Bureaucracy

If you believe NASA, late in 2026 Americans will walk on the moon again. That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.

But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3 billion (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10 billion). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission's scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven't been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.

...Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can't even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It's as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.

Then it struck me: the flair of filing was still here in Records Management—but it was in the implied aesthetic nature of the filing enterprise: in the alignment of tabs and arrangement of drawers. That pizzazz was to be found, too, in the style of the book itself—in its liberal use of diagrams and illustrations and photographs of state-of-the-art office equipment and fashionably dressed, well-coiffed office ladies. I figured, why not read Records Management against the grain, focusing less on the staid instruction and more on the aesthetic and even ludic nature of filing work? Why not read this textbook as a toy catalogue, or as a set of rules for a Monopoly-esque administrative game?

Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow. The Naval officer who wired "Sighted Sub - Sank Same" told the whole story.

Put the real subject matter - the point - and even the conclusion, in the opening paragraph and the whole story on one page. Period.' If a lengthy explanation, statistical matter, or such is necessary, use attachments.

Stay off gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up. For the Lord's sake, be short and say what you're talking about. Let's stop "pointing- up" programs, "finalizing" contracts that "stem from" district, regional or Washington "levels". There are no "levels" - local government is as high as Washington Government. No more patterns, effectuating, dynamics. Anyone using the words "activation" or "implementation" will be shot.

In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

I sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying my stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to me that my ears had deceived me, or Bartleby had entirely misunderstood my meaning. I repeated my request in the clearest tone I could assume. But in quite as clear a one came the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.”

“Prefer not to,” echoed I, rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride. “What do you mean? Are you moon-struck? I want you to help me compare this sheet here—take it,” and I thrust it towards him.

“I would prefer not to,” said he.

I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.

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Four years ago, I wrote that the SLS was a cripplingly embarrassing national failure and a tragedy waiting to happen. That remains true, of course, but now I will go further and underscore that by continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility.

...Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it.

Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.

On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?

In 2024, I must admit I am having a bit of a personal crisis regarding continuous improvement. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about "high performing" companies and teams, or companies seeking to transform how they work—there is very little talk of continuous improvement.

The language around layoffs in tech is rife with talk of operational efficiency gains, achieving profitability targets, rightsizing, and high-interest rates. There is very little sense that employees were allowed to be part of the solution or path forward (e.g., by recommending areas of cost savings, quality circles, taking pay cuts, etc., similar to Harley-Davidson in the early 1980s, Southwest Airlines in 2001 or 2008, or countless companies mid-pandemic).

...Meanwhile, among companies less impacted by the ups and downs (real or imagined) in tech and deep in their respective transformations, we see the same old copy-paste approaches, outdated practices, and "changing but not really changing." On some fundamental level, when it comes to continuous improvement, there is no real difference between the two: in both cases, you have change imposed on teams and a lack of engagement to co-design the way forward. In both cases, existing power structures remain entrenched.

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

In software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.

We have rituals of decision-making. Some of those rituals of decision making are truly in our best interest, some of them are socially important, and some of them are… I think Jason Fried said it best when he said that bureaucracy is scar tissue based on previous traumatic events, and those previous traumatic events happened.

Like, a lot of the craziness around NASA, for example, is downstream of the Challenger explosion and also downstream of many people lining up for pork for very many years and us wanting to cut down on the corruption and have more efficiency in government; all good things. [But] we found ourselves – the societal ‘we’ – we found ourselves very constrained by scar tissue that had piled up over the years.

“CEO-ification” refers to the trend of nonprofits and charities to increasingly mirror corporate and military structures. Often they will adopt similar language, hierarchies, and strategic approaches.

...In truth this stemmed from Taylorism, also known as Scientific Management. This theory was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century, but influenced today’s corporate language by introducing efficiency-focused terms like “time and motion studies” and “optimised workflows.”

...I spoke to Bryony Shannon about this on the Let’s Talk Ideas podcast. Bryony argues that the words we choose reflect our values and feelings, and shape how we think and act. She argues that when language focuses on processes, bureaucracy, and transactions, it can reduce people from individuals to labels – like “service user” or “case.” These words distance us from the very people we were employed to develop relationships with.

Those relationships then become mere transactions. As Rob Mitchell has said, when you’ve got a form and a process for every relationship “Love becomes relationships. Relationships become processes. Processes get processed.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved today’s world of process, customer segmentation and journey mapping. Such methodologies can approach humans lives as something that can be managed just like a car production line, or a canning factory producing baked beans.

When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken*. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed.

...The next step, then, is to reflect on the systems around us now that we are cursed with the horrible truth that all of them are working correctly. Ask yourself, how do you get the power to change the system so that it wants something else, so that it can only inevitably do the right thing? Is there a reasonable path to that power? Or does that system need to be dismantled, so that it can be replaced by a system whose purpose is to do the right thing?

The fetish for compliance over results create a circus where the main act is anything but actual productivity. It’s a rigid, change-resistant world where innovation goes to die.

It seems, my dear friend, that the brains of the greatest men contract when they are gathered together, and that where there are more wise men, there you will also find less wisdom. The great assemblies are so preoccupied with minutiae, with formalities, and with empty orthodoxies, that essential issues are always relegated to the end.

Our ancestors weren’t stupid. They were trying to find some kind of logical progression of cause-and-effect, but they lived in epistemic hell. This is why cargo-cult programming exists. This is why urban legends persist. This is why parents simply want their children to do as they say. This is why we have youtubers chastising NASA for not reading their own Apollo 11 postmortem. This is why corporate procedures emphasize checking boxes instead of critically examining the problem. When your cause-and-effect chain is a hundred steps long and caused by something 5 years ago, economic pressure incentivizes simply trying to avoid blame instead of trying to find the actual systemic problem. The farther up the chain of management a problem is, the longer it takes for the effects to be felt, and the worse we get at finding the root cause. Software engineering has the same issue, where incompetence may only cause performance issues years later, after the original coder has left, and the system has scaled up beyond a critical breaking point. This is why we still don’t know how to hire programmers.

The bane of large interests is that, just by dint of communication complexity alone (leaving aside politics/fiefdoms, "compliance" process and associated mandatory trainings, etc), they are extremely wasteful machines that largely squander human creativity and wisdom all while generating massive revenue due to small but effective groups within.

Think the Pareto Principle: 80% of the value from 20% of the people—except it's likely worse than 80-20.

Central planning has been repeatedly shown to give poor results (consider the Russian experiment, for example, or our own bureaucracy). The persons on the spot usually have better knowledge than can those at the top and hence can often (not always) make better decisions if things are not micromanaged.

When you find yourself in a context where agile is being practiced by seizing power on developers, squeezing more features out of a delivery team in a given time, I´m sorry for you and I hope you find a way to change. But it doesn´t render the agile values false. Agile is serious play and it´s worth striving for this way of working - you don´t need to name it agile and probably it will not help you with your management to name it serious play either. Instead, try to find a way of doing what you came for, building and making something beautiful and meaningful together with your colleagues.

Professionalism is a lie, build what you love, explore everything. In today’s age of creation, anyone who attempts to tell you otherwise is lying. You’ll end up seeking what you traded for the rest of your life.

The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.

At most organizations, a third of the room is interested in making a good chair, another third is hell-bent on removing three of the legs to look good on wood-savings with the intention of leaving for a bigger woodworking operation before the whole thing collapses, and the last third have never seen a chair but nonetheless insist on getting a turn with the hammer. Even if all you want to do is craft beautiful code, it seems that the more important skill is to develop the antibodies requires to defend your craftsmanship. I can't do my job if some random guy gets to pick all my fellow carpenters despite the fact they aren't one themselves, and decides how long a chair "should" take to make as if the reality respects human opinions.

The biggest hurdle you might face is that the organisation is simply not set up to support or allow you having access to code. There are many companies where non-engineers don’t have access to necessary systems and credentials, and requests are met with restrictive policies or at least warranted friction. There’s usually nobody to have your back, either — you might have to keep pressing the issue on your own or through your manager to make progress.

The other is that engineers might be sceptical that someone else wants to be involved. Some orgs are very segregated, and engineering teams can be insular. The best teammates will welcome the interest and help but some might feel like you’re stepping on their toes.

One way to approach both of these hurdles is not asking or telling but showing what you can bring to the team if you’re involved with code. Pair with engineers; build prototypes; use your browser’s inspector to debug issues and share solutions. Earn trust and doors will open.

All of the Oregonian complaints about non-professionals pumping gas–“only qualified people should perform this service”, “it’s dangerous” and “what about the jobs”–are familiar from every other state, only applied to different services.

Once we got familiar with self-pumping it didn’t seem like a problem, but it’s surprising we ever got self-pumping as it would have been easy to scare people into voting no. After all, the case for trained gas pumpers is far stronger than for licensed barbers. Perhaps we were less risk averse and complacent in the past. I don’t think we could build the Hoover Dam today either.

It’s easier to scare than to inform and we fear losses more than we desire gains so collective decision-making defaults toward stasis.

We have innovations like Uber and Airbnb and many others only because entrepreneurs didn’t have to ask for permission. ...Demonstration is more powerful than imagination.

Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function.

...Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how engineering organizations can adopt a variant of the No Wrong Doors policy to directly connect folks with problems with the right team and information. Then the first contact point becomes a support system for navigating the bureaucracy successfully.

The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.

Over the past few months, I've found myself reasoning a little bit more deftly with each passing week. That's the only way I can think of to describe it - I've been connecting thoughts in disparate fields that have surprised myself, been speaking more fluently, and otherwise felt switched-on in a way that I haven't for a long, long time. A friend of many years stopped me to ask if I'm okay, and when I asked why, he said I sounded smarter.

...I [recently] popped open my old Master's thesis code. It's a deeply flawed piece of work for various reasons, ranging from my own inadequacies as a young engineer to my truly accursed university-bred workflow, but it looks astonishingly complex to me, to the degree that both the code and the actual text of the thesis look like they were written by someone ten times smarter than me. I dimly recall checking out a physical copy of Mardia and Jupp's Directional Statistics which does appear in the citations of the paper, but was there really a point in 2019 where, instead of blearily reading over the pandas documentation to deliver a report no one is going to read, I was so concerned with how to write an expectation-maximization algorithm from scratch to estimate the parameters of mixed von Mises distributions that I checked out a physical book? That sounds like some fucking nonsense they'd say in Star Trek right before explaining why the warp core is about to overload for the tenth time that season.

Then it clicked. The feeling of suddenly feeling smart was just reclaiming the intellectual life that the corporate world demanded I sacrifice. I used to spend huge numbers of hours reading, to the point that my poor, despairing parents used to tell me off for developing a strange left-handed claw-grip that I would use to manipulate books during meals, and I kept reading all the way through university. The fact that I was giving this up never occurred to me because "you'll be too tired to read something complex" isn't in the contract I signed with my first employer, it's just sort of baked into the fabric of the universe at all but the greatest workplaces. Reading slowly dropped off until it wasn't happening at all, not even for something useful! Just to stare at a screen then go home.

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Whenever you wonder what it's like at a big company... sometimes, it's like this! And, hey, sometimes it's even worse!

As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones – the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file.

'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.'