A16Z Partner Calls Out Bullshit Jobs, Is Your Company Next In Line?

A16z’s partner David Ulevitch recently called out Google as a prime example of a company with bullshit jobs, stating that “half the white-collar staff probably does no real work.”

Ulevitch’s statement is more than provocation. In fact, it might be more true than most business leaders care to admit.

Consider for example, a 2023 user-generated poll at the Teamblind platform on how many hours people actually work per day. After almost 10,000 responses it’s clear that the majority of FAANG employees don’t spend anywhere near eight hours on their tasks.

How did we get to a point where organizations that are led by Ivy League MBAs and Chief Economists suddenly fail at the most basic tests of workforce optimization?

There’s a handful of candidate answers.

One reason is that white-collar jobs can be quite difficult to fully describe. Most white-collar work is performed in rapidly changing contexts where inputs, outputs and goals are ambiguous by design.

The fact that neither the manager nor the employee knows exactly what each role entails makes managing performance difficult, leading to opportunistic slacking and shirking.

Another reason is that some companies have deliberately grown to a point where there’s more employees than there is work for them to do. Investors and the markets reward growth for growth’s sake, and adding headcount is one way CEOs have signaled that their company is on the right part of the hockey stick.

This in turn leads to redundancies, overlaps and ample opportunities for employees to moonlight and join the overemployment trend.

Finally, Ulevitch’s critique also touches on the argument that some jobs are more real than others. The tug-of-war between profit and cost centers won’t be resolved during our lifetime, and there will always be employment for people who don’t directly contribute to the bottom line.

Elon Musk felt comfortable firing 80% of Twitter’s engineers who worked on trust and safety, but the move came with regulatory consequences and difficulties keeping prohibited content off the site.

We can make one refinement to Ulevitch’s statement: even if employees aren’t doing real work from the management or investor’s perspective, they aren’t necessarily employed in bullshit jobs.

Thanks to David Graeber and his delightful book from 2018, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, we can build on established definitions and taxonomy here.

Defining Bullshit Jobs

According to Graeber, bullshit jobs are ones that don’t contribute to society in a meaningful way. Performing these jobs is not only pointless; they are quite often harmful to the psychological well-being of those who are tasked with them.

Graeber lists five archetypes of roles that are particularly liable to be entirely pointless:

• Flunkies (perceptions over performance)
• Goons (antagonistic roles that exist only to protect from other goons)
• Duct tapers (repeated short-term fixes instead of long-term solutions)
• Box tickers (doing something so a company can say it was done)
• Taskmasters (supervising people who don’t need supervising)

Bullshit Jobs is filled with sardonic wit and grim accounts from lawyers, receptionists, middle managers and many others who might have very clearly defined roles but who nevertheless confess to their work being entirely meaningless.

No wonder employee disengagement figures persistently hover around 20% when a decent amount of our workforce is working on tasks that carry no sense of meaning to them.

What should CEOs do to address Ulevitch’s critique?

The first thing leaders need to do is to learn to differentiate between bullshit jobs that no one should do from jobs that are undermanaged, overstaffed or poorly organized.

Bullshit jobs, defined a’la Graeber, makes both the employees and the workplace worse off in the long run, making it imperative to find new ways of meeting the same goals. AI, automation and thoughtful process and product design can go a long way in accomplishing just this.

Addressing the fact that a sizable number of employees might not be working as much as a leader wants requires an entirely different approach.

Each hour spent off-task can be recovered and repurposed for productive use by managers who are closer to the action, more clearly defined outputs, and using clearly defined OKRs and KPIs that have ‘stretch goals’ that adjust upwards as employees perform over the baseline.

We should also be cognizant that while swelling headcounts might be impressive signals of growth, they are by no means accurate signs of productivity and profitability. Focusing growth efforts on topline revenue and productivity per/head is a great way to divorce oneself from the notion that bigger departments mean bigger business.

Finally, it’s important to be realistic about the inherent constraints the nature of white-collar work imposes on performance management. Even when employees are performing real work, 90% of the effort is hidden under the surface. Getting more out of a process that is hard to define and difficult to accurately perceive isn’t exactly straightforward, and we all must come to terms with some residual inefficiencies at even the most well-optimized workplace.