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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.

https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/

According to our data, almost half of HR people and recruiters got laid off, as compared to 10% of engineers and only 4% of salespeople.

This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.

But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.

If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).

Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.

I don't think HR or recruiter are a "bullshit job". But if you have people whose job is to recruit people, and you know you're not going to recruit any more people for a while - since you've just decided to actually fire 10% of them! - then it doesn't make sense for you to keep paying those people whose job is to recruit. That is not some judgement on the objective eternal worth of the recruiting as human endeavor, it's just a consequence of economic circumstance IMHO.

In my experience, HR pays very crucial role in the company, it allows it to run smoothly for one. Try to put sand instead of oil into the most ingenious and powerful engine, and it will destroy itself pretty quickly. But: in good times, the company can afford a fat HR department, to squeeze out any benefit and even add some just in case. In lean times, it will be cut for the company to survive. If lean times are too long, the same will happen as happens when you neglect to maintain your engine, change oil, etc. - it'll work for a while, and then it will start breaking very badly. In most companies, the hope is the lean times will improve before that time comes.

HR should be taken very seriously. It is a small branch of the state forced into business so that the business complies with everything the state demands. That is far more dangerous, although maybe not "serious" than any other part of a business. None of the others can have the cops come down to put you in jail or take away everything you own.

It strikes me that HR and recruiting are simply less necessary than sales and engineering as employees, whether their actual jobs need to be done or not- after all, during layoffs you're presumably not hiring any more people(and thus don't need recruiters), and large portions of what HR does can be moved to the managers of specific departments(other things they do, eg on-boarding paperwork and organizing company celebrations, companies are probably doing less of if they're laying people off). That may not thrill those managers, of course, but in a cost cutting environment it's typically a price companies are willing to pay.

Just because HR etc. are the least productive of all employees, that doesn't actually mean the job they do is 'bullshit', just no longer economical in the current environment. I mean, corporations are generally not in the business of making frivolous expenditures. A comparable example might be agriculture. In favourable economic conditions for farmers, for instance if the price of bread rises, farmers/landowners will put 'marginal' fields to work; that is, fields which don't usually yield enough to be profitable except in good (for the landowners) times. When these fields are no longer profitable and fall out of work, that doesn't mean they were 'bullshit fields', it's just that they only operate profitably in certain conditions. The same could said of certain employees or even departments; they only make economic sense in good times.

Just because HR etc. are the least productive of all employees, that doesn't actually mean the job they do is 'bullshit', just no longer economical in the current environment. I mean, corporations are generally not in the business of making frivolous expenditures.

Corporations make frivolous expenditures all the time. The people at the top are always giving themselves insane perks because they can get away with it, for one obvious example. But even outside the realm of "power corrupts" type examples, corporations are run by people who are capable of being misled about whether something is a good idea. Whether that is because someone is lying to them, they are following conventional wisdom that is wrong, or some other cause, it happens all the time.

I mean, corporations are generally not in the business of making frivolous expenditures.

Corporations are big enough that they have a heavy parasite load.

I think BS jobs are called as such not because they are useless but because they provide status/compensation not in proportion to how difficult the job is. And people inherently feel there is something "bullshit" about that, labor theory of value and all.

Without rampant credentialism the average bricklayer would have the alternative choice of becoming thhe average email sender.

People are very sensitive to class warfare being committed against them.

Without rampant credentialism the average bricklayer would have the alternative choice of becoming thhe average email sender.

I have worked with bricklayers and I have worked with email senders. This statement is simply untrue. E-mail senders are probably doing a less-highly skilled job on the whole than bricklayers, but they are doing a job which absolutely requires skills that most bricklayers do not have. E-mail senders need to be computer literate, they need to be fluent in English with good spelling and grammar, they need a certain amount of trustworthiness with potentially confidential information(and knowing how to handle confidential information is a skill!) and cybersecurity skills(basic stuff like "set a password and don't write it on the device" is not basic to bricklayers), and they need to be able to understand their role within the company and what they can and can't promise to the people they will be communicating with(not a problem for bricklayers in non-supervisory positions because they don't communicate with customers). They also need a certain level of "ability to fit into a white collar employment scenario", where it's assumed that they can take their work home with them(bricklayers, like most other construction trades, are assumed to be drunk and unreachable when off the clock) at least at critical times, they need to be able to be paid every two weeks via direct deposit(bricklayers expect a physical check every Friday at quitting time, because this is industry standard for construction), they need to communicate effectively about when they're not able to be at work or to complete a particular task and to resolve disputes by reference to a third party mediator(neither of these are expectations for construction workers, although plenty of individual construction workers are capable of doing them).

Requiring a college degree is a very cheap(for the company) filter for people who fit that description much better than a typical construction worker. Yes, even if that degree is in underwater basketweaving or whatever, it usually means that a person is computer literate, English fluent and capable of good spelling and grammar, can clearly communicate, is capable of doing work outside of the office setting when necessary, can follow directions for computer use and information handling, and probably comes from a class background where basic white collar behavioral norms like "tell someone when you won't show up" and "bring problems with a coworker to your boss instead of just angrily confronting them" are widespread. People who hire bricklayers have a different set of filters they use to seek out people who have the skills to be bricklayers, of course, because the ability to use computers and spell English is irrelevant to that job, but the ability to build things according to measurements is not.

assumed to be drunk and unreachable when off the clock

I work in cyber-security and have worked long and hard to establish that assumption, thank you very much!

Without rampant credentialism the average bricklayer would have the alternative choice of becoming the average email sender.

I think this claim requires a lot more evidence than anyone ever gives for it. For it to be true, it would mean almost every company in the world is just ignoring an enormous opportunity to cut their spending on salaries because... who knows. Maybe possible, but a fairly extraordinary claim that requires commensurate evidence. I think it's fair to assume that if these companies could employ most anyone to do 'email sender' jobs, they would.

Also, if all people mean by saying 'bullshit jobs' is 'jobs that maybe aren't quite as hard as people think', 'bullshit jobs' is a terrible term and people should stop using it. What do you think most people hear when someone describes something as 'bullshit'?

Credentialism doesn't mean companies are refusing to employ competent people because "who knows", it means that companies are refusing to employ competent people for the very specific reason that the lawyers of the Administrative State dreamt up a Byzantine tangle of regulations that says your company can be sued for $1 trillion if your e-mail senders don't have a piece of paper from e-mail sending school which indicates that they are properly versed in e-mail safety.

Also, if all people mean by saying 'bullshit jobs' is 'jobs that maybe aren't quite as hard as people think'

A bullshit job is a job which would have zero or positive net impact on the world if it didn't get done.

Our company keeps hiring DEI folks, and it worries me -- they seem a net negative, beyond just their salary.

My post was partially inspired by having to sit through 2 hours of DEI training organized by HR.

Maybe it's me spending too much time here and getting used to good faith, high quality arguments, but those two hours felt like being schooled by teenagers who were giving it half their effort. It was painful. For example, we had a module about how diversity is a smart business choice because it gets more diverse ideas injected into the company, after which we had to get into groups of 3-4 and discuss how each of us would work toward increasing diversity in our specific roles.

My first thoughts were:

  • leading the question -> there's no room for discussion, even questions, but you're made to feel "as if" you have any choice or input. You're given a goal (diversity) and ordered to come up, in front of your peers (social pressure), with ways to achieve that goal.

  • motte and bailey -> basically arguing for an unfair, politically-motivated redistribution of wealth ("bad diversity") and hiding it behind a good, meaningful idea of diversity.

At the end, I couldn't tell what's worse. The icky ways someone was trying to pressure people into doing/thinking what they wanted us to think OR the form it took, which was so poor, it would get you a C at most if you did that for a school project.

leading the question -> there's no room for discussion, even questions, but you're made to feel "as if" you have any choice or input. You're given a goal (diversity) and ordered to come up, in front of your peers (social pressure), with ways to achieve that goal.

The snarky, but reasonably accurate, way to answer is, "in the context of getting fresh ideas in, I'd suggest that we hire smart people with non-college backgrounds; we could probably do that using aptitude testing on an open pool of candidates". For me, this has the virtue of being something that I actually believe is true in addition to it baiting someone to say that they actually don't give a shit about ideas and that "diversity" doesn't mean anything like the dictionary definition.

Edit - Of course, the latter part is a ridiculous fantasy of a gotcha moment. In real life, the answer is that aptitude testing is racist and doesn't actually measure intelligence anyway.

In real life, the answer is that aptitude testing is racist and doesn't actually measure intelligence anyway.

But, one might answer, how well do they predict one's ability to come up with unconventional ideas ? Because that's what would matter here.

The entire DEI infrastructure may be leaning towards the negative but, as long as the laws and regulations are what they are, it might be locally beneficial (to that company) to hire people to help them navigate that mess.

They may keep the Justice Department's Civil Rights division at bay. Regulatory burden can be costly enough that taking a hit to productivity and profits internally still makes sense.

I think you're overlooking a simpler explanation: You don't need recruiters if you're not hiring. As for HR, I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that they spend a wildly disproportionate share of their time dealing with onboarding new employees. So there's less need for that during a lull in hiring as well. Plus companies that laid off engineers have fewer existing employees to manage.

That's a good point, and I think it explains part of what's happening, but not all of it. Eg. the numbers are disproportional: firing half of HR and firing only 10% of engineers means that the HR-to-engineer ratio was heavily skewed toward HR if you get tilt it back and still be ok.

Also, a small, anecdotal data point: a friend's small tech company that employed about 30 engineers fired about 20 HR people. The whole company employed roughly 100 people. So it boggle my mind why they needed to have 20 HR folks in the first place.

Maybe HR in some of these tech companies are acting more like a concierge for the other workers. That could explain their high numbers.

So it boggle my mind why they needed to have 20 HR folks in the first place.

Lol, that's outright insane amount of HR people.

I started working in the R&D dept for the local subsidiary of a decent sized multinational company and I remember the HR person complaining that she was responsible for hiring and onboarding ~100 new people during the spring (including all the temporary workers for the assembly plant).

In a previous job with around 30 employees in the country, we had one person who spent maybe a third of their time on HR work and the actual official HR person was situated in another country (and was responsible for most of Northern Europe by themselves).

I understand your point and thing HR is mostly being parasitic.... but....

HR person complaining that she was responsible for hiring and onboarding 100 new people during the spring

If you told me to Hire and onboard 100 people in 3 months as a single person, even if all of them were in the top half of my industry for competence and EQ, I'd tell you to fuck off. That either means you're not onboarding people with enough care, maintaining them and their experience, or hiring with enough discretion.

That either means you're not onboarding people with enough care, maintaining them and their experience, or hiring with enough discretion.

Or in this particular case handling the paperwork and administrative onboarding for people who are mostly factory assembly workers. And yes, they did get another person to help after that.

You should be skeptical of narratives that make you feel good about yourself. I’m assuming here that you’re an “engineer”. In that case, your insight into the usefulness of the HR department is limited- in fact, the better they do their job, the less you should notice it.

That’s not to say HR are more valuable than the people who actually make and sell the product, but there’s a range between “most useful” to “bullshit job”, and IME HR doesn’t fall in the “bullshit” part of that range. In fact, I can’t think of any broad category of jobs that really are “bullshit” once you understand their function.

That's a fair point. I admit I have an axe to grind with HR and that's skewing my perceptions. It's useful for me to air it out and get some pushback--thank you.

That said, can you describe what value HR brings to a company? I can think of a couple of things, such as managing the recruiting pipeline and on/off-boarding processes. Plus taking care of mandatory trainings and providing employees with an interface with the benefits & insurance. Also: tackling employee grievances. But that still means the ratio of HR-to-employee should be low. Perhaps something like 1:25 or even more, since you get economies of scale as the number of employees grow.

That's a fair point. I admit I have an axe to grind with HR and that's skewing my perceptions. It's useful for me to air it out and get some pushback--thank you.

That's big of you.

That said, can you describe what value HR brings to a company?

At its core, HR applies or enforces management's decisions regarding their employees. This is a very broad scope, and the exact borders change depending on the organization - smaller organizations will include payroll in HR, for example, while very big ones may separate even employee well-being to its own department. In most cases, though, they'll have to handle everything to do with e.g. promotion policy, PTO for individuals and for the entire org, hours worked (sometimes offloaded to payroll, which may be a separate entity), insurances & benefits (including negotiations with whoever supplies those, maybe annually), internal transfers according to company policy, and of course compliance with the law (i.e. external policy). HR is a bit like the police or the court system in that it actually makes sure that the decisions from higher up are carried out, as well as keeping track of those decisions. Otherwise management's decisions are meaningless, like an unenforced law.

For a small organization, you can get away with not having HR, or handing it all to one person such as the CFO. For a big organization, HR is essential, otherwise you get chaos.

For an example that I'm closely familiar with, if an employee wants to relocate from one branch of a large organization to another (this could be inside a country or even between countries), then the person who actually manages everything will be from HR. They'll take care of visas if needed (or hiring a law firm for it, much more likely), they'll make sure the employee gets whatever relocation bonuses they're do, they're in charge of the actual numbers f what those benefits are - all according to the policy that the company's management decided on. Or if your company offers tuition assistance, someone from HR will authorize it.

It's mostly bureaucracy, but I honestly can't see how an organization functions without it in any meaningful way.

Perhaps something like 1:25 or even more, since you get economies of scale as the number of employees grow.

Absolutely. I think for my local branch of a globe-spanning org, it's closer to 1:100. (I actually just went ahead and counted, and got to ~1:250, but I think I'm missing a few). Spit-balling, I'd say over 1:50 even is overkill.

Thanks, that's illuminating. Now I just have to adjust my monkey brain.

There’s that famous Buffett quote about investment banks being run more for employees than for shareholders.

Excellent post, I'd also throw in that this is the original purpose of the idea of the Professional and Managerial Class as a distinct entity from the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. The classical Marxian model of Bourgeoisie (the ownership class, or those who Hobsbawm defined in his history of the 19th century as "Anyone who employed another person") and the Proletariat (workers, the rest, who make their money from their own labor) seemed increasingly out of date when corporations seem to run not in the interests of "capital" ownership but in the interests of the managers.

seemed increasingly out of date when corporations seem to run not in the interests of "capital" ownership but in the interests of the managers.

I think the bourgeoisie allow - or are forced to allow via threat of regulation - some say into events by managers but I think that's a far cry from the argument that managers have actually wrested control.

At worst imo they are forced into the situation that Roman emperors found themselves in after coopting Christianity: powerful enough church leaders can compel or give Roman officials (even the Emperor) pause or even force them to change tack. They had to play along with the new ideology and couldn't just write it off.

But the bulk of the power remained with the Roman Emperor, especially if he was strong.

I feel the same way about capitalist today, especially in fields that don't get caught up as much in the culture war. We can all point to endless rampages by lunatics in colleges or progressive non-profits or businesses that depend on constant PR (film, fashion). I'm not sure that the situation is the same in the oil business or whatever.

Who are the bourgeoisie in your view? In the 19th century when Marx is writing (and that hobsbawm is writing about) there were individuals who owned companies, factories, ships, farms. Today the big players are pension funds and other wealth managers.

Musk, Bezos, and Gates combined barely eclipse Calpers alone. Blackrock has ten Trillion under management. The fund managers have many times the power of the owners.

I'd give the historical parallel not of the late Roman empire but of late Merovingian France. The Roi FaiNeant era, out of which emerged powerful subordinates like Charles Martel, who would slowly seize power in their own names. Or the emergence of Japanese Shogun.

The managers are already doing it. The CEO of nasdaq is no one you've ever heard of, and while she is probably very rich by ordinary standards she's not even a billionaire to my knowledge. Musk can piss her net worth away because someone asked him to support Ukraine on Twitter, and never even notice it.

Blackrock now plays by her rules, unless it specifically becomes an esg investor and refuses to use Nasdaq listed products.

You can't be neutral on a moving train. Everybody is standing somewhere, none of us are totally objective, Blackrock's very statements of neutrality are privileging some viewpoints over others.

Who are the bourgeoisie in your view?

I actually was thinking of the stereotypical business owner/industrialist. In terms of managers I was speaking more of middle managers and the HR types.

I take your point though that the first is outdated and I think I just misread how others were using the second.

The point isn't really wealth, though, it is relationships of power. To be bourgeoisie is to be engaged in relationships of exploitation, the labor of the proles supports your lifestyle. The PMC distinction is valuable not because of the money/wealth, but because of the way that the PMC obscures the relations of power it has with the proles through a variety of legal/technical innovations. A PMC liberal might claim that they personally do not exploit anyone, while their lifestyle and vocation creates and perpetuates structures that engage in that same exploitation.* Think of Uber. The 1880 Bourgeois capitalist who wanted his driver to take him home from a party had a personal relationship with his driver. If he forced his driver to work late, didn't let his driver take off on Sunday to go to church and spend time with his family, didn't pay him enough, that was all personal: it was he the capitalist doing to it to him the driver. The Uber user today, the capitalist PMC, does not personally exploit any individual Uber driver. In fact, Uber encourages the PMC to tell himself lies, that his Uber driver is an artist and this is his day job, that his Uber driver likes the flexible hours that let him do other things, etc.

A personal sideways example: an engineering firm I work with puts in their email signatures that their company is a "carbon neutral workplace." This despite the fact that they are sending me plans to cut down a forest and fill in a wetland, plans that will be carried out with diesel bulldozers and excavators. Their "firm" is carbon neutral measured as a firm; their work is a bit less carbon neutral. That to me is the essence of the liberal PMC: they don't personally exploit anyone, they're insulated from it.

  • American Psycho is IMO best interpreted as a series of hallucinations by which Patrick Bateman, the picture perfect PMC, hallucinates actually physically killing the people that the laissez-faire Wall Street Capitalism (of which Bateman forms a cog in the machine) will kill. He hallucinates stabbing a homeless man while taunting him that he can't get a job, doesn't the capitalist system he supports achieve the same thing but slower and without assigning agency in the killing to any Wall Street tycoon? He hallucinates torturing and murdering prostitutes, isn't that exactly what a system that forces women to sell their bodies to support themselves does? Bateman is insulated by layers of paperwork and legalese and subordinates from the results of his bond trading on the proletariat, he hallucinates feeling it morally as though he were actually doing it.

The saying goes, "privatize the gains, socialize the losses." What you describe sounds like "privatize[?] the harm [or agency?], socialize the guilt."

Think of it more like outsourcing your ethical compromises. Like a primitive superstitious ethical system, where direct contact with the impure makes you impure, but contracting someone else to handle the impure doesn't make you impure no matter how often you do it. As long as you never personally oppress anyone, other people doing it on your behalf doesn't bother you, you can tweet lecture everyone about ACAB while living in a doormanned building and taking private cars everywhere.

Modern legal and ethical systems recognize hiring someone to commit murder as equivalent to pulling the trigger yourself. Logically, it is ethically no different for any other ethical violation.

But then I don't tend to have the disgust reactions that many do about work. I've handled sewage all day, both literal septic tanks and reading case files for human sewage in pedophile confinement cases, and then gone out for a big meal. Purity isn't a reflex I have strongly, call it the 'tism.

There was a massive bubble in 2020-21 with web3/NFT/crypto and all kinds of start-ups got insane valuations. So I think the sector is just trimming the fat. Not just within sectors (or entire sectors) but within companies too.

As for HR, my view is somewhat more cynical than yours. I think their primary function is to keep tabs on employees and keeping the company leadership in charge rather than helping to solve conflicts or other fluffy stories they tell others - and occasionally themselves.

My view is even more cynical- the primary function of HR is to reduce the workload for managers by offloading routine or non-decisionmaking tasks to functionaries. Your manager can personally keep track of your PTO, and document in the company's calendar times you'll be off, but in practice he'd rather approve your request and let a bureaucrat handle the rest.

Getting rid of HR is trimming the fat at the expense of making management work more. For a company in the red, this is fine to upper management because lower managers who have to take on HR responsibilities are all salaried anyways.

I actually agree with you that these jobs are probably chaff that owe their existence to higher-ups taking their eye off the ball during times of plenty; there's less pressure to eye the budget like a hawk and make your department a lean mean economic machine when the Line Goes Up is already firmly in the green, which allows all manner of bloat and pathology to creep in.

However, in the interest of Devil's Advocacy:

But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork.

Others have pointed out something similar, and I'll add to the chorus: it might be the case that having lots of HR people really is business-optimal in times of plenty. When the market falls, your engineers are happy to just have a job at all and don't need much coddling. When the market is rising, and engineers have many options to jump ship, it could be in the company's genuine interests to have a huge HR pool managing their perks / expenses / work retreats / Casual Pizza Party Fridays / etc etc.

Alternatively, we could take a more cynical view that HR is a response to the Administrative State's bullshit legal codes and have it still make sense. Being a stickler for the letter if legal compliance is more important in a bull market than in a bear market because having legal monkey wrenches thrown at your company that slow you down, carries a higher opportunity cost during good times of high turnover than it does during bad times of low turnover. Also, people are more likely to try to sue you when your quarterly reports say "We're loaded" rather than "We've got nothing in the bank to pay settlements". A greater desire to avoid government fines and bad PR therefore incentivises a larger HR department at the zenith of the business cycle than at the nadir.

Others have pointed out something similar, and I'll add to the chorus: it might be the case that having lots of HR people really is business-optimal in times of plenty. When the market falls, your engineers are happy to just have a job at all and don't need much coddling. When the market is rising, and engineers have many options to jump ship, it could be in the company's genuine interests to have a huge HR pool managing their perks / expenses / work retreats / Casual Pizza Party Fridays / etc etc.

This is an interesting take, but my experience is the opposite. HR don't coddle, they suffocate. All the bullshit training, the blizzard of emails, the forms, the surveys the requirements. Giving each manager $100 per month per employee to take their team out to dinner is low overhead. Just paying people more is zero overhead. In times of plenty and times of little, I want HR to nothing more than payroll.

I wonder if a lot of bullshit jobs are acting as a sort of... I'm not even sure what word to use here... emotional/comfort embezzlement? A principal agent problem in which Middle managers, or even upper management and CEOs with plenty of slack that aren't worried about shareholders, hire or keep around people who make their work lives slightly more pleasant because that maximizes their own utility, not the company's. If a middle manager has a choice between a friendly face who hangs out around the office, chats with them, brings donuts to work, and is generally friendly, or a stoic competent worker drone who gets stuff done, the optimal choice for the business is the worker drone, but the rationally selfish choice for the manager is going to depend on how much slack they have and how important it is for them to maximize productivity. If the choice is between the friendly face in a bullshit job or removing the job and saving the company $50k, the rationally selfish choice is probably to the keep the friendly face around. Having an extra friend around at the office isn't worth $50k, and the manager wouldn't spend that out of their own pocket. But if it's just a number of a spreadsheet? That's worth paying. If the manager could take $50k of the company's money at put it into their own pocket, and get away with it, they would. But they can't. But spending $50k of the company's money to improve their lives and make their job slightly easier at an equivalent of $5k? If they can get away with it then it's worth it, because the cost is measured in company-utility and the benefit is in personal-utility.

Any time you give someone control over someone else's money, inefficiencies are bound to happen in one way or another. It's just a question of to what degree.

A more concise way to put it is that managers are judged in importance partly on the number of direct reports they have, and some departments select for people who are good at getting more direct reports whether they need them or not, and that in bad times CFO's and the like keep a much closer eye on them.

Another explanation for this is the following: it's really hard for a CEO to maintain focus across an organization, and most can only do it with very simple messaging.

  • "This year is about growth!"

  • After several years of :arrowup: "This year is about good growth, we won't lose more than $X per new customer."

  • 2022: "This year is about cash flow positivity/profitability/not dying."

I work at a company where I'm dead certain the CEO and many execs understand all this at a very quantitative level. Nevertheless, the actual messaging that reaches us regular workers is just the bullet point. And the net result is that the way it plays out, $1 from CEO bullet point > $1 from other method. If you're pushing "get $1 via careful cost cutting" in a growth year, your project isn't funded and if you do it yourself it doesn't look as good in a promo packet.

Net result is that me and my manager - two PhDs of Quantitative Subject on a Quantitatively Make Money Team - pick our projects based as much on alignment with CEO messaging as we do on an estimate of how much money we'd make. Or alternately, we do the same projects (make the growth vs ROA efficiency frontier move outward) but our summary slide reports a horizontal shift (more of profit per customer-ish metric) instead of a vertical one (more growth at the same profit per customer).

And everyone does this. A year ago at my work, Internal Bureaucracy Team saved some money by building a no-code app in AirCodaJiraForce instead of renting the relevant SAAS product. No one cared. Also a year ago, Engineering Platform Team picked a >$100k hosted SAAS product with cool visualizations over OSS Project that only renders tables. As far as I know no one has used any visualizations. Now the latter choice is being rethought mainly because messaging changed.

Iirc this is exactly the source of Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber suggested: managers bolstering their own egos (or one might less charitably say bolstering their own megalomania) by incrementing the "how many underlings do I have" counter. Whether or not those underlings actually do anything is (apparently) not relevant to the modal human sense of self-aggrandizement: this type of people just wants Number Goes Up.

I would further expect some departments, like HR and recruiting, to be full of people who know how to make it look like they need more employees even if they don't, while the business end of most businesses hires people who aren't so good at that skill.

I have many friends in management. Having lots of employees under them is the opposite of what they are trying to do.

HR is useful because so many modern workers are litigious, need a lot of TLC to do even basic things like turn up to work regularly and get off their phones while working, and employment regulations are a nightmare. The days of having a plucky young men lined up outside the building site who can be employed with less than a handshake and who are desperate to be hired the next day are gone in the (legal part of) the developed world.

On the other hand, HR people reduce risks but they are often not essential. Low-level managers themselves can do a lot of HR work, though the opportunity costs can be high. Thus, I wouldn't be surprised if HR folk tend to be first to go.

Like many here I'm the type that would be one of the engineers in this list and I'm a little skeptical this the first jobs to get let go in a contraction can tell you all that much about which jobs are "bullshit". People have already covered that recruiters, much like fracking, can be essential and have good value returns when engineers or oil is difficult to extract and worth a lot are less important when supply is abundant and cheap. But just in general this isn't the right way to look at businesses. The telling part is that sales people aren't let go. At least in my experience the sales people are making the value directly, they're contacting syndicators or clients or whatever directly and bringing business. The engineers support the sales people with new tools but in very harsh times they can be scrapped and sales people can make due with the older tools. recruiters are even more easy to let go because you can keep improving with the engineers you have. Each role is useful and not a bullshit jobs but their relative usefulness is more or less correlated with whether the company is being lean to survive or attempting to grow and improve and that is more responsive to the economy than anything like inherent usefulness.

The problem with recruiters is that 95% of them can be replaced with a python script and a picture of a IG influencer.

To be fair there are a lot of engineers that when let go their team productivity will go up.

Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't.

While I'm not a fan of HR, this characterization is not correct. Why would companies keep HR employees on the payroll at any time if they weren't providing value? What's happening now is companies are expecting not to hire much in the next ~year so they're cutting employees that help hire people -- HR and recruiters.

I suppose if you take a wider view, the HR roles are a way for society to feed people who aren't producing anything, and companies are coerced into participating in the farce by employment laws that require compliance. It's similar to police: they don't produce anything; they're just there to ensure compliance. The difference is that police stop crimes that are actually harmful, while HR stops implicit witchery.

While I'm not a fan of HR, this characterization is not correct. Why would companies keep HR employees on the payroll at any time if they weren't providing value?

There are many theories of this, but labor hoarding is quite well established empirically. Cultural influences seem non-trivial - managers just don't like firing people. I once replaced someone with about 20 lines of code and kept them around doing the same job (producing a spreadsheet that was formerly read by a cron job, but is now read by no one) until I found an internal transfer for them.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/real-dev.stlouisfed.org/wp/2005/2005-040.pdf

https://www.nber.org/papers/w3556

https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/cultural-influences-on-employee-termination-decisions-firing-the-

Why would companies keep HR employees on the payroll at any time if they weren't providing value?

To cover employer asses from potential legal liability created out of thin air by the State.

One could even say that this is the only reason. Think about it, what is it that HR does that doesn't ultimately stem from some legal obligation? Even fucking conflict resolution could just be handled by private society but has to be there because otherwise you get sued for "fostering a hostile work environment".

It's made up sinecures all the way down.

It's made up sinecures all the way down.

This article takes this thesis and tries to talk about the gender dynamics behind it:

One would expect office politics to intensify when good jobs are scarce. But where some respond to scarcity by fighting harder for existing resources, others may seek to deepen the pool. Here a look at the cradle of elite (over)production suggests something intriguing is afoot.

“Administrative bloat” has been a remarked on feature of higher education for some time. According to one 2014 study, the number of faculty and teaching staff per administrator fell roughly 40 per cent at most US colleges and universities between 1990 and 2012, and now stands at around 2.5 faculty members per administrator.

Less remarked on is the sex breakdown of the growing proportion of administrators. A recent diversity and inclusion report by the University of California indicates that women make up more than 70 per cent of non academic staff across (among others) nursing, therapeutic services, health, health technicians, communications services roles, and a majority or near majority across all non manual staff roles. In other words, if men are still over represented in top academic roles, the non academic supporting ecosystem is overwhelmingly female.

In practice, then, as pursued within universities, one byproduct of student activism is something akin to a “jobs for the girls” scheme, in which a heavily female student body drives demand for more roles across feminised non-academic administrative roles, which in turn helps create an environment geared toward women, and so on. Or, as 2019’s “Afghanistan Papers” famously described that military campaign, a “self licking ice cream cone”.

Young alumnae graduating from this ecosystem might be expected to carry its insights out into professional life. And indeed, according to America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, HR (a career whose employees are 71 per cent female, according to one industry report) is one of the fastest growing occupations in the country.

70.3% of all human resources managers are women, while 29.7% are men.

https://www.zippia.com/human-resources-manager-jobs/demographics/

I imagine it's harder to get this kind of scheme to work in private industry, but I don't see a reason why it wouldn't be at least a minor component. In my own experience, most HR folks I've talked to were women who were also heavily into a certain flavor of politics. I wouldn't put it above them to invent work, then use that to argue for increasing headcount and hiring more comradettes. But I don't think this is a large force. More like upper single digits of % perhaps?

I wouldn't put it above them to invent work, then use that to argue for increasing headcount and hiring more comradettes. But I don't think this is a large force. More like upper single digits of % perhaps?

More like near-triple digits. Arguing for increasing one's subordinates is a standard managment behavior, as documented in the classic "Parkinson's Law or the Pursuit of Progress"

Recruiters and HR eating shit? You love to see it. Finally some good news.

I hope they have 10 years of experience in some niche recruiting tool that came out 3 weeks ago.

But the real pressing question is who is going to confuse Java and Javascript now?

Me. I will bear the sins of this world as my father demands.

But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't.

The problem with the BS jobs theory is would for-profit companies willingly hire employees that do not create value, especially given that the difference between a company meeting or beating an earnings estimate, even by a penny, can make the difference between the sock rising or falling by a large amount. This creates a huge incentive to minimize waste. As you mention, some of this HR is for regulatory/legal reasons, not out of generosity. Although gig economy jobs typically pay poorly, at least they represent how a labor market that is not distorted or inflated by excessive regulation should work, such as supply vs. demand. Gig workers create value directly, not indirectly like with many salaried jobs.

Another interpretation is that companies are still optimizing for producing value, but this value isn't shareholder dollars. It's status. Status might come from size. Or great parties. Or scoring high on "best place to work at $insert_year", etc. These could all make hiring lots of HR people seem like a good idea. And I'm sure if you hire great HR people, you could increase your employee satisfcation, but like with anything, it's hard to find these great HR people. I wouldn't be surprised if every HR employee beneath the 90th percentile of quality is just clocking in and clocking out.

the sock [sic]

Have you considered that maybe the people making the decisions don't actually give a shit about the shareholders? Or even, that the people holding the shares care more about there being HR departments than the value of the stock?

A lot of the bloat starts to make sense once you realize it's just the same kind of people doing what they need to do to get the prestige that gets them promotions and people are loyal to their class more than to the formal organization. It's so natural a tendency that C-suites basically spend all of the time fighting it, and almost always lose.

Sure it's supposed to be illegal to not make the shareholders richer with your every breath on company time, but if there's enough people to spread the responsibility that means nothing, and it means even less if our kind of people also controls the institutions that say what is and isn't defrauding the shareholders.

In theory the way executive compensation works is to motivate C-levels and other senior management very strongly to prioritize the stock price over whatever other hobby horses. In practice, there's probably ways around it.

I'm not quite sure why people seem to think businesses having a profit motive makes them, or the people working within the business, completely immune to entryism and perverse incentives. But whenever this or similar topics comes up people seems to think this is the case.

What you're saying is interesting and a good interpretation, but an alternative:

According to our data, almost half of HR people and recruiters got laid off, as compared to 10% of engineers and only 4% of salespeople.

You don't need recruiters when 10% of engineers have been fired across the industry. That's Marx's Industrial Reserve Army in action. When unemployment is too low, when good engineers aren't available, you need recruiters and headhunters to find people. When 10% of engineers are out on the street, you just post the job and you get applicants.

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