Bullshit jobs

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Bullshit jobs

A Comprehensive Analysis

The Bullshit
Jobs Problem

Meaningless work, moral injury, and the crisis of purpose in modern society — examined through philosophy, anthropology, psychology, economics, and politics.

Philosophy · Anthropology · Sociology · Psychology · Economics

BSJ Definition Philosophy Anthropology Sociology Psychology Economics Politics Culture Critiques Future Bullshitification 50 + 50 Sources

Part IDefinition & Taxonomy

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In 2013, the anthropologist David Graeber published a short essay in Strike! magazine titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." Within weeks, it had been translated into over a dozen languages and shared millions of times. The response was volcanic — not because the idea was radical, but because it named something millions of people already knew but had never been given permission to say out loud: their jobs were pointless.[1]

Graeber had touched a nerve that ran far deeper than workplace complaints. He had identified a structural feature of contemporary capitalism that contradicted its own foundational mythology. The system supposed to ruthlessly eliminate inefficiency had instead produced an enormous class of workers who privately believed their labor contributed nothing of value — and suffered profoundly because of it.

What Makes a Job "Bullshit"?

Graeber was careful to distinguish bullshit jobs from merely bad jobs. A bullshit job is not one that is unpleasant, exploitative, or poorly paid. It is one that the worker themselves believes to be unnecessary. The defining feature is not external judgment but the internal experience of purposelessness.[2] A sanitation worker may have a grueling, underpaid job, but they know that if they stopped showing up, the consequences would be immediate and serious. A "Strategic Vision Coordinator" at a mid-size corporation may earn three times as much while harboring the private suspicion that if their position were eliminated, no one would notice.

A bullshit job is 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.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

The Five Categories

Flunkies

Exist to make someone else look or feel important — modern equivalents of feudal retainers. Receptionists with nothing to do, personal assistants whose bosses need no assistance. The role projects an image of power rather than accomplishing any practical task.

Goons

Roles that only exist because competitors have them, creating an arms race of mutual cancellation. Corporate lobbyists, certain PR specialists, telemarketers. If all armies disbanded simultaneously, no nation would be less secure.

Duct Tapers

Hired to fix problems that shouldn't exist — the organizational equivalent of using tape to hold a broken pipe together. Their competence sustains and perpetuates the dysfunction it was hired to address.

Box Tickers

Perform work that exists primarily to create the appearance that something is being done. Compliance forms nobody reads, surveys never acted upon, reports filed and forgotten. The work is performative.

Taskmasters

Come in two varieties: supervisors who manage people who don't need managing, and — more perniciously — those who create bullshit tasks for others, generating an expanding sphere of purposeless activity.

Data

The Scale of the Problem

37%

of UK workers surveyed said their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world

40%

of Dutch workers reported that their job had no good reason to exist

8%

consistently described their jobs as socially useless in rigorous academic study

37% Self-reported as meaningless (YouGov survey)

8% Consistently rated as socially useless (Soffia et al.)

55–92% Report their work as meaningful (varies by method)

Sources: YouGov/UK (2015) · Leiden University (2017) · Soffia, Alderman & Wood, Work, Employment & Society (2021)

Part IIThe Philosophical Dimension

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The bullshit jobs problem is, at its core, a philosophical crisis. It raises fundamental questions about the relationship between labor, meaning, and human dignity that philosophers have been wrestling with for millennia.

Aristotle

Praxis vs. Poiesis

Bullshit jobs are pure poiesis without a product — labor neither intrinsically meaningful nor productive of anything external.

Marx

Fourfold Alienation

An intensification of all four forms of alienation: from product, process, fellow workers, and human potential — there is no product at all.

Arendt

Labor / Work / Action

Bullshit jobs fit none of her categories. They sustain no life, produce nothing durable, initiate nothing new — a philosophical void.

Weber

Protestant Ethic

The secular survival of work-as-virtue means people are morally compelled to perform meaningless activity — busyness as morality.

Camus

The Absurd

Unlike Sisyphus, the bullshit job worker cannot even articulate their task. The absurdity is not metaphysical but bureaucratic.

The Protestant Work Ethic and Its Secular Afterlife

Max Weber argued that the Protestant Reformation transformed work from a mere necessity into a moral imperative.[3] Hard work became a sign of divine favor, and idleness became sinful. This ethic survived the decline of the religious worldview that produced it, becoming embedded in secular capitalist culture as an unquestioned assumption: work is inherently virtuous, and anyone who does not work is morally suspect.

The bullshit jobs problem exposes the absurdity of this inherited moral framework. If work is inherently good, then it doesn't matter whether the work accomplishes anything — the act of working is what counts. The worker who admits their job is pointless risks being seen not as a perceptive critic but as someone with a bad attitude.

Camus argued that we must imagine Sisyphus happy — that meaning could be found in revolt against absurdity. But this seems harder to apply to the bullshit job worker, whose struggle is not against an indifferent cosmos but against a human-made system that demands participation in a charade. The absurdity is not heroic but quietly desperate.

Part IIIThe Anthropological Perspective

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Anthropological evidence consistently shows that pre-agricultural and early agricultural societies required far less labor than modern ones. Marshall Sahlins's classic study characterized hunter-gatherers as "the original affluent society" — not because they had abundant goods, but because their desires were few and easily satisfied, leaving ample time for leisure, ritual, storytelling, and social life.[4]

Historical Comparison

Daily Labor Hours Across Human History

Sources: Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (1972) · Schor, The Overworked American (1992)

E.P. Thompson described pre-industrial communities as operating according to a "moral economy" — shared norms about fairness, reciprocity, and the social obligations of economic participation.[5] The bullshit job violates this moral economy in a way that is psychologically devastating: the worker is denied the experience of being genuinely useful to others.

Organizational Religion

From an anthropological perspective, many features of corporate life bear a striking resemblance to religious ritual. Meetings follow prescribed formats regardless of content. Mission statements are recited without being believed. Reports are produced as offerings to higher authorities who may never read them. The bullshit job is often a ritual role: the holder performs symbolic actions that affirm the organization's identity without producing any practical result.

Part IVThe Sociological Dimension

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One of the most striking features of the bullshit jobs phenomenon is its class distribution. Essential workers — nurses, cleaners, garbage collectors, farmworkers — tend to be poorly paid and low-status. Meanwhile, many bullshit jobs are well-compensated and socially respected.[6]

The Central Paradox

Who Gets Paid — and Who Matters?

Essential Work

Nurse / CaregiverSaves lives daily · Median salary ~€28K

TeacherShapes future generations · Median salary ~€30K

Sanitation WorkerPrevents epidemics · Median salary ~€22K

FarmworkerFeeds humanity · Median salary ~€18K

versus

Bullshit Work

Corporate LobbyistExists because rivals have them · ~€95K

Brand StrategistProduces reports no one reads · ~€72K

Compliance Box-TickerFills forms filed and forgotten · ~€55K

Strategic Vision CoordinatorNo one can explain the role · ~€68K

Graeber provocatively compared the modern economy to feudalism. The proliferation of administrative, supervisory, and strategic roles serves the same function as the feudal retinue: it maintains hierarchies of prestige and control.[7]

Institutional Self-Perpetuation

Organizations, like organisms, prioritize their own survival. Parkinson's Law — "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" — describes a genuine organizational dynamic.[8] Bullshit jobs are one of the primary mechanisms: each new position creates a need for coordination, supervision, and communication, which in turn creates new positions.

There is a gender and racial dimension that deserves attention. The work that is most essential — caregiving, cleaning, food preparation — has historically been performed disproportionately by women and people of color. This work is simultaneously acknowledged to be necessary and treated as low-status, while bullshit work performed disproportionately by white-collar professionals is treated as prestigious.

Part VThe Psychological Toll

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Research in occupational psychology consistently finds that the single strongest predictor of job satisfaction is not pay, not working conditions, and not the quality of one's relationships — it is the sense that one's work is meaningful.[9] The bullshit job inverts this. The worker is materially comfortable but existentially starving.

Spiritual violence — the enforced purposelessness of bullshit work constitutes a direct assault on the worker's sense of self, a slow grinding destruction of the capacity to find meaning in one's own existence.

David Graeber, on the psychological impact

The Double Bind

Most bullshit job holders cannot openly acknowledge the futility of their work. They must maintain the performance of busyness, competence, and purpose, even when they know — and suspect that everyone around them also knows — that the performance is hollow.[10]

Psychological EffectsSeverity →

Loss of Purpose

92%

Cognitive Dissonance

85%

Depression / Anxiety

78%

Identity Erosion

71%

Guilt & Self-Blame

65%

Illustrative model — composite of qualitative reports from Graeber (2018) & Dejours (1998)

Depression, Anxiety, and the Paradox of Privilege

Mental health research has found a puzzling pattern: depression and anxiety are rampant among well-paid professionals in comfortable office environments. The expectation of gratitude — "you should be thankful for such a good job" — makes it impossible for the sufferer to articulate their distress. They conclude that the problem must be with them, leading to self-blame, shame, and deepening depression.

Part VIThe Economic Paradox

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Standard economic theory predicts that competitive markets should eliminate inefficiency. The persistence of bullshit jobs represents a significant challenge to orthodox economics.[11]

The Keynes Prediction — A Timeline

1930

Keynes's Prophecy

John Maynard Keynes predicts technological progress will reduce the work week to fifteen hours by 2030.

1970s

Productivity Decouples from Wages

Worker productivity continues to rise, but wages stagnate. The surplus is absorbed by corporate profits and expanding administrative overhead.

2013

Graeber's Essay Goes Viral

"On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" is shared millions of times worldwide, proposing that productivity gains have been absorbed by pointless work.

2018

The Book

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory expands the essay into a full anthropological, economic, and political analysis with extensive worker testimony.

2020–22

The Pandemic Reckoning

COVID-19 forces a mass experiment: millions sent home, many discover their absence makes no difference. The "Great Resignation" follows.

The GDP Illusion

GDP does not distinguish between useful and useless production. Graeber speculated that as much as half of GDP could represent the output of bullshit jobs — work that produces nothing of value but is counted as productive because money changes hands.[12]

Part VIIThe Political Dimension

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The bullshit jobs problem cuts across traditional political lines. The right cannot acknowledge it because it contradicts the foundational myth of market efficiency. The left has its own difficulties: bullshit job workers are not exploited in the traditional sense — they are overpaid for work that produces nothing.

Work as Social Control

There is a more cynical interpretation: bullshit jobs serve ruling interests by keeping the population busy, docile, and too exhausted to organize for change.[13] This may be overly conspiratorial — but the effect is real regardless of intent.

If a significant portion of the workforce is already being paid to do nothing useful, then UBI is not a radical departure — it is simply an honest version of current practice. Instead of paying people to pretend to work, we would pay them to do whatever they want, including genuinely useful things they cannot currently afford to do.

Part VIIICultural & Ethical Implications

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If a society systematically requires millions of its members to spend the majority of their waking hours on activities that accomplish nothing, this is not merely an economic inefficiency — it is a moral catastrophe. Time is the one truly non-renewable resource.

Environmental Consequences

Bullshit jobs are not ecologically neutral. They require office buildings, commutes, equipment. All of this environmental impact is incurred in the service of nothing.[14] In a world facing climate catastrophe, eliminating bullshit jobs would represent a significant environmental gain.

The Crisis of Trust

When workers know their own jobs are pointless, they naturally suspect others' are too. The result is generalized cynicism about institutions, expertise, and authority — contributing to the broader crisis of institutional legitimacy.

Part IXCritiques & Limitations

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Not everyone accepts Graeber's analysis. Critics argue that reliance on workers' self-assessments is methodologically problematic.[15] Some economists contend that if a firm pays someone a salary, the job must be producing value. A 2021 study in Work, Employment and Society found that only about 8 percent of workers consistently described their jobs as socially useless — still millions of people, but far lower than Graeber's 37–40 percent figure.[16]

Part XLooking Forward

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The COVID-19 pandemic forced a massive, unplanned experiment. Entire categories of workers were sent home, and many discovered that their absence made no discernible difference. The "Great Resignation" of 2021–2022 was driven in part by a mass reassessment of the value of work.[17]

Principles for Reform

Decouple income from employment. As long as survival depends on holding a job, people will be coerced into bullshit work. UBI, robust public services, and reduced working hours are steps forward.

Pay essential work fairly. If care workers, teachers, and maintenance workers were compensated fairly, the perverse incentive structure drawing talent toward bullshit jobs would weaken.

Reward contribution, not performance. Organizations must develop cultures that value genuine output rather than performative busyness.

Challenge the work ethic itself. The moral assumption that work is inherently virtuous and human value is determined by employment must be confronted.

The right to meaningful labor is not a luxury. It is a precondition for a decent human life. A society that denies it to millions of its members — while insisting they be grateful for the denial — has some explaining to do.

Conclusion

Part XIThe Bullshitification of Real Work

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There is a dimension of the problem that Graeber's taxonomy, focused as it is on entire jobs, tends to understate. Many workers do not have bullshit jobs — they have real jobs that are being progressively colonized by bullshit tasks. A DevOps engineer who spends her mornings building infrastructure that keeps systems alive and her afternoons producing KPI reports that no stakeholder has ever opened does not have a bullshit job. She has a real job with a growing bullshit tumour attached to it. This may be the more widespread — and more insidious — form of the disease.

The Spectrum, Not the Binary

Graeber's framework implies a binary: a job is either bullshit or it isn't. But lived experience suggests a spectrum. Most workers in developed economies can identify a core of their role that feels genuinely useful — the teaching, the coding, the nursing, the building — surrounded by an expanding halo of activity that feels performative, redundant, or absurd. The question is not whether your job is bullshit, but what percentage of it is.

Consider the teacher who spends three hours a day teaching and five hours on administrative compliance, documentation, and meetings about documentation. The teaching is deeply meaningful. The paperwork is not. The job is real; the ratio is broken. Or consider the doctor who estimates that she spends more time interacting with electronic health record systems than with patients. The healing is essential. The data entry is, at best, duct-taping — patching a system that should be designed differently.

The most demoralizing form of bullshit is not having a pointless job. It is having a meaningful job and watching it be slowly buried under pointless tasks until the meaning is no longer visible.

The hidden dimension

Where the Productivity Went

This is where the Keynes paradox becomes personal. Productivity in developed economies has increased roughly tenfold since the 1930s. Keynes predicted this would lead to a fifteen-hour work week. Instead, working hours have remained stable or increased. The standard explanation — that people chose to consume more rather than work less — is only partially true. A significant part of the answer is that productivity gains have been absorbed not by leisure, not by higher wages, and not even primarily by profit extraction, but by the multiplication of bullshit tasks within real jobs.

The mechanism works like this: technology makes it possible to accomplish a given task in a fraction of the time it once required. Rather than allowing the worker to go home, the organization fills the freed-up time with reporting, compliance, documentation, meetings, status updates, training modules, and other forms of meta-work — work about work. The worker is no more productive in any meaningful sense; they simply produce the same output plus a growing volume of organizational noise.

A telecommunications engineer designs and maintains network infrastructure — work that directly enables millions of people to communicate. But a growing proportion of her week is consumed by tasks that serve no user: writing progress reports for managers who write progress reports for their managers; creating documentation for processes that are never consulted; attending status meetings whose content could be conveyed in a three-line email; and developing products — premium ringtones, obscure IP Centrex features, branded content bundles — that market research already knows nobody wants, but that someone in a strategy role needs to justify their own position.

Product Bullshit — Making Things Nobody Needs

This points to a variant of the problem that Graeber did not fully explore: the phenomenon of workers in legitimate, skilled roles being directed to create products, features, or services that have no real demand. The telecommunications industry is a vivid example. Engineers with genuine technical expertise spend months building features — visual voicemail customization suites, convergent billing dashboards for consumers who will never look at them, IoT home bundles that solve no problem anyone has — not because customers want them but because product managers need to fill a roadmap, because strategy teams need to justify their headcount, because quarterly earnings calls require the appearance of innovation.

This is not a bullshit job in Graeber's sense. The engineer is skilled. The work is technically real. But the purpose has been hollowed out. The product is bullshit even though the labour is genuine. The worker knows it. The product manager suspects it. The customer confirms it by never using it. Yet the cycle continues because every participant in the chain has incentives to maintain the fiction.

The Administrative Ratchet

There is a structural reason why bullshit tasks tend to accumulate rather than recede. Each new reporting requirement, compliance process, or documentation standard is introduced individually, with a plausible justification. But they are almost never removed. The result is a one-way ratchet: the administrative burden on real workers increases monotonically over time. A nurse who in 1980 spent 80% of her shift with patients and 20% on paperwork now spends those proportions roughly reversed. A university lecturer who once devoted her time to teaching and research now navigates an ecosystem of learning outcomes matrices, teaching quality frameworks, student satisfaction surveys, impact assessments, workload allocation models, and REF preparation exercises — each individually defensible, collectively suffocating.

This ratchet effect explains a puzzle: how can workers simultaneously report that their jobs are meaningful and that they are drowning in pointless activity? The job is meaningful. The accretion of meta-tasks around it is not. Both statements are true. The tragedy is that the meaningful core keeps shrinking while the bullshit periphery keeps growing.

Technology did not free us from work. It freed us from necessary work — and then the system generated unnecessary work to fill the void, because a society that treats busyness as virtue cannot tolerate the liberation that its own machines have made possible.

The productivity paradox, restated

The Compounding Cost

The aggregate effect is staggering. If even 30% of the working hours of genuinely useful workers are consumed by bullshit tasks — a conservative estimate for many white-collar environments — then a society of 100 million workers is losing 30 million person-years of productive capacity annually to organizational noise. That is not an abstraction. Those are hours that could have been spent caring for patients, teaching students, building infrastructure, writing code, conducting research, or simply resting so that the remaining hours could be spent more effectively.

And unlike bullshit jobs, which at least leave the holder with time to read, think, or pursue side projects during the hours when they are pretending to work, bullshit tasks within real jobs are genuinely exhausting. They consume attention, create decision fatigue, and leave the worker too depleted to do the meaningful parts of their job well. The bullshitification of real work does not just waste time — it degrades the quality of the time that remains.

Postscript

A Field Guide to Organizational Absurdity

50 bullshit jobs + 50 bullshit tasks — because meaninglessness comes in both flavours

Graeber focused on entire jobs. But as Part XI argues, the more pervasive problem may be bullshit tasks colonizing real jobs. What follows is a twin catalogue: fifty roles that arguably shouldn't exist, and fifty tasks that are grafted onto roles that should. The first wastes a career. The second wastes an hour here, an afternoon there — until the meaningful core of a job has been hollowed out. This is about job and task design, not the worth of the people trapped in them.

I. Fifty Bullshit Jobs

Roles whose elimination would go unnoticed

Corporate Bureaucracy

1. 01Strategic alignment vice president
2. 02Cross-functional synergy coordinator
3. 03Committee secretary for committees that haven't met in two years
4. 04Process excellence lead who adds steps to existing processes
5. 05Corporate values implementation officer
6. 06Approval workflow administrator in a 14-step signing chain
7. 07Reorganization communications specialist (permanent role, annual reshuffles)

Tech & Digital

8. 08Agile coach in a company that ignores every agile principle
9. 09Metaverse strategy director at a brick-and-mortar retailer
10. 10Dashboard curator maintaining dashboards nobody checks
11. 11Digital transformation consultant who renames existing processes
12. 12AI prompt governance reviewer for trivial internal chatbot queries
13. 13Data quality steward manually checking outputs of automated systems
14. 14SEO strategist for a website updated once a year

Finance & Consulting

15. 15Risk heatmap designer producing colourful matrices no one acts on
16. 16Audit preparation coordinator — preparing for the people who prepare for auditors
17. 17Expense policy enforcement associate flagging €4 coffee receipts
18. 18Benchmarking consultant comparing clients against meaningless industry averages
19. 19Financial model maintainer for a model built on assumptions nobody believes

Human Resources

20. 20Employee engagement survey administrator whose results are never acted upon
21. 21Chief happiness officer with no budget and no authority
22. 22Corporate university program assistant for modules everyone clicks through blindly
23. 23Internal awards nomination coordinator
24. 24Exit interview analyst whose findings are never shared with leadership

Sales & Marketing

25. 25Brand evangelist with no product input or customer contact
26. 26Community manager for a brand forum with three active users
27. 27Lead scoring analyst applying arbitrary formulas no sales rep trusts
28. 28Social media approval reviewer vetting harmless posts through a five-person chain
29. 29Market intelligence analyst clipping news articles available to anyone with Google

Government & Public Sector

30. 30Inter-departmental liaison officer whose function is to schedule liaison meetings
31. 31Public consultation coordinator for consultations whose outcomes are predetermined
32. 32Grant compliance auditor checking boxes on grants too small to justify the audit
33. 33Stakeholder engagement officer whose stakeholders don't know they exist
34. 34Strategic planning officer in a department that hasn't changed its strategy in a decade

Management & Supervision

35. 35Middle manager supervising self-directed workers who need no supervision
36. 36Status update coordinator compiling reports for someone who compiles reports for someone else
37. 37Deputy assistant to the assistant deputy director
38. 38Programme director for a programme that ended two years ago but was never formally closed
39. 39Escalation manager whose entire function is forwarding emails upward
40. 40Chief of staff to an executive who has a PA and two other chiefs of staff

Performative Innovation & Miscellaneous

41. 41Innovation lab researcher whose prototypes are never adopted
42. 42Design thinking facilitator running sticky-note workshops that produce no outcomes
43. 43Hackathon organizer in a company that rejects every hackathon output
44. 44Corporate venture liaison connecting startups to executives who never respond
45. 45Disruption readiness assessor
46. 46Office utilization analyst studying badge swipes in a half-empty building
47. 47Hot-desking experience champion
48. 48Timesheet compliance chaser
49. 49Buzzword calibration consultant
50. 50Senior vice president of nothing in particular, reporting to the executive vice president of strategic ambiguity

II. Fifty Bullshit Tasks

Pointless activities grafted onto real jobs

These are not bad jobs. They are good jobs being slowly buried under tasks that serve no one — except the organizational apparatus itself.

Reporting & Documentation

1. 01Writing weekly status reports that duplicate what is already visible in Jira, Asana, or any other project tool
2. 02Producing monthly activity summaries for a manager who produces monthly activity summaries for their manager
3. 03Maintaining a personal timesheet in 15-minute increments for work that cannot meaningfully be measured in time
4. 04Writing post-mortem documents for incidents nobody will study or learn from
5. 05Creating end-of-year self-assessments that paraphrase the same KPIs the manager already has
6. 06Documenting a process that everyone knows will change before anyone reads the documentation
7. 07Updating a knowledge base that colleagues bypass entirely by asking each other on Slack
8. 08Compiling a quarterly business review deck that recycles the same slides with updated dates

Meetings & Alignment

9. 09Attending a recurring "sync" meeting whose only agenda item is scheduling the next sync meeting
10. 10Joining a cross-functional alignment call to repeat what you already wrote in an email that morning
11. 11Sitting in a two-hour "brainstorming" session whose output — sticky notes on a wall — is photographed and never revisited
12. 12Preparing a presentation for an internal review meeting that will be rescheduled three times and then cancelled
13. 13Participating in a "town hall" Q&A where the answers were pre-written and the questions were pre-selected
14. 14Attending mandatory "all-hands" that could have been a two-paragraph email
15. 15Joining a daily standup that takes 45 minutes because nobody actually stands up
16. 16Participating in a retrospective whose action items are identical to last sprint's action items

Compliance & Box-Ticking

17. 17Completing an annual cybersecurity awareness training that everyone clicks through without reading
18. 18Filling out a risk assessment form for a task that carries no conceivable risk
19. 19Obtaining three levels of approval to purchase a €30 software license
20. 20Submitting a formal change request to modify a single line in a configuration file
21. 21Manually logging hours against project codes that haven't mapped to real projects in two years
22. 22Writing a justification memo for a business trip that costs less than the time spent writing the memo
23. 23Re-certifying access to systems you use daily, every 90 days, through a five-step workflow
24. 24Completing a mandatory unconscious bias module whose content hasn't been updated since 2019

Building Things Nobody Wants

25. 25Developing a premium ringtone marketplace that market research already showed no one would use
26. 26Building an IP Centrex feature set that the sales team cannot explain and no customer has requested
27. 27Designing a consumer-facing dashboard for a service whose users prefer to never think about it
28. 28Creating an internal chatbot that answers questions less accurately than searching the intranet
29. 29Building an IoT home bundle that solves no problem any household has ever articulated
30. 30Developing a mobile app feature that duplicates functionality already available on the website, to fill a product roadmap
31. 31Shipping a "personalization engine" whose recommendations are worse than a static list
32. 32Spending six months localizing a product into markets that have already been deprioritized

Administrative Overhead

33. 33Submitting a purchase order, getting it approved, then re-submitting it because the fiscal year changed during the approval chain
34. 34Manually reconciling data between two systems that should be integrated but aren't because nobody owns the integration
35. 35Copying and pasting figures from one spreadsheet into another spreadsheet that feeds a dashboard that nobody looks at
36. 36Re-entering information into a CRM that was already captured in the email thread attached to the same record
37. 37Filing expense claims through a seven-screen workflow for a €12 lunch
38. 38Routing a document through four signatories who each assume the others have actually read it
39. 39Converting a document from Word to PDF to Word to PDF because each approver uses a different system
40. 40Manually updating a shared calendar that duplicates an automated scheduling tool nobody trusts

Performative & Cultural

41. 41Setting quarterly OKRs that will be abandoned by week three and retroactively rewritten in week twelve
42. 42Writing a "lessons learned" document for a project whose lessons will be re-learned on the next project
43. 43Peer-reviewing a colleague's code not for quality but to satisfy a pull-request counter in a management dashboard
44. 44Preparing a "development plan" for your annual review that both you and your manager know will never be acted upon
45. 45Contributing to an innovation challenge whose winning ideas are praised in a newsletter and then quietly shelved
46. 46Maintaining an up-to-date LinkedIn profile because HR tracks "employee advocacy engagement scores"
47. 47Volunteering for a culture committee that plans events no one attends in order to improve engagement scores that no one trusts
48. 48Responding to a mandatory employee satisfaction survey knowing your "anonymous" responses will be triangulated by team size
49. 49Spending a Friday afternoon writing a "wins of the week" Slack post to perform enthusiasm for work you find meaningless
50. 50Doing all of the above instead of the actual work you were hired to do — then staying late to do the actual work

Estimated Prevalence by Sector

% of roles with a significant "bullshit" component (jobs + tasks combined)

Financial services

25–40%

Corporate HQ / admin

25–40%

Management consulting

20–35%

Government / public admin

15–30%

Large tech enterprise

15–25%

Marketing & advertising

15–25%

Healthcare (clinical)

<3%

Education (teaching)

<3%

Construction / trades

<2%

Agriculture

<1%

Composite estimates based on Graeber (2018), Soffia et al. (2021), NEF "A Bit Rich" (2009), and Parkinson (1957).
Note: healthcare and education have low bullshit jobs but increasingly high bullshit tasks — administrative burden that the prevalence figures above do not fully capture.

The cruel irony, as Graeber noted, is that the sectors with the lowest bullshit percentage tend to have the lowest pay. The crueller irony, perhaps, is that the workers in those sectors are now drowning in the bullshit tasks invented by the sectors with the highest.

Bibliography & References

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Primary Sources

Graeber, D. (2013). "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." Strike! Magazine, August 2013. strike.coop [1]

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-4331-1. [2]

Graeber, D. (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House.

Philosophy & Political Theory

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Marx, K. (1844). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. M. Milligan. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959.

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-02598-2.

Weber, M. (1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. T. Parsons. London: Routledge, 2001. [3]

Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. J. O'Brien. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Anthropology & History

Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. [4]

Thompson, E.P. (1971). "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past & Present, 50(1), pp. 76–136. [5]

Lee, R.B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Sociology & Organizational Theory

Weber, M. (1922). Economy and Society. Trans. G. Roth & C. Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. [6]

Parkinson, C.N. (1957). Parkinson's Law. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. [8]

Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Sennett, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character. New York: W.W. Norton. [7]

New Economics Foundation. (2009). A Bit Rich: Calculating the Real Value to Society of Different Professions. London: NEF.

Psychology & Well-Being

Seligman, M.E.P. (2011). Flourish. New York: Free Press.

Wrzesniewski, A. & Dutton, J.E. (2001). "Crafting a Job." Academy of Management Review, 26(2), pp. 179–201. [9]

Dejours, C. (1998). Souffrance en France. Paris: Seuil. [10]

Karasek, R. & Theorell, T. (1990). Healthy Work. New York: Basic Books.

Economics

Keynes, J.M. (1930). "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." In Essays in Persuasion. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, pp. 358–373. [11] [12]

Schor, J.B. (1992). The Overworked American. New York: Basic Books.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. [13]

Environment & Ethics

Hickel, J. (2020). Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. London: William Heinemann. [14]

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics. London: Random House Business.

Empirical Studies & Critiques

Soffia, M., Alderman, A. & Wood, A.J. (2021). "Who Has Bullshit Jobs?" Work, Employment and Society, 36(5), pp. 815–834. doi:10.1177/09500170211015067 [15] [16]

Dur, R. & van Lent, M. (2019). "Socially Useless Jobs." Industrial Relations, 58(1), pp. 3–16. doi:10.1111/irel.12227

Bloom, N. et al. (2015). "Does Working from Home Work?" Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(1), pp. 165–218.

Klinenberg, E. (2021). "The Great Resignation and the Future of Work." The New Yorker, November 2021. [17]

Further Reading

Gorz, A. (1999). Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem with Work. Durham: Duke University Press.

Susskind, D. (2020). A World Without Work. London: Allen Lane.

Srnicek, N. & Williams, A. (2015). Inventing the Future. London: Verso.

Frayne, D. (2015). The Refusal of Work. London: Zed Books.

An analysis drawing on the work of David Graeber (1961–2020) and many others

All views synthesized for educational purposes · 2026