The 2010 US Census was a good example of this sort of dysfunctionality (I worked in one of the offices for it). Hiring anyone for field jobs was a process some

The 2010 US Census was a good example of this sort of dysfunctionality (I worked in one of the offices for it). Hiring anyone for field jobs was a process something like: * field operations clerks arrange application/testing sessions and get all applications in on paper * administrative clerks (other side of the same office) enter all applications into the computer * when the people running the field operations want to hire field employees, they fill out paper forms with manually selected criteria (local area, languages spoken, etc) and give them to the administrative fiefdom * administrative clerks enter the form criteria into the computers, print out a paper list of matching applicants * administrative clerks call down the list until they have enough who have said 'yes' to the job to match the form * administrative clerks hand the paper lists with selected applicants on them over to the field operations fiefdom * field operations clerks try to organize the data in an actually usable way, usually by manually entering the lists into Excel or Access The most bizarre part was the "manual hiring forms" thing. Beyond the cargo-cult hiring practice of the forms literally only existing so that they could be filed away somewhere national in case of cover-your-ass legal issues, the Census didn't actually give us access to any resources for demographics... and so the only reason my area had anything like representative employees (important for getting into gated communities, dealing with different languages, etc) was because we had a set of people spend a week just comparing paper county tract maps supplied by the feds with locally-supplied city and county demographic info and writing up dozens of forms with criteria tuned for specific areas.