Bullshit Jobs in Design

David Graeber, the late anthropologist and activist, made waves with his provocative idea of the "Bullshit Job." In his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Graeber argued that a large portion of modern white-collar work is meaningless and the people doing these jobs often know it.

Graeber defined a bullshit job as one that even the person doing it believes shouldn't exist. These aren't just boring or unfulfilling roles. They are jobs where the worker feels that nothing of real value would be lost if their role disappeared. The world could function better without them.

He outlined five primary types:

Flunkies
Jobs that exist to make someone else look or feel important (think receptionists hired mostly for status, not function).

Goons
Roles that exist because others have them (like corporate lawyers or PR specialists in certain industries, where their function is mainly reactive).

Duct Tapers
Employees who fix problems that shouldn't exist and are not allowed to solve the root cause.

Box Tickers
Workers who do tasks purely for show, such as filling out reports no one reads or creating compliance systems that add no value.

Taskmasters
Managers who manage people who don't need managing or create extra work to justify their roles.

Graeber's claim wasn't just that these jobs are typical and that they are designed to be this way. He blamed the rise of bullshit jobs on a mix of bureaucratic bloat, corporate culture, and what he called "managerial feudalism," where status and power come from expanding the number of people beneath you. The more subordinates you have, the more important you appear, regardless of whether they're doing anything useful.

It's a bold argument. Critics have resisted, pointing out that usefulness is subjective and that the economy is more complex than Graeber's categories suggest. Still, his ideas struck a chord, especially among people in middle management, corporate admin roles, and certain tech sectors.

Graeber's theory isn't just about work. It's a critique of capitalism and how it distorts purpose. He believed that people want meaningful work and not just pay checks. When society forces people into roles they know are pointless, it creates resentment, depression, and a sense of deep alienation.

He wasn't arguing for laziness or utopian fantasy. Graeber advocated for universal basic income and a reevaluation of labour that recognises care work, teaching, and creative work, which is underpaid or unpaid.

In the end, the point of Graeber's "bullshit jobs" theory isn't just to complain. It's to ask if we can automate so much while still keeping people employed and doing meaningless tasks. What would it look like to redesign work around the real need and human fulfilment?

Applying Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" framework to evaluate the design industry reveals several interesting patterns. Here's how this principle might critique various design roles:

Flunkies → Pixel Polishers
Designers who are asked to endlessly tweak colours, spacing, or fonts for internal presentations or decks that no one outside the company will ever see. These roles exist more to make executives feel like something is happening than to produce meaningful outcomes.

Goons → Hype Designers
Designers hired to build branding or flashy visuals for broken, unethical products that don't work, putting lipstick on a pig. Their job is to help sell or defend something that shouldn't be sold.

Duct Tapers → UX Janitors
Designers constantly patching bad user experiences caused by bad product decisions or technical debt. Instead of being allowed to redesign a broken system, they're stuck making band-aid fixes and endlessly designing around the real problems without the authority to solve them.

Box Tickers → Compliance Creatives
These are designers who create accessibility checklists, diversity mockups, or "ethical design" frameworks that leadership requests to look progressive. These tasks often don't lead to implementation or change; they're there to check a box.

Taskmasters → Design Managers Without Teams
Sometimes, there are layers of design managers managing a tiny team or just coordinating meetings. Their role can become more about justifying their position than supporting real design work.

Bullshit design roles don’t come from bad designers. They’re a byproduct of organisational dysfunction. They thrive in environments that treat design as decoration rather than a tool for direction. In these settings, success is measured by the quantity of deliverables instead of the quality of outcomes.

Design becomes about appearance, not effect; it is about showing activity, not driving clarity. Design devolves into a checkbox when companies prioritise optics over substance and reward those who perform well in the room instead of those solving real problems. It becomes a signal to investors, stakeholders, or leadership that innovation is happening, even when nothing meaningful is being built.

The cost isn’t just inefficiency; it’s the erosion of talent. Talented designers spend their days making surface-level changes that carry no real impact. They burn out from the mental toll of working on things that don’t matter. They grow disillusioned with leaders who speak the language of design but don’t understand or value its role.

Creativity fades in the absence of stretch, challenge, and honest critique. Eventually, good designers don’t just leave their jobs; they question whether design can still be a force for good. The problem isn’t that they’ve lost faith in the craft; they’ve been stuck in roles where the craft was never really invited in.

Meaningful Design Work That Matters

Design work that would be considered meaningful and valuable under Graeber's framework includes but is not limited to the following:

Problem-Solving Designers
These are the quiet heroes of our industry. They dig deep into user behaviours, business constraints, and messy workflows. They ask real questions and solve real problems. Their work doesn't just look good in a portfolio; it reduces friction, enhances usability, and delivers measurable outcomes. They don't design for applause; they design for clarity.

Accessibility Specialists
In a world that still often treats accessibility as an afterthought, these designers champion inclusion from the ground up. They ensure that products and services are usable by everyone, regardless of ability, age, or context. Their work may not win flashy awards, but it changes lives.

Ethical Design Advocates
These professionals act as moral compasses within design teams. They question dark patterns, raise flags about manipulative UX, and advocate for user consent and transparency. Their insistence on dignity and agency is essential in an era dominated by surveillance capitalism.

Service Designers
Instead of obsessing over isolated screens or single touch points, service designers zoom out. They map systems, align front-stage and back-stage interactions, and coordinate design with operational reality. They don't just design the app; they design the journey, the support systems, and the cultural touch points that make or break the user experience.

Design Researchers
They bring users back into the conversation, not as personas but as people. Their interviews, field studies, and journey maps uncover unmet needs, emotional triggers, and behavioural patterns that guide meaningful design decisions. They beautifully prevent teams from solving the wrong problems.

Design System Builders
They create scalable foundations, not just components, but the philosophy and logic behind them. Design systems reduce inconsistencies, speed up workflows, and improve product cohesion across teams and time.

Content Designers / UX Writers
These professionals bring clarity where confusion thrives. They don't just label buttons but help users understand, trust, and navigate complex digital spaces with ease and empathy.

Strategy-Infused Designers
They marry design intuition with data. They understand business KPIs, product-market fit, market forces and use that knowledge to shape designs that are not only usable but viable.

Design Coaches / Mentors
These are senior designers or leads who prioritise talent development. They review work with care, give strategic feedback, and create safe spaces for growth. Their job is to raise the quality of thinking in the room and not control the output.

And many more...

How Not to Fall Into the Bullshit Job Trap

If you want to steer clear of performative roles and stay anchored in meaningful impact, here’s how to build a career that matters:

Chase Problems, Not Polish
Before jumping into design work, ask: What problem are we solving? For whom? Why now? If the answer is vague or politically driven, you might be decorating dysfunction. Prioritise clarity over cosmetics.

Stay Close to Real Users
Avoid teams where feedback loops are secondhand, filtered, or nonexistent. The closer you are to genuine user behaviour and pain points, the more grounded your work becomes.

Make Outcomes your North Star
Design isn't just about what it looks like but it's about what it does. Track and communicate how your work improves usability, conversion, trust, accessibility, or performance.

Learn the Language of Business
Designers who understand product strategy, business models, and constraints earn more trust and more influence. Stop waiting for a seat at the table. Speak the language that gets you invited.

Push for Autonomy and Accountability
Don’t settle for being a decorator of bad decisions. Work in environments where you can shape the direction, not just the visuals. If you're endlessly duct-taping broken systems, question the setup and not just the UI.

Build Systems, Not Just Screens
Move beyond one-off deliverables. Whether it's design systems, pattern libraries, or reusable frameworks. Create work that scales, evolves, and empowers others.

Pick Missions Over Logos
Big brands don't always mean big impact. Choose teams and projects aligned with your values where the work feels urgent, real, and alive. A small, mission-driven team solving hard problems will teach you more than five years at a status-chasing giant.

Expand Beyond the Design Bubble
Learn from behavioural science, sociology, tech ethics, systems thinking, and adjacent disciplines. Great designers aren’t just skilled but aware.

Designers should build depth in areas that create lasting value to stay relevant and resilient. First, they must master problem framing and systems thinking. They must get upstream to understand complexity and redefine how problems are approached. Equally important is a commitment to inclusive and ethical design, ensuring that products reflect the diversity and dignity of their users.

Investing in design infrastructure and operations enables teams to work faster, more consistently, and at higher quality. Designers should also strengthen cross-functional collaboration by building strong relationships with product, engineering, and data teams, positioning themselves as part of the solution rather than just the presentation.

This analysis raises necessary questions for the design profession

1. Are we creating real value or simply participating in corporate theatre?

2. Are we solving genuine human problems or just optimising screens to chase KPIs?

3. Are we empowered to address root issues, or are we stuck making surface-level tweaks that serve little purpose beyond appearances?

These questions are the silent tension many designers carry in their day-to-day roles.

The industry often finds itself caught between the promise of design-led innovation and the reality of business constraints. Designers feel the gap between what their craft is capable of and what they’re actually asked to do.

It’s the same kind of existential dissonance David Graeber spoke of which is a sense that your job exists, but your work doesn’t truly matter. When systems are set up to reward output over impact, or aesthetics over empathy, even the most skilled designers can end up questioning the point of it all.

Finally, they must craft with context where aesthetics are meaningful only when grounded in clarity, usability, and real user insight. By examining which design activities genuinely improve people's lives versus those primarily serving corporate bureaucracy, designers can push toward more purposeful work that aligns with their professional values and user needs rather than perpetuating what Graeber might call "Design Theatre."