But it would be an incredibly dysfunctional org to just hire a bunch of people with no deliverables for them. IME people are hired to build and maintain things to produce product value. You may disagree on the necessity of the value, but that doesn’t mean no one else sees value in it.
An organization is made up of individuals and those individuals may have goals that are entirely different from the goals of the organization as a whole. Their own personal goals may even be detrimental to the organization.
"An organization" doesn't hire people; it's a manager that hires people based on his ability to convince upper management of their necessity. That necessity doesn't need to be real, it just needs to be convincing. Furthermore, some other part of the organization might be starving for staff but be unable to convince the organization of that necessity.
This doesn't even make the whole organization dysfunctional; this is just the nature of any group of humans getting together to do anything. There will always be lairs, cheaters, over-ambitious, under-ambitious, workaholics, slackers, geniuses, and idiots.
> You may disagree on the necessity of the value, but that doesn’t mean no one else sees value in it.
This is key. You're getting hung up on the semantics of 'value'. Bullshit jobs are not valueless jobs. These are jobs that have some value to someone who's funding them.
The failure point for utility theory is that all utility is not fungible
> But it would be an incredibly dysfunctional org to just hire a bunch of people with no deliverables for them
They create bullshit jobs that sound important so that they can get to hire more, you are right nobody hires without such descriptions but that doesn't mean that such descriptions means they aren't bullshit jobs. Haven't you heard about the concept of "use your budget or lose it", that goes for headcount as well, managers are greatly encouraged to invent bullshit jobs to not get their budget shrunk.
And no, managers don't get paid for delivering results, they get paid per headcount first and foremost. As long as they can convince their superiors that they are doing a good job it doesn't matter what the results are.
And yeah, as you say this is dysfunctional, but most giant orgs are dysfunctional, that is the norm, otherwise small companies would have no chance in hell competing against the giant well oiled machines.
