There was a man I worked with whose job was to co-ordinate amongst 10 men daily, move a bunch of tasks (that were actually being done by those 10 men) across folders and states on a webpage, write some updates, attend meetings, and repeat this the next day. He wasn’t interested in diving deep into the technicalities of the tasks, there was another man responsible for all that stuff. This man did occasionally intervene in the planning of tasks. But his estimates regarding how much time a certain activity would take were not based on his experience but on past estimates by sets of the same or different 10 men.
Now his work seemed pretty mundane to me, and I wondered why
- was this needed in the first place, given that the 10 men were chosen especially for their ownership qualities (and had another manager already)
- did he do it, given that the man was educated and had once had jobs that probably called for his skills
I reasoned about 1., i.e. why the firm might have hired such men.
Private companies are supposed to be efficient. Maybe it was because the 10 odd men, whose work he reported to the higher ups, were already busy producing things of value, and hence it made sense to save their time from these ‘meetings’. If you have 10 teams of 10 men, and all of them gather around daily for a ‘stand-up’ directly with the CEO, it could take an hour or two to get done. It makes sense to save 10 hours by employing another man for 8 hours, right? Plus, the CEO is saving some time of his too. Placing these middlemen-cum-information-filters at scale across a company could certainly be seen as beneficial. And occasionally he could have inputs that led to better decision making.
There was an obvious reason I could think of for 2.
He was comparatively old (referred to as experienced) and hence didn’t want the stress of being at the bottom rung of the company. Being this middleman-cum-parrot perhaps gave him more time with his family, and to enjoy the finer things in life.
This man was getting paid almost twice what I was earning. Big firms care more about money than employees’ time, right?
You can place this scenario vis-à-vis another economic sector. A wholesaler, selling farm produce, acting as a middleman for the retail customer and the farmers (the lowest rung in this case) and earning more than the farmers. But in a physical market, goods need to be moved, perhaps even marketed, and you could see the value addition made by the wholesaler.
I think the need for such men increases as corporations become the monoliths that they are becoming, with their fingers in every pie. Imagine a CEO whose company has a lot of verticals and hence has about 10,000 employees at lowest rung. These are the folks who he thinks need to be (non-technically) supervised. First, he hires 10 men who work directly under him. These 10 men further hire 10 men each to work under them. This goes on till you reach the individual contributors. Now obviously there exist some folks like the researchers, accountants, etc. who don’t fall under this hierarchy, but we shall exclude them and focus on the chain of one particular job family. The structure looks somewhat like a tree². It’s got 1110 information-middlemen.
Now imagine if the company was actually 100 companies each with their own CEO. Each company has 100 employees at the lowest rung. The number of information-middlemen in this case is 10*100 = 1000. Difference = 110. Now scale this up to 1000 corporations. = 110000. That’s a lot of bullshit jobs¹.
In a way, I think that the man in question is indeed incredibly smart. The word smart here not particularly describing his abilities at anything, but smart in making people believe that he is indispensable for the team (and eventually the company) to function well. Someday in the future I might gladly take his place.
- When I wrote a draft for this, I didn’t have a term for this position. Then I looked up the internet and found the book Bullshit Jobs. I haven’t yet completed the book, partly because it derives from an essay of the same name and reading the essay is enough to reinforce the opinions in this article. It extends into political driving factors, the author kinda identifies himself as an anarchist.
- If I get 5 views on this piece I might just draw this out for you guys
