On Bullsh*t Jobs | David Graeber | Meaningless Jobs | Royal Society of Arts | Lecture

What Hacker News said

Cites benrbray · 2020-12 · on “Managers, not workers, are losing jobs to AI and robots: study”

Related is David Graeber's article [1] / book [2] / talks [3] about "Bullshit Jobs". [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [this video]

Cites hn_asker · 2021-03 · on “Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?”

Before you judge it, I implore you to ask whether your organization is actually doing Agile/Scrum correctly. I doubt most orgs are and I suspect most negative opinions come from doing it incorrectly/ineffectively. I think the core principles of agile are well-intended. It's the desired state we want to achieve. However, most of us are still trying to reconcile with our current state. There are many pitfalls. For example, giving product owner and even manager roles to the lead engineer or architect, daily standups devolving into telling people what ticket number they have in progress as opposed to blockers they are seeing or actually working on, product owners not showing up to backlog groomi

Cites brudgers · 2022-02 · on “Enforcement by Software”

I recommend a different strategy when you encounter annoying processes like this—insist upon following these processes, to the letter, and going through appropriate channels until the system collapses under its own weight. In the Graeber model of bureaucracy [1], a functioning bureaucracy will not collapse. It will expand. It will add one or more people whose job is to badger professors toward compliance...and whose function is to expand the empire of the bureaucrats above (for this is why many requirements exist at all). "Silently routing around bureaucracy” is a good plan if what you’re doing has some real importance to it. If that's not the case, there's a chance your job is toward badger