Future Trends in the World of Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit jobs aren't a fixed category frozen in the 2018 essay that named them — they evolve with technology, management fashion, and economic pressure, just like every other feature of work. Understanding where the phenomenon is heading matters just as much as recognising it in its current form, because the roles that look meaningless today aren't necessarily the ones that will define the next decade of hollow work. Here's a grounded look at where things are actually trending, and what that means for how you should be reading job postings now.

Want expert help putting this into practice? Bullshit Job Finder can guide you through it.

AI is eliminating some bullshit jobs and quietly creating new ones

The most obvious trend is also the most double-edged. Generative AI tools are genuinely automating a meaningful share of the "box ticker" and "duct taper" work Graeber originally described — routine reporting, basic content drafting, first-pass data summarisation — which should, in theory, shrink the pool of purely administrative bullshit work over time. But the same disruption is simultaneously creating a new category: roles built around "AI oversight," "prompt governance," or "AI strategy" that, in a meaningful number of organisations, exist mainly because leadership feels pressure to be seen doing something about AI, rather than because a clearly defined problem needs solving. Watch this space carefully in interviews — ask what specific decision or output the role is accountable for, because "AI-adjacent" titles are unusually prone to the vague-purpose problem right now, precisely because the technology itself is moving faster than most organisations' clarity about how to use it.

Return-to-office mandates are resurrecting presence-based roles

Related: Bullshitjobfinder - Expert Advice for Navigating the Job Market.

As more organisations pull back from fully remote arrangements, a specific flavour of bullshit job is making a comeback: roles whose primary function has quietly shifted from producing outcomes to being visibly present. This isn't true of every return-to-office push — plenty of roles genuinely benefit from in-person collaboration — but it's worth noticing when a role's justification leans heavily on "culture" and "visibility" language rather than concrete collaborative deliverables. A useful test: ask what, specifically, is easier to accomplish in person for this particular role that couldn't be accomplished remotely. A strong answer names a real workflow. A weak one falls back to general statements about culture and cohesion, which is often a sign the mandate is about control or optics rather than output.

The gig and fractional economy is exporting bullshit risk onto individuals

• As more organisations shift toward fractional, contract, and project-based roles instead of full-time hires, the vetting burden shifts more heavily onto the individual worker, who now has to evaluate a new "employer" relationship far more frequently than a traditional full-time career would require.
• This trend rewards people who've built a strong, repeatable evaluation process, because they'll be running it far more often, and penalises people who evaluate opportunities purely by gut feeling, because the volume of decisions simply outpaces intuition alone.
• Fractional and contract roles are also more prone to scope ambiguity than full-time roles, since the working relationship is inherently looser — get deliverables and success metrics in writing before starting, not after.
• Expect this trend to accelerate the demand for structured evaluation frameworks rather than reduce it — more decisions, more frequently, raises rather than lowers the value of a repeatable process.

Transparency pressure is slowly forcing companies to define roles better

See also: Bullshitjobfinder - Essential Steps to Identify and Avoid Meaningless Work.

A quieter, more encouraging trend: growing pay transparency legislation and public scrutiny of workplace culture are, slowly, forcing organisations to define roles and success metrics more concretely than they used to, simply because vague roles are harder to defend publicly and harder to justify in a transparent pay band. This won't eliminate bullshit jobs — organisational incentives to create empire-building or optics-driven roles haven't gone anywhere — but it does mean job seekers increasingly have more public information available to evaluate a role before ever speaking to a recruiter. Expect job postings themselves to become a more useful, if still imperfect, signal over the next few years, rewarding candidates who read them critically rather than skimming for keywords.

Economic downturns cut both ways on meaningless work

It's tempting to assume that economic pressure automatically eliminates bullshit jobs, since cost-cutting organisations should logically trim roles that don't add clear value first. The reality is messier. Downturns do eliminate some purely decorative roles, but they also frequently create new ones — restructuring coordinators, change-management roles, and communication functions built specifically to manage the anxiety and confusion that layoffs and reorgs themselves generate. In other words, organisational dysfunction tends to generate its own bullshit-job demand in direct proportion to how much dysfunction there is, which means downturns are not a reliable signal that hollow roles are disappearing — sometimes they simply change shape.

Generational expectations are shifting what counts as acceptable

Younger workers entering the labour market today are, on the whole, considerably more willing to name a role as meaningless and act on that assessment than previous generations were at the same career stage, having watched older colleagues and family members endure hollow roles for the sake of stability that didn't always materialise anyway. This shift is already changing employer behaviour at the margins — organisations that want to attract early-career talent are under growing pressure to articulate genuine purpose and measurable impact for open roles, not just competitive pay. Expect this pressure to keep building rather than fading, which is good news for job seekers generally, even though it won't eliminate hollow roles outright — it will, gradually, make it more costly for employers to leave them unaddressed.

What this means for how you should be job hunting now

None of these trends make the underlying evaluation discipline obsolete — if anything, they make it more necessary, because the specific disguises meaningless work wears keep changing even as the core pattern stays recognisable. That's exactly the gap Bullshit Job Finder is built to track: not a fixed checklist frozen in time, but a living approach to spotting hollow roles as the labour market itself keeps shifting. Stay alert to which category a role you're considering might fall into given current trends — AI-adjacent ambiguity, presence-based justification, under-scoped fractional work — and keep applying the same fundamental tests: concrete outcomes, real accountability, and answers that hold up under a specific follow-up question rather than dissolving into vague reassurance.