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The document the author is referencing is a CIA sabotage manual. It’s not a prescription for how to run a bureaucracy any more than their section on sabotaging

The document the author is referencing is a CIA sabotage manual. It’s not a prescription for how to run a bureaucracy any more than their section on sabotaging electrical cables is intended as a prescription for electricians. I think many Americans believe that because the American government is slow, unresponsive and generally painful that all governments must be this way. As a counterexample I would like to suggest Singapore, which has an online visa process (traveler visa) which was a breeze to follow and was approved in under 2 days. Compare that to the US legal immigration system (USCIS) which if you ever have the misfortune of dealing with, is a nightmare to navigate. The government needs a UX department to streamline all of the painful processes it has. Make it easy to follow the law.

derefr 2y ago
The article's implicit conceit is that a bureaucracy is just an attempt to abstract away what is in actuality a bunch of distinct self-interested obstructionist fiefdoms — that each do all they can to prevent the organization from 1. doing anything that would pose an existential threat to the fiefdom, 2. starting any project that would be the fiefdom's ultimate responsibility to deliver upon, 3. reorganizing in a way that would cause the the fiefdom's "slack", or continued underperformance (compared to the organization's usually-unrealistic expectations) to be made more legible, 4. doing anything to equalize and redistribute any special advantages that come with the fiefdom's existing responsibilities, ...and so forth. The CIA sabotage manual applies perfectly to the usual sort of bureaucratic organization full of such fiefdoms, as such fiefdoms use exactly these techniques to prevent the projects that would threaten them from moving forward (at anything beyond a glacial pace.)
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I guess what I’m saying is that the author is conflating bureaucracy with the broken system suggested in a sabotage manual, and that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. “Founder mode” isn’t scalable, sorry. Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion. > There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. The best way we know of doing this is to put them in competition with one another and make sure there are at least a dozen. Keep barriers to entry low enough that if the incumbents suck, someone new can eat their lunch. The bureaucracies, of course, want the opposite. A monopoly that allows them to dictate terms and extract rents, or failing that at least a concentrated cartel that can coordinate behind closed doors or through conscious parallelism. Inhibiting that is the way to achieve the desired result. The bureaucracies can't do it internally because a bureaucracy without external competitive pressure has no internal incentive to improve efficiency to counter the intrinsic incentive for bureaucrats to capture and redirect surplus to protect and accumulate power.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    > Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion I mostly agree with this, but there are a lot of failure modes that are known and should be avoided. e.g. running an incentive structure where success is not rewarded and failure is not punished. This broken structure seems to be the default in bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats won't see a cent if they find a more efficient way to do things. In fact, they will be punished with lower budgets.
  - derefr 2y ago
    You're talking about intentionally-created bureaucracies. I don't think very many of these exist! The majority of the time, bureaucracies aren't prescriptive, a structure imposed; but rather, they're descriptive — that is, they're just the abstraction we use to talk about what is actually a bunch of pre-existing special-interest groups, groups that would continue to exist whether or not there were an organizational label to collect them all into. For example, what is a municipal government, but a bureaucracy that evolves out of conflicting special-interest groups, with each top-level city-council seat beholden mostly to some particular special-interest group? The NIMBY gridlock in most cities can be blamed, in some sense, on "bureaucracy" — but only in the sense that there is an explicit NIMBY interest group that holds many council seats through representatives, and which cannot be organizationally engineered out of existence. The NIMBY home-owners make up a large proportion of voters — and so hold power as a voting bloc — and this holds whether they are directly represented by a party that agrees with them, or whether they are just bribing some other party to implicitly do things their way in order to get their votes. And in the case of NIMBYs, "doing things their way" is exactly "doing all that sabotage-manual stuff, to create bureaucratic gridlock, to block any attempt to fix or improve the city that would come at the expense of the asset-value of homes." There's no technology that can "fix" the problem of the majority of an organization being composed of groups with fundamentally opposed ideologies, with groups seeing the other groups in the organization as likely to fundamentally destroy the things they hold dear if allowed, and where the fundamental tool these group see as available to resist what they see as "regressive change", is degradation of the process of change itself, though such organizational-process sabotage. Make the organizational process more efficient, and you just enable the sabotage to happen faster. (It's a bit like accelerating an AI, just translating into it deciding to refuse you faster.) And to be clear, I am not just saying that polities and their democratic proxies are like this; I am saying that most organizations are like this. Most orgs are inherently, definitionally made up of such fundamentally ideologically-opposed factions. Yes, even if you hire them to work in explicit alignment with one-another.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? I'm sure there have been others... Simple sabotage for software (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695839 - June 2024 (75 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual – How to Destroy Your Organizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831946 - July 2023 (95 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090 - April 2023 (129 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1945) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32356038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32356038 - Aug 2022 (3 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States Office of Strategic Services - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964 - June 2022 (55 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070624 - April 2022 (8 comments) Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597454 - Dec 2021 (209 comments) 1944 OSS Manual on How to Sabotage Productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28507930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28507930 - Sept 2021 (5 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293804 - Feb 2021 (1 comment) CIA's Declassified 1941 Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316292 - May 2020 (1 comment) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041 - Feb 2020 (89 comments) Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045073 - Jan 2018 (36 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 - Aug 2017 (32 comments) The CIA’s 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 - Aug 2016 (64 comments) Updating classic workplace sabotage techniques - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702267 - May 2016 (280 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 - Nov 2015 (68 comments) Declassified CIA documents detail how to sabotage employers, annoy bosses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490804 - Nov 2015 (21 comments) How to make sure nothing gets done at work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393485 - Oct 2015 (3 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 - Nov 2012 (67 comments) From CIA: Timeless Tips for 'Simple Sabotage' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243649 - July 2012 (3 comments) How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398103 - June 2010 (22 comments) WW2 "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" declassified [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905750 - Oct 2009 (6 comments) OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443 - Sept 2009 (29 comments)
gffrd 2y ago
> The government needs a UX department to streamline all of the painful processes it has. Make it easy to follow the law. Sometimes the pain is a feature.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  In some systems of government, yes. The Soviet Union had so many laws that at any point in time everyone was likely a criminal. But I believe in a democracy, a reasonable person should know when they’re breaking the law, or when they’re suspected of doing so.
Swizec 2y ago
> Singapore, which has an online visa process (traveler visa) which was a breeze to follow and was approved in under 2 days. Compare that to the US legal immigration system (USCIS) which if you ever have the misfortune of dealing with, is a nightmare to navigate The US version of a traveler visa, ESTA, gets approved in a matter of hours after you apply online. The fastest I got it was 30min at an Italian airport a few years ago when they blocked me from boarding because my old one expired and I didn’t notice. Still made it onto the same flight.
- yen223 2y ago
  The difference between applying for a US visitor's visa as a citizen of a non-ESTA country and as a citizen from an ESTA country, is night and day. If you aren't ESTA, you need to pay lots of money and undergo an in-person interview at a US embassy. This can take months to arrange, as embassy slots are scarce, plus you need to make travel arrangements to be in a city with a US embassy. If you are ESTA, you can apply for the visa online and be done with it in 10 minutes. It is very clear that if the US wants you in the country, they can make it happen very easily.
lend000 2y ago
Generally all the governments that are considered excellent and easy to work with are smaller governments with small populations. Modern government ideas just don't seem to scale up well, which would seem to support the idea of keeping a government no bigger than it needs to be.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  > Modern government ideas don’t seem to scale up well When I needed to get my US passport renewed, there were no appointments available in my state for the next 2 months. I had to fly to another state. I would love to know which “modern government idea” is preventing them from scaling up the service to meet demand. No, this is simply a symptom of neglect and indifference.
amy-petrik-214 2y ago
What's nice about Singapore is they employ common sense beating laws. Did something stupid? That's a beating. Illegal immigrant? Beating. Thief? Beating. Incompetent bureaucrat? Yup, yes again, beating. I have a feeling Americans would take to beating laws very well, many would be eager to serve as beaters of incompetent bureaucrats. Fascinating history though. They got kicked out of Micronesia in 1969, much similar to if the US just punted Detroit out of the US and it became the city-state of Detroit - in both cases drug-addled economic failures. The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip, and he said, "The beatings will continue until Singapore improves" and they've been delivering beatings, all day, every day, since then.
- fakedang 2y ago
  > Fascinating history though. They got kicked out of Micronesia in 1969, Never knew I'd see the day when Malaysia would be confused with Micronesia. > The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip Or Lee Kuan Yew with some random named Kown Lee.
ozozozd 2y ago
You compared a tourist VISA with an immigration VISA? It’s comparing apples with…an olive tree? US immigration process - among the countries one would care to immigrate to, of course - is much better designed than most countries. In fact, there are very clear paths one can follow, with very clear steps. Not everyone can qualify, sure, but it’s not complicated or bad. There may be complicated paths for those who don’t readily qualify but immigration lawyers think they can make a case, which is pretty much unheard of for other countries. They simply have no one to even process an out-of-band case. I asked to reschedule a citizenship appointment because I had COVID and they had specifically instructed to do so in the case of COVID. My wife said my case would fall through the cracks, and that I would never get an appointment. 2 phone calls - actual person looking into my case on the phone, much better experience than most bank call centers - and I got a new appointment. One gripe I had with the US greencard process was when they asked me to submit my vaccination records from 90s. I thought it was simply an impossible ask, and that was the end of that process for me. It would’ve been nice if they lead with “get these vaccinations OR bring proof of vaccination.” Obviously, I just got the shots and it was done. Canada, NZ, and Australia may have better processes. But they also have much smaller volume and diversity of applications. Again, not quite the same fruit.

derefr 2y ago

The article's implicit conceit is that a bureaucracy is just an attempt to abstract away what is in actuality a bunch of distinct self-interested obstructionist fiefdoms — that each do all they can to prevent the organization from 1. doing anything that would pose an existential threat to the fiefdom, 2. starting any project that would be the fiefdom's ultimate responsibility to deliver upon, 3. reorganizing in a way that would cause the the fiefdom's "slack", or continued underperformance (compared to the organization's usually-unrealistic expectations) to be made more legible, 4. doing anything to equalize and redistribute any special advantages that come with the fiefdom's existing responsibilities, ...and so forth. The CIA sabotage manual applies perfectly to the usual sort of bureaucratic organization full of such fiefdoms, as such fiefdoms use exactly these techniques to prevent the projects that would threaten them from moving forward (at anything beyond a glacial pace.)

janalsncm 2y ago
I guess what I’m saying is that the author is conflating bureaucracy with the broken system suggested in a sabotage manual, and that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. “Founder mode” isn’t scalable, sorry. Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion. > There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. The best way we know of doing this is to put them in competition with one another and make sure there are at least a dozen. Keep barriers to entry low enough that if the incumbents suck, someone new can eat their lunch. The bureaucracies, of course, want the opposite. A monopoly that allows them to dictate terms and extract rents, or failing that at least a concentrated cartel that can coordinate behind closed doors or through conscious parallelism. Inhibiting that is the way to achieve the desired result. The bureaucracies can't do it internally because a bureaucracy without external competitive pressure has no internal incentive to improve efficiency to counter the intrinsic incentive for bureaucrats to capture and redirect surplus to protect and accumulate power.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  > Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion I mostly agree with this, but there are a lot of failure modes that are known and should be avoided. e.g. running an incentive structure where success is not rewarded and failure is not punished. This broken structure seems to be the default in bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats won't see a cent if they find a more efficient way to do things. In fact, they will be punished with lower budgets.
- derefr 2y ago
  You're talking about intentionally-created bureaucracies. I don't think very many of these exist! The majority of the time, bureaucracies aren't prescriptive, a structure imposed; but rather, they're descriptive — that is, they're just the abstraction we use to talk about what is actually a bunch of pre-existing special-interest groups, groups that would continue to exist whether or not there were an organizational label to collect them all into. For example, what is a municipal government, but a bureaucracy that evolves out of conflicting special-interest groups, with each top-level city-council seat beholden mostly to some particular special-interest group? The NIMBY gridlock in most cities can be blamed, in some sense, on "bureaucracy" — but only in the sense that there is an explicit NIMBY interest group that holds many council seats through representatives, and which cannot be organizationally engineered out of existence. The NIMBY home-owners make up a large proportion of voters — and so hold power as a voting bloc — and this holds whether they are directly represented by a party that agrees with them, or whether they are just bribing some other party to implicitly do things their way in order to get their votes. And in the case of NIMBYs, "doing things their way" is exactly "doing all that sabotage-manual stuff, to create bureaucratic gridlock, to block any attempt to fix or improve the city that would come at the expense of the asset-value of homes." There's no technology that can "fix" the problem of the majority of an organization being composed of groups with fundamentally opposed ideologies, with groups seeing the other groups in the organization as likely to fundamentally destroy the things they hold dear if allowed, and where the fundamental tool these group see as available to resist what they see as "regressive change", is degradation of the process of change itself, though such organizational-process sabotage. Make the organizational process more efficient, and you just enable the sabotage to happen faster. (It's a bit like accelerating an AI, just translating into it deciding to refuse you faster.) And to be clear, I am not just saying that polities and their democratic proxies are like this; I am saying that most organizations are like this. Most orgs are inherently, definitionally made up of such fundamentally ideologically-opposed factions. Yes, even if you hire them to work in explicit alignment with one-another.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? I'm sure there have been others... Simple sabotage for software (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695839 - June 2024 (75 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual – How to Destroy Your Organizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831946 - July 2023 (95 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090 - April 2023 (129 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1945) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32356038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32356038 - Aug 2022 (3 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States Office of Strategic Services - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964 - June 2022 (55 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070624 - April 2022 (8 comments) Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597454 - Dec 2021 (209 comments) 1944 OSS Manual on How to Sabotage Productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28507930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28507930 - Sept 2021 (5 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293804 - Feb 2021 (1 comment) CIA's Declassified 1941 Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316292 - May 2020 (1 comment) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041 - Feb 2020 (89 comments) Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045073 - Jan 2018 (36 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 - Aug 2017 (32 comments) The CIA’s 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 - Aug 2016 (64 comments) Updating classic workplace sabotage techniques - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702267 - May 2016 (280 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 - Nov 2015 (68 comments) Declassified CIA documents detail how to sabotage employers, annoy bosses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490804 - Nov 2015 (21 comments) How to make sure nothing gets done at work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393485 - Oct 2015 (3 comments) Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 - Nov 2012 (67 comments) From CIA: Timeless Tips for 'Simple Sabotage' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243649 - July 2012 (3 comments) How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398103 - June 2010 (22 comments) WW2 "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" declassified [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905750 - Oct 2009 (6 comments) OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443 - Sept 2009 (29 comments)

gffrd 2y ago

> The government needs a UX department to streamline all of the painful processes it has. Make it easy to follow the law. Sometimes the pain is a feature.

janalsncm 2y ago
In some systems of government, yes. The Soviet Union had so many laws that at any point in time everyone was likely a criminal. But I believe in a democracy, a reasonable person should know when they’re breaking the law, or when they’re suspected of doing so.

Swizec 2y ago

> Singapore, which has an online visa process (traveler visa) which was a breeze to follow and was approved in under 2 days. Compare that to the US legal immigration system (USCIS) which if you ever have the misfortune of dealing with, is a nightmare to navigate The US version of a traveler visa, ESTA, gets approved in a matter of hours after you apply online. The fastest I got it was 30min at an Italian airport a few years ago when they blocked me from boarding because my old one expired and I didn’t notice. Still made it onto the same flight.

yen223 2y ago
The difference between applying for a US visitor's visa as a citizen of a non-ESTA country and as a citizen from an ESTA country, is night and day. If you aren't ESTA, you need to pay lots of money and undergo an in-person interview at a US embassy. This can take months to arrange, as embassy slots are scarce, plus you need to make travel arrangements to be in a city with a US embassy. If you are ESTA, you can apply for the visa online and be done with it in 10 minutes. It is very clear that if the US wants you in the country, they can make it happen very easily.

lend000 2y ago

Generally all the governments that are considered excellent and easy to work with are smaller governments with small populations. Modern government ideas just don't seem to scale up well, which would seem to support the idea of keeping a government no bigger than it needs to be.

janalsncm 2y ago
> Modern government ideas don’t seem to scale up well When I needed to get my US passport renewed, there were no appointments available in my state for the next 2 months. I had to fly to another state. I would love to know which “modern government idea” is preventing them from scaling up the service to meet demand. No, this is simply a symptom of neglect and indifference.

amy-petrik-214 2y ago

What's nice about Singapore is they employ common sense beating laws. Did something stupid? That's a beating. Illegal immigrant? Beating. Thief? Beating. Incompetent bureaucrat? Yup, yes again, beating. I have a feeling Americans would take to beating laws very well, many would be eager to serve as beaters of incompetent bureaucrats. Fascinating history though. They got kicked out of Micronesia in 1969, much similar to if the US just punted Detroit out of the US and it became the city-state of Detroit - in both cases drug-addled economic failures. The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip, and he said, "The beatings will continue until Singapore improves" and they've been delivering beatings, all day, every day, since then.

fakedang 2y ago
> Fascinating history though. They got kicked out of Micronesia in 1969, Never knew I'd see the day when Malaysia would be confused with Micronesia. > The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip Or Lee Kuan Yew with some random named Kown Lee.

ozozozd 2y ago

You compared a tourist VISA with an immigration VISA? It’s comparing apples with…an olive tree? US immigration process - among the countries one would care to immigrate to, of course - is much better designed than most countries. In fact, there are very clear paths one can follow, with very clear steps. Not everyone can qualify, sure, but it’s not complicated or bad. There may be complicated paths for those who don’t readily qualify but immigration lawyers think they can make a case, which is pretty much unheard of for other countries. They simply have no one to even process an out-of-band case. I asked to reschedule a citizenship appointment because I had COVID and they had specifically instructed to do so in the case of COVID. My wife said my case would fall through the cracks, and that I would never get an appointment. 2 phone calls - actual person looking into my case on the phone, much better experience than most bank call centers - and I got a new appointment. One gripe I had with the US greencard process was when they asked me to submit my vaccination records from 90s. I thought it was simply an impossible ask, and that was the end of that process for me. It would’ve been nice if they lead with “get these vaccinations OR bring proof of vaccination.” Obviously, I just got the shots and it was done. Canada, NZ, and Australia may have better processes. But they also have much smaller volume and diversity of applications. Again, not quite the same fruit.