Neil Fraser

For most of the past couple of decades I've been a software engineer at Google in California. Currently I'm working for New Voice in Switzerland. In my spare time I've created a mélange of open-source software. I've also built some rather unusual hardware. On rare occasions I've even been known to write something interesting.

Bureaucracy Thursday, 19 December 2024

Recently I needed to ship a robot glockenspiel from the Zurich office to myself at the Boston office for a conference, then back again. When I joined the company eighteen years ago, it would be a simple process: bring the package to the shipping department, fill in a form, done. However, doing so today is a bit different: four separate tickets needed to be filed, ten people were involved in the process, a part number for the glockenspiel had to be acquired, a week-long process was needed to determine its classification, five-year-old receipts for components had to be gathered for presentation during a video conference in order to establish the declaration value -- and after over a month of work we eventually ran out of time and the glockenspiel could not be shipped.

It must be stressed that there were no bad actors in this process. Everyone was competently doing their jobs. It was the process itself that was bad. There are three reasons why bureaucracy spirals out of control.

1. Rules accumulate. Every time someone makes a mistake, a rule is added to try to prevent its recurrence in the future. Hypothetical example: Someone mails a Kinder Surprise^[?] to the US, triggers a fine from US Customs, and from then on a review process is added to prevent Kinder Surprises from being shipped. The ever-increasing set of rules and reviews slows down the process for everyone. Rules are never removed, only added.

2. Externalized work. Every department is under pressure to scale up efficiently. For the shipping department, that means instead of having one of their own people handle each package, they create a process that employees can follow. The result is that a professional shipping agent no longer has to take 10 minutes per package to navigate the process. Instead, that work is externalized, resulting in random software engineers spending a month learning how to navigate international import/export regulations.

3. Insulated managers. The only people with the power to put the brakes on runaway bureaucracy outside their own departments would be senior management. But these people never encounter this bureaucracy since they all have executive assistants whose job is to shield them from tedium.

I'm using shipping a package as an example, but the same pattern permeates every task. It shouldn't take six months to open a hole in a firewall. It shouldn't take a project review, a legal review, a security review, a privacy review, and a management review just to change from one server to another. Managers do notice the slow drop in productivity, but they usually blame things that are top-of-mind, such as work-from-home.

I deeply miss the amazing company that I joined back in 2006. Engineers were free to work and innovate. But after nearly 18 years of steadily increasing bureaucracy and steadily decreasing accomplishments, I'm now working at New Voice. It's a small Swiss company that handles alarms in hospitals, industry, and other organizations. The best part of this job is that if I need to send a package, I just walk to the post office.

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