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> Are you sure there isn't any strong systemic effect incentivizing them not to change? There's a strong incentive not to make any decisions, because decisions

> Are you sure there isn't any strong systemic effect incentivizing them not to change? There's a strong incentive not to make any decisions, because decisions could be wrong, and being wrong could get you blamed. You'll never get fired for being wrong, but you might get moved to a different post that is somewhere else where nothing ever happens (and you can't do damage, I suppose). German bureaucracies are trying to cover each and every single case so that state employees don't have to think and will reliably return the same result given the same inputs. Unfortunately, you rarely ever have the exact same inputs, so you'll need to add more code to fix edge cases, and at some point one person can't keep all your rules in their head, so you need two people, now they need to communicate and it goes on and on. The other part is very much a cultural thing, state administrations are well-known for being cushy jobs where you won't have to do much and attract the kind of person that wants that job. Every now and then someone will see the state of bureaucracy in Germany, think "I'll help!" and get themselves hired, and then burn out within half a year of trying to change the culture around them. I'm only half joking: the best thing to happen to most small-ish bureaucracies in Germany would be to have a team building exercise with an accident that leaves everyone unable to work for 2 years so that there's enough time to build up a new team, install a new culture and clean up the processes. When the old ones are ready to come back, you can slowly introduce them into healthy teams, so that they'll take on the new culture.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> German bureaucracies are trying to cover each and every single case so that state employees don't have to think and will reliably return the same result given the same inputs. Hum, yes, that's strict legalism. It was the fashion a few decades ago. Do you have insight on the inner working of your local bureaucracy? Because it's hard to believe in a country as large as Germany people are so outside of the curve. Maybe you are seeing the outside appearance of a power structure that evolved in some past decades, and that won't tell you anything about what people are trying to do, just about what people are allowed to. (Or maybe Germany public service is almost all composed of people nearing their retirement and with old ideas. It's not that unlikely that an entire government is skewed in age.)
- luckylion 4y ago
  I don't have any insight in my local branch (I've only lived here for two years, but from the little contact I did have, it doesn't look different from where I've previously lived). I've done some consulting for a trade union that covers parts of public administrations and what I learned from helping them organize files surrounding the labor environment in ministries and local agencies looked like it could've well been the inspiration for that Asterix comic dealing with Roman bureaucracy. I have a friend who works on a large federal digitalization project and he's ready to quit because it drains the life out of you for those same reasons (rules abound, nobody wants to make a decision, and expensive consultants and lawyers who are brought in to take the blame -- only they don't care for taking the blame, they want to bill as much as possible, and so everything takes forever). Yet he won't, because he believes that it's important work and will help make things better, and so he'll suffer and probably snap in a few years down the line. To me, it looks like a culture issue. I'm a freelancer and have worked with quite a few teams over the past 20 years and some teams are just broken because of culture. They're places where nobody cooperates willingly and nobody takes ownership of anything, where fear stalks the offices and ideas go to die. And then you have places where people are proactive, and will handle a task and when an additional thing pops up a week later, they'll say "I've anticipated that and made sure it's easy to add" and things just work, because everybody works so that the team's future version has an easy time. I'm sure a broken culture can be fixed somehow, but I don't know if you can do it gradually because new members will adapt to the existing culture and perpetuate it.

marcosdumay 4y ago

> German bureaucracies are trying to cover each and every single case so that state employees don't have to think and will reliably return the same result given the same inputs. Hum, yes, that's strict legalism. It was the fashion a few decades ago. Do you have insight on the inner working of your local bureaucracy? Because it's hard to believe in a country as large as Germany people are so outside of the curve. Maybe you are seeing the outside appearance of a power structure that evolved in some past decades, and that won't tell you anything about what people are trying to do, just about what people are allowed to. (Or maybe Germany public service is almost all composed of people nearing their retirement and with old ideas. It's not that unlikely that an entire government is skewed in age.)

luckylion 4y ago
I don't have any insight in my local branch (I've only lived here for two years, but from the little contact I did have, it doesn't look different from where I've previously lived). I've done some consulting for a trade union that covers parts of public administrations and what I learned from helping them organize files surrounding the labor environment in ministries and local agencies looked like it could've well been the inspiration for that Asterix comic dealing with Roman bureaucracy. I have a friend who works on a large federal digitalization project and he's ready to quit because it drains the life out of you for those same reasons (rules abound, nobody wants to make a decision, and expensive consultants and lawyers who are brought in to take the blame -- only they don't care for taking the blame, they want to bill as much as possible, and so everything takes forever). Yet he won't, because he believes that it's important work and will help make things better, and so he'll suffer and probably snap in a few years down the line. To me, it looks like a culture issue. I'm a freelancer and have worked with quite a few teams over the past 20 years and some teams are just broken because of culture. They're places where nobody cooperates willingly and nobody takes ownership of anything, where fear stalks the offices and ideas go to die. And then you have places where people are proactive, and will handle a task and when an additional thing pops up a week later, they'll say "I've anticipated that and made sure it's easy to add" and things just work, because everybody works so that the team's future version has an easy time. I'm sure a broken culture can be fixed somehow, but I don't know if you can do it gradually because new members will adapt to the existing culture and perpetuate it.