Review of _Bullshit Jobs_
I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation.<p>Edit: you can read more about the idea here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ie&#x2F;books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT75&amp;lpg=PT75&amp;dq=bull+shit+jobs+“duct+tape”&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=xL4O7mlGMW&amp;sig=5d3WPf8btLridL9RopkQiqGCmno&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwjHiczZiaTbAhWksKQKHacYCz8Q6AEwAHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=bull shit jobs “duct tape”&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ie&#x2F;books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT75&amp;lpg=PT...</a><p>My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff.<p>My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for <i>disruption</i> by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer.<p>Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.