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As a technical person, you have a natural moat around your castle. Technical work is difficult, complex and requires years of training and experience. Business

• kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Businesses are quite complex. A lot of bureaucracy starts as an attempt to organize and simplify the problem space. There are simply too many decisions for one person to make and informal processes fall apart at scale. This is also where things take on a life of their own. Without strong guidance, you end up with the rules becoming more important than reality.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  > Most of this complexity has no clear business purpose (bureaucracy) Bureaucracy has a very clear purpose. In business, politics, or otherwise. Bureaucracy makes change difficult and slow. Bureaucracy should be applied when you have a working solution to your problems and you don't want anyone (new devs, new managers, external forces) to change it. Bureaucracy is often prematurely applied, in an attempt to "bring order." This cannot work. Bureaucracy applied to chaos cements the chaos into place.
  • orwin 4y ago
    Yes! Bureaucracy is helpfull. Sometime, bureaucracy prevents more bureaucracy. The issue is that it is hard to understand how or why it was set up, and to differentiate bad bureaucracy from good bureaucracy. Both look the same and feel the same. Both can be simplified. Only, when you simplify bad bureaucracy, you can get whatever. If you simplify good bureaucracy, you will definitely end up worse, at least for a time.
  • civilized 4y ago
    This is absolute poetry. It's like the Zhuangzi meets Dilbert. The bureaucracy that can be changed is not the true bureaucracy.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    Sure, not all bureaucracy is misused, it can have a good function in governance. But it absolutely can be used to extend and protect power as well. It is a tool, plain and simple.
  • mancerayder 4y ago
    Bureaucracy is organization. If you build something complex, you need a lot of humans to do it. But the humans need organizing principles, common goals, divisions of labor and leadership. To not understand that, and like some of the comments above to place technical work of an IC above that is ridiculous folly. Skyscrapers and bridges and big complex things like software requires human organizational structures which we view as 'bureaucracy'.
• Thursday24 4y ago
  One way to really understand the organisational BS phenomenon is to study the really old books on administration. Read China's Han Feizi, Legalism; India's Chanakyan Arthashastra; Perhaps even Machiavelli (less recommended - since he was not really a hands-on leader dealing with issues of the day actively). In these works you will see naked desires of individuals expressed clearly. The men who established bureaucracies truly saved humanity from collapse, from utter chaos; by establishing laws and regulations, they restrained the animal within man, even without having any technology. I consider the establishers and enforcers of law the least appreciated in human history. It is a humongous task, to take up utter entropy and convert it into a semblance of civilisation, where the animal in man is kept within limits. These things were invented long back, 2000+ years ago, and the formations have stood the test of time. They are still in use, the same ruthlessness is used to control human impulses. However, at a shallow level, our language and our "aspirations" have moved on. So we like to speak in more flowery language, hide the animal in man in public, and have forgotten why were the laws and regulations put in place by our ancestors. I believe human regulation, through means other than bureaucracy is on the way. This alone can help humans get rid of the need to BS. With technology there is a way to combine both education/training & laws/reguations. In place education/training allows for "kind correction" while automated punishment will ensure "harsh correction". Both are needed for successful existence of human civilisation.
  • pratik661 4y ago
    Just got Arthashastra. It’s amazing. Han Feizi is next on my list.
  • plasticchris 4y ago
    I know it's not what you are going for, but this reads like the opening to a dystopian novel - maximum control over our impulses leads to maximum coordination but at what cost? Without some disorder there is only incremental advancement and life is boring. This isn't universally good.
    • Thursday24 4y ago
      incremental advancement > blowing ourselves up in exuberance tolerable life > interesting life that ends in blow up good enough > good I feel "universal good" is too high a standard (pure fantasy even) for our species. I feel our species may disappear from the planet or with the planet at any arbitrary moment in the future; we seem not to recognise how fragile our existence truly is.
• refurb 4y ago
  Disagree on business and management work not being complex. It often involves a lot more uncertainty and you often don’t have enough data.
• ineptech 4y ago
  This is seductively true-sounding but I don't think it's true. Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job." That's the mirror image of what you're saying. Perhaps some of those "layers and layers" really are useless but most of them are probably to satisfy auditors or something similarly opaque.
  • SilasX 4y ago
    That businessperson would be correct too.
  • scottlamb 4y ago
    > Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job." Would they be so wrong? The state of the art is advancing, and these re-implementations can be huge improvements...but aren't always. The tools/techniques often seem to be used outside the domain where they're important (e.g. Big Data tooling used on data sets that can be processed on a nice laptop) or are so short-lived the switching cost is never reclaimed (e.g. always using the trendiest Javascript framework/tooling). This hypothetical business person certainly wouldn't be alone in wondering if the reason isn't sometimes job security, resume building, and/or to make a boring problem interesting rather than an attempt to find the most straightforward way of solving the business problem. I can easily see the same applying to these business ideas. They sometimes make sense but often (usually?) don't.
    • ineptech 4y ago
• scottyah 4y ago
  How does this trope still get repeated so often? It has been debunked time and time again: strategy and management are infinitely more complex than almost all technical work. Assuming a group is incompetent just because you don't understand what they're doing (even when they dumb things down to just a few buzzwords for the desperate hope that talking like a third grader will enable you to follow along), is such an obvious folly that it should at least raise some red flags in your head. Even if you feel this way you should at least consider how repeating it is of no help to anyone.
  • RugnirViking 4y ago
    "strategy and management are infinitely more complex than almost all technical work" Lets not get ahead of ourselves now. It's folly to write off management, marketing etc's jobs as pointless, but its equally foolish to believe what you've just espoused. There is only so much complexity that a single human can grasp, and that is why we specialise within organisations.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Business and management work is... not nearly as complex. But the people doing that work have the same highly complex brains as you do. They can handle the same deep complexity as you. So with all this extra mental space, they add layers and layers of complexity to seemingly simple business processes. This complexity builds the moat protecting their turf from others. It creates the irreplaceability that you get for free. This is one of those fictions that engineers love to believe about management because it imbues a sense of superiority. Who doesn't like feeling like their job is better or more important than others'? Having been an IC, middle manager, upper manager, and back to IC a few times, I can tell you this is a false notion. Business and management are different problems, but they're not necessarily "easier". As an engineer-minded person by nature, I honestly found the technical problems easier to handle than a lot of the management problems I had to deal with. Managing a computer program is generally easier than managing people. People are hard.
  • topkai22 4y ago
    There is “complex” and there is “hard” and they aren’t necessarily the same thing. A good strategy is rarely complex and often very straightforward, but consistently executing to it is hard. A technical problem may be complex, but it might be easy to actually implement against and especially easy to make sure it stays implemented. Many management and business problems fall into the “straightforward to understand but hard” category. The apparent “unnecessary”complexity around these problems is sometimes self important fluff, by far, far more often it represents individual or organizational learning about what is actually necessary to solve these “simple, but hard” problems.
  • dougmwne 4y ago
    I agree that people are hard, but they are hard specifically because of what I said, they need to protect their turf and conquer new turf. Management problems are difficult because of politics, and at the root of politics is self and tribe interest. Having management meetings be a bit impenetrable is a symptom of politics.
    • edmundsauto 4y ago
• bergenty 4y ago
  Management is definitely not easier. It’s dealing with abstractions around intractable problems that aren’t well defined as well as people at the same time. IC work feels easy after this which is why so many managers go back to being ICs all the time.