The Bullshit Job Apocalypse: When Your Product Manager is an Empty Chair

A quiet, furious debate is raging across Slack channels and subreddits. Product managers, engineers, and data scientists are whispering the same question: What do I actually produce? The highest-impact deliverable for a shocking number of tech workers is a weekly recap email documenting the work other people shipped months ago. You can clock in, shut your virtual door, avoid everyone, do almost nothing, and the corporate machine purrs on, unconcerned. This isn’t individual imposter syndrome, it’s a systemic symptom of organizational bloat. A recent viral discussion on Reddit captured this mood perfectly: a growing fear that many high-paying roles in tech are, to borrow the late anthropologist David Graeber’s term, “bullshit jobs.”

The feeling isn’t just cynicism. It’s a quiet crisis tied directly to the AI-driven “great rebuild” companies are now undergoing, where value creation is being ruthlessly scrutinized. A Deloitte report highlights a crucial shift: leaders are moving from asking “What can we do with AI?” to demanding “How do we move from experimentation to impact?” This focus on real business value is turning a harsh spotlight on roles built around process rather than tangible outcomes.

The Three Red Flags of a Bullshit Tech Role

The conversation isn’t abstract. Practitioners on the ground are diagnosing their own roles with brutal clarity. The litmus test isn’t about being busy, it’s about being necessary.

1. Value is Recapped, Not Created: If your primary output is summarizing the efforts of others, status reports, stakeholder presentations, deck-making, you’re likely managing perception, not building a product. As one Reddit post starkly put it: “If the highest-impact thing you deliver is a recap email about what other people shipped months ago, you are in a bullshit job.”
2. Delegation as a Shield: Routinely delegating tasks you could efficiently handle yourself is a classic sign. It’s not management, it’s job justification manufacturing. The original poster labeled this one as critical, suggesting it creates unnecessary friction and layers.
3. Invisibility Without Consequence: This is the ultimate test. Could you vanish for a week, or even a month, without causing a meaningful dip in team velocity or product quality? If the answer is “probably not”, but more importantly, “no one would even notice”, the role’s existential foundation is suspect.

The Delusion of Measurable Output

A common deflection from this critique is that output is measurable. Code is shipped, tickets are closed, KPIs are met. Surely that’s value. But survivors of layoffs know the reality is far messier.

One commenter who had been on the decision-making side of a recent RIF (Reduction in Force) pointed out that output alone may not spare you. Layoffs, especially in large organizations, are often indiscriminate. Entire projects get cut because they’re no longer seen as “critical”, regardless of individual performance. “It was all about a drive for a certain target margin”, shared another user who had to make people redundant for years before becoming redundant themselves. The public reasons for cuts, “strategic realignment”, “market conditions”, rarely match the private calculus, which can be as simple as political winds shifting or a project falling out of favor.

This exposes the fallacy of the “cynical meritocracy.” The belief that surviving solely depends on demonstrable value creation is, as one commenter called it, “weird and naive.” In the complex, politically charged ecosystems of large tech companies, visibility and perceived alignment with power can trump raw output.

The AI Reckoning and the Quest for Concrete Value

This existential panic isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s colliding with a fundamental industry shift. The flywheel of AI innovation is spinning at an unprecedented rate. Deloitte’s analysis notes that the knowledge half-life in AI has shrunk from years to months. A CIO lamented, “The time it takes us to study a new technology now exceeds that technology’s relevance window.”

In this environment, processes and roles that add friction, rather than velocity, are becoming intolerable. The new mantra from successful leaders interviewed for the Deloitte report is blunt: “Redesign, don’t automate.” They are focusing on their biggest problems, prioritizing velocity over perfection, and designing with people, not just for them.

This is the antithesis of the bullshit job, which often exists to automate or manage a broken process rather than redesign it. The role of the “AI translator” or the “innovation evangelist” is scrutinized if it doesn’t directly connect to solving a concrete business problem. As Broadcom’s CIO warned, “Without focusing on a specific business problem and the value you want to derive, it could be easy to invest in AI and receive no return.”

Product Management: The Necessary Glue or the Ultimate Bullshit Job?

Product Management sits uniquely at the vortex of this crisis. One commenter articulated the paradox: “Product became a key bullshit job because it’s a necessary glue between engineers, stakeholders and customers who cannot autonomously coordinate.”

It’s a role that is both indispensable and ripe for irrelevance. When done well, it’s the strategic connective tissue that guides a product to market fit. When done poorly, or when the organization’s processes are so dysfunctional that coordination becomes the full-time job, it devolves into a bullshit role: endless stakeholder alignment meetings, prioritizing the backlog based on who yelled loudest, and polishing product requirement documents that no engineer reads.

The advice from practitioners feeling this tension is telling. One product manager working on a “shitty product” argued it was an opportunity: “I did the work to showcase why it’s shitty, what’s the feedback, what could be done better, what’s the alternative – all tying it back to metrics.” The pivot from passive coordination to active problem-diagnosis and solution-hunting is the line between a bullshit job and a critical one.

Survival in an Age of Indiscriminate Cuts

So, what do you do if you’re looking at your calendar with a sinking feeling? The consensus from those who have weathered multiple rounds of cuts offers a two-part survival guide: Be visible, and be valuable.

1. Visibility: Make sure the people making RIF decisions know who you are and the problems you solve. This isn’t about self-promotion for its own sake. It’s about proactively connecting your work to the organization’s most pressing strategic goals. As one survivor noted, if the decision-makers aren’t close enough to your network to have that visibility, your fate is left to chance.
2. Valuable Work: Tie your efforts directly to measurable business outcomes. Move from being a facilitator of process to a driver of impact. Own a problem end-to-end, even, or especially, if the product is terrible. Demonstrate how your work moves the needle on revenue, cost, retention, or strategic priority. Ask yourself: if my role were eliminated tomorrow, what concrete business outcome would suffer?

Crucially, as many pointed out, even following this advice is no guarantee. You can be visible, valuable, and still get cut in a “department sweep.” Luck, being on the “right” project under the “right” leader at the “right” time, remains a massive, uncontrollable factor.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion: Embracing the Wave

The most unsettling takeaway from the conversation is also the most clarifying. The original post concluded with a stark, almost nihilistic, pragmatism: “If someone is paying you, there is a reason. You are producing some level of value above your cost. Just do not be stunned when cuts come and the people who create real, concrete output survive while you do not. Stay on the wave as long as it carries you.”

In other words, the bullshit job exists because, for now, the organization perceives its cost as lower than the risk or friction of removing it. It’s an inefficient but tolerated tax on the system.

The AI-driven “great rebuild” is changing that calculus. As companies like Deloitte argue, we’re moving from a time of sequential improvement to a need for continuous learning loops. Organizations built for efficiency are ruthlessly cutting away anything that doesn’t directly contribute to velocity and impact. The quiet crisis of bullshit jobs is really the first tremor of this larger seismic shift. The wave is carrying everyone for now, but as the focus sharpens on solving real problems with tangible outcomes, it’s starting to leave a lot of empty chairs, and recap emails, behind.