10 ms·

Understanding how bureaucracy develops

196 points by dhruvmethi 2y ago

robwwilliams 2y ago
Greatly enjoyed this commentary. The example of IRB approvals for biomedical research is unfortunately on the mark. How much of a full time researcher’s time is bureaucratic overhead? In my case no more than 10% but it feels like 30%.
- dhruvmethi 2y ago
  Thank you for reading! Even if it takes up only a small percentage of time, it probably takes up the majority of frustration (that's at least true for me)
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    You haven't seen anything until you've spent a career working in and around measurement & testing bureaus which go back to the 19th century themselves :\ Which are only involved with much bigger institutions harboring their much larger, dissimilar but more dysfunctional and less-professionally-developed "inadvertent" bureaucracies which are most often layered on under emergency conditions. Hint, the key word is work around. Don't even think about it until you've spent however many years it takes to "master" the bureaucracy itself, working from within. Before you even attempt your first workaround, or you could be shot down in flames without a parachute. I've said it before but you can't herd cats unless you're a cat already.
    - EricE 2y ago
      Success in spite of the organization...
nine_zeros 2y ago
This is a very well written article. And I firmly agree with this from first-hand experience. Organizational malleability is key. But it wouldn't work in FAANG style standardized performance review style of work.
- dhruvmethi 2y ago
  Agreed - as organizations scale, it's like some kind of fundamental law of thermodynamics that says they must become more bureaucratic in order to remain competitive. I think it's because organizations can only work at scale if they minimize the variance of each individual business unit, and malleability threatens that. I still think that good enough leadership and communication should allow for malleable units to coexist well together, but that may be a naive ideal.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > I think it's because organizations can only work at scale if they minimize the variance of each individual business unit, and malleability threatens that. It's because of the principal agent problem. As organizations grow, people inside it become less and less oriented towards the organizational goal. The rigidity appears to fight that.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Very insightful. When an organization is small, the individuals protect the org, and are incentivized to. The org cannot survive without strong alignment between individuals. At some point, when sufficient scale has been achieved, the org crystallizes to protect itself from certain actors that prioritize the individual over the org. The rigidity is a defense mechanism, an immune system of sorts.
    - nyrikki 2y ago
      There is a school of thought about management by intent that tries to address this, following the ideas born out of the Prussian army in the early 1800s. But many of our current problems are more directly related to Taylorism and an intentional separation of design from production. GMs failure to learn from Toyota at the NUMMI plant is a well documented modern example, with Japan intentionally targeting the limits of Taylorism to basically destroy the US industrial market is another. The centralized command and control model also ignored the finite congitive ability and assumed the relational omniscient actors. The funny thing is that multiple Nobel prizes have been awarded related to some of the above, and we know that Taylor faked some of his research and most business tasks are not equivalent to loading pig iron onto train cars anyway. Even TOGAF and ITIL recently made changes after the Feds changed the Klinger act, moving away from this model and every modern military uses mission command vs C2, but management is still teaching the pseudo scientific management school of thought and not addressing the needs modern situations. The incentive models are largely a reason for this and recent developments like 'impact' scores push things back even more. You can still have a principal-agent relationship, but delegate and focus on intent and avoid this trap, but it requires trust and bidirectional communication. Really IMHO, or comes down to plans being safe feeling, high effort and compatible with incentives. Those plans never survive the real world, because of the actors bounded rationality and knowledge. A book that is potentially a useful lens into this is 'The art of action', but it is just a lens. Organization 'goals' are often poorly communicated and useless because 'planning' is insufficient and not durable enough. Being way past any horizon that can be planned for, actionable concepts of shared intentions and purpose are not communicated. Toyota gave teams concrete goals to obtain, allowed them to self organize and choose how to deliver. GM meticulously copied what those teams had done and forced Detroit teams to follow those procedures and it failed. It was allowing the teams, which understood the context and constraints of their bounded problems that worked, not the procedures themselves. Amazon's API mandate resulted in a product mindset and scaled better than almost everyone until culture erosion killed that. Delegating works, but centralized process needs to be restricted to the minimum necessary. Unfortunately the negative aspects of bureaucracy seem artificially successful in the short term, but the negative aspects of setting things in concrete are long tailed. The growing disengagement problem is one of those long tails IMHO.
sevensor 2y ago
When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. This is the cost of a blameless culture. There are places where that’s the right answer, especially where a skilled operator is required to operate in an environment beyond their control and deal with emergent problems in short order. Aviation, surgery. Different situations where the cost of failure is lower can afford to operate without the cost of bureaucratic compliance, but often they don’t even nudge the slider towards personal responsibility and it stays at “fully blameless.”
- hypeatei 2y ago
  I've never seen it put so succinctly but this is the issue I have with blameless culture. We can design CI pipelines, linters, whatever it is to stop certain issues with our software from being released but if someone is incompetent, they don't care and will find a way to fuck something up and you can only automate so much.
  - liquidpele 2y ago
    There’s a 2x2 matrix you can put employees into with one side being smart/idiot and the other being lazy/industrious. There is no greater threat than the industrious idiot.
    - wffurr 2y ago
      There’s a quote from a German general: “ I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
      - 2y ago
alexashka 2y ago
Modern society is wage slavery. Wage slaves respond to their condition with malicious compliance [0]. The rest is talk. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  [dead]
wavemode 2y ago
In my experience, the more siloed an organization, the more bureaucracy you end up with. We've all had those experiences where, the problem we are trying to solve isn't inherently difficult - it's difficult because three separate teams are in charge of parts A, B, and C of the problem, and getting them to talk to each other, align their roadmaps, change their processes, etc. is impossible, unless you can go above their heads and force them to do it. I think about organization design similarly to software design. It's tempting to think about your software design from the top-down, and design a hierarchy of siloed interfaces with encapsulated private data and strictly separated concerns. This looks beautiful on paper, but then in practice you now have to navigate through a sea of objects and abstractions and redundancies - getting anything meaningful done often requires "punching holes" through the siloes so data can be shared. Organizations are the same way. Paul Graham wrote an essay[0] recently about the differences between "founder mode" and "manager mode". In a nutshell, managers usually think about organizations as silos - we divide up the company into a hierarchy of departments and teams and levels, so that only directors talk to middle managers and only middle managers talk to supervisors and only supervisors talk to the individual contributors. Again, it looks great on paper, and is what most people are used to. But "founder mode" is when someone with a lot of political capital can step in and say, "you know what, I want to talk to the people on the ground. I want to find out what's actually going on below the surface in the org, not just the pre-packaged PowerPoint version I hear from my directors. I want to pull together people from across teams and across levels and across departments - whoever is best suited to making this project a success." I think that sort of "hole punching" can be really powerful, if the company's culture is amenable to it. [0]: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
- liquidpele 2y ago
  To a founder, the success of the company means their own success. To a manager, success is to climb a ladder, any ladder. Their incentives are very different, and thus how they approach things will be.
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    The question I have grappled with is, can a manager ever be made to feel like he has a sake in the company it in the true sense? Companies do attempt to have partners and share purchase plans but a true ownership may be out of reach, unless the founder makes sincere attempts to include the manager in decision making etc. Even then I suspect a founder may fail.
GlenTheMachine 2y ago
Here's an example from my corner of the Defense Department: In order to publish a research paper, it has to be reviewed for suitability for public release. This process is more than a little silly, because it requires seven levels of review, of which exactly one - my immediate supervisor - will have any idea what the paper is about. But fine. There used to be a paper form. You'd fill it out and either route it around for signatures, or if you had a time crunch, walk it around yourself. Eventually they replaced the paper form with a web form, so now there's an automated queuing system that emails people when they have a paper waiting to be reviewed. The web form has all of the same info as the paper form, with one addition. They scanned the paper form and turned it into a pdf, and they make you fill out both the web form AND the pdf version of the original paper form. So to sign off on a paper, you now have to download the pdf, digitally sign it, upload it again, and hit the "Approve" button on the web form. Because God help us if anybody does an audit and we don't have all of the forms correctly signed.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  At a medical device manufacturer I worked at, it’s even worse: you print a copy of the thing to sign and sign it, then upload that to the digital system and digitally sign there too. You end up with several people printing huge documents, not just the signature page, and each signing a different copy which is uploaded then thrown away. That’s right, one paper copy per person is signed, scanned, then shredded.
  - IIAOPSW 2y ago
    At least tell me the shredded paper is recycled so that the next document can be printed signed and shredded on it.
    - dalmo3 2y ago
      Shredchain? Veracity by Proof of Shredding.
    - Obscurity4340 2y ago
      This is like the bureaucratic version of the Poop Machine art piece
IIAOPSW 2y ago
I'm pretty torn about this, because I am also deeply skeptical of exactly the sort of situations an IRB is set up to prevent. Things like requiring documents to be signed in pen are an important part of a secure audit trail. And an appropriate audit trail with proper safe guards is absolutely essential especially given the way personal health related things are conducted in the inherent darkness of confidentiality. The privacy protections of personal health records also happens to be just as effective at keeping evidence of corrupt conduct within the system private as well. Maybe the real problem is that there is (at least to a degree) a trilemma between effective, safe from research misconduct, and respectful of individual privacy.
- underbiding 2y ago
  Where does the perception that signing a physical piece of paper with pen is an important part of a secure audit trail? If a signature is meant to represent both intent and identity, what is it about the physical medium which makes it more ideal than a digital signature where you're prompted to enter in your login password or something similar? Is it the belief that its less forgable, that electronic audit trails are more easily duped and spoofed while signature blocks and paper/pen is somehow immutable (despite the decades of forged signatures easily traced from other sources)? Never understood this idea whatsoever, it just strikes me as a form of pearl-clutching over some nebulous hackers that could easily destroy our well-oiled pen/paper/document machines.
  - IIAOPSW 2y ago
    As per the article, the alternative was pencil not digital. For whatever reason the rule of the mental ward was there could only be access to pencils. Pencil marks are indeed more mutable and thus more vulnerable than pen. Electronic signatures are an entirely different (and interesting) thing to consider.
- jpeloquin 2y ago
  According to the original account, the pencil/pen thing wasn't about an audit trail, and both the IRB and hospital admin were equally silly. > IRREGULARITY #3: Signatures are traditionally in pen. But we said our patients would sign in pencil. Why? > Well, because psychiatric patients aren’t allowed to have pens in case they stab themselves with them. I don’t get why stabbing yourself with a pencil is any less of a problem, but the rules are the rules. We asked the hospital administration for a one-time exemption, to let our patients have pens just long enough to sign the consent form. Hospital administration said absolutely not, and they didn’t care if this sabotaged our entire study, it was pencil or nothing. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
TacticalCoder 2y ago
Look at what the DIV is achieving. Look at what SpaceX and StarLink are achieving. When in doubt: don't imitate the DIV.
- gruez 2y ago
  What is "the DIV"?
  - natmaka 2y ago
    Probably "The Diversity Immigrant Visa program, also known as the green card lottery, is a United States government lottery program for receiving an immigrant visa followed by a permanent resident card." (per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa )
    - gruez 2y ago
      That came up on a Wikipedia search but doesn't make much sense. How can you meaningfully compare the performance of a visa program with a space company?
      - natmaka 2y ago
        Not sure but I heard people in the know criticizing the way this program is managed, in a way similar to the way many in the US criticize the DMV (Department of motor vehicles, "a government agency that administers motor vehicle registration and driver licensing"), leading to a slow and overcomplicated organization.
physicsgraph 2y ago
To summarize the main two take-aways, measure ROI (return on investment) and be Agile.
natmaka 2y ago
Pournelle's take on part of it seems pertinent to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir... John Ousterhout explained "it's easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one...": https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php :
- oigursh 2y ago
  I'd forgotten the name of this Law for a long time - it's excellent.
fcatalan 2y ago
I've always seen a dilemma with increased bureaucracy driven by corruption prevention: Systems too focused on defeating corruption as a main objective tend to miss their original intent, and become overly restrictive, to the point of having to rely on rule breaking to actually perform their function. But once a particular rule is OK to break, every other rule is in jeopardy. This way you end up with systems like the Spanish access to public jobs: extremely punishing for the participants that are subject to humongous nonsensical competitive examinations, ostensibly to select the very best strictly on their merits, but still rife with corruption.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>Organizations don’t just naturally become bureaucratic as they grow; they become bureaucratic as a result of deliberate decisions made by leaders who at the time believed they were doing the right thing. These leaders will have to be held accountable. Generally one want to do the dirty job. It boils down to people and nothing else. Any attempt at analysis the system without considering people's intelligence/character is premature. My partial take on it: https://quberoot.wordpress.com/partners/ https://quberoot.wordpress.com/partners/
lbriner 2y ago
I have a few personal thoughts on this but I think it ultimately comes down to the variation between people being more complex and harder to measure than it seems. In a startup, there is some natural way to choose the 1 right person for the job, say, the Developer. They probably wouldn't be chosen unless they have a high level of ability, communication skills (hopefully) and a lot of productivity and proactivity. This could be directly related to the potential rewards of equity etc. but maybe not, maybe they are happy to be free to work at high and low level and to make educated decisions on everything. I did this job for the same money as my older job without much expectation of a large payout (never got one!) But as soon as you hire 1 other person, things immediately change. It isn't just about their ability, although we often talk about that both in terms of testing it during interview but also measuring it using some KPI but a person is much more than ability. You can have ability and be lazy or lack ability but are a quick learner. You might be really easy to get on with but your stuff is slightly above average, or a complete a-hole but produce rock-solid code. You might be reliable, you might not, you might be motivated all the time, some of the time or none of the time. As much as we like to think we can have regular performance reviews, you can't put numbers on those things but you can put process. I can arrange a daily standup and weekly progress reviews to get slightly better at making sure you are on-track. I can try and count things like tasks completed or LoC or Stories completed or bugs in production etc. but these are also a rich tapestry and after-all, do you compare them to the 10x coder that you are? Some people need to be told to do something properly, they need process, others will do it properly without being asked, they have passion. How can you tell? Mostly gut feel, and maybe a checklist! I think there is also a myth that if we only had tonnes of cash, we could be much more picky with hires and only get the best, that would remove a lot of bureaucracy but look at FANNG companies, they have this problem in buckets. People can fake their ability and passion to a point, they have 1000s of applications to process and they still have tonnes of meetings. Even if you hire someone with the same passion and ability as you, they will be still be different. They will be insistent on VueJS instead of C#, TDD instead of DDD, Unit Tests for everything or UI tests for some things. Each of those is OK but you still then create that Architect position to ensure consistency between teams, the Project Leader to ensure delivery times are balanced with technical perfection. Personally, I have never believed that a company with more than, say 200 employees can ever be efficient. They can be rich but eventually they will buckle under their own red-tape or at the next culling that takes place under the "new trendy CEO who had successes at previous companies".
yourapostasy 2y ago
A key feature I see that rampantly grows bureaucracy: the ability to impose costs upon other teams without accountability. This takes many forms, but common ones include the following. People don't say the following outright, you spot these a mile away when actions speak louder than words. "I don't have to know how what I tell you to do fits into the overall flow of what you want to accomplish between multiple different teams. That's your problem, go talk to all the different teams you have to work with to get approvals and figure it out yourself, that's not my problem." "I acknowledge absolutely nothing has changed, and I will never use what you create, but format A has changed to format B because everything new is in format B, and thus you must spend time to re-create everything in format B so everything in my filing system is consistent." "Yes, this is recording the information twice in two different ways. By hand. And with no enforcement to keep it up to date. But I'm only measured on recording the information, and as long as Number Go Up on the recordings, it is not my problem." "Yes, the new form has not been published. Yes, the new requirement for these approvals have not been put into existing processes that take months to grind out a decision, much less the processes debugged. But in six months, everyone must follow what we publish in several months leaving only two months for you to implement in 3-4 months a new, untried process. No, we will not talk about this possibly creating a bottleneck and exacerbating the flow, that won't happen." If there was a chargeback of effort to this kind of mindset and decisions, then a different political battle would emerge, but at least it would make these kinds of unilateral, unaccountable decisions in their aggregate form visible to the organization. A tremendous amount of this friction goes away if organizations had the capacity to automate many processes, but the cost hurdle is currently too high for most organizations. I'm hopeful LLM's in the hands of non-technical staff can mitigate that, but I'm likely dangerously naive there.
nineteen999 2y ago
Just look at how Agile has turned out ... the thing is loaded with bureacracy from standups, retros, kanbans, scrums. It's way more bureaucratic and dogmatic than waterfall ever was. Y'all just don't notice cause the frog has been boiled slowly in the pot, or because you didn't grow up in the "waterfall" era.
sumosudo 2y ago
The bureaucracy must be expanded to accommodate the ever-growing bureaucracy.
a_c 2y ago
Shooting a specific problem with general solution together with obscuring the feedback loop are perfect recipe for making bureaucracy
nxobject 2y ago
> But because we were recording data, it qualified as a study; because it qualified as a study, we needed to go through the IRB. I'm not sure when Scott did his work, but this reasoning (at least after 2019) would have been wrong. IRB review only considers "generalizable" research, and is exempted from IRB review according to federal regulations and as encoded into specific institutional procedure. [1] Federally binding standards about specific exempt categories exist, but they aren't exhausitive. [2] Part of the point of IRB training – well, human subjects research training specifically – is to get drilled into you what's within and not within the scope of IRB. [1] https://ori.hhs.gov/content/chapter-3-The-Protection-of-Human-Subjects-Definitions https://ori.hhs.gov/content/chapter-3-The-Protection-of-Huma... [2] https://irb.ucsf.edu/sites/hrpp.ucsf.edu/files/exempt%20category%20decision%20tool%20march%202019.pdf https://irb.ucsf.edu/sites/hrpp.ucsf.edu/files/exempt%20cate...
xiaodai 2y ago
The bit about cia is too funyy

196 points by dhruvmethi 2y ago

Greatly enjoyed this commentary. The example of IRB approvals for biomedical research is unfortunately on the mark. How much of a full time researcher’s time is bureaucratic overhead? In my case no more than 10% but it feels like 30%.

dhruvmethi 2y ago
Thank you for reading! Even if it takes up only a small percentage of time, it probably takes up the majority of frustration (that's at least true for me)
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  You haven't seen anything until you've spent a career working in and around measurement & testing bureaus which go back to the 19th century themselves :\ Which are only involved with much bigger institutions harboring their much larger, dissimilar but more dysfunctional and less-professionally-developed "inadvertent" bureaucracies which are most often layered on under emergency conditions. Hint, the key word is work around. Don't even think about it until you've spent however many years it takes to "master" the bureaucracy itself, working from within. Before you even attempt your first workaround, or you could be shot down in flames without a parachute. I've said it before but you can't herd cats unless you're a cat already.
  - EricE 2y ago
    Success in spite of the organization...

nine_zeros 2y ago

This is a very well written article. And I firmly agree with this from first-hand experience. Organizational malleability is key. But it wouldn't work in FAANG style standardized performance review style of work.

dhruvmethi 2y ago
Agreed - as organizations scale, it's like some kind of fundamental law of thermodynamics that says they must become more bureaucratic in order to remain competitive. I think it's because organizations can only work at scale if they minimize the variance of each individual business unit, and malleability threatens that. I still think that good enough leadership and communication should allow for malleable units to coexist well together, but that may be a naive ideal.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > I think it's because organizations can only work at scale if they minimize the variance of each individual business unit, and malleability threatens that. It's because of the principal agent problem. As organizations grow, people inside it become less and less oriented towards the organizational goal. The rigidity appears to fight that.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Very insightful. When an organization is small, the individuals protect the org, and are incentivized to. The org cannot survive without strong alignment between individuals. At some point, when sufficient scale has been achieved, the org crystallizes to protect itself from certain actors that prioritize the individual over the org. The rigidity is a defense mechanism, an immune system of sorts.
  - nyrikki 2y ago
    There is a school of thought about management by intent that tries to address this, following the ideas born out of the Prussian army in the early 1800s. But many of our current problems are more directly related to Taylorism and an intentional separation of design from production. GMs failure to learn from Toyota at the NUMMI plant is a well documented modern example, with Japan intentionally targeting the limits of Taylorism to basically destroy the US industrial market is another. The centralized command and control model also ignored the finite congitive ability and assumed the relational omniscient actors. The funny thing is that multiple Nobel prizes have been awarded related to some of the above, and we know that Taylor faked some of his research and most business tasks are not equivalent to loading pig iron onto train cars anyway. Even TOGAF and ITIL recently made changes after the Feds changed the Klinger act, moving away from this model and every modern military uses mission command vs C2, but management is still teaching the pseudo scientific management school of thought and not addressing the needs modern situations. The incentive models are largely a reason for this and recent developments like 'impact' scores push things back even more. You can still have a principal-agent relationship, but delegate and focus on intent and avoid this trap, but it requires trust and bidirectional communication. Really IMHO, or comes down to plans being safe feeling, high effort and compatible with incentives. Those plans never survive the real world, because of the actors bounded rationality and knowledge. A book that is potentially a useful lens into this is 'The art of action', but it is just a lens. Organization 'goals' are often poorly communicated and useless because 'planning' is insufficient and not durable enough. Being way past any horizon that can be planned for, actionable concepts of shared intentions and purpose are not communicated. Toyota gave teams concrete goals to obtain, allowed them to self organize and choose how to deliver. GM meticulously copied what those teams had done and forced Detroit teams to follow those procedures and it failed. It was allowing the teams, which understood the context and constraints of their bounded problems that worked, not the procedures themselves. Amazon's API mandate resulted in a product mindset and scaled better than almost everyone until culture erosion killed that. Delegating works, but centralized process needs to be restricted to the minimum necessary. Unfortunately the negative aspects of bureaucracy seem artificially successful in the short term, but the negative aspects of setting things in concrete are long tailed. The growing disengagement problem is one of those long tails IMHO.

sevensor 2y ago

When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. This is the cost of a blameless culture. There are places where that’s the right answer, especially where a skilled operator is required to operate in an environment beyond their control and deal with emergent problems in short order. Aviation, surgery. Different situations where the cost of failure is lower can afford to operate without the cost of bureaucratic compliance, but often they don’t even nudge the slider towards personal responsibility and it stays at “fully blameless.”

hypeatei 2y ago
I've never seen it put so succinctly but this is the issue I have with blameless culture. We can design CI pipelines, linters, whatever it is to stop certain issues with our software from being released but if someone is incompetent, they don't care and will find a way to fuck something up and you can only automate so much.
- liquidpele 2y ago
  There’s a 2x2 matrix you can put employees into with one side being smart/idiot and the other being lazy/industrious. There is no greater threat than the industrious idiot.
  - wffurr 2y ago
    There’s a quote from a German general: “ I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
    - 2y ago

alexashka 2y ago

Modern society is wage slavery. Wage slaves respond to their condition with malicious compliance [0]. The rest is talk. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
[dead]

wavemode 2y ago

In my experience, the more siloed an organization, the more bureaucracy you end up with. We've all had those experiences where, the problem we are trying to solve isn't inherently difficult - it's difficult because three separate teams are in charge of parts A, B, and C of the problem, and getting them to talk to each other, align their roadmaps, change their processes, etc. is impossible, unless you can go above their heads and force them to do it. I think about organization design similarly to software design. It's tempting to think about your software design from the top-down, and design a hierarchy of siloed interfaces with encapsulated private data and strictly separated concerns. This looks beautiful on paper, but then in practice you now have to navigate through a sea of objects and abstractions and redundancies - getting anything meaningful done often requires "punching holes" through the siloes so data can be shared. Organizations are the same way. Paul Graham wrote an essay[0] recently about the differences between "founder mode" and "manager mode". In a nutshell, managers usually think about organizations as silos - we divide up the company into a hierarchy of departments and teams and levels, so that only directors talk to middle managers and only middle managers talk to supervisors and only supervisors talk to the individual contributors. Again, it looks great on paper, and is what most people are used to. But "founder mode" is when someone with a lot of political capital can step in and say, "you know what, I want to talk to the people on the ground. I want to find out what's actually going on below the surface in the org, not just the pre-packaged PowerPoint version I hear from my directors. I want to pull together people from across teams and across levels and across departments - whoever is best suited to making this project a success." I think that sort of "hole punching" can be really powerful, if the company's culture is amenable to it. [0]: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

liquidpele 2y ago
To a founder, the success of the company means their own success. To a manager, success is to climb a ladder, any ladder. Their incentives are very different, and thus how they approach things will be.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  The question I have grappled with is, can a manager ever be made to feel like he has a sake in the company it in the true sense? Companies do attempt to have partners and share purchase plans but a true ownership may be out of reach, unless the founder makes sincere attempts to include the manager in decision making etc. Even then I suspect a founder may fail.

GlenTheMachine 2y ago

Here's an example from my corner of the Defense Department: In order to publish a research paper, it has to be reviewed for suitability for public release. This process is more than a little silly, because it requires seven levels of review, of which exactly one - my immediate supervisor - will have any idea what the paper is about. But fine. There used to be a paper form. You'd fill it out and either route it around for signatures, or if you had a time crunch, walk it around yourself. Eventually they replaced the paper form with a web form, so now there's an automated queuing system that emails people when they have a paper waiting to be reviewed. The web form has all of the same info as the paper form, with one addition. They scanned the paper form and turned it into a pdf, and they make you fill out both the web form AND the pdf version of the original paper form. So to sign off on a paper, you now have to download the pdf, digitally sign it, upload it again, and hit the "Approve" button on the web form. Because God help us if anybody does an audit and we don't have all of the forms correctly signed.

ok_dad 2y ago
At a medical device manufacturer I worked at, it’s even worse: you print a copy of the thing to sign and sign it, then upload that to the digital system and digitally sign there too. You end up with several people printing huge documents, not just the signature page, and each signing a different copy which is uploaded then thrown away. That’s right, one paper copy per person is signed, scanned, then shredded.
- IIAOPSW 2y ago
  At least tell me the shredded paper is recycled so that the next document can be printed signed and shredded on it.
  - dalmo3 2y ago
    Shredchain? Veracity by Proof of Shredding.
  - Obscurity4340 2y ago
    This is like the bureaucratic version of the Poop Machine art piece

IIAOPSW 2y ago

I'm pretty torn about this, because I am also deeply skeptical of exactly the sort of situations an IRB is set up to prevent. Things like requiring documents to be signed in pen are an important part of a secure audit trail. And an appropriate audit trail with proper safe guards is absolutely essential especially given the way personal health related things are conducted in the inherent darkness of confidentiality. The privacy protections of personal health records also happens to be just as effective at keeping evidence of corrupt conduct within the system private as well. Maybe the real problem is that there is (at least to a degree) a trilemma between effective, safe from research misconduct, and respectful of individual privacy.

underbiding 2y ago
Where does the perception that signing a physical piece of paper with pen is an important part of a secure audit trail? If a signature is meant to represent both intent and identity, what is it about the physical medium which makes it more ideal than a digital signature where you're prompted to enter in your login password or something similar? Is it the belief that its less forgable, that electronic audit trails are more easily duped and spoofed while signature blocks and paper/pen is somehow immutable (despite the decades of forged signatures easily traced from other sources)? Never understood this idea whatsoever, it just strikes me as a form of pearl-clutching over some nebulous hackers that could easily destroy our well-oiled pen/paper/document machines.
- IIAOPSW 2y ago
  As per the article, the alternative was pencil not digital. For whatever reason the rule of the mental ward was there could only be access to pencils. Pencil marks are indeed more mutable and thus more vulnerable than pen. Electronic signatures are an entirely different (and interesting) thing to consider.
jpeloquin 2y ago
According to the original account, the pencil/pen thing wasn't about an audit trail, and both the IRB and hospital admin were equally silly. > IRREGULARITY #3: Signatures are traditionally in pen. But we said our patients would sign in pencil. Why? > Well, because psychiatric patients aren’t allowed to have pens in case they stab themselves with them. I don’t get why stabbing yourself with a pencil is any less of a problem, but the rules are the rules. We asked the hospital administration for a one-time exemption, to let our patients have pens just long enough to sign the consent form. Hospital administration said absolutely not, and they didn’t care if this sabotaged our entire study, it was pencil or nothing. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/

TacticalCoder 2y ago

Look at what the DIV is achieving. Look at what SpaceX and StarLink are achieving. When in doubt: don't imitate the DIV.

gruez 2y ago
What is "the DIV"?
- natmaka 2y ago
  Probably "The Diversity Immigrant Visa program, also known as the green card lottery, is a United States government lottery program for receiving an immigrant visa followed by a permanent resident card." (per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa )
  - gruez 2y ago
    That came up on a Wikipedia search but doesn't make much sense. How can you meaningfully compare the performance of a visa program with a space company?
    - natmaka 2y ago
      Not sure but I heard people in the know criticizing the way this program is managed, in a way similar to the way many in the US criticize the DMV (Department of motor vehicles, "a government agency that administers motor vehicle registration and driver licensing"), leading to a slow and overcomplicated organization.

physicsgraph 2y ago

To summarize the main two take-aways, measure ROI (return on investment) and be Agile.

natmaka 2y ago

Pournelle's take on part of it seems pertinent to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir... John Ousterhout explained "it's easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one...": https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php :

oigursh 2y ago
I'd forgotten the name of this Law for a long time - it's excellent.

fcatalan 2y ago

I've always seen a dilemma with increased bureaucracy driven by corruption prevention: Systems too focused on defeating corruption as a main objective tend to miss their original intent, and become overly restrictive, to the point of having to rely on rule breaking to actually perform their function. But once a particular rule is OK to break, every other rule is in jeopardy. This way you end up with systems like the Spanish access to public jobs: extremely punishing for the participants that are subject to humongous nonsensical competitive examinations, ostensibly to select the very best strictly on their merits, but still rife with corruption.

throwaway984393 2y ago

[dead]

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>Organizations don’t just naturally become bureaucratic as they grow; they become bureaucratic as a result of deliberate decisions made by leaders who at the time believed they were doing the right thing. These leaders will have to be held accountable. Generally one want to do the dirty job. It boils down to people and nothing else. Any attempt at analysis the system without considering people's intelligence/character is premature. My partial take on it: https://quberoot.wordpress.com/partners/ https://quberoot.wordpress.com/partners/

lbriner 2y ago

I have a few personal thoughts on this but I think it ultimately comes down to the variation between people being more complex and harder to measure than it seems. In a startup, there is some natural way to choose the 1 right person for the job, say, the Developer. They probably wouldn't be chosen unless they have a high level of ability, communication skills (hopefully) and a lot of productivity and proactivity. This could be directly related to the potential rewards of equity etc. but maybe not, maybe they are happy to be free to work at high and low level and to make educated decisions on everything. I did this job for the same money as my older job without much expectation of a large payout (never got one!) But as soon as you hire 1 other person, things immediately change. It isn't just about their ability, although we often talk about that both in terms of testing it during interview but also measuring it using some KPI but a person is much more than ability. You can have ability and be lazy or lack ability but are a quick learner. You might be really easy to get on with but your stuff is slightly above average, or a complete a-hole but produce rock-solid code. You might be reliable, you might not, you might be motivated all the time, some of the time or none of the time. As much as we like to think we can have regular performance reviews, you can't put numbers on those things but you can put process. I can arrange a daily standup and weekly progress reviews to get slightly better at making sure you are on-track. I can try and count things like tasks completed or LoC or Stories completed or bugs in production etc. but these are also a rich tapestry and after-all, do you compare them to the 10x coder that you are? Some people need to be told to do something properly, they need process, others will do it properly without being asked, they have passion. How can you tell? Mostly gut feel, and maybe a checklist! I think there is also a myth that if we only had tonnes of cash, we could be much more picky with hires and only get the best, that would remove a lot of bureaucracy but look at FANNG companies, they have this problem in buckets. People can fake their ability and passion to a point, they have 1000s of applications to process and they still have tonnes of meetings. Even if you hire someone with the same passion and ability as you, they will be still be different. They will be insistent on VueJS instead of C#, TDD instead of DDD, Unit Tests for everything or UI tests for some things. Each of those is OK but you still then create that Architect position to ensure consistency between teams, the Project Leader to ensure delivery times are balanced with technical perfection. Personally, I have never believed that a company with more than, say 200 employees can ever be efficient. They can be rich but eventually they will buckle under their own red-tape or at the next culling that takes place under the "new trendy CEO who had successes at previous companies".

yourapostasy 2y ago

A key feature I see that rampantly grows bureaucracy: the ability to impose costs upon other teams without accountability. This takes many forms, but common ones include the following. People don't say the following outright, you spot these a mile away when actions speak louder than words. "I don't have to know how what I tell you to do fits into the overall flow of what you want to accomplish between multiple different teams. That's your problem, go talk to all the different teams you have to work with to get approvals and figure it out yourself, that's not my problem." "I acknowledge absolutely nothing has changed, and I will never use what you create, but format A has changed to format B because everything new is in format B, and thus you must spend time to re-create everything in format B so everything in my filing system is consistent." "Yes, this is recording the information twice in two different ways. By hand. And with no enforcement to keep it up to date. But I'm only measured on recording the information, and as long as Number Go Up on the recordings, it is not my problem." "Yes, the new form has not been published. Yes, the new requirement for these approvals have not been put into existing processes that take months to grind out a decision, much less the processes debugged. But in six months, everyone must follow what we publish in several months leaving only two months for you to implement in 3-4 months a new, untried process. No, we will not talk about this possibly creating a bottleneck and exacerbating the flow, that won't happen." If there was a chargeback of effort to this kind of mindset and decisions, then a different political battle would emerge, but at least it would make these kinds of unilateral, unaccountable decisions in their aggregate form visible to the organization. A tremendous amount of this friction goes away if organizations had the capacity to automate many processes, but the cost hurdle is currently too high for most organizations. I'm hopeful LLM's in the hands of non-technical staff can mitigate that, but I'm likely dangerously naive there.

nineteen999 2y ago

Just look at how Agile has turned out ... the thing is loaded with bureacracy from standups, retros, kanbans, scrums. It's way more bureaucratic and dogmatic than waterfall ever was. Y'all just don't notice cause the frog has been boiled slowly in the pot, or because you didn't grow up in the "waterfall" era.

sumosudo 2y ago

The bureaucracy must be expanded to accommodate the ever-growing bureaucracy.

a_c 2y ago

Shooting a specific problem with general solution together with obscuring the feedback loop are perfect recipe for making bureaucracy

nxobject 2y ago

> But because we were recording data, it qualified as a study; because it qualified as a study, we needed to go through the IRB. I'm not sure when Scott did his work, but this reasoning (at least after 2019) would have been wrong. IRB review only considers "generalizable" research, and is exempted from IRB review according to federal regulations and as encoded into specific institutional procedure. [1] Federally binding standards about specific exempt categories exist, but they aren't exhausitive. [2] Part of the point of IRB training – well, human subjects research training specifically – is to get drilled into you what's within and not within the scope of IRB. [1] https://ori.hhs.gov/content/chapter-3-The-Protection-of-Human-Subjects-Definitions https://ori.hhs.gov/content/chapter-3-The-Protection-of-Huma... [2] https://irb.ucsf.edu/sites/hrpp.ucsf.edu/files/exempt%20category%20decision%20tool%20march%202019.pdf https://irb.ucsf.edu/sites/hrpp.ucsf.edu/files/exempt%20cate...

xiaodai 2y ago

The bit about cia is too funyy