unless all jobs go away, we should just expect them to change, though I think not in the way Zvi expects. Bullshit doesn’t exist for its own sake. Bullshit exists due to Goodharting. So bullshit will change to fit the context of where humans are perceived to provide additional value. The bullshit will continue up until some point at which humans are completely unneeded by AI.
So the question is “(when) will AI start to help top management reduce goodharting, by expanding the complexity that managers can use in modeling their business decisions and sub-organization incentives”? If we can IDENTIFY deals that won’t pay back their cost of acquisition, we can stop counting them as growth, and stop doing them.
Whether this collapses or expands the overall level of production (not finance, but actual human satisfaction by delivering stuff and performing services) is very hard to predict.
Additionally, bullshit gets worse the more you try to optimize because you start putting worse optimizers in charge of making decisions. I think this is where the worst bullshit comes from: you hire people who just barely know how to do their jobs, they hire people who they don’t actually need because hiring people is what managers are supposed to do, they then have to find something for them to do. They playact at being productive because that’s what they were hired to do, and the business doesn’t notice for a while because they’re focused on trying to optimize past the point of marginally cost effective returns. This is where the worst bullshit pops up and is the most salient, but it’s all downstream of Goodharting.
Agreed. Facilitation- focused jobs (like the ones derided in this post) might look like bullshit to an outsider, but in my experience they are absolutely critical to effectively achieving goals in a large organization.
Twitter recently fired a majority of its workforce (I’ve seen estimates from 50% to 90%) and seems to be chugging along just fine. This strongly implies that at least that many jobs were bullshit, but it’s unlikely that the new management was able to perfectly identify all bullshitters, so it’s only a lower bound. Sometimes contributions can be illegible, but there are also extremely strong incentives to obfuscate.
If you fire your sales staff your company will chug along just fine, but won’t take in new clients and will eventually decline through attrition of existing accounts.
If you fire your product developers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to react to customer requests or competitors.
If you fire your legal department your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll do illegal things and lose money in lawsuits.
If your fire your researchers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to exploit any more research products.
If you fire the people who do safety compliance enforcement your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll lose more money to workplace injuries and deaths (this one doesn’t apply to Twitter but is common in warehouses).
If you outsource a part of your business instead of insourcing (like running a website on the cloud instead of owning your own data centers, or doing customer service through a call center instead of your own reps) then the company will chug along just fine, and maybe not be disadvantaged in any way, but that doesn’t mean the jobs you replaced were bullshit.
In general there are lots of roles at every company that are +EV, but aren’t on the public-facing critical path. This is especially true for ad-based companies like Twitter and Facebook, because most of the customer-facing features aren’t publicly visible (remember: if you are not paying, you’re not the customer).
These statements seem awfully close to being unfalsifiable. The amount of research and development coming from twitter in the 5 years before the acquisition was already pretty much negligible, so there’s no difference there. How long do we need to wait for lawsuits or loss of clients to cause observable consequences?
The amount of research and development coming from twitter in the 5 years before the acquisition was already pretty much negligible
That isn’t true, but I’m making a point that’s broader than just Twitter, here. If you’re a multi-billion dollar company, and you’re paying a team 5 million a year to create 10 million a year in value, then you shouldn’t fire them. Then again, if you do fire them, probably no one outside your company will be able to tell that you made a mistake: you’re only out 5 million dollars on net, and you have billions more where that came from. If you’re an outside observer trying to guess whether it was smart to fire that team or not, then you’re stuck: you don’t know how much they cost or how much value they produced.
How long do we need to wait for lawsuits or loss of clients to cause observable consequences?
In Twitter’s case the lawsuits have already started, and so has the loss of clients. But sometimes bad decisions take a long time to make themselves felt; in a case close to my heart, Digital Equipment Corporation made some bad choices in the mid to late 80s without paying any visible price until 1991 or so. Depending on how you count, that’s a lead time of 3 to 5 years. I appreciate that that’s annoying if you want to have a hot take on Musk Twitter today, but sometimes life is like that. The worlds where the Twitter firings were smart and the worlds where the Twitter firings were dumb look pretty much the same from our perspective, so we don’t get to update much. If your prior was that half or more of Twitter jobs were bullshit then by all means stay with that, but updating to that from somewhere else on the evidence we have just isn’t valid.
My experience is that bullshit jobs certainly do exist. Note that it is not necessary for the job to actually be easy to be kind of pointless.
One example I think is quite clean. The EU had (or has) a system where computer games that “promoted European values” developed in the EU were able to get certain (relatively minor) tax breaks. In practice this meant that the companies would hire (intelligent, well qualified, well paid) people to write them 300+ page reports delving into the philosophy of how this particular first person shooter was really promoting whatever the hell “European values” were supposed to be, while other people compiled very complicated data on how the person-hours invested in the game were geographically distributed between the EU and not (to get the tax break). Meanwhile, on the other side of this divide were another cohort of hard-working intelligent and qualified people who worked for the governments of the EU and had to read all these documents to make decisions about whether the tax break would be applied. I have not done the calculation, but I have a sense that the total cost of the report-writing and the report-reading going on could reasonably compete with the size of the tax break itself. The only “thing” created by all those person-hours was a slight increase in the precision with which the government applies a tax break. Is that precision worth it? What else could have been created with all those valuable person-hours instead?
A bit beside the point, but I’m a bit skeptical of the idea of bullshit jobs in general. From my experience, many times, people describe jobs that have illegible or complex contributions to the value chain as bullshit, for example, investment bankers (although efficient capital allocation has a huge contribution) or lawyers as bullshit jobs.
I agree governments have a lot of inefficiency and superfluous positions, but wondering how big are bullshit jobs really as % of GDP.
Agreed. I think the two theories of bullshit jobs miss how bullshit comes into existence.
Bullshit is actually just the fallout of Goodhart’s Curse.
(note: it’s possible this is what Zvi means by 2 but he’s saying it in a weird way)
You start out wanting something, like to maximize profits. You do everything reasonable in your power to increase profits. You hit a wall and don’t realize it and keep applying optimization. You throw more resources after marginally worse returns until you start actively making things worse by trying to earn more.
One of the consequences of this is bullshit jobs.
Let me give you an example. Jon works for a SaaS startup. His job is to maximize reliability. The product is already achieving 3 9s, but customers want 4 because they have some vague sense that more is better and your competitor is offering 4. Jon knows that going from 3 to 4 will 10x COGS and tells the executives as much, but they really want to close those deals. Everyone knows 3 9s is actually enough for the customers, but they want 4 so Jon has to give it to them because otherwise they can’t close deals.
Now Jon has to spend on bullshit. He quadruples the size of his team and they start building all kinds of things to eek out more reliability. In order to pull this off they make tradeoffs that slow down product development. The company is now able to offer 4 9s and close deals, but suffers deadweight loss from paying for 4 9s when customers only really need 3 (if only customers would understand they would suffer no material loss by living with 3).
This same story plays out in every function across the company. Marketing and sales are full of folks chasing deals that will never pay back their cost of acquisition. HR and legal are full of folks protecting the company against threats that will never materialize. Support is full of reps who help low revenue customers who end up costing the company money to keep on the books. And on and on.
By the time anyone realizes the company has suffered several quarters of losses. They do a layoff, restructure, and refocus on the business that’s actually profitable. Everyone is happy for a while, but then demand more growth, restarting the business cycle.
Bullshit jobs are not mysterious. They are literally just Goodharting.
Thus, we should not expect them to go away thanks to AI unless all jobs go away, we should just expect them to change, though I think not in the way Zvi expects. Bullshit doesn’t exist for its own sake. Bullshit exists due to Goodharting. So bullshit will change to fit the context of where humans are perceived to provide additional value. The bullshit will continue up until some point at which humans are completely unneeded by AI.
So the question is “(when) will AI start to help top management reduce goodharting, by expanding the complexity that managers can use in modeling their business decisions and sub-organization incentives”? If we can IDENTIFY deals that won’t pay back their cost of acquisition, we can stop counting them as growth, and stop doing them.
Whether this collapses or expands the overall level of production (not finance, but actual human satisfaction by delivering stuff and performing services) is very hard to predict.
Additionally, bullshit gets worse the more you try to optimize because you start putting worse optimizers in charge of making decisions. I think this is where the worst bullshit comes from: you hire people who just barely know how to do their jobs, they hire people who they don’t actually need because hiring people is what managers are supposed to do, they then have to find something for them to do. They playact at being productive because that’s what they were hired to do, and the business doesn’t notice for a while because they’re focused on trying to optimize past the point of marginally cost effective returns. This is where the worst bullshit pops up and is the most salient, but it’s all downstream of Goodharting.
Agreed. Facilitation- focused jobs (like the ones derided in this post) might look like bullshit to an outsider, but in my experience they are absolutely critical to effectively achieving goals in a large organization.
Twitter recently fired a majority of its workforce (I’ve seen estimates from 50% to 90%) and seems to be chugging along just fine. This strongly implies that at least that many jobs were bullshit, but it’s unlikely that the new management was able to perfectly identify all bullshitters, so it’s only a lower bound. Sometimes contributions can be illegible, but there are also extremely strong incentives to obfuscate.
If you fire your sales staff your company will chug along just fine, but won’t take in new clients and will eventually decline through attrition of existing accounts.
If you fire your product developers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to react to customer requests or competitors.
If you fire your legal department your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll do illegal things and lose money in lawsuits.
If your fire your researchers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to exploit any more research products.
If you fire the people who do safety compliance enforcement your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll lose more money to workplace injuries and deaths (this one doesn’t apply to Twitter but is common in warehouses).
If you outsource a part of your business instead of insourcing (like running a website on the cloud instead of owning your own data centers, or doing customer service through a call center instead of your own reps) then the company will chug along just fine, and maybe not be disadvantaged in any way, but that doesn’t mean the jobs you replaced were bullshit.
In general there are lots of roles at every company that are +EV, but aren’t on the public-facing critical path. This is especially true for ad-based companies like Twitter and Facebook, because most of the customer-facing features aren’t publicly visible (remember: if you are not paying, you’re not the customer).
These statements seem awfully close to being unfalsifiable. The amount of research and development coming from twitter in the 5 years before the acquisition was already pretty much negligible, so there’s no difference there. How long do we need to wait for lawsuits or loss of clients to cause observable consequences?
That isn’t true, but I’m making a point that’s broader than just Twitter, here. If you’re a multi-billion dollar company, and you’re paying a team 5 million a year to create 10 million a year in value, then you shouldn’t fire them. Then again, if you do fire them, probably no one outside your company will be able to tell that you made a mistake: you’re only out 5 million dollars on net, and you have billions more where that came from. If you’re an outside observer trying to guess whether it was smart to fire that team or not, then you’re stuck: you don’t know how much they cost or how much value they produced.
In Twitter’s case the lawsuits have already started, and so has the loss of clients. But sometimes bad decisions take a long time to make themselves felt; in a case close to my heart, Digital Equipment Corporation made some bad choices in the mid to late 80s without paying any visible price until 1991 or so. Depending on how you count, that’s a lead time of 3 to 5 years. I appreciate that that’s annoying if you want to have a hot take on Musk Twitter today, but sometimes life is like that. The worlds where the Twitter firings were smart and the worlds where the Twitter firings were dumb look pretty much the same from our perspective, so we don’t get to update much. If your prior was that half or more of Twitter jobs were bullshit then by all means stay with that, but updating to that from somewhere else on the evidence we have just isn’t valid.
the actual bullshit jobs are political. They exist to please someone or run useful cover in various liability laundering and faction wars.
My experience is that bullshit jobs certainly do exist. Note that it is not necessary for the job to actually be easy to be kind of pointless.
One example I think is quite clean. The EU had (or has) a system where computer games that “promoted European values” developed in the EU were able to get certain (relatively minor) tax breaks. In practice this meant that the companies would hire (intelligent, well qualified, well paid) people to write them 300+ page reports delving into the philosophy of how this particular first person shooter was really promoting whatever the hell “European values” were supposed to be, while other people compiled very complicated data on how the person-hours invested in the game were geographically distributed between the EU and not (to get the tax break). Meanwhile, on the other side of this divide were another cohort of hard-working intelligent and qualified people who worked for the governments of the EU and had to read all these documents to make decisions about whether the tax break would be applied. I have not done the calculation, but I have a sense that the total cost of the report-writing and the report-reading going on could reasonably compete with the size of the tax break itself. The only “thing” created by all those person-hours was a slight increase in the precision with which the government applies a tax break. Is that precision worth it? What else could have been created with all those valuable person-hours instead?
This is besides the point of your own comment, but “how big are bullshit jobs as % of GDP” is exactly 0 by definition!