You might already be aware of the widely discussed 2013 article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber

The major points (and why they are even more relevant in the age of AI are):

  • Technological progress made it ==possible to reduce working hours== (as Keynes predicted), yet societies have not adopted it. Instead of freeing time, systems manufactured more jobs. When John Maynard Keynes Predicted a 15-Hour Workweek “in a Hundred Year’s Time” (1930)
  • Productive and manual jobs have ==declined because of automation== (and now because of AI thats declining even faster), but white-collar bureaucratic and pseudo-service roles have exploded.
  • Many workers privately believe ==their work has no real societal value==, creating psychological harm, resentment, and existential dissatisfaction.
  • The system benefits from people staying busy, disciplined, and dependent. Idle citizens with free time are viewed as politically dangerous, so ==employment becomes a moral obligation.==
  • Society perversely ==rewards low-value or exploitative roles more than essential ones== (nurses, teachers, sanitation workers). This fuels resentment against people with meaningful jobs, not meaningless ones.

He later published a book on the same topic, and outlined 5 major types of BS jobs

  • Flunkies: Jobs that exist mainly to make someone else look or feel important.
  • Goons: Roles that exist only because rivals have similar roles, essentially arms-race jobs.
  • Duct Tapers: Employees hired to temporarily fix structural problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
  • Box Tickers : People hired so organisations can claim compliance, progress, innovation, or efficiency that they aren’t genuinely delivering.
  • Taskmasters
    • Unnecessary managers hired to oversee people who don’t need oversight.
    • People whose job is creating work for others (multiplying bureaucracy).

How about Product Management

The pointless Taskmaster. Going through some reddit posts on r/ProductManagement , where people candidly talk about their PM experience, might feel like it is this one of these BS jobs

Our job is to “be like a liquid that fills in the spaces wherever needed”

 “I would be nothing without my dev teammates, but my devs would probably get on pretty well without me.”

“Stuff would 100% get done without me, and fundamentally my job day to day is a shit umbrella to protect the engineers and designers from nonsense, and to guide the narrative. I’m not indispensable.”

“_It is alarmingly easy to get ahead in this field by speaking a solid academic game about product and never shipping anything of substance. This has done real damage to our standing in the tech industry and I don’t see it improving.

If it’s a Bullshit Job then why so much obsession around it?

The idea of a mini CEO, driving strategy, having a say in major decisions, definitely sound appealing. Many Companies and Professionals succumb to this idea.

However, what happens in practice is frightening.

Top management believes in knowing best what to do and expecting product people to follow their orders. In reality, you start doing bullshit management instead of product management. product professionals become powerless because they are not the ones calling the shots.

Without decision power, Product Managers cannot thrive.

Mostly, and I will take a bold guess, 80% of the times, Product Manager is essentially a Backlog Manager or Story Writer. In this scenarios, the only way for a PM to advance in career, is to please stakeholders, rather than focusing on what you should, improving end-users live.

Thats where stakeholder management becomes so important in Product Management in the wrong way. ==When pleasing and obeying stakeholders become the primary aim, a PM will start “bullshitting” around==.

These so called Stakeholder have very less bandwidth to scratch their head with the actual engineering, so they hire PMs to carry the baton on there behalf. ==PM fights the battles with engineering on behalf of the stakeholders. ==

Stakeholders feel important -> purpose solved. Company wants PM PMs feel busy and important -> purpose solved. Professionals want to be PM. Users and the product itself is hampered -> who cares?