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Steve Bannon, the old Trump goon, I forget his actual position, had talked about the growth of the "administrative state" when referring to government. I don't

Steve Bannon, the old Trump goon, I forget his actual position, had talked about the growth of the "administrative state" when referring to government. I don't agree with his politics over all, but on this front I do and see similar trends in other institutions, the education system being one of the most obvious. We see the growth of the "administrator class/caste" in education at the cost of rising tuition while seeing no improvement in student/teacher ratios, etc. At the same time teachers who rightly spend their time doing their job, which is teaching, are often in a place where they then have to fight the shit rolling downhill from the expanded administrative caste. They could fight the administrator class, but the administrators do this all day every day as their actual job, it's fun to them. The teacher's actual job is teaching, the time and energy needed to fight these battles mean the administrator class wins. I think this dynamic plays out at our tech companies with the expansion of various non-product roles like HR that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking. Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities. Or the new DEI orgs, agree or disagree, they didn't exist a decade or two ago but are now prevalent in all spaces and DEI consultants are one of the most widely growing positions inside Fortune 500. I think these things will continue to compound.

javiramos 4y ago
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_...
partiallypro 4y ago
If I'm not mistaken, the US has one of the, if not the, highest per capita spend per student in the world...but most of it goes into administrative costs and students never see it. It's a big problem. It's unfortunate that many of the people saying this also have questionable politics on other serious topics that drown this point out. Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  > Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up. I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators. That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant. I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.
  - namibj 4y ago
    Maybe give the power/obligation to the "engineers" (well, here it's about universities, but I know far more about managerial duties of engineering associations than of a university; though much should translate), which can pawn off the non-engineering work to some sort of group-shared secretaries. I.e., the managers aren't the ones owning the power, but the engineers are. The latter just don't want to do the daily tasks that require holding the power, so they hire a delegate to hold the power and take care of day-to-day duties. And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power). I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...
bawolff 4y ago
Bureocracy is easy to create and almost impossible to destroy. I think its one of the main reasons start ups beat out established competitors who on paper can bring much more resources to bear. I dont think its just in our time either. I'm sure Rome had quite a bureocracy in its day.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  This is one thing that's always fascinated me in corporate and government: why is bureaucracy easy to create and hard to destroy? Or to put it another way, bureaucracy increases as a result of systems. E.g. 'We want to do a new thing, let's set up a new team to do it' But there rarely seems to be continuous, automatic counter-system in place. I.e. a generic, regularly re-run reaping process that exists solely to decrease the number of teams/orgs/rules You have periodic, CFO-org-led centralization / re-orgs, but those are default: status quo. Someone explicitly has to decide to decommission a thing, and that turns into a political struggle. Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"? Isn't that called an audit? They're rare because you can't force bureaucrats to always be making the argument for their usefulness without impacting their actual work. Impact assessment for policy is also gaining some ground, at least wrt. government. So that when a policy fails to achieve its goals, that failure is a matter of shared knowledge.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      That's why, in my experience, it usually comes out of the CFO org. At the end of the day, they have the actual opex/capex numbers. And I am sympathetic to the other side of the equation: continually asking people to justify their work ends up with a lot of useless-but-visible or sub-optimal work being prioritized (e.g. Google's lack of strategic attention to bugs/maintenance). Self-destructing, temporary policies and teams seems like a nice balance. And maybe a cultural expectation that most teams will be disbanded and reformed after X years. It'd also be curious to have an org where manager-back-to-IC was more normalized. IOW, manager is a role everyone is expected to serve a stint in, but then relinquish without salary/title penalty.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
themitigating 4y ago
I like how to tried to come off as unbiased by agreeing with Bannon on this one issue but calling him a "goon" and saying you don't agree with his other politics. However you then make this obvious right wing statement. "of various non-product roles like H.R that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities." Who are you to say that certain groups of people don't deserve to have their own resources when they may face similar issues of racism or sexism. Maybe they feel more comfortable talking amongst people like them about sensitive issues. How many more HR people do you think it takes to set these groups up when they are mostly just employees. You also talk about training impying that it's only for "box checking", which is a obvious right wing red flag. Basically, you assume that no one really cares, everything is for show, simply because you don't care. You just have no empathy and therefore any resources allocated at companies that wouldn't help you are useless.
- tome 4y ago
  Sorry, could you elaborate? Are you saying that it’s impossible for someone right wing to dislike Steve Bannon, or that no one should express right wing opinions on HN, or something else?
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Where do I say that? I don't like manipulative arguments. This person tried to set themselves up as being unbiased or "above the situation". This is done so that others, who normally tune out certain types of people or have a bias (which to be fair is wrong but natural), will take their arguement more seriously. It's like when the wise old man in a movie finally speaks on a contentious issue Everyone listens more closely and places a higher initial value on their opinion. This is entire conversation was about excess administratiors/managers, whether that's the case at all or some companies has almost nothing to do with employee groups, like a group of Black employees. These groups are self managed by employees with the backing of HR. This person is so right wing that they couldn't help make a point about how overly sensitive we are and that these groups are unneeded due to that. This is Glenn Beck at a chalkboard connecting everything negative (bloated management) to a view of opposing political force. It's so transparent that I blew my head gasket. Alone that would be annoying but combined with the "I normally hate X and disagree with X but this view has some merit" BS guided my response
brazzledazzle 4y ago
While I don't agree with your politics I do understand the desire to raise issues you feel passionate about even if they're only indirectly or tangentially connected to the topic at hand. However, if you had focused exclusively on managerial and administrative overhead without trying to connect it with your political grievances, real or imagined, the discussion would be vastly improved by being less divisive and more constructive.

javiramos 4y ago

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_...

partiallypro 4y ago

If I'm not mistaken, the US has one of the, if not the, highest per capita spend per student in the world...but most of it goes into administrative costs and students never see it. It's a big problem. It's unfortunate that many of the people saying this also have questionable politics on other serious topics that drown this point out. Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.

DFHippie 4y ago
> Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up. I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators. That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant. I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.
- namibj 4y ago
  Maybe give the power/obligation to the "engineers" (well, here it's about universities, but I know far more about managerial duties of engineering associations than of a university; though much should translate), which can pawn off the non-engineering work to some sort of group-shared secretaries. I.e., the managers aren't the ones owning the power, but the engineers are. The latter just don't want to do the daily tasks that require holding the power, so they hire a delegate to hold the power and take care of day-to-day duties. And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power). I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...

bawolff 4y ago

Bureocracy is easy to create and almost impossible to destroy. I think its one of the main reasons start ups beat out established competitors who on paper can bring much more resources to bear. I dont think its just in our time either. I'm sure Rome had quite a bureocracy in its day.

ethbr0 4y ago
This is one thing that's always fascinated me in corporate and government: why is bureaucracy easy to create and hard to destroy? Or to put it another way, bureaucracy increases as a result of systems. E.g. 'We want to do a new thing, let's set up a new team to do it' But there rarely seems to be continuous, automatic counter-system in place. I.e. a generic, regularly re-run reaping process that exists solely to decrease the number of teams/orgs/rules You have periodic, CFO-org-led centralization / re-orgs, but those are default: status quo. Someone explicitly has to decide to decommission a thing, and that turns into a political struggle. Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"? Isn't that called an audit? They're rare because you can't force bureaucrats to always be making the argument for their usefulness without impacting their actual work. Impact assessment for policy is also gaining some ground, at least wrt. government. So that when a policy fails to achieve its goals, that failure is a matter of shared knowledge.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    That's why, in my experience, it usually comes out of the CFO org. At the end of the day, they have the actual opex/capex numbers. And I am sympathetic to the other side of the equation: continually asking people to justify their work ends up with a lot of useless-but-visible or sub-optimal work being prioritized (e.g. Google's lack of strategic attention to bugs/maintenance). Self-destructing, temporary policies and teams seems like a nice balance. And maybe a cultural expectation that most teams will be disbanded and reformed after X years. It'd also be curious to have an org where manager-back-to-IC was more normalized. IOW, manager is a role everyone is expected to serve a stint in, but then relinquish without salary/title penalty.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

themitigating 4y ago

I like how to tried to come off as unbiased by agreeing with Bannon on this one issue but calling him a "goon" and saying you don't agree with his other politics. However you then make this obvious right wing statement. "of various non-product roles like H.R that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities." Who are you to say that certain groups of people don't deserve to have their own resources when they may face similar issues of racism or sexism. Maybe they feel more comfortable talking amongst people like them about sensitive issues. How many more HR people do you think it takes to set these groups up when they are mostly just employees. You also talk about training impying that it's only for "box checking", which is a obvious right wing red flag. Basically, you assume that no one really cares, everything is for show, simply because you don't care. You just have no empathy and therefore any resources allocated at companies that wouldn't help you are useless.

tome 4y ago
Sorry, could you elaborate? Are you saying that it’s impossible for someone right wing to dislike Steve Bannon, or that no one should express right wing opinions on HN, or something else?
- themitigating 4y ago
  Where do I say that? I don't like manipulative arguments. This person tried to set themselves up as being unbiased or "above the situation". This is done so that others, who normally tune out certain types of people or have a bias (which to be fair is wrong but natural), will take their arguement more seriously. It's like when the wise old man in a movie finally speaks on a contentious issue Everyone listens more closely and places a higher initial value on their opinion. This is entire conversation was about excess administratiors/managers, whether that's the case at all or some companies has almost nothing to do with employee groups, like a group of Black employees. These groups are self managed by employees with the backing of HR. This person is so right wing that they couldn't help make a point about how overly sensitive we are and that these groups are unneeded due to that. This is Glenn Beck at a chalkboard connecting everything negative (bloated management) to a view of opposing political force. It's so transparent that I blew my head gasket. Alone that would be annoying but combined with the "I normally hate X and disagree with X but this view has some merit" BS guided my response

brazzledazzle 4y ago

While I don't agree with your politics I do understand the desire to raise issues you feel passionate about even if they're only indirectly or tangentially connected to the topic at hand. However, if you had focused exclusively on managerial and administrative overhead without trying to connect it with your political grievances, real or imagined, the discussion would be vastly improved by being less divisive and more constructive.