This is a leftist fantasy and not at all what actual white collar jobs are like.
The concept of bullshit jobs, which was already tenuous and debunked when that book released, is more than ever nonexistent. Companies know how much revenue an employee generates.
Every corporate office has been squeezing and tightening since 2008. Entire departments reduced to one person wearing 15 hats while generating more profit than ever. Constantly overloaded with too much work by design so you’re always doing the most critical tasks and have no downtime.
Try the “work 15min a day” act as an engineering project manager and it’s not going to go well.
Western leftists love to denounce anything that is not Mcdonalds as ”not labor”.
This is reactionary and childish and reveals a fundamental failure to materially understand how labor accomplishes things. Imagine if the USSR or China had this attitude towards labor. Yeah look at those useless admin staffers building high speed rail, infrastructure, and space programs. Researching vaccines and novel treatments. What a bunch of lazy entitled posers.
I wasn’t thinking about actual white collar jobs in [current year] but the gen-x 90s - early 2000s pop culture trope of someone working in the corporate middle strata and getting an existential breakdown from it
Companies know how much revenue an employee generates.
Yeah for me I work in a team with 10 other devs, corporate knows how much revenue we as a department make, but breaking it down accurately per individual would be pretty much impossible, quantity metrics like tickets closed, commits or lines of code written are useless because some tickets are more important than others, some code is better quality which its not something you can really objectively measure accurately, and I’m sure similar applies to many other jobs
I don’t know, I’m a maintenance man, and while I do have busy periods when things go wrong in the building I do just sit on my ass doing my own life stuff most of the time.
And even then, I want to leave. The reality is the pay isn’t all that great (good enough, but I want more!), and I feel like I’m just wasting my life away. At work I used to work on my hobbies, now I mostly just scroll bullshit. It’s gotten stale and depressing.
That said, I’m certainly not on 80k. That’s insane numbers. Nothing pays like that anymore unless you’re bringing serious money into the company.
My mum used to write for property and interior design magazines/websites. For the same job title she had about 20-30 years ago at the same company, they’ve added more responsibility and the wages are the exact same - as in the purchasing power has been halved. I will never have it as good as my parents had it.
Western leftists love to denounce anything that is not Mcdonalds as ”not labor”.
Well they love to denounce service jobs a not labor too. Remember the discourse during the Starbucks union formation? Labor is only when you hit something with a hammer.
The whole productive labor v unproductive as the sole defining trait of one being proletarian confusion. All those who labor under capital and have it stolen.
Try the “work 15min a day” act as an engineering project manager and it’s not going to go well.
When the project deadline keeps changing because all the other companies involved have different billing cycles and want to save a buck, then the end client changes their mind about some critical design choice repeatedly, that specific job can become a living hell. Doubly so when the CEO/owner of the company doesn’t know what you do and keeps trying to use AI to update the tracking sheets only to break them for a day.
This is a leftist fantasy and not at all what actual white collar jobs are like.
The concept of bullshit jobs, which was already tenuous and debunked when that book released, is more than ever nonexistent. Companies know how much revenue an employee generates.
Every corporate office has been squeezing and tightening since 2008. Entire departments reduced to one person wearing 15 hats while generating more profit than ever. Constantly overloaded with too much work by design so you’re always doing the most critical tasks and have no downtime.
Try the “work 15min a day” act as an engineering project manager and it’s not going to go well.
Western leftists love to denounce anything that is not Mcdonalds as ”not labor”.
This is reactionary and childish and reveals a fundamental failure to materially understand how labor accomplishes things. Imagine if the USSR or China had this attitude towards labor. Yeah look at those useless admin staffers building high speed rail, infrastructure, and space programs. Researching vaccines and novel treatments. What a bunch of lazy entitled posers.
I wasn’t thinking about actual white collar jobs in [current year] but the gen-x 90s - early 2000s pop culture trope of someone working in the corporate middle strata and getting an existential breakdown from it
i don’t know, not always
Yeah for me I work in a team with 10 other devs, corporate knows how much revenue we as a department make, but breaking it down accurately per individual would be pretty much impossible, quantity metrics like tickets closed, commits or lines of code written are useless because some tickets are more important than others, some code is better quality which its not something you can really objectively measure accurately, and I’m sure similar applies to many other jobs
I don’t know, I’m a maintenance man, and while I do have busy periods when things go wrong in the building I do just sit on my ass doing my own life stuff most of the time.
And even then, I want to leave. The reality is the pay isn’t all that great (good enough, but I want more!), and I feel like I’m just wasting my life away. At work I used to work on my hobbies, now I mostly just scroll bullshit. It’s gotten stale and depressing.
That said, I’m certainly not on 80k. That’s insane numbers. Nothing pays like that anymore unless you’re bringing serious money into the company.
My mum used to write for property and interior design magazines/websites. For the same job title she had about 20-30 years ago at the same company, they’ve added more responsibility and the wages are the exact same - as in the purchasing power has been halved. I will never have it as good as my parents had it.
Well they love to denounce service jobs a not labor too. Remember the discourse during the Starbucks union formation? Labor is only when you hit something with a hammer.
That was like 10 weird losers on Twitter
The whole productive labor v unproductive as the sole defining trait of one being proletarian confusion. All those who labor under capital and have it stolen.
When the project deadline keeps changing because all the other companies involved have different billing cycles and want to save a buck, then the end client changes their mind about some critical design choice repeatedly, that specific job can become a living hell. Doubly so when the CEO/owner of the company doesn’t know what you do and keeps trying to use AI to update the tracking sheets only to break them for a day.