Understanding how bureaucracy develops

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.”

This is a wonderfully insightful comment!

I’ve encountered a similar phenomenon with regard to skill as well: people want to ensure that every part of the software system can be understood and operated by the least skilled members of the team (meaning completely inexperienced people).

But similarly to personal responsibility, it’s worth asking what the costs of that approach are, and why it is that we shouldn’t have either baseline expectations of skill or shouldn’t expect that some parts of the software system require higher levels of expertise.

I'm not sure I understand this position. What I hear is "obscure hard to understand code is good" but as others have said, code will be maintained and modified for years to come and not by the original author so making it easy to understand and follow is usually the recommendation. Even the original programmer will usually find it easier to understand their own code months or years later

Did you mean something else?