https://open.substack.com/pub/newmeans/p/you-are-not-the-problem?r=4q91u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Great message.

Not sure if this is the best place for it, but here we are. The Indeed listing is already gone, so I can't refresh my memory, but they'd made it sound more like a customer service role. The grammar was a bit of a red flag, but I thought it could have been second language issues, so let's see where this goes. Thanks for wasting my time, guys! And apparently the time of around sixty other people if Indeed is accurate about that. I can still report your job posting even though it's gone, though, so that makes me feel a little better.

I want to explore this thought more and its biased to post this in antiwork however i think itll be a good insight to see what people think of employers in here

Bit frustrated at my workplace currently, hope memes are allowed here

The theory that many people feel the work they do is pointless because their jobs are "bullshit" has been confirmed by a new study.

The research found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others.

The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were "bullshit"—socially useless and meaningless.

Researchers had since suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work, but Mr. Walo found this was only part of the story.

He analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the U.S. working in 21 types of jobs, who were asked if their work gave them "a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "the feeling of doing useful work."

The American Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, found that 19% of respondents answered "never" or "rarely" to the questions whether they had "a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "of doing useful work" spread across a range of occupations.

Mr. Walo adjusted the raw data to compare workers with the same degree of routine work, job autonomy and quality of management, and found that in the occupations Graeber thought were useless, the nature of the job still had a large effect beyond these factors.

Those working in business and finance and sales were more than twice as likely to say their jobs were socially useless than others. Managers were 1.9 more likely to say this and office assistants 1.6 times.

"David Graeber's 'bullshit jobs' theory claims that some jobs are in fact objectively useless, and that these are found more often in certain occupations than in others," says the study, published in the journal Work, Employment and Society.

"Graeber hit a nerve with his statement. His original article quickly became so popular that within weeks it was translated into more than a dozen languages and reprinted in different newspapers around the world.

"However, the original evidence presented by Graeber was mainly qualitative, which made it difficult to assess the magnitude of the problem.

"This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilized dataset and provides new evidence.

"It finds that working in one of the occupations highlighted by Graeber significantly increases the probability that workers perceive their jobs as socially useless, compared to all others. This article is therefore the first to find quantitative evidence supporting Graeber's argument."

Law was the only occupation cited by Graeber as useless where Mr. Walo found no statistically significant evidence that staff found their jobs meaningless.

Mr. Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit or the public sector.

More information: Simon Walo, "Bullshit" After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless, Work, Employment and Society (2023). DOI: 10.1177/09500170231175771

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/853128

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Scientific papers are too complicated generally with their vocab and I've trawled through lots of like social media posts and wedmd/live strong type posts.

My already soul-sucking job that has me carving out 9 hours a day just announced that going forward we’re supposed to be dedicating an extra half hour and that this will be rigorously enforced with a clock-in/clock-out system (we didn’t have one before), and I’m livid. Naturally, there’s no mention of a pay increase or any such because apparently “this is what we should’ve been doing all along”, even though we’re paid peanuts and there’s next to nothing by way of incentives or anything of the sort.

I worked my way up here precisely so I wouldn’t have to be subject to this sort of Big Brother scrutiny and this is just beyond annoying.

/end rant