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.

There is the reason Haskell or F# are relatively unpopular and Go has a much wider footprint in the industry: high expertise levels don’t scale. You can hire 100 juniors but not 100 seniors all trained up in the same difficult abstractions.

Conversely, one skilled senior can often outperform a hundred juniors using simpler tools, but management just doesn’t see it that way.

Indeed, specialist knowledge is a real constraint, but I think it’s possible to at least _orient_ towards building systems that require no baseline level of skill (the fast food model I guess) or towards training your staff so they acquire the necessary level of skills to work with a less accessible system. I suspect that the second pathway results in higher productivity and achievement in the long term.

However, management tends to align with reducing the baseline level of skill, presumably because it’s convenient for various business reasons to have everyone be a replaceable “resource”, and to have new people quickly become productive without requiring expensive training.

Ironically, this is one of the factors that drives ever faster job hopping, which reinforces the need for replaceable “resources”, and on it goes.

Also there is no easy way for management to know if somebody has required level of skill.