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    Understanding how bureaucracy develops

    (dhruvmethi.substack.com)
    192 points dhruvmethi | 12 comments | | HN request time: 0.906s | source | bottom
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    sevensor ◴[] No.41889622[source]
    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.”
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    1. schmidtleonard ◴[] No.41891032[source]
    Just one tiny problem: I've played the blame game before. I've worked there. You can't sell me the greener grass on the other side of the road because I've been to the other side of the road and I know the grass there is actually 90% trampled mud and goose shit.

    The blame game drives the exact same bureaucratization process, but faster, because all of the most capable and powerful players have a personal incentive to create insulating processes / excuses that prevent them from winding up holding the bag. Everyone in this thread at time of writing is gleefully indulging in wishful thinking about finally being able to hold the team underperformer accountable, but these expectations are unrealistic. Highly productive individuals do not tend to win the blame game because their inclinations are the exact opposite of the winning strategy. The winning strategy is not to be productive, it's to maximize safety margin, which means minimizing responsibility and maximizing barriers to anyone who might ask anything of you. Bureaucracy goes up, not down, and anyone who tries to be productive in this environment gets punished for it.

    "Blaming the system" doesn't prevent bureaucracy from accumulating, obviously, but it does prevent it from accumulating in this particular way and for this particular reason.

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    2. tdeck ◴[] No.41891203[source]
    This also multiplies with hierarchy. In a blame-based culture, your manager is partly to blame for what you do. Their manager is partly to blame for what your manager does. Therefore everyone in a reporting chain is incentivized through fear to double check your work. That means more sign-off and review and approval processes so that people can avoid any kind of fuckup, and it also often means a toxic environment where everyone is spending at least 20% of their brain power worrying about internal optics which in my experience is not a good thing for people engaged in creative work.
    3. Spivak ◴[] No.41893243[source]
    Thank you! A blame focused culture rewards the least amount of risk taking, the most ass covering, and so much useless bureaucracy because you naturally accumulate systems to convert individual blame to collective blame like change review boards and multiple sign-offs for everything. Folks do the bare minimum because that's the safe subset.

    I'm never going back to that kind of culture, it's soul crushing.

    4. ◴[] No.41893666[source]
    5. yunohn ◴[] No.41894745[source]
    Yep, this is accurate IME.

    In modern corporate blameless culture, nobody takes the blame. Now this has its own variety of issues, it’s not perfect. But if you look at blame culture, then exactly like OP said, you have to stop building and start protecting. You know who has time for that? The underperforming lazy employee.

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    6. willcipriano ◴[] No.41894956[source]
    People who aren't the getting blamed all the time call it accountability culture rather than blame culture.

    Some people want to be holding the bag, if the bag is full of money. All risk no reward won't attract accountable people.

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    7. ryandrake ◴[] No.41895601[source]
    This is why CEOs and other very senior leadership people have no problem accepting “blame.” Because their contracts are set up so they get even richer no matter what they do! If your company does well, the CEO takes credit and becomes even more fabulously wealthy. If your company does poorly, the CEO takes the blame and leaves on a golden parachute, becoming only moderately more wealthy. Either way, they become more wealthy.

    If screwing up my job meant getting fired with a $5M golden parachute, I would be more than happy to be assigned individual blame!

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    8. scott_w ◴[] No.41895624[source]
    I want to offer a mild counter which is that blameless post mortems shouldn’t mean people escape accountability for misconduct. Only that we focus on how to improve systems.

    If, as an accountable leader, you realise that someone ignored the processes and protections, you still have the right to hold them accountable for that. If someone is being lazy, it’s your job to identify that and fire that person.

    I won’t pretend it’s easy, and I fully appreciate organisations struggle to make that happen for the reasons you and the article raise.

    replies(1): >>41895659 #
    9. yunohn ◴[] No.41895659{3}[source]
    I’m not advocating for avoiding accountability for misconduct/malice - but in most companies, things are convoluted enough that individual blame is often misplaced, one is always juggling various limitations and issues trying to deliver.

    However, the broader problem I have with blame-focus is that it only applies to Individual Contributor roles. I’ve never heard of middle management being held accountable for any actions whatsoever. And obviously not for less “egregious” misconduct like toxicity, workload, favoritism, etc. Heck middle managers can be completely ignorant of their reports’ actual work and survive for decades.

    In my experience at FAANG, the worst of managers will get reassigned to a different team, and maybe have their promotion delayed. Occasionally, I’ve seen VPs get put on nearly a year of gardening leave after major misconduct like sexual harassment - and then they leave and become a C level at a smaller company. And of course, CEOs are fired only for complete mismanagement and company failure - and that’s a very high bar and can take forever until shareholders loudly complain.

    Basically, my point is that you can only blame the actual workers at the end of the chain - everyone else along the way is easily shielded and escapes blame.

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    10. scott_w ◴[] No.41896238{4}[source]
    > I’m not advocating for avoiding accountability for misconduct/malice - but in most companies, things are convoluted enough that individual blame is often misplaced, one is always juggling various limitations and issues trying to deliver.

    I didn’t think you were advocating for the situation that occurs. I was merely proposing that “blameless” processes are possibly mis-assigned blame (heh) for company cultures that become centred around ducking accountability.

    11. potato3732842 ◴[] No.41903499{3}[source]
    CEOs get way f-ing richer when they succeed than they do when they pull the golden parachute cord.

    Everyone's time is finite. Would you rather spend a few years to make high five figures slogging through a failure of mid 6s succeeding? It's the same mental calculation but with more 0s in to the left of the decimal.

    12. rightbyte ◴[] No.41905283[source]
    > The winning strategy is not to be productive, it's to maximize safety margin, which means minimizing responsibility and maximizing barriers to anyone who might ask anything of you.

    Ye. You quickly learn that with Scrum. Pad alot and report the amount of hours estimated at an even pace. Make the burn down line straight.

    People doing actual work have a big disadvantage versus those that put their time into manipulating the setup, if the bosses are oblivious. It is really frustrating as a newgrad until you realize how it is done.