DEI was a novel bureaucratic form created by panicky liberals in 2020. Credit: Getty
The buzzy Apple show Severance depicts a group of office drones trapped in a cubicle hell called Lumon Industries. It’s a workplace drama in which suspiciously little is revealed about the actual work done by protagonist Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) and his colleagues. It appears to be a Sisyphean task of sorting random numbers — but we have no idea why, and neither do they. Do any of these people hunched over screens do anything of use?
Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.
But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.
Last week, President Trump issued his own Severance of sorts. On 22 January, federal DEI employees were placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately”. As a result, many are being flung back into the private economy at an inopportune time. DEI initiatives had already been hemorrhaging support in the C-Suite and among rank-and-file workers over the past two years; the private sector might soon be just as much of a DEI dead end as the government.
I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.
Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics. LBJ and MLK would probably snicker if they knew that the main mission of contemporary DEI departments isn’t economic redistribution, but fussily policing the language and manners of college-educated professionals.
DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?
The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organisations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.
The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.
The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.
Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?
Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.
Consider Flunkies (workers whose purpose is to make their superiors feel important) and Goons (those who deceive others on behalf of their employers). Since the rise of DEI, executives grilled about their anti-racism initiatives by the media can simply gesture vaguely at their middle-management DEI Flunkies and walk away. The Goons are the ones mystifying what they do via the dark arts of public relations. Brands could wallpaper over bad behavior like union-busting by appearing to be Taking a Stand for social justice, even if they weren’t quite sure what that meant or what came next after all that standing.
I say this as a former Goon. In 2022, I did some contract work for a small ad agency hired to do DEI-related anti-racist campaigns. The company was helmed by a black woman, who outsourced much of the creative work to freelancers like myself. There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth. But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors.
The same goes for the people Graeber considered “Box tickers” — those who create the appearance that something useful is being done, when it emphatically isn’t. Will your company unionise or provide your employees with better health care? No, but how about promoting a Queer BIPOC Awareness Day? When I was a reporter covering Atlanta’s public-school system in 2023, I was puzzled by the fact that the district was spending $3.5 million a year on DEI. If your student population is 72% black, what does it mean to diversify it? Were white and Asian children “underrepresented”? No one could tell me. Additionally, three-quarters of Atlantic public-school students couldn’t even read at grade level. But why teach kids how to read when you can “uplift Indigenous voices” instead?
Likewise, “Taskmasters” are the bullshit-job artists who create extra work for those who don’t need it, and that’s what DEI seems to do best. For four years, white-collar office workers have endured the same self-serious seminars on pronouns and “unconscious bias”, and have had to pretend to care about self-congratulatory “awareness” days with social-justice-y slogans. It was all premised on the theory that the way to beat racism is to be hyper-aware of race at all times — the rough equivalent of being told to treat intrusive thoughts about the possibility of death by moving into a cemetery. So, it’s no surprise that a growing body of research shows that DEI undermines diversity, rather than strengthening it.
To make matters worse for out-of-work DEI professionals, corporate America has been cutting back on all bullshit jobs recently amid a surge of consolidation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the growing realization that many remote workers and middle managers weren’t adding much value. So will there be sufficient demand in other fields for someone in a suit who can lead dour Robin DiAngelo “White Fragility” support groups or write passive-aggressive emails to those using the term “pregnant women” rather than “birthing people” on Slack? That’s anyone’s guess.
Back in the Obama days, those whose hard-hat jobs were outsourced or automated away were told to “learn to code” and join the information economy. But now that the blue-collar sector is hot, maybe it’s time to tell ex-DEI workers: learn to hammer.
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SubscribeI work for an Airline and we have, in management, a position with the title: “Service Excellence Lead Representative”. Their duties and responsibilities are as vague and confusing as their title.
It isn’t just the DEI positions, though. If I ask someone what they do and they say that they’re a “Financial Analyst”, or a “Chief Marketing Executive”, or a “Corporate Strategist”, I’m left more confused than before.
“Corporate Strategist”? That ain’t nuttin!
I’m a Twizzle Sticker and was previously a Senior Numpty. And, boy, do I love filling out those “How Did I Add Value to the Corporation This Month” questionnaires. I’m aces at that.
Agree overall but a corporate strategist or financial analyst in, say, your planning department is a real thing. The two work together, and particularly if they eschew any unhealthy disrespect for the salespeople, do work to keep the corporation profitable. It’s when colleagues adopt a title like ‘Chief Customer Experience Officer’ that you might be justifiably suspicious they may be a grifter.
At least “service and excellence” implies a goal of excellent service! DEI basically says that doing your job well is secondary to being a political activist.
Surely, if you were excellent at ‘doing’ DEI, it would be a limited term appointment?
Once you had taught everyone the correct way to think and speak, your work here is done. Unless, of course, you could think up of ways to move the goalposts to keep the grift grifting!
Exactly,I have long thought the same about quangos like the FCA.There must come a time when the rules cover everything but no they keep giving new guidance and regulations just to keep themselves in work,And the costs fall on IFA’s who then cant afford to service clients with less than £200k under management .So the whole purpose of protecting clients is turned on its head
Same goes for the bullshit concept of employee engagement. If your employees aren’t sufficiently engaged it’s because you’re doing it wrong. Therefore more billable consultant hours.
Just as Stonewall have done. Original purpose fulfilled but have found a new grift.
This is great news. I believe many people fear and loath their DEI colleagues. These are the people that shove anti-racism down your throat and in some cases talk about, …”being less white.” If you say what they consider the “wrong thing” or “look the wrong way” and you’re in for counseling and perhaps termination.
There is broad popular support for getting rid of DEI in business, government and academia, especially when the costs of DEI staff and consultants are made known in an organization.
You’re absolutely right that organisations – especially consulting firms – are quick to jump on fads like DEI if they think there’s money to be made. We’ve seen this before with trends like “Agile” project management, which was marketed as revolutionary but often resulted in bloated consulting fees and minimal tangible results. Once these ideas are entrenched, they’re incredibly difficult to dismantle, even after their flaws are exposed.
However, while it might seem like business support for DEI is declining in the US, that doesn’t appear to be the case in the UK. DEI and ESG policies remain firmly embedded in corporate and government culture here, largely because they’re tied to regulatory compliance and fear of reputational risk. Many leaders still see these initiatives as a necessary shield against bad PR, even if they breed resentment and inhibit free discussion among employees.
The truth is, DEI often serves as little more than a profit centre for consultants and a liability for organisations. When people learn just how much these programmes cost, it’s no wonder there’s growing frustration. Employees and leaders alike are tired of being policed by ideologues, and the backlash you’re seeing reflects a natural reaction to years of overreach.
The challenge is cutting through the inertia and recognising that these programmes have done more harm than good. Until there’s the courage to face that reality, many organisations will keep clinging to DEI – no matter how ineffective or divisive it becomes.
Agile Project Management is how much, perhaps most, user oriented software is developed and delivered. It is not fad or a piece of buzz.
Absolutely. I suspect the author has experienced Agile being done in the wrong projects – or project managers just saying “we are Agile” to excuse a poorly run initiative.
Perhaps there is something to say for Agile methodology. However one of my former colleagues had a more cynical but perhaps more realistic explanation.
Having got almost every middle project manager in the public and major private sector organizations through Prince 2 courses, a methodology often far too bureaucratic for the bulk of the projects being managed, and often leading to not seeing obvious woods for the trees, project management training providers had to turn to something else to keep the cash flowing!
Agile manufacturing is top notch (if done correctly)!
It’s how Musk gets to places first..
A consultant. Someone who takes your watch to tell you what time it is.
DEI are a sort of ‘corporate Nazi’ to keep folks thinking ‘correctly’….goose-steppers for ‘non-white justice’….a new rendition of racism.
Ryan, love your headline and all your work. The priceless truth: ‘Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics.’ Corporations have long been prone to internal social engineering, and this made them ripe for the picking as the DEI crowd so well knew.
One great example of a bu11sh1t job: ‘Sensitivity Readers’ at publishing houses, an army of ghastly little prigs drunk on the exercise of their dull-witted power. You know, the ones that want Roald Dahl rewritten without the insensitive/offensive bits, or who want Flannery O’Connor banned from campuses. How can these people not be mortified to describe what they do. Fire the lot of them. Yesterday.
Ghastly half-educated little prigs, some from what used to be good universities.
I was appalled when I first learned about “sensitivity readers,” but it certainly helps explain why the readership of books, outside of the woke left, has cratered. It’s instructive to look at the webpages of literary agents. You will see a remarkable uniformity of sex and political views clearly expressed in the desire of agents to represent books by “marginalized” people and other official victim groups.
Just in time. How would they possibly desensitize a “Vermicious Knid”?
They even had the temerity to “rewrite” PG Wodehouse, one of the finest writers in the English language. The absolute liberty.
DEI was isomorphic throughout the institutions largely as a defense mechanism for discrimination lawsuits more than a union busting technique. The practice is most prevalent in office jobs which don’t really lend themselves to unionization. Yes, the corporations were also hitting the S portion of ESG targets and earning social credit points from various interest groups but lawsuits were the real concern.
Now that the Federal Government is hostile to DEI there’s seemingly more legal risk to having them and so corporations are rolling them back.
Perhaps the folks who’ve relished burning innocent people alive at the DEI stake should’ve pondered whether this really was a viable long-term career path before going ‘all in’? Just sayin’.
The Washington Post said that Trump’s assault on affirmative action would affect every aspect of American life.
Just how big is affirmative action in America?
After all, it was designed as a purely temporary measure 60 years ago just to give Black people a helping hand until they caught up with white people after segregation ended and Black children were then able to access the very same high quality schools and colleges that white children had previously had exclusive access to.
Yet still can’t read?
Lol. Bitter but true.
A contraction was needed.
But strongly suspect the myth well out ahead of the facts on number of roles this extinguishes. It serves an additional purpose though – mask the White Billionaires take-over and the betrayal of middle America.
What the Trump regime certainly doesn’t believe in is meritocracy. How otherwise could a talk show Host with drink and womanising deficiencies become Sec of Defence?
No meritocratic principles are for losers in Trump World. Fealty, money and/or algorithms that favour the Orange One are what count.
Time will tell of course with regards to a real shift to meritocracy. Perhaps the concept itself is too narrow. To be clear, of course it applies to the individual, but in the Trumpian world, it might also include ineffective corporations feeding from tax payers for decades. Think Boeing, NASA, LM… Personally I think that this will be a huge part of his success or failure, whether he can rid the federal government of the most extreme cases of crony capitalism (mafia) and radically shift the current supply chain. It is a huge ask.
As for “mask the White Billionaires take-over and the betrayal of middle America”, sorry, no. You are perfectly aware who their preferred candidate was, they were not shy of donations, endorsements, and free speech censorship. If you are going to be obsessed with money, please follow it. Among economists, the consensus is that this trend was turbo charged by Clinton and never properly assessed either by the democrats or the republicans. The Democratic party since Clinton has depended on white billionaires far more than the republicans, that is just a fact. That so many jumped ship and started kissing arse in the last couple months is objectively disgusting but hardly relevant.
That so many earning 100 000$ or less voted for Trump is no coincidence.
Unless your perception is that they are too stupid to vote for their best interest.
Not defending the Democrats. They’ve a serious period of reflection and they’d lost their moorings.
But whilst some Billionaires certainly ran late to Daddy world’s richest man gave him quarter of Billion and a tweak of algorithms. And you should wonder who’s buying his meme coin now whilst tipping him off about the token number. The fealty and favours nice and transparent isn’t it.
Let’s see if he favours the Billionaire tax cuts in coming Reconciliation House Bill or whether he favours the ‘little guy’. And did you notice the EO that reduced healthcare cover for a number of million? Did he mention that in campaign?
They may have voted for him but they’ll smell betrayal soon enough
Of course you may have a point, or at least, reason to be suspicious. However you run the risk of being rather selective. It was always thus. Follow the money. Under Biden do you really believe that federal funds were blind? The new establishment is the old establishment, a temporary alliance of interests. Plus c’est pareil.
What is different is that established brands of century old success stories are being replaced by new brands and self made men and women with exposure to market competition and management. The disconnect with the general population is of course unavoidable, but not the degree we have witnessed in the last 30 years. Else globalisation would have touched the brakes or hit pause way before Trump 2016.
The bigger picture surely is the stated aim to reduce the amount of gravy. You will never entirely get rid of the pigs in the trough. Sadly.
The health issue is an interesting and complex one. Why the richest country in the world has performances and costs wildly different from say Switzerland? Not informed enough to have an opinion tbh.
But cannot say that I see that EO as of particular concern. It is essentially a repeal of Biden legislation which increased insurance exposure, and the cost was passed down, as always. Furthermore, it will require a little bit more than an EO.
https://www.statnews.com/2025/01/20/trump-executive-orders-health-care-drug-pricing-aca-covid-gender-discrimination/
I do agree with you implied point that he has less control over Federal expenditure than the current impression. EOs can’t allocate much cash.
The Cypto meme-coin is a new and unique development allowing financial favours to be hidden.
On Healthcare, put a largely private insurance model alongside ‘fee for service’ in an asymmetric knowledge market and all the models show you end up with higher costs and millions lacking adequate cover.
As a result, many [federal DEI employees] are being flung back into the private economy at an inopportune time.
Well boo-effin-hoo. Come join the rest of us out in the globalised private economy where you actually have to produce something of value in order to earn your crust.
You mean that global private economy that required trillion dollar taxpayer bailouts and monetary expansion to this day? If there is one problem in the economy it is that a major part of it, the financialized part, for years told everyone they ‘produced’ massive gains when it appeared to be a Ponzi in 2008. It should also be noted, then, that Graeber argues that a lot of BS jobs are actually in the private sector. The author also writes he worked for a private company.
Yes, DEI has infected the private sector in a big way. But numerous companies are now disinfecting themselves of the noxious, racist, self-righteous DEI groups. How is the government doing?
Companies might as well be MAGA-washing. In the end, they cannot afford to actually care about thise things. They will mainly, in the end, try to maximize shareholder value. Since many sectors are dependent on crony deals they will carefully monitor what kind political wind is blowing and adjust their PR accordingly.
The biggest companies are indeed often no better than the state in their laziness and inclination towards whatever might be the latest trend; pronoun badges, Net Zero etc.
But in the middle and smaller sized companies, you really have to sing for your supper.
What trillion dollar bailout are you talking about?
During COVID, the small business owners I know barely survived and received minimal support (largely repayable loans).
Meanwhile, government employees got to stay at home on full salary for months on end.
Quite. And still they stay!
U.K. is full of shit and, bullshit jobs…..Starmer better take the hint or X……… either way, British elite are dead as dodos and have yet to accept they’re all doing bullshit jobs.
Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics.’
Surely the most visible and irritatingly audible symbol were the president and the VP themselves?
The president is supposed to yield executive power, on a pragmatic day to day basis. We never saw day to day. We were never convinced he yielded anything, who wrote his teleprompts. Pause. We noticed that on his first day, his EO were in direct contradiction to his campaign pledges. We noticed that from a caretaker position, the poor old fool was convinced he was destined to two presidential terms. Insane. A whole party machine went with insanity.
As for poor Mrs Harris, she was chosen on the basis of her skin colour. A blatantly racist act. She is the absolute symbol of DEI madness, patronising white saviour complex, ie, racism, and ultimately, cruelty.
Had she risen to the top through merit, primaries, excellent service, different story altogether. She was not. America voted in Obama, twice. There was absolutely no need to compromise the integrity of the state with such a weak unproven candidate. I actually feel sorry for her, as well as for the numerous individuals over promoted living in constant fear of exposure. How else could you explain her risible word salad outbursts? It was a fear driven survival technique.
The Democrat party is sick. Regardless of policy, the contempt shown to Americans is on a stupefying level, and not just democrat voters. Who knows if Trump would have won the trifecta if Newsom had been chosen through primaries and standing for office instead of a mediocre old git in terminal decline?
DEI killed the democrats long before Trump shot it in the head. Frankly, at this stage, you would have to call that an act of mercy.
PS
For the sake of empathy and understanding, I highly recommend reading the following.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/trump-inauguration-kamala-harris.html
A fan piece of course, but nevertheless, interesting in that it appeals exclusively to emotional tropes and tribal allegiances, all within a binary vision of the world. Really hope that time does its thing, and that we can move on from the bleeding hearts to something just a little bit more positive and constructive.
Yes. A sad deluded fan piece but worth a chuckle.
It’s a very odd piece, like buzzword bingo and full of self pity/being a victim. And the quotes, who says to a toddler ‘let me hear you speak like a leader’?? Boy or girl, I would never talk to a kid like that, you’d sound like an idiot
Sorry to be a grammar nazi but I couldn’t read past “yield,” it’s “wield.” Entirely different.
Newsom shows the insanity that makes Biden and Harris look almost reasonable. Newsom is criminally insane. He makes people outside of the California zone of madness cringe with everything he says, every crazed smile, every twitch and eye roll.
Insightful and funny. Thank you.
“The more I see of the human race the more I love my Dogs”.*
*Frederick the Great 1712-1786.
Has anyone else noticed that these non-jobs were created.as the number of.people.attending university expanded to nearly 50% of population in the.UK? There has.been.no.real economic growth since the Blair experiment in HE expansion, so what.else was.going to happen? Educated, idle minds are.dangerous.- better.to house them unproductively? The question is what happens next. Presumably a continuum between continued loss of graduate.premium through to increased student debt default.
DEI provided jobs to the thousands of folks who majored in the ‘Studies’ at universities & colleges – Black Studies, Women Studies, Gender Studies. Otherwise, these people would be unemployed; They have no other skills other than to sniff out inequities, and play ‘cop’ through enforcement of their social engineering. A complete loss for productivity in a society.
Yes, these people aren’t historians or sociologists, they’re management consultants whose only skill lies in getting people to think and speak a certain way (at least publicly) through a combination of bullying, shaming and, for the really intransigent, sacking. Good riddance to them.
This article is fine except that it gets its timescales seriously understated. The DEI madness started way way previous to 2020. The entire Humanities/Social ‘Science’ part of academia has effectively been one huge DEI-Bullshit job for decades. And it is the reason why the incoming Trump administration now has such a vast decades-old ocean of the stuff to roll back.
A good place to get at the sheer scale of the problem is Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion (published in 2018). It is a devastatingly compelling expose of “how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture.” How the contemporary Western professional job market has for decades been assailed by invocations to feel guilty about the – largely baseless – alleged grievances of an ever-growing list of ‘victims of society’. This competitive victimhood narrative originated in academia but now oozes daily from the liberal media and has progressively been absorbed as orthodoxy in each and every one of our institutions, all the way from schools to armed forces. God speed to the Trumpist championing of some long-forgotten common sense on all of this.
Right. The groves of academe have long been awash in make-believe scholars who hold what are in effect PhDEI degrees from “Studies” fiefdoms or the Ed Schools. After the 2020 fever, they started pouring into the corporate world, which will prove to be a temporary aberration.
When I read Graeber’s book a lot things about society fell into place for me. But I think it’s much ‘worse’ than just the obvious examples. If we include jobs that are partially bullshit I would not be surprised if the bulk of post-industrial labor is just work for the sake of it.
However, bullshit jobs might be an intrinsic phenomenon of late capitalist society because we simply need demand in the economy. That will remain a problem if AI is able to take over manegerial jobs. When people don’t have jobs they cannot spend money on the excess productivity and, in the end, you only need so many plumbers.
Graeber, recognizes this problem too and suggests a universal basic income (UBI). I have this hypothesis that we might already be doing something like that. We know that a lot of economic expansion after the 80s were bubbles. In fact, after the 2008 GFC one could argue that the entire financialized industry appeared to be somewhat of a lie. Since then the economy has been on the central bank life line. So the 1% have their giant UBI. But what about the rest? Well, we are not quite sure about the social consequences of a UBI and also we don’t have the fiscal and monetary infrastructure right now. It is still based on an industrial society. So instead we distribute some of the excess liquidity through bullshit jobs. By keeping it more or less confined to the 10%, one also produces a loyal class of clergy men who are inclined to defend the status quo.
Do we remember all the changing management fads? The balanced score card or promotion based on competences which was just a bluffers charter?
Actually it still predominates in government.
Yes I thought at the time that it was all rubbish but the Company had bought into it by recruitment “specialists” i.e.Consultants
Yes there seems to be a great tendency to quantifying the unquantifiable. Everything has to be audited. In fact, one needs to constantly self-audit. It is part of managerial orthodoxy and market fundamentalism. The late Mark Fisher wrote a good book about it called Capitalist Realism.
see below
It was just a fad clearly. So happy to see it go and also that I was fortunate enough to have left big(ish) corporate world before being forced to play along with it or leave.
see comment below
Would you hire people who’s work will never be completed, and whose mission will never be fulfilled? Those are the DEI folks. A complete grift. Bye bye.
Idea for project – trace the sequence of key events and key drivers for this bad dream which so many appear to have belatedly awoken from. Young women in social media, status seeking? I don’t know. The phenomenon goes round and round in a causal circle with no start point, to my understanding, Idea for new word – awake. Replaces woke. Idea for next societal re-set – flick away the inevitable epidemic of manoeuvring by lawyers which is in the pipeline. That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.
White people are under-represented in the NHS, so I guess all those Diversity Officers still have plenty of work to do.
“…being told to treat intrusive thoughts about the possibility of death by moving to a cemetery.” Brilliantly expressed.
DEI hires will re-purpose as regulators to impose fast-burn-out light bulbs, dishwashers that don’t clean, toilets that don’t flush, noisy air conditioners that don’t cool & vehicles you can’t drive long distance. The only limitation is their imagination running out of your money.
The good news-the energy industry is hiring. There will 1000’s of jobs in the oilfields and oilfield adjacent.
I’m of the opinion that any organization will begin to display inefficiency when reaching a critical point of complexity, that point almost always being the point where one person can personally and individually monitor, understand, and control all aspects of the business. One person can only do and understand so much stuff. At that point, they have to delegate not just the actual work, but the oversight of the work, to others. In some ways, nearly all management is composed of ‘bullshit jobs’ as by definition it’s not directly related to what the organization actually produces, dealing with customers, or any other economically meaningful activity, but rather is the oversight of all such functions. Human interpersonal communication is less than perfect, and the business begins to suffer from these imperfections. As organizations get larger, they keep adding more managers and more layers of management, the chain of communications gets longer, and the people at the top get farther from the actual meaningful work. Most of us played the game in grade school where students pass whispered messages one to the next around the entire class. They called it ‘telephone’ where I live but I’m pretty sure the game was invented long before the telephone. Anyone who’s played the game knows that the message will get garbled along the way and won’t be remotely like the original message. It’s interesting to go around afterwards and see who heard what exactly and how and where the message changed. It’s also interesting to keep that concealed and rather to leave each student to consider only what they personally heard and repeated and speculating which of their classmates might have deliberately inserted a curse word and how said curse word might have been changed by the next person. I would argue that this is the more instructive, educational approach because it prepares kids for what the real world will actually be like, not some idealized world where everybody gets along and helps each other. By the time an organization has the size and resources to legitimately concern itself with social and political issues and legitimately respond, the lines of communication are probably already so long that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing and the people running the organization may have a very inaccurate picture of what the business is really like at the lowest levels.
It gets worse, because communication isn’t the only issue. Just as we speculate which of our classmates deliberately sabotaged the message when playing ‘telephone’, managers speculate about which of their colleagues might be slacking off, or kissing up to the boss, or stealing from the company or completely useless. All this adds up to what we commonly refer to as ‘office politics’. People in groups of even modest size will subdivide themselves into smaller groups based on commonalities of whatever kind. In the office setting, it’s often a similar attitude toward work or a dedication to the company or it could be completely unrelated. People tend to keep certain opinions to their own subgroups and these opinions affect other people in the group until you have political factions having spats over issues like who’s not contributing to the coffee fund, or advocating for this or that office policy, or conspiring for their own advancement, or whether corporate pushing DEI initiatives is full of crap. Once again, the bigger the organization, the bigger the factions, the more there are, the bigger the overall problem and loss of efficiency.
There’s also the problem of managers who have a vague understanding of how little impact they can have on the actual business outputs, especially the middle layers of management who don’t oversee the actual work directly. They basically try to invent ways to make themselves seem more important or just ways to look busy in front of employees who are actually doing something rather than sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen and maybe playing solitaire. Managers above them also make work for them to do for the same reasons, keeping up appearances to the grunts and justifying their paychecks. It’s the source of most ‘bullshit jobs’ and DEI is one of the recent offenders, but there have been others, less well known outside business schools but no less stupid or pointless. At bottom, it’s a combination of being something managers can do to make themselves look useful and it’s a form of public image advertising. The problem gets worse when managers go beyond making work for themselves and their underlings and start making so much extra work that they need more managers to do it. This is when it begins to draw the attention of the highest levels of management and/or the investors/owners who didn’t invest in the company to provide jobs for managers or to make the world a better place. They expect their money be spent wisely on activities that actually generate profits and they eliminate things that don’t make them any money whenever and wherever they find them. The DEI purge is just a highly visible case of investors performing this function of eliminating waste in their companies. It’s visible because unlike most management fads, it wasn’t entirely internal, rather it was advertised to attract younger customers and talented employees who supposedly cared about these issues. Then it got seized by the media and used as a political football by both sides. The political and public aspects meant that managerial overreach raised the stakes and the possibilities of bad outcomes. Wasting public goodwill, alienating customers, and inviting government meddling is a lot more expensive than just wasting organizational time and money. Just ask Disney, Target, or Budweiser if you doubt that.
I could probably fill a book or a volume of books just on my own observations of the inefficiencies that plague human collective activity, but I’ll spare you any more of my ranting on that subject. My point is that all management is to some extent ‘bullshit jobs’ because by definition, they’re related to overseeing and monitoring the work, not actually doing the work. Further, they’re completely necessary because people can’t be universally trusted. If you pay a person a wage to come into work and do X labor, he or she may or may not do work of an acceptable quality, or a sufficient quantity, or any work at all. Because people are capable of deception and exploitation and some do, it is necessary to monitor, oversee, organize, and manage groups of people. Businesses have to have management for the same reasons people need governments. Somebody has to keep order and keep people’s behavior within boundaries to either keep domestic peace or to keep the organization functional and profitable.
We tend to question the efficiency and quality of government automatically and contrast that with the relatively more efficient and better quality of goods and services produced by private organizations. We attribute this difference to the presence or lack of the profit motive. While that does matter, as I related above, it isn’t the whole picture. The reality is that a lot of the problems and inefficiencies that can be observed in government are in fact duplicated in many private for-profit and non-profit organizations. The overlap of problems that are simply a consequence of size and complexity is quite significant. I’d go so far as to say it’s the greater portion of both. Trump is getting rid of ‘bullshit jobs’ in taxpayer funded government and corporations are taking the hint and doing the same. That’s good news for both taxpayers and investors alike. Here we actually have some good news for a change.
‘Telephone’ was called Chinese whispers when I was at school. 53 people were employed to change that name
Brilliant!
People in DEI and also in HR inter related jobs – are political appointments.
They are todays equivalent of the policy enforcers, the political officers of the former Soviet Union. The political commissars of the working world – for Diversity and Woke.
Make them illegal hires and punishable by jail time for Executives who employ them.
It’s interesting to note that in 1923 a remarkable 317,232 employees were dismissed from the Italian railway system and it ran more efficiently. P. H. Box, quoted and cited in C. N. Parkinson’s Evolution of Political Thought. Is there a parallel here?
“It is our collective failure – we, the progressives, the centrists, the remainers, the political elites,” Hyman wrote to the tear-stained liberals who cannot quite believe the rise of the new Right and what has happened in the United States.
“It’s look-in-the-mirror time. Cold water to the face time. Enter-the-i’m-acelebrity-jungle-and-eat-a-kangaroo’spenis time.
“We have been asleep at the wheel while the populists have dusted off their megaphones, fine-tuned their algorithms, and got to work exploiting the gaping chinks in our armour.
“Yet somehow, we are undeterred. We are still surfing wave after wave of superiority, each one propelling us forward to the promised land of political oblivion.”
He outlines the seven deadly sins of the Left – sins that could all be laid at the door of Starmer. It is patronising (the university-educated Left thinks it is cleverer than everyone else), complacent (the Left’s logic will win), abstract (follow my complicated reasoning), censorious (call the thought police, I have witnessed a Right-wing opinion), gullible (the Left is always in a fit of the vapours about every “t**d a wannabe Trump drops on the sidewalk”), conservative (the Left defends old state institutions that have clearly failed) and bland (the Left’s range of emotions “starts at earnest and ends at sincere”).
DEI hasn’t gone away, its just changed a bit. How could Pete Hegseth be considered anything other than a DUI hire? He has literally zero qualifications for the job, he only got it because he is a ferocious ass kisser, and he comes from the vastly under-represented alcoholic sex abuser white nationalist community.
You really do have an appropriate posting name.
EEO is a superlative idea, but weird in its way. It appears to provide protection for everyone except white males under age 40 who can’t claim to be adherents of particular religions. In the federal civil service, I saw EEO invoked because essentially, no evidence, only feelings were required. The grievance process required more, and the filer would be less likely to get an investigator predisposed to see discriminatory conduct. The solution? I don’t know.
By bias is such that when I meet a DEI or affirmative action hire, I assume they got the job because of policy, not talent.
Many likely feel the same, and this is a disservice to those who were hied on merit. Eliminating DEI will help.
I’m always suspicious of companies/corporations who are super vocal on DEI. My first thought is always “what you trying to hide?”
It’s like Hollywood and it’s steady stream of bull$hit movies with wooden DEI characters shoehorned into plots that are so ridiculous it’s laughable. Meanwhile Hollywood is actually a cesspit of sex crimes, weird deaths and dodgy plastic surgeons. And these are the people who want to lecture us all on morals and what constitutes a fairer society….ahahahahahah! Please stop. I’m laughing so hard I might hurt myself.
I read recently that the world’s biggest tech giant doesn’t want to dismantle its DEI apparatus. We should all be asking ourselves why is that? What are you hiding?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjex3878z3wo.amp
Thank God Trump has driven a hole the size of the Nimitz through the DEI grift and most importantly, people see it for what it is. An industry that was built on emotion and not on fact has finally been found out and I hope, to never return. Identity politics and everything it stands for is both regressive, racist and by design, pernicious.
Well said. Comments are thoughtful as well.
The DEI complex jobs are the equivalent of aparatchik communist minders in the Societ Union. Aparatchik party minders were there to enforce the latest crap being spewed by the communist party. Universally tolerated upon pain of cancellatiin, and universally despised for being dangerous parasites.
Can you imagine wanting to do it as a job though? Like being a priest of some made up religion. It’s not even interesting.
This is so satisfying to see. DEI is a horrible carbuncle of “white hatred”. It’s nothing except revenge racism. I was the victim of this dreadful shit back in 1984. So any situation in which the DEI shitheads are harmed by unemployment is fine by me.
I’ve spent most of my life in the ” hot” jobs mentioned in the last paragraph. Often very well paid indeed, and with great freedom .
How I would love to see a few of those precious DEI “professionals” come among us. What joy that would bring!
Factcheckers set about seeking substantiation or refutation of Trump’s “facts”. No, the FAA does not hire blind and deaf air traffic controllers, the factcheckers found. No, DEI does not cause aircraft to collide midair. “Experts could not cite a known instance of a plane crash in which diversity efforts had been cited as the sole cause,” the Times reassured.