No. But it comes up occasionally in David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs, based on this much-shared essay (in lieu of a thorough review, I’ll just tell you that if you like that essay you’ll like the book).
Graeber includes plenty of anecdotes from people languishing in pointless employment. One reads:
My job is to oversee and coordinate a team of five translators. The problem with that is that the team is perfectly capable of managing itself […] So I normally act as a “task gatekeeper.” Requests come in […] and I pass them on to the relevant person. Other than that, I’m in charge of sending periodic reports to my manager, who, in turn, will incorporate them into “more important” reports to be sent to the CEO.
Graeber says this person actually served one useful function because the translators got so little work from the head office “that he had to constantly figure out ways to finagle the reports to make it look like they were very busy and no one needed to be laid off.”
Two tangential comments on this: one is that when doing agency work, I notice that a few large companies send several jobs through the agency every day. And I always think, “Those guys should hire an in-house translator.” Using the agency is cheaper than paying for a full-time employee salary and benefits, but if they had one person working in-house, they’d get consistent translations from someone who understands their corporate culture, can easily settle difficult terminology issues by walking over to a co-worker, and can handle lots of other minor requests (for example, when I worked as an in-house translator in Germany, colleagues who had to write an email in English often asked me to check it over for them). So I applaud this anonymous company for having full-time, in-house translators. It sounds like they didn’t need five of them, though.
The other is that although this guy had a dismal job filling in TPS reports, there are a lot of middlemen in the translation industry whose work is useful and pretty stressful: they match clients (the kind who really don’t need someone in-house) with translators and make sure everything goes through quality checks and meets deadlines. Thank you, project managers. Try to stay sane.
A translator wrote to Graeber:
Over the years, I have translated papers from just about every academic discipline – from ecology to corporate law, social science to computer science. The vast majority of it is of no discernible value to humanity whatsoever.
Now, I hope I won’t scandalize anyone by admitting that I am not fully convinced of the value to humanity of every single text I’ve translated. However, many of them are things people enjoy reading (e.g. art books) or need to read (e.g. instructions for taking medicine). And even if I don’t see the value in a given text, the client actually wants an English version of it, so at least I’m making someone happy.
Bullshit jobs force you to do things nobody really wants or needs; the recipient of your filled-in TPS report is as indifferent to it as you are. But when I complete a job whose value isn’t obvious to me, at least I know someone is going to open their email and think, “Hooray! My English version of Subcultural Desublimation, Capitalist Discourse and Transgressive Neodiscourse in the von Schleinitz Collection is here!” And that’s good enough for me.
Another non-bullshit aspect of my job is that when I’m done, I’m done – I never have to pretend to work. I just have to complete certain tasks, then I can move on to baking or caring for guinea pigs.
So translating is not a bullshit job. I did have a couple bullshit jobs as a temp during my college years, though.
One company hired us to go around their whole immense building in teams of two, reading out serial numbers from the bottoms of desktop computers and recording them on a chart. The company had bought new computers for everyone but neglected to record the serial numbers when they first arrived. It turned out they were needed for insurance purposes, so the company sent every employee a sheet with instructions on how to find their computer’s number, write it on a line, and turn it in to someone. But only about 4 people ever bothered to do it, so they had to hire a team of temps to sweep through the building and do it for them. I got so sick of reading long numbers that when I got home after work one day, glanced at a newspaper, and saw an article about tracking wild horses with a photo captioned “Wild horse number 3746574900011” my brain exploded.
The temps finished faster than expected. Some of them were upset because they probably wouldn’t get another job that week and they needed to work 40 hours to keep their heads above water financially. They got together (without me, I’m sorry to say, because I wasn’t that desperate and didn’t want to look at numbers anymore) and demanded that the job be expanded in some way so they could get their 40 hours. But no deal.
So essentially, they were punished for working efficiently. The company expected them to take a full week to read all those numbers and would have paid them accordingly if they had worked at a snail’s pace.
And if that doesn’t seem right to you, you’ll enjoy reading Bullshit Jobs.
Two points:
1. The BS job in this anecdote is the “overseer” of the translators. This is a BS job because the translators are perfectly capable of managing themselves, as he admits.
2. Translation has the least amount of actual BS of any job I’ve had. I only get paid for work actually done, and I only work on things somebody actually needs. Plus, in the legal, medical or business field, there is little or no allowance for error.
“Would anyone notice or care if you made a mistake?” is probably a good question for figuring out if you have a bs job.
Also, I like the book, and I’m not claiming that Graeber says translation is bs. I just figured commenting on those anecdotes would make more sense here than reviewing the entire book.
There is a copy of Graeber’s book in the window of the small independent bookshop by my office, which I will have to buy. I remember working at a leasing subsidiary of an Austrian bank back in Winter 2001. They told me that there was roughly three weeks work for me, changing the backgrounds of approx 1,500 logos to transparent, using Corel Draw. They thought 5 minutes per logo, and 8 hour days. I asked whether they would pay me for three weeks work (ie. 120 hours) for the 1,500 logos, even if I finished quicker. They wouldn’t. However, in the end the lady I was doing the work for was so embarrassed that a Modern Languages graduate did the work with a batch file in under half a hour, while reading a newspaper, and asking for more work, that she arranged for a week’s pay for 30 minutes work. The following week she asked if I could manage to run through some Access databases, which she assured me would be a week’s work. I finished in three hours. Was it a BS job? No. It taught me a valuable lesson, namely to charge how much a customer was willing to pay, not what the real value of the job was based purely on the physical time spent doing it. It also told me that not all work is cerebral…
Having done both sides of the coin as a translator,(ie. Freelance and in house) neither are BS jobs. One of the problems I find with freelancers is that they fail to see how much they are really worth, and why I would rather keep a translator happy by paying them a good rate than annoying them by squeezing that last 5 cents per line out of their rate and losing them. Similarly I don’t like Praktikanten being exploited or given the stuff that is too menial for others to do.
Reader Thomas writes: I think *MOST* (not all) managerial jobs are bullshit. They are particularly bullshit when the person managing did not come up through the ranks of the jobs he is managing. I have had managers who have been software engineers themselves, and there is a distinct difference between them and somebody who did Feminist Studies in undergraduate school, realized they couldn’t turn a buck that way and then got sent to a fancy MBA program by daddy, then became my manager. Project Management is another job that makes me raise my eyebrows usually. Biggest bullshit jobs in the corporate world, in my opinion, belong to those who decide to get on the Six Sigma bandwagon. I know this “methodology” supposedly worked at GE but everywhere else, in my opinion, it has wreaked havoc. It is true that my old company Sun Microsystems tanked due to the abrupt downturn in the server market after the dot.com bust, but I think there was another culprit as well: they allowed Six Sigma into the company. Workers no longer created on their own but were subject to the input of people highly removed from the situation. When I hear somebody brag that they have their “Black Belt” in Six Sigma, first I laugh and then I want to murder them.
Anyway, I like the timeliness of this book: of “Bullshit Jobs”. I am seriously thinking of becoming a farrier.