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The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake
by kd5bjo 7y ago
The application form requires a paragraph labeled A3, and their application had the required information but didn’t label it as A3. That’s the sort of mistake that can land you in bureaucratic purgatory anywhere in the world, which is exactly what happened, and there’s an ongoing appeal right now.
The founder’s take-away from this should have been “double-check the details, especially when dealing with a bureaucracy” instead of “optimize for the short term”. This was an unfortunate but entirely preventable outcome.
- IshKebab 7y agoClassic victim blaming / blaming the user. The takeaway should be that this bureaucracy is broken, not that applicants shouldn't be able to make trivially fixable mistakes.
- Waterluvian 7y agoI've made non-trivial numerical errors on my tax returns and the CRA just calls me up and asks, "did you mean X?" It's absurd to punish someone because the formatting was wrong.
- mrighele 7y agoBureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant. In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials
- ulucs 7y agoI don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.
- Retric 7y agoLocal governments are independent in the US and don’t operate at huge scales. Further, their independently implementing laws written by a separate group so correctness is placed well above UX. Sadly, politics only cares for people actively involved. If you want different behavior, communicate with an elected official, try to elect different people, or run for office yourself.
- zacharycohn 7y agoThere are almost 90,000 governments in the United States. Each of them maintains x websites. That is a lot of UX designers.
- watt 7y agoNo, you expect bureaucracy to be helpful and resist when they are acting as harmful to the spirit of the law. Otherwise you get a nightmare state akin to Soviet Union.
- mrighele 7y agoYou're right but that doesn't invidate what i said. I am not talking about how a bureaucracy should work, but how you should approach it. Of course a helpful bureacracy will ask feedback in order not to waste your work, but unless you know how it will work expect the worst and act accordingly
- wutbrodo 7y agoThis is obviously true and also irrelevant. Everyone knows that it's better to adhere to the minutiae: no one is suggesting you shouldn't put forth your best effort to do so. The complaint here is that the bureaucracy is so sensitive to those minutiae.
- souterrain 7y agoPerhaps one day bureaucracies will accept proposals via JSON (or other open data format... XML anyone?) rather than Word or PDF. One could argue that these formats are more accessible than their equivalent pseudo-paper formats. It would eliminate the nitpicking over document format, as the low bar to enter would be enforced programmatically. This would allow technologists with lesser experience in the minutia of proposal writing to compete with huge government contractors with specialists who deal in final proposal preparation. At least it would in the short term until the big contractors retooled.
- waterhouse 7y ago> Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If what it expects had an exhaustive formal spec and also an automatic validator, that would work better.
- kd5bjo 7y agoI'm certainly not going to defend San Francisco's behavior. I think we can all agree that Skip was wronged by the city here. If you're in a position to do something about the quality of the bureaucrats, fixing their behavior is the right choice; this article is obviously an attempt on the part of the journalist to do that. Without meaning to imply that Skip did anything particularly wrong, I intended to dispute the lesson its CEO took away from the experience. Skip wasn't in a position to change the bureaucracy: it simply wanted to get something from it. The advice given was implicitly for other people in similar circumstances, so I modeled my take-away for the same context. Dysfunctional bureaucracies are widespread, and knowing how to successfully interact with them is a crucial survival skill in modern business. Doing everything exactly by the book is how you do that; declining to invest in the future is simply an admission of defeat.
- edouard-harris 7y agoThe reason "optimize for the short term" is one of the takeaways here isn't that Skip filled out their application wrong. It's that the operators who did this (such as Lime, Bird, and Spin) weren't punished by the City for it.