All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people (2019)

Poof. Another Big Tech middle manager got their wings.

This cynical surrendering is not keeping bureaucracy at bay, at all. It's joining the bureaucracy and increasing its size. It is the bureaucracy.

At companies that have competent managers up and down the hierarchy, it doesn't have to be like this. Good work can be judged by good managers, and rewarded, without anyone having to play bureaucratic games. There are companies, mostly smaller, that work like this.

It seems to reliably fail as companies scale, but for each company it might fail at a different point. The longer competent management can be maintained, the better chance of the company succeeding in a big way.

But all it takes is one good manager hiring a bad manager and the whole thing can start to fall apart. Once the company culture starts to reward people for playing bureaucratic games more than doing good work, it becomes broken and dysfunctional. Diseased.

Everyone quickly realizes that the dynamic has shifted. That good work isn't rewarded any better than bad work that is well marketed internally.

And so the best people, who have the most confidence and ability, go to smaller/better companies that know how to reward the people that do the best work. The other people stay and settle in for long-term escalating bureaucratic warfare.

And these broken companies are left to fail or ride out the momentum generated before they were broken. All the while being miserable places to work.

It is keeping it at bay in the context of a team. My company is a company with seemingly more paperwork than the government (and I used to work in government).

Until a few weeks ago, I saw none of it as an individual developer (then we got individual specific paperwork and I looked at the required paperwork in the Google drive). A little digging turned up exactly why he doesn't have time to write code anymore. I would have called my company extremely low in bureaucracy before that.

How does that work? He is constantly in meetings with senior people. So my manager keeps the bureaucracy at bay from the perspective of me by joining it.

Elon said the best part is no part. Parts between systems, interfaces/valves/pumps/APIs/whatever, are often modelled not after what makes the most sense for the final system or product but often follows the organisational structure of the people making the system. So it makes sense that these interface parts are often what creates problems.

Ran into a lot of situations like this:

https://xkcd.com/1425/

The other common issue was that the non-technicals didn't grasp the need for absolutes and specificity. One common issue revolved around dates.

So we would get a ticket that "such and such permission should expire at a reasonable time on the date specified." Reasonable time was not defined and it turned out to be whenever the particular thing closed.

They would also forgot to list exceptions to that expiration policy, which the people doing it manually would have seen on the post-its this system replaced.