Royal Society of Arts
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2022
57:08 · 694K views · May 17, 2018
David Graeber's RSA lecture on bullshit jobs, expanding on his essay about why so many people do work they believe is pointless. He discusses what this says about the modern economy and the way society values work.
Used as a reference when discussing meaningless work and bureaucracy growth in tech and management.
3 comments from Hacker News
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 grooming sessions leaving engineering to make their own priorities, product managers being the engineering manager and leading retrospectives making everyone biased to say what went well but not things to improve on, agile release trains having teams that don't really interact with each other leaving engineering teams tuned out during system level PI planning and demos. The list goes on. The current state of an org implementing agile/scrum can easily lead to what David Graeber calls Bull*hit jobs: this video . The onus is on the organization's leaders to take everyone to the desired state. However, all too often the actual leaders of an organization are the engineers themselves and would much rather get work done than to micromanage.
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-professors-toward-compliance end of the spectrum. [1]: this video
Related is David Graeber's article [1] / book [2] / talks [3] about "Bullshit Jobs". [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video