Show me the money
A big chunk of a career is spent just doing stuff. Sometimes because it’s interesting, mostly because someone told us to. Almost never because the value clearly outweighs the cost.
We assume someone else is checking. Somewhere up the chain, someone must be making sure this work matters.
But usually no one is.
In small firms there’s some protection. You’re closer to the money. If you’re burning cash on work that doesn’t create value, the company dies. The feedback loop is fast and brutal.
But in many big firms this loop is broken. The distance between what you do and whether it really matters can span multiple layers, and the feedback never comes. You can stay busy for years without learning whether any of it was worth it. Staying busy has become the end itself, rather than the means.
And it’s worse in firms with captive customers. If people have to pay (e.g. through taxes), there’s almost no selection pressure against waste. These firms don’t have to be efficient, so they aren’t.
That’s where so-called bullshit jobs come from: roles nobody understands doing work nobody needs. You could spend all day trying to trace a line from the work to the customer, and you’d never get there. It just fades into organisational fog.
Maybe this sounds familiar. If you find yourself in a place like this, you have a choice. You can walk deeper into the fog, becoming brilliant at work that doesn't matter. Or, you can drag the money back into view. 1
What’s the value? What’s the cost? What could we be doing instead?
The system won’t like this. You’ll be the weird one for asking, the one who doesn’t understand how things work around here.
That’s because people tend to wrap their identity up with their work; if you question the work, you question them.
But you know something they probably don’t; they didn’t choose the work because it was valuable. They just did the work, and now it must be valuable because they did it. They fired into the barn and drew the bullseye after. 2
So it won’t be easy. There’ll be politics and pride and bruised egos. But this isn’t for the company’s sake; it’s for yours.
Spending a career in the fog feels safe because your pay cheque comes in each month. But you’re trading long-term market value for short-term security. If you look for the money, you’re forced to solve problems that are objectively valuable; and these skills are portable.
If your only skill is navigating the machine you’re in, you’d better hope it never changes.