Why “Bullshit Jobs” Still Matters
Rethinking the Purpose of Work in a Neoliberal World
Although it was first published six years ago, David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory feels remarkably relevant. The book explores meaningless jobs — roles that contribute little to society and make their holders miserable. This topic continues to resonate amid today’s debates on work and labor.
I have worked in at least two such bullshit jobs. There is no other way to call them. One was in HR consulting and one was in marketing. I did not feel that my work contributed in any meaningful way to the company or society at large, and it made me miserable. I quit both jobs within a year.
Graeber argues that these bullshit jobs are the product of a complex web of economic structures, bureaucratic growth, and cultural attitudes rooted in neoliberal ideology. A system that prioritizes job quantity over quality, this setup rewards busywork rather than meaningful contributions.
The result? A growing class of workers in roles that offer little more than the appearance of productivity, all while reflecting deeper societal issues like inequality and misaligned economic incentives.
One passage in Graeber’s book stands out. He recalls an employee named Robert who, feeling trapped in an inefficient job, found ways to automate his tasks, then spent the rest of his time doing what he wanted. Robert describes how he juggled multiple projects just to keep up the illusion of busyness. “I made sure I was working on at least two projects run by different managers so I could tell each of them the other was demanding more of my time,” he says.
When I read this example, I couldn’t help but wonder: Do the people in these “bullshit jobs” often feel stuck because they are overqualified for the work they are doing? It is a theme not explored much by Graeber himself.
Overqualification: The Root of the Bullshit Job Problem?
The evidence seems to suggest this is often the case. Many people in these roles finish their tasks quickly, only to find themselves bored and underwhelmed. But is this a problem with the jobs themselves, or is it a mismatch between qualifications and responsibilities?
Consider the example Graeber provides of Rachel, a woman with a degree in physics and a reputation as a mathematical genius. Her job? To input data into an Excel sheet and tweak the numbers until they “look right” to management. For this, she needs a degree in physics?
This is a case of overqualification, and it’s a pattern that plays out across many industries. Companies often demand highly skilled candidates, even for roles that could easily be filled by someone with minimal training or experience.
There is a tendency to hire the “best” candidate — those with prestigious degrees, high-status universities, or impressive former employers on their resumes. But once hired, these workers quickly realize the work doesn’t challenge them.
This does resonate with another topic explored by Graeber. He argues that many decisions in organizations — be they private businesses or government agencies — are not economically rational, but rooted in concerns about status and prestige.
Graeber uses the imagery of feudalism a lot here. Like kings and lords, our modern managers are much concerned about the absolute and relative size of their entourage. This entourage often does not have much to do, especially no complex tasks to solve. So why not hire minimally educated people to perform these jobs? Because in a world primarily driven by status concerns, this just would not look right. The manager would rather hire someone expensive with a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT to put some numbers into a simple Excel file than admit that his own tasks and the tasks he delegates could be performed by a trained monkey.
It may not even be that the jobs are inherently bullshit. The problem often lies in the mismatch between the role and the person in it. The status system encourages companies to seek out overqualified workers, because managers and recruiters are reluctant to admit that the actual work performed in their companies is very simple. After all, if any position can be filled by someone with fewer qualifications, what does that say about the company?
The Systemic Issues at Play
What happens when this pattern extends across the economy?
There are two major effects:
Underemployment among less-qualified workers: If overqualified workers fill jobs that don’t require their skillset, those with lower qualifications — who could perform the same tasks — are left out in the cold. These people end up unemployed. This inefficiency recalls Karl Marx’s concept of the reserve army of labor. Unemployment is not a natural phenomenon but a byproduct of systemic forces within the labor market.
Vacancy in high-skill positions: Graeber’s theory is further complicated by research from Sweden, where a large-scale study of 59,000 men found that the most “elite” workers don’t necessarily have the highest cognitive abilities. In fact, the top 1% scored slightly worse on cognitive tests than those just below them in income strata (Keuschnigg et al., 2023). Can we say that the people in top positions are actually underqualified for their work?
Who’s Doing Which Work?
This raises the question: Are we systematically mismatching people with the jobs that would best suit their skills? The provocative idea I want to develop here is the following. The people at the top of our organizational hierarchies are systematically underqualified to perform the most complex tasks. The people down the hierarchical ladder are systematically overqualified. And then there are millions of people who are pushed into unemployment, because the positions they could fill effectively are crowded with overqualified people.
The key mechanism is, and here I return to Graeber, one that resembles feudalism. Nobody has ever evaluated if the person who is currently king is the right one for the job. At the top of any organization, be that McDonalds or the Carolingian empire in 840, the allocation of positions is not governed by competency, but by other things like social networks and status signals. And the person who gets the job will make sure they stay in the privileged position as long as possible, and make sure their entourage looks nice and big.
The Rise of Bullshit Jobs in Neoliberal Capitalism
The proliferation of bullshit jobs may be a natural outgrowth of neoliberal capitalism. In his 1986 study, sociologist David Stark argued that companies operating in socialist environments often resemble bureaucracies, while those in capitalist environments behave more like markets. This creates a paradox: the more we rely on markets to coordinate activity between companies, the more those companies begin to organize internally like bureaucratic entities.
Graeber argues that there is not much of a difference between private, market-driven and public, bureaucracy-driven organizations: bullshit jobs proliferate everywhere. But if Stark is right, most companies on this planet should have become internally very bureaucratic during the past decades.
A phenomenon that Max Weber also anticipated, by the way, though for different reasons. The early days of dynamic capitalism are over, and have been replaced by an iron cage of meaningless work for the sake of working. And so the bullshit job phenomenon may be the result of bureaucratization.
This internal shift toward bureaucracy leads to a misallocation of resources. Jobs are created to serve internal processes, not external value. What happens is an inefficient, ineffective distribution of labor, leading to a rising number of roles that serve no real purpose except to perpetuate an image of productivity.
Conclusion: Time for a Rethink
The rise of bullshit jobs is a symptom of a larger problem: a misalignment between what our economy values and what it needs. We’ve built a system that rewards status over contribution, qualifications over capability, and appearance over substance.
If we don’t address these mismatches, we’ll continue to face a labor market where too many people are overqualified for their jobs, while others with the skills and desire to work remain on the sidelines. Ever heard of silent quitting? It may be an outgrowth of the systematic mismatch of people and positions enforced by status-conscious, useless managers.
Amazon recently announced they would let 14,000 managers go. I am not usually a fan of Jeff Bezos or Amazon, but I can only applaud this decision. I do not believe the performance of Amazon is going to change in any way.
I am only scared about what these 14,000 useless people are going to do to other companies, jobs, and lives once they inevitably find new work. After all, they will, because some other status-conscious higher-ranking manager will be impressed by their Amazon-including resume and hire them. I can only hope they are hired into completely meaningless and powerless positions in which they can do no harm.
It’s time to rethink what work should really look like. Are we creating jobs that fulfill a purpose, or simply jobs for the sake of jobs? And if work isn’t fulfilling its purpose, how can we reshape the economy to make labor meaningful again? Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs offers an uncomfortable, but necessary, starting point.
Graeber, D. (2020). Bullshit Jobs: Vom wahren Sinn der Arbeit. Klett-Cotta.