A Note on "Bullshit Jobs" — Required Reading for All Departments

To all employees,

The Department of Professional Development has added a new title to the Hardly Working Corp. mandatory reading list: “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” by the late anthropologist David Graeber (1961–2020).

All employees are expected to familiarize themselves with the core arguments of this text. The Department has determined it provides a classification framework consistent with patterns observed across the Hardly Working Corp. employee base.

Background

In 2013, Graeber published an essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. In 2018, he expanded it into a book. The central thesis is simple:

A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence — even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Graeber estimated that between 20% and 50% of all jobs in advanced economies are, by this definition, bullshit. Subsequent surveys have broadly confirmed this range. In a YouGov poll, 37% of British workers said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world.

That is not a fringe opinion. That is more than a third of the workforce.

The Five Types

Graeber identified five categories of bullshit jobs. The Department of Professional Development has translated them into corporate-friendly language for training purposes:

• Flunkies — Roles that exist primarily to make someone else feel important. If your job is to be present so that a senior person appears to have staff, classification as flunky may apply. This is a structural designation, not a performance review.
• Goons— Roles that exist only because competitors have them. Corporate lobbyists. Armies of in-house lawyers. PR teams whose sole purpose is countering the other company's PR team. If your role would be unnecessary in a world where your competitors didn't exist, you may be a goon.
• Duct Tapers — Roles that exist to fix problems that should not exist. If your job is to manually reconcile data between two systems that should talk to each other, or to smooth over failures caused by organizational dysfunction, you are a duct taper. Such roles are operationally necessary but structurally redundant.
• Box Tickers — Roles that exist to create the appearance that something is being done. Compliance officers who file reports no one reads. Diversity consultants hired after a scandal who produce a strategy document that sits in a drawer. If the primary output of your role is documentation of activity rather than activity itself, you may be a box ticker.
• Taskmasters — Roles that exist to manage people who do not need managing, or to create work for others to do. The manager who generates busywork. The supervisor who supervises self-sufficient teams. If you were removed and your reports continued unchanged, you may be a taskmaster.

Department Self-Assessment

As part of this training initiative, each department is asked to conduct a brief self-assessment:

1. If your department disappeared tomorrow, would the company notice within 30 days?
2. Can you describe your department's output in one sentence without using the word “facilitate”?
3. Has your department ever produced a report about the need to produce fewer reports?

Please submit your answers to your direct supervisor. Or don't. We suspect the exercise of answering these questions honestly is more valuable than anything your supervisor would do with the answers.

Relevance to Operations

Graeber's framework has been adopted by the Department of Professional Development as a diagnostic tool. Employees who recognize their role within the five-category taxonomy may find that Hardly Working Corp.'s time reclamation tools provide useful data points for self-assessment.

The relationship between role classification and reclamation volume is documented but not commented upon. The Department notes only that the correlation is consistent.

— Dept. of Professional Development
Reference: Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster. Designated mandatory reading per MEMO-2026-008.