"The pandemic pulled back the curtain for a moment. When everyone worked from home, it became obvious who was actually doing things and who was just... there."

"Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. 'I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams,' she said. Then laughed. 'I genuinely don’t know what that means anymore.'

"She’s not alone. I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they’d never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don’t need doing.

"The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they’ve had time to decompress, they’ll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They’re professional email forwards. They’re human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other. ...

"The pandemic pulled back the curtain for a moment. When everyone worked from home, it became obvious who was actually doing things and who was just... there. Some people’s entire roles evaporated when they couldn’t physically attend meetings. Others discovered they could do their 'full-time' job in about three hours a day.

"Now we’re back in offices, and everyone’s pretending again. But something’s shifted. The pretense feels different. More conscious. More exhausting.

"The economist David Graeber called these 'bullshit jobs'—roles that even the people doing them suspect are pointless. But I think it’s evolved beyond that. We’ve built entire ecosystems of mutual nonsense. ...

"What’s emerging [however] isn’t the collapse of corporate work—it’s something more interesting. People are building parallel systems of actual value while maintaining their corporate personae. ...

"They’re not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.

"One person I spoke to called it 'corporate entrepreneurship'—not in the LinkedIn way where you’re an 'intrapreneur' innovating within your company, but in the sense that you’re using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work."

~ 'Alex' from his post 'The Pandemic of Fake Jobs'