As developers obsessed, sometimes unhealthily so, with optimization, this strikes us as an inadmissible waste.

However, we need to remember that a lot of what we perceive as "legitimate" jobs are also bullshit jobs. Even if they're not exactly zero-sum games, many jobs are more about diverting money from company A to company B than creating net wealth. Take marketing and advertising departments operating on inelastic markets: every dollar taken to Adidas by a Nike marketing guy is cancelled by a dollar taken to Nike by an Adidas marketing guy. And even if they can convince you to buy more shoes, every additional dollar spent on shoes is one less dollar for your video game budget.

We treat salaried work as an intrinsically good thing rather than a necessary evil: that's the fundamental fallacy that makes the mock companies in this article morally justifiable in many people's eyes. To sustain that "work ethics", we pretend that people wouldn't do anything socially useful if they didn't get a salary in exchange, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (stay-at-home parents, most retired people in sound health and financial situations, philanthropists... People only work for salary, because they're in a vital need for a salary. And as every decent manager knows, extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation)

Central planning won't solve the problem of inefficient exploitation of human workforce, as demonstrated by communist countries. But the situation is very comparable to an arms race, and there already are many multilateral agreements to limit this arms race, some legal (can't hire a hitman to dispatch your competitors' executives), some informal (no-employee-poaching agreements), and some illegal and secret (cartels). If we were to admit that wealth creation, not salaried occupation, is what we should thrive for, multilateral agreements to limit unproductive work could be set up. The net result would be orders of magnitude bigger that thwarting the couple of ridiculous initiatives, such as illustrated here, to conceal unemployment and unemployability.

Here are some examples of wealth-creation-promoting reforms, which don't require central planning: punitive taxes on advertizing; mandatory long warranties on product to tackle obsolescence; limiting lottery-like legal actions by banning "no gain=no fee" lawyer hiring, and by making it standard for the loser to pay the winner's fees (that would probably kill patent trolls).

A key reason why we focus on preserving jobs rather than maximizing job efficiency is that we use salary both as a way to create wealth through work, and to distribute it through wages. It becomes a poorer and poorer way to generate wealth on average, but as long as we don't set up better complementary ways to distribute wealth, we're doomed to create more and more bullshit, pointless jobs. Capitalism reaches its limits later than communism, but when it does, it also becomes a wildly inefficient converter of human work.

Another reason is that the jobs which give power are often those which control and displace wealth flow, rather than those creating net wealth. What's the lawyer/engineer ratio in Senate and Congress? You can't expect those in power to destroy their power tools, if they can help it.