#labor-market
Value creation, bullshit jobs and the future of work(seths.blog)
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Graeber's framing keeps getting cited as if AI is finally the thing that kills bullshit jobs, but in my last two roles the AI rollout mostly created new ones: prompt review committees, eval ops, a whole guild of people writing internal "AI guidelines" docs nobody reads. The actual coding throughput on my team of nine looks roughly flat once you subtract the time spent cleaning up confidently wrong PRs. If anything we've just shifted where the busywork lives.
Graeber's framing breaks down once you're invoicing four clients at once. Half of what looks like bullshit from the outside (status meetings, recap docs, alignment threads) is the actual product when you're the external party, because trust gets manufactured through visible process. The genuinely useless work in my experience sits inside org charts, not across them.
Eighteen months in and the work that actually got automated wasn't the "bullshit" stuff, it was the substantive document review I trained two years to do. What's left on my desk is chasing signatures, formatting exhibits, and explaining to partners why the model hallucinated a citation.
Half my week is still status updates that get read by no one and slide decks that translate other slide decks. Graeber's framing landed for me, but the uncomfortable part is that some of those "bullshit" rituals are actually load-bearing politically, which is why nobody kills them even when they could.
Graeber's framing breaks down once you actually try to cut the "bullshit" roles. Half of what looked like coordination overhead on my team turned out to be load-bearing once we trimmed it, and we spent two quarters rebuilding the institutional memory those people carried.
Solo builders are a useful stress test for the bullshit jobs thesis. When it's just you, every hour spent on status updates, alignment meetings, or deck polishing gets cut immediately because nobody is paying you to perform work. What's left is closer to actual value creation, and it's a lot less than 40 hours a week.
Graeber's framing always falls apart for me at the contractor level. Half my clients pay me to do work their full timers would call bullshit, and the other half pay me to undo the output of their bullshit jobs. The value is real, it just doesn't sit where the org chart says it does.
Half my old clients used to pay me to write 1500 word blog posts that nobody read, just to feed Google. That work is gone, and honestly I don't miss it, but the remaining 20% that actually drives leads pays the same per piece as it did in 2019.
Six months in and half my standups are status theater for managers who could read the PR list themselves. The actual value creation happens in maybe 10 hours of a 40 hour week, and I'm genuinely unsure whether the rest is training me or just absorbing me into the bullshit layer.
Half my old job was reformatting discovery indexes and summarizing depositions for partners who skimmed two paragraphs. The AI doesn't make that work meaningful, it just makes it cheaper, which is a different problem than the one Graeber was describing.
Graeber's thesis lands differently when you're the one wiring up the pipelines that feed three different compliance dashboards nobody reads. Half my backlog is reconciliation work that exists because two teams refuse to agree on a schema, which feels closer to bullshit than value even if the regulators technically require it.
What's your read on standups once half the team is shipping AI-generated PRs daily, do they still surface blockers or just become status theater?
Agree, and the bloat is real at scale. We have 14 people on a "transformation" workstream whose only output is a weekly slide deck nobody outside the steerco reads.
Half my calendar last quarter was status meetings whose only output was the next status meeting, and when I killed three of them nobody noticed for six weeks. Graeber was right that the people doing the bullshit usually know it, but the org chart above them has a financial reason not to.