I was once flipping through channels and stumbled on the channel that records the meetings for the local government. There were people sitting on some raised pl

I was once flipping through channels and stumbled on the channel that records the meetings for the local government. There were people sitting on some raised platform and for 10 minutes straight they were just shuffling papers back and forth between themselves. They were quite literally paper-pushers for those 10 minutes. I laughed for a little bit and then felt really sad that this was actually my own town government. On a more technological side of things we have APIs and APIs for APIs. I have spent non-trivial amount of time trying to build something usable on top of AWS and OpenStack APIs. Same goes for various ecommerce APIs. The situation is so bad that there are entire companies built around making horrible APIs more usable. See channeladvisor and sellbrite. Horrible APIs are the equivalent of inefficient bureaucracies for programmers and quite literally keep them employed. More than once I've had the thought that if some API was more usable then I would not have a job.