I get the usage as a dig at do nothing office jobs, but what are these jobs really? I’ve never worked in an office or known anyone who did well enough to ask.
So what are these jobs actually like? How do they exist in the first place? Could I lie my way into getting one lol?
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Like project manager, scrum master. That kind of shit is what I think of. They exist because technical people and upper management don’t interface well typically, obviously those management jobs are also more or less email jobs but they’re rarer.
Okay, what does a project manager do? I have a real hard time imagining what anyone does in these “office” type jobs (i imagine many of them are remote now, but i don’t know what else to call them lol)
Supposedly, they help organize people and tasks, whether that actually happens depends on how good they are.
The project has an end goal and they will help break it down into smaller, manageable milestones that drive the project forward. They manage questions like: who will do the task, when does it need to be done, what does this worker need to accomplish the task, what barriers exist and how can we remove them? They manage interfacing between different teams on a project as well as between those doing the project work and those who fund the project.
There’s plenty more they can do. Whether this is a necessary position is debatable, but in my experience, a good project manager is vital to a project and a bad one is a hindrance to the project.
Okay that job makes sense to me. What are these projects though? Sorry if that’s a weird question. I just have no clue and am really curious about it.
Anything can be a project, in basically any industry. Marketing or advertising campaigns, development of new products… A relative works for a huge corp that renovates buildings after flooding and there are tons of different teams of people that need to be coordinated among and between to complete that kind of job. Think of a hospital that is full of mold after a flood and the kind of rigorous restoration needed to bring it back into a usable state.
Another whole category are government contracts: there are engineering and architecture firms that employ thousands of people with hundreds of contracts, having teams of dozens of people making plans for all kinds of shit for the feds, states, and cities (transportation, infrastructure, land use, conservation… You name it). Then all of those plans have things that need to get implemented, usually by construction crews with their own PMs.
Construction projects for one example
The other comments give good examples. A project is essentially something that a group wants to accomplish. It can be work related, but it can be in activist, volunteer, or other groups as well.
Examples: fulfilling a scientific grant to discover or develop a new technology, development of an app, construction of a new grocery store, running a clinical trial, environmental restoration of a damaged forest, putting together a labor organization workshop…really any project that is big enough that it needs to be broken down into smaller parts and would be difficult for the group doing the work to accomplish without someone taking on a role that specifically monitors the larger picture.
I can speak to scrum master, I was one for a while. On a programming team you have a bunch of devs who ideally wouldn’t do any work and management (a project manager?, a “product” guy, etc) who wants to get as much work as possible out of the devs. The scrum master is supposed to help them reach a compromise: a limited amount of work, with a reasonable amount of flexibility in when it’s done, but on a wider scale it is legible and predictable to management so that they can make business plans. To this end the scrum master runs planning meetings and helps break development work down into sensible tasks, the length/difficulty of which can be roughly estimated. If you don’t have a scrum master, management is constantly making impossible requests, asking the team to do 180 degree turns, etc., and also it’s really hard to estimate software progress so basically nothing gets done on schedule and everyone is mad all the time. In effect it’s a limited-mandate negotiation job on behalf of the developers.
In my opinion this is not an email job, but maybe at large companies with more opaque management it is. /u/chickentendrils is spot-on about why it exists.
Thanks for the description! What would you consider to be an email job?
no clue, never had one. I’ve had some friends who did logistics(?) work that seemed to be mostly emails. One that worked at wind turbine company, her job seemed to be mostly emailing vendor fairs to make sure that they could set up a booth there. No idea what her job title was.
Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (book not essay) presumably has some examples since it’s the source of this line of thought. I haven’t read it
My boss is also my project manager, most of what she does is function as a sort of go between for us (the people on the ground actually providing the service) and the customer. That involves sitting in meetings with the customer higher ups to keep them in the loop on how things are going, bringing any issues that are preventing us from getting something done to them to make a decision on, figuring out the logistics of how something is going to get done, things like that.
Basically she deals with the people bullshit so all I have to do is go out and fix the problems.
It’s the coordination work. Project management, accounting, purchasing, compliance, etc, is about figuring out what the hell is going on, and what the hell should be done. When an organization reaches certain thresholds of complexity, a lot of labor needs to be spent on those kind of activities, or else the whole operation of the organization seizes up.
The day to day varies, but spending all day updating spreadsheets and sending emails is common. A lot of them are bullshit, and only exist to fight fires that other parts of the organization are lighting. Many are complex and require extensive training to do, but most can probably be done by someone who just lied on their resume. They are physically cushy, and often pay better than manual labor or standing-up jobs (but not always, especially not the ones that don’t require any credentials).
What reactionaries would call “do nothing burocrats” if the business was state owned
These jobs are largely just people “knowing” what a bunch of other people are doing so they can coordinate the labor between all of them and is specialized paperwork/administrative/inter-team communications labor so that the other types of specialized labor (factory, accounting, engineering, etc.) dont have to spend time on it
You could definitely lie your way into one if you learn all the lingo, and look/speak/act like a typical corporate drone
These jobs are ridiculed cause the most important aspects are generally just acting professional, understand classist jargon, and being prompt with responding to emails/messages.
Versus other bullshit office jobs that actually require knowledge or skills like accounting, HR, legal, finance etc.
You rub an email against someone’s genitals, same as any other job…
Speaking for myself, what I largely do is logistics. I am coordinating shipments between facilities and that mostly looks like sending information back and forth from one party to another.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned yet is sometimes these jobs are created because of “permissions” issues.
For example, you don’t want someone who both creates and confirms purchase orders for accountability reasons.
