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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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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.

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