What Are the Five Types of Bullshit Jobs?

When David Graeber began collecting accounts of pointless work, he expected to find a few isolated cases of organizational stupidity. Instead, he found a flood. Thousands of people recognized their own positions in his descriptions. To make sense of the data, he sorted the jobs into five types that are now central to any discussion of meaningless employment.

1. Flunkies

Flunkies exist to make their superiors feel important. They open doors, carry bags, schedule calls with people who could schedule their own calls, and smile at the right moments. The archetype is the executive assistant whose sole purpose is to signal that her boss has reached a level of status where basic tasks are beneath him. But flunkyism is not confined to assistants. A manager who commissions a report from a subordinate merely to have something to read in a meeting is acting as a flunky to his own ego.

The key indicator of flunky work is redundancy. If the flunky vanished, the superior would simply perform the trivial task herself — no loss, no gain.

2. Goons

Goons are professional aggressors. They are employed not to create value but to press an advantage: lobbyists who buy influence, PR specialists who spin scandals, telemarketers who interrupt dinner, and corporate lawyers who file intimidation suits. Graeber’s use of the term is deliberately violent. A goon does not negotiate; she bludgeons. The social product is not wealth but submission.

Goon work is often well-paid and socially respected, which makes its moral emptiness even more striking. The goon knows that her success means someone else’s loss — a zero-sum game dressed up as entrepreneurship.

3. Duct Tapers

Duct tapers fix problems that should never have existed. In the corporate world, they are the IT staff who patch over poorly designed systems, the customer service agents who apologize for billing errors created by other departments, and the crisis managers whose only real job is to prevent the company’s own design flaws from becoming public. The name comes from the worker who literally uses duct tape to keep a broken machine running until the next product cycle.

Duct tapers are not useless in the same way as flunkies. Their labor is technically necessary — but only because someone else’s irresponsible choices made it necessary. They are the repair crew of a ship that the captain keeps deliberately sinking.

4. Box Ticketers

Box tickers create paperwork, indicators, and audit trails that prove the organization is doing something. They write compliance reports, fill in performance matrices, and generate metrics that no one reads. The tragedy of the box ticker is that he often takes his job seriously. He believes the boxes matter, and so he spends hours crafting data visualizations destined for a bin.

This category has expanded enormously since the financial crisis, propelled by a regulatory apparatus that demands documentation rather than results. The box ticker is institutionalized suspicion made flesh.

5. Taskmasters

Taskmasters are the middle managers, project coordinators, and division leaders whose core function is to manage workers who already know how to do their jobs. A taskmaster does not increase efficiency; he creates layers of approval, retroactive justification, and unnecessary meetings. He assigns tasks that otherwise would not exist and then evaluates whether his colleagues are doing them well enough.

Sometimes taskmasters are themselves bullied by higher taskmasters, creating a chain of coercion that extends upward to the CEO, who reports to the board, which answers to imaginary stockholders. The whole structure is a parasitic loop.

A single job can shift between these types over a week. Monday you are a box ticker preparing the weekly status report. Tuesday you are a duct taper fixing a colleague’s error. Wednesday you are a flunky attending a meeting purely to affirm your boss’s authority.

If you found this valuable, consider supporting our work.

Why the Taxonomy Matters

Naming the five types gives workers a language for their unease. It transforms private shame into a public category. If your job is bullshit, you are not a fraud; you are part of a structural absurdity. The taxonomy also suggests a remedy: if a job cannot be classified under one of these headings, it may be doing something real.

Critics have pointed out that the boundaries are fuzzy. Is a soldier a goon? Is a middle manager always a taskmaster? Graeber accepted this. He called his categories “ideal types” in the Weberian sense, not moral verdicts. The point is to start the conversation, not to settle it.