Hah I got in trouble once for just going through a grab bag of bugs from our designer (mostly trivial CSS issues) and fixing them. My manager got upset because the tickets never got their costs estimated, and I never put them in jira. (Even though the “3, 5 or 8” conversation would have taken more engineer time than just fixing the bugs directly).
I asked him why he was so upset. Eventually he admitted that closing tickets in jira was how upper management measured how well our team was doing - and by extension him. I thought that sounded like his problem and still refused to put the issues in jira. So he did it - meticulously creating a couple dozen issues, making up a BS point estimation and closing them all as complete.
Whenever I think about bullshit jobs, I think about those silly cost estimation cards, that guy, and how deeply satisfying it was that day just diving in and making our product actually better.
I asked him why he was so upset. Eventually he admitted that closing tickets in jira was how upper management measured how well our team was doing - and by extension him. I thought that sounded like his problem and still refused to put the issues in jira. So he did it - meticulously creating a couple dozen issues, making up a BS point estimation and closing them all as complete.
Whenever I think about bullshit jobs, I think about those silly cost estimation cards, that guy, and how deeply satisfying it was that day just diving in and making our product actually better.