2. In part some of these peoples' high pay can be attributed to the expectation for them to be available when needed, regardless of the day or hour, even if total hours worked isn't so high.
3. I'm more senior, in a different highly-paid profession and work a lot more than the people you describe, although if I'm being honest I must admit to spending more time on Substack then I should. Nevertheless it's indeed the case that my value to my employer is not a direct function of hours worked but of disasters averted or major wins won. It could very well be I contributed 95% of the value I contribute to the company in 5% of my time -- but it's still worth well more than my compensation, hence I remain employed.
I bet you don't work.shit. You just spend your time in useless meetings creating plans that make.things worse and have no connection to the reality on the ground level. The only disasters you avoid are those made possible by idiots like you.
Yes, my whole career must be totally worthless. We are so blessed to have the few and proud Joe Doe's of the world supporting the whole economy by shitposting on substack re: people and jobs that they know nothing about.
Fuck off clown. I know a lot more than clowns like you about most things. Now go get another booster and attend another useless meetings to decide upon some more useless than you Kpis.
This is a fundamental attribution error: those employees get high salaries because their companies are rich. That’s it.
Edit: I was too hasty earlier, your premises do perfectly describe the unregulated markets (drug trade, parts of crypto, some new tech firms) but not regulated markets (hospitals, most long-legal industries and corporations).
In regulated markets, pay comes from systemic/market placement, not talent. Microsoft can afford high salaries because of monopoly power, regardless of employee quality. We all know about their terrible Indian engineers. Contrast with a known-failure shop like Blockbuster: it could meet almost all your premises and still fail because it lacked that leverage. Premise #2 (“one breakthrough covers everything”) is the one standout but it doesn’t hold broadly, since breakthroughs show up in low-paying firms too which should be impossible if 2 is true.
In unregulated markets like the drug trade (black market), your premises fit perfectly. I'll use meth. Walter White is the best, his discovery changes everything, few can match him, the work is hard to leave, loyalty is bought, etc.
New heuristic: Bullshit jobs exist at companies with monopoly or market choke points. There, employee quality barely matters — maintaining the stranglehold on that niche does. If you see a bullshit job, it means that company in inside a systemic niche (monopoly, etc). Outside those niches, talent quality matters. In the drug trade you will rarely see a bullshit employee.
Yes this seems more correct to me. I highly doubt anyone with "Brenda's" job is making the $100-300k described here. An entry level college graduate whose job is to tell people what's cool and not cool? I don't believe a person in that role is making more than $70-80k in a big city and is probably living with roommates. The coder job makes sense is there's a low supply of coders who can do that work. The consulting gig doesn't make much sense other than prestige, though everyone I knew who worked those jobs worked ALL THE TIME, not like what's described here. These are just made up characters after all. If there really ARE jobs like this, particularly the last two, which I don't actually believe, it's just a company with more cash than they know what to do with.
More work => higher wage is particularly true for entry levels. Big Four junior stays in office till 1 or 2am on busy weeks. Going home at 7pm means it’s not a particularly busy week.
Exactly. This little description though from the post is just made up. No entry level person making $200k at McKinsey is working the easy level described here, they're working all the time and have no life.
This misses what I think, as one of these people and now a manager of managers of these people, is a major factor in their compensation: it’s actually worth it to pay tens of thousands of dollars more for slightly better workers. If you’re trusting someone with a ten million dollar decision getting the best person for $200k per year is a lot better than getting a slightly worse person for $150k PA if the difference in the decision is impactful. Output per hour worked or total hours worked are useless metrics for critical knowledge work. Good calls are often worthy more than workers’ salaries even if they only make one good call per month.
Great post. But I'm left unsatisfied. If most of these how low or negligible impact, why do the bullshit jobs exist?
I think the answer is that jobs create a baseline level of stability that enables true innovation to occur in small pockets of instability. Essentially it's a form of self-selection, where the average person agrees to partake in social norms and raise the children to do the same, with a small probability that their kids are brilliant and benefit society greatly.
I view it as a form of regularisation in a giant search algorithm over human beings...
When you anesthetize the population with these jobs, the ones that break the mold are high-signal at least on the agency axis. Their work acts as a society-wide call option, allowing us to reap the benefits of their work.
how do you think about the factor of inability to measure performance? i find it difficult to tell for sure who is productive or not (though i have my suspicions, they fall far short of objective measurable fact). it’s intuitive to think this gets better at the tail end of ability but it somehow actually gets even more hopeless — at the top there is not only the most talented and able but also the most politically competent and ferocious.
would that explain your effect or is there necessarily something missing?
I think people have a directionally correct sense of who is productive and who isn't, but social and financial incentives keep that knowledge from surfacing or being acted on.
Managers who actually care have a pretty strong incentive to act on that knowledge without verbalizing that knowledge. In a project-based workplace, the laggard gets the easy, small projects, which slow his career advancement. If they're really bad, the manager gives them the difficult clients and underfunded projects and makes sure they have enough slack in their schedule to interview elsewhere.
A friend who took a break between jobs recently commented to me with surprise 'even without work I am so busy'. We talked more and she confided that really she did almost all the same stuff without having a 'job' as when she had one, except now she wasn't getting a pay check.
There are jobs out there where you work hard the whole time you're in. For example, being a waitress in a very busy restaurant or a hotel cleaner where the employer tracks your every move. Those jobs tend to be more manual and require less formal education. In that light, corporate and corporate-adjacent jobs increasingly do seem a bit like a scam.
It feels a bit like there is a large chunk missing here? Like, where the money comes from, and where it goes, and how much there is?
Like, what if the lion's share of revenue is created by the interlocking system itself, and not the contributions of any one person? What if any cog/person within the system is inherently replaceable, with only minor changes to final output, because the system itself is such a productivity multiplier that it is near-pointless to describe the value created by any single person within it? What if what looks like "high salaries" here are actually tiny fractions of the "share" of wealth that the person is involved in creating, but the system is generating so much money that it doesn't matter?
What if despite being BS email jobs, they're actually, in a sense, "underpaid", which is why the company can afford for them to suck?
1. Most of these roles have drastically diminishing returns for each additional person doing the same job. Like the additional utility of an extra worker scales near logarithmically so after hiring one guy you think wow I could get twice as much from then 1 but really the output of two people is like 1.5 times what it was for 2.
2. Managers love having bigger teams. It looks way better to say you managed 15 marketers than 3 even if there was only really 3 marketers worth of work.
3. Nobody wants a make work job where you look busy all day so they have to pay well for people to take them.
I was born in the wrong era. As a hardware engineer (a grunt) at a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, sometimes I would see how long I could go without bathroom breaks so as to keep working. The usual was a 10-12hr day, I often skipped meals so as not to break my concentration with the tasks at hand. Christmas Eve, I was there, at work, late, year after year. Many around me were no different.
This was the 90s, thank god we don’t work like that anymore!
This is a great article. There is no doubt a really bad structure to this system where people are essentially bribed to not work that hard.
That said, I think your analysis could be self contradictory. RE 4: how is the work "the same" between US and Indians if the latter can cause asymmetric damage to the firm?
I have personally been a part of cleaning up a lot of engineering messes caused by carelessness of the H1B types. By definition their value is emphatically NOT the same if they cause a black swan that damages the company.
Worked with H1Bs. They're usually good guys but they are careless FREQUENTLY. I have seen things that would turn you white. Putting the entire business and physical safety of individuals at risk. The bean counters don't factor this into their decision making and think they'll just hire whoever for cheaper.
I'm not going to say that all these people deserve their salaries or whatever, but in my career I've seen what it looks like when these people mess up or aren't competent and it basically destroys companies or products or costs a ton of money extremely quickly. Subtle decisions or indecisions at high levels can break things in ways that people at lower levels can't imagine unless they've been through it.
Something like hiring the wrong person in a high (or even low) position, choosing a direction that isn't profitable, following or avoiding a trend, switching vendors or suppliers, missing a critical feature in a deliverable, or even pissing off someone important in some subtle way.
I argue not doing anything 95% of the time and getting the 5% right is a much better outcome than doing stuff 100% of the time and getting 1 of that 5% wrong.
It's like complaining about the rate of fire or movement of a sniper compared to a soldier. If they sit there for 3 days and kill their target in one shot, it would be weird to be like his job is so easy he just fired one shot and sat there, soldiers have to go everywhere and fire 100s of rounds that's way harder.
Somewhat unsatisfactory. The biggest piece in the puzzle is that yes, compensation schemes are outdated because they mostly follow the industrial revolution scheme of paying for time spent on the job. This now gives the impression of low productivity in the information economy where the value of individual inputs is episodic. In Adam's job specifically, the value of the many small coding decisions is extreme, even if they only take little time. In reality all these companies pay for results but as they don't know when or how results will occur or how long it will take employees to reach them, unlike at the assembly-line, they have no choice but to pay for people sitting there until something important occurs. The gig economy was supposed to solve this, but ended up working well only for specific configurations. Compare Adam to a classic Hotel registration clerc: same episodic workload with extreme impact of skilled execution in a short period of time (checking in twitchy VIP in the middle of the night). So this is less of a mystery than it looks like.
To note also that the descriptions are unkind for B and C especially. I work in a fast paced environment where yes you can claim some time is spent unproductively but it is certainly spent working: talking, writing, setting meetings, debating in meetings, most meetings feel necessary and productive, if not always pleasant or entertaining, etc.
The employers assets (user base, distribution, product, IP etc) act as leverage on the employees’ output. If they go to a small agency working twice as hard they'd still make much less because the company's leverage is tiny in comparison to a big corporate structure.
Very interesting piece. A few thoughts:
1. This piece is the first time in my 45+ year old life where I can recall someone describing current reality as what the future was always supposed to be. Read Keynes (https://www.siop.org/publication/revisiting-keynes-predictions-about-work-and-leisure-a-discussion-of-fundamental-questions-about-the-nature-of-modern-work/) who predicted that tech advancement would eventually create a world where everyone worked maybe 15 hours a day and the biggest challenge in life was figuring out what to do with yourself the rest of the time. See also https://youtu.be/ReoeI1V4YoE?si=uDTTM38B4Hj81a3K.
In fact we never got flying cars or moon colonies, and the first ~30 years of the information age just led to educated people working harder and longer. I still don't really understand why the companies you describe would pay these people to barely work, but I welcome the development and hope it spreads. Unfortunately mass unemployment seems more likely. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://fortune.com/2025/08/08/ai-layoffs-jobs-market-shrinks-entry-level/&ved=2ahUKEwi60bKIrv6OAxWLEFkFHS6NEKUQFnoECBkQAw&usg=AOvVaw1BEThHL4eeY9cQaVK0fwJy
2. In part some of these peoples' high pay can be attributed to the expectation for them to be available when needed, regardless of the day or hour, even if total hours worked isn't so high.
3. I'm more senior, in a different highly-paid profession and work a lot more than the people you describe, although if I'm being honest I must admit to spending more time on Substack then I should. Nevertheless it's indeed the case that my value to my employer is not a direct function of hours worked but of disasters averted or major wins won. It could very well be I contributed 95% of the value I contribute to the company in 5% of my time -- but it's still worth well more than my compensation, hence I remain employed.
I bet you don't work.shit. You just spend your time in useless meetings creating plans that make.things worse and have no connection to the reality on the ground level. The only disasters you avoid are those made possible by idiots like you.
Yes, my whole career must be totally worthless. We are so blessed to have the few and proud Joe Doe's of the world supporting the whole economy by shitposting on substack re: people and jobs that they know nothing about.
I think Joe can't come to grips with the fact that someone else's 5% could provide several multiples of his entire productive capacity to society.
Fuck off clown. I know a lot more than clowns like you about most things. Now go get another booster and attend another useless meetings to decide upon some more useless than you Kpis.
This is a fundamental attribution error: those employees get high salaries because their companies are rich. That’s it.
Edit: I was too hasty earlier, your premises do perfectly describe the unregulated markets (drug trade, parts of crypto, some new tech firms) but not regulated markets (hospitals, most long-legal industries and corporations).
In regulated markets, pay comes from systemic/market placement, not talent. Microsoft can afford high salaries because of monopoly power, regardless of employee quality. We all know about their terrible Indian engineers. Contrast with a known-failure shop like Blockbuster: it could meet almost all your premises and still fail because it lacked that leverage. Premise #2 (“one breakthrough covers everything”) is the one standout but it doesn’t hold broadly, since breakthroughs show up in low-paying firms too which should be impossible if 2 is true.
In unregulated markets like the drug trade (black market), your premises fit perfectly. I'll use meth. Walter White is the best, his discovery changes everything, few can match him, the work is hard to leave, loyalty is bought, etc.
New heuristic: Bullshit jobs exist at companies with monopoly or market choke points. There, employee quality barely matters — maintaining the stranglehold on that niche does. If you see a bullshit job, it means that company in inside a systemic niche (monopoly, etc). Outside those niches, talent quality matters. In the drug trade you will rarely see a bullshit employee.
Yes this seems more correct to me. I highly doubt anyone with "Brenda's" job is making the $100-300k described here. An entry level college graduate whose job is to tell people what's cool and not cool? I don't believe a person in that role is making more than $70-80k in a big city and is probably living with roommates. The coder job makes sense is there's a low supply of coders who can do that work. The consulting gig doesn't make much sense other than prestige, though everyone I knew who worked those jobs worked ALL THE TIME, not like what's described here. These are just made up characters after all. If there really ARE jobs like this, particularly the last two, which I don't actually believe, it's just a company with more cash than they know what to do with.
Came here to say the same.
And lol at every level copywriters making $100k
More work => higher wage is particularly true for entry levels. Big Four junior stays in office till 1 or 2am on busy weeks. Going home at 7pm means it’s not a particularly busy week.
Exactly. This little description though from the post is just made up. No entry level person making $200k at McKinsey is working the easy level described here, they're working all the time and have no life.
This misses what I think, as one of these people and now a manager of managers of these people, is a major factor in their compensation: it’s actually worth it to pay tens of thousands of dollars more for slightly better workers. If you’re trusting someone with a ten million dollar decision getting the best person for $200k per year is a lot better than getting a slightly worse person for $150k PA if the difference in the decision is impactful. Output per hour worked or total hours worked are useless metrics for critical knowledge work. Good calls are often worthy more than workers’ salaries even if they only make one good call per month.
Great post. But I'm left unsatisfied. If most of these how low or negligible impact, why do the bullshit jobs exist?
I think the answer is that jobs create a baseline level of stability that enables true innovation to occur in small pockets of instability. Essentially it's a form of self-selection, where the average person agrees to partake in social norms and raise the children to do the same, with a small probability that their kids are brilliant and benefit society greatly.
I view it as a form of regularisation in a giant search algorithm over human beings...
When you anesthetize the population with these jobs, the ones that break the mold are high-signal at least on the agency axis. Their work acts as a society-wide call option, allowing us to reap the benefits of their work.
nice post!
how do you think about the factor of inability to measure performance? i find it difficult to tell for sure who is productive or not (though i have my suspicions, they fall far short of objective measurable fact). it’s intuitive to think this gets better at the tail end of ability but it somehow actually gets even more hopeless — at the top there is not only the most talented and able but also the most politically competent and ferocious.
would that explain your effect or is there necessarily something missing?
I think people have a directionally correct sense of who is productive and who isn't, but social and financial incentives keep that knowledge from surfacing or being acted on.
Managers who actually care have a pretty strong incentive to act on that knowledge without verbalizing that knowledge. In a project-based workplace, the laggard gets the easy, small projects, which slow his career advancement. If they're really bad, the manager gives them the difficult clients and underfunded projects and makes sure they have enough slack in their schedule to interview elsewhere.
A friend who took a break between jobs recently commented to me with surprise 'even without work I am so busy'. We talked more and she confided that really she did almost all the same stuff without having a 'job' as when she had one, except now she wasn't getting a pay check.
There are jobs out there where you work hard the whole time you're in. For example, being a waitress in a very busy restaurant or a hotel cleaner where the employer tracks your every move. Those jobs tend to be more manual and require less formal education. In that light, corporate and corporate-adjacent jobs increasingly do seem a bit like a scam.
It feels a bit like there is a large chunk missing here? Like, where the money comes from, and where it goes, and how much there is?
Like, what if the lion's share of revenue is created by the interlocking system itself, and not the contributions of any one person? What if any cog/person within the system is inherently replaceable, with only minor changes to final output, because the system itself is such a productivity multiplier that it is near-pointless to describe the value created by any single person within it? What if what looks like "high salaries" here are actually tiny fractions of the "share" of wealth that the person is involved in creating, but the system is generating so much money that it doesn't matter?
What if despite being BS email jobs, they're actually, in a sense, "underpaid", which is why the company can afford for them to suck?
Adam is worth it, Brenda is replaceable, Carl is worthless. Their job titles reinforce this.
I think it’s for three reasons you didn’t mention
1. Most of these roles have drastically diminishing returns for each additional person doing the same job. Like the additional utility of an extra worker scales near logarithmically so after hiring one guy you think wow I could get twice as much from then 1 but really the output of two people is like 1.5 times what it was for 2.
2. Managers love having bigger teams. It looks way better to say you managed 15 marketers than 3 even if there was only really 3 marketers worth of work.
3. Nobody wants a make work job where you look busy all day so they have to pay well for people to take them.
I was born in the wrong era. As a hardware engineer (a grunt) at a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, sometimes I would see how long I could go without bathroom breaks so as to keep working. The usual was a 10-12hr day, I often skipped meals so as not to break my concentration with the tasks at hand. Christmas Eve, I was there, at work, late, year after year. Many around me were no different.
This was the 90s, thank god we don’t work like that anymore!
This is a great article. There is no doubt a really bad structure to this system where people are essentially bribed to not work that hard.
That said, I think your analysis could be self contradictory. RE 4: how is the work "the same" between US and Indians if the latter can cause asymmetric damage to the firm?
I have personally been a part of cleaning up a lot of engineering messes caused by carelessness of the H1B types. By definition their value is emphatically NOT the same if they cause a black swan that damages the company.
Worked with H1Bs. They're usually good guys but they are careless FREQUENTLY. I have seen things that would turn you white. Putting the entire business and physical safety of individuals at risk. The bean counters don't factor this into their decision making and think they'll just hire whoever for cheaper.
I'm not going to say that all these people deserve their salaries or whatever, but in my career I've seen what it looks like when these people mess up or aren't competent and it basically destroys companies or products or costs a ton of money extremely quickly. Subtle decisions or indecisions at high levels can break things in ways that people at lower levels can't imagine unless they've been through it.
Something like hiring the wrong person in a high (or even low) position, choosing a direction that isn't profitable, following or avoiding a trend, switching vendors or suppliers, missing a critical feature in a deliverable, or even pissing off someone important in some subtle way.
I argue not doing anything 95% of the time and getting the 5% right is a much better outcome than doing stuff 100% of the time and getting 1 of that 5% wrong.
It's like complaining about the rate of fire or movement of a sniper compared to a soldier. If they sit there for 3 days and kill their target in one shot, it would be weird to be like his job is so easy he just fired one shot and sat there, soldiers have to go everywhere and fire 100s of rounds that's way harder.
Helps when the firm is profitable.
Somewhat unsatisfactory. The biggest piece in the puzzle is that yes, compensation schemes are outdated because they mostly follow the industrial revolution scheme of paying for time spent on the job. This now gives the impression of low productivity in the information economy where the value of individual inputs is episodic. In Adam's job specifically, the value of the many small coding decisions is extreme, even if they only take little time. In reality all these companies pay for results but as they don't know when or how results will occur or how long it will take employees to reach them, unlike at the assembly-line, they have no choice but to pay for people sitting there until something important occurs. The gig economy was supposed to solve this, but ended up working well only for specific configurations. Compare Adam to a classic Hotel registration clerc: same episodic workload with extreme impact of skilled execution in a short period of time (checking in twitchy VIP in the middle of the night). So this is less of a mystery than it looks like.
To note also that the descriptions are unkind for B and C especially. I work in a fast paced environment where yes you can claim some time is spent unproductively but it is certainly spent working: talking, writing, setting meetings, debating in meetings, most meetings feel necessary and productive, if not always pleasant or entertaining, etc.
The employers assets (user base, distribution, product, IP etc) act as leverage on the employees’ output. If they go to a small agency working twice as hard they'd still make much less because the company's leverage is tiny in comparison to a big corporate structure.
Now do “Anthropology Professor writing vapid books that impress the gullible”