Hello y’all. I’ve been trying to understand the software development industry from a societal POV but most sources I find have this liberal corporate bootlicking theme or don’t have much hard data. Search engines provide few good sources 🤔
In specific I would like to see some research in the self-assessment of bullshit job status in the industry or a similar analysis. In my anecdotal experience a gigantic portion of jobs I’ve seen provide basically no benefit to society (but pay well I guess), and I would like to check if this belief of mine holds up scientifically.
Anybody know any places to start?
From my point of view, many ‘bullshit jobs’ seem like that because of the high level of abstraction of the software industry nowadays.
I am actually halfway through this book that touches some of this called Survival of the rich by Rushkoff (its freely available in Annas archive on ePUB format), it develops ideas on ‘the mindset’ of the tech bros.
In their mind, regular competition and continuos improvement is irrelevant, theyve programmed themselves to be destructive creators (schumpeter concept) or paradigm shifters so theyre stuck in this cycle “going meta” (concept by the writer) which boils down to abstracting some practice through software, and since software is easily scalable and expandable, we end up with abstraction of already abstract businesses that offer nothing of value but end up in the middle of consumers and providers extracting value such as cryptocurrency exchanges.
As i said im still halfway through the book and i need some time to organize my thoughts, so my interpretation may be wrong but it is an interesting read for sure.
I am actually halfway through this book that touches some of this called Survival of the rich by Rushkoff (its freely available in Annas archive on ePUB format), it develops ideas on ‘the mindset’ of the tech bros.
Gonna look into that one too, thanks!
In their mind, regular competition and continuos improvement is irrelevant, theyve programmed themselves to be destructive creators (schumpeter concept) or paradigm shifters so theyre stuck in this cycle “going meta” (concept by the writer) which boils down to abstracting some practice through software, and since software is easily scalable and expandable, we end up with abstraction of already abstract businesses that offer nothing of value but end up in the middle of consumers and providers extracting value such as cryptocurrency exchanges.
That sounds interesting and fits the description of bullshit jobs to a T, but I’m also very interested in a thing that I’ve been calling “bullshit job” in my head but I guess is slightly different. Basically a lot of current IT industry focuses only on reinventing and commodifying previously existing tech, and branding it as if nothing like that ever existed before. As some examples, there’s Discord basically just being a worse XMPP or VS Code which is just Atom with keyloggers. These jobs do “produce” things, but their market is mostly created artificially through sheer marketing and layman ignorance, and at the end of the day their function to society is barely extant compared to what they could have working on what already exists. On the other hand, they serve perfectly to further accumulate tech corporations’ shares of their control over the IT environment.
Like, I’m sure if somebody who works developing Discord they could believe their job is “productive” (specially if they’re too young to have used MSN), so I’m not sure if it would have the same psychological impact of actual bullshit jobs, which are much better exemplified by the people who have to redesign youtube’s front-end every 2 months or so.
But reading the sources listed here I’ll probably find better vocabulary to understand these concepts better though, so I’ll hit the books.
Sorry I don’t have research references, but I’m not sure you’ll find it anyhow. These industries aren’t keen on researching how useless they actually are, they just do work that their bosses tell them to do, and useful or not, that is that.
But, places to start? Hmmm.
Check out the sources on some Adam Connover podcast episodes of “factually”. Debunking tech hype and I can’t find the episode now but I think he interviewed someone from the Facebook ai team that came out and said they fb didn’t use their code to limit fascism on the platform because it was to effective and cutting into profits. Sorry I can’t be of more help
Good luck!
That’s actually a great suggestion! I actually listened to his episodes on AI and enshitification but completely forgot about it. Thanks comrade!
Another decent podcast is Tech Won’t Save Us.
Never heard of that one, looks pretty cool. Thanks!
