Calling a bureaucrat by its name

Calling a bureaucrat by its name
scottlocklin.wordpress.com

    Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats.

    Such people are not  engineers in any normal definition of the word; they’re dealing with plumbing and protocol and social problems which come about from large groups of people. 

Professional Engineering is almost entirely procedure and paperwork, documenting, ordering, checking specifications, identifying responsibility via chain of evidence, etc.

Big Engineering projects (eg: the multi year UK rail transport expansion, the London sewer mega build (both the original and the recent upscaling), etc.) require truly vast amounts of attention to detail to eventually complete.

Small engineering projects like building or safely removing bridges are very much the same; the work of an Engineer isn't to weild a spanner or press a plunger after cutting away steel to weaken a structure, it's to make a plan, order the ducks and line all the ducks up, to have a diagram of what steel to cut in what order (for both construction and demolition).

And, (and this is quite the thing), to be responsible in the case of resource over runs and|or lives lost.

Scott here has quite the romantic view of engineering, for Scott it seems that real engineering is all about single person | small team total control just have at it hacking about.

Don't get me wrong here, I love doing that - but that kind of activity is (to steal a quote from the author) not engineering in the normal several decades old definition of the word.

"Bureaucrats are also almost universally reviled for their lack of accountability and the lack of pride in their work. While there certainly have been great men; leaders who were great bureaucrats (Napoleon), they’re mostly seen as mostly a caste of sniveling eunuchs who flee from taking responsibility or attempting to make things better or taking any risks, even when that is in their job description."

This is very, very inaccurate. Criticism of bureaucrats starts with the 1960s. While you can find an occasional novel or story that critiqued some aspects of bureaucracy (arguably some of Kafka's work, also maybe Bartleby, the Scrivener, though that is mostly seen as a critique of alienation, rather than bureaucracy per se) the rise of the "bureaucracy sucks" as a genre can be dated to the 1960s.

Others often make this point, but you can really judge the cultural transition by the careers of leading business commentators, such as Peter Drucker. In 1946 he published his study of General Motors, the book Concept of the Corporation. In it, he examined the large bureaucracy at General Motors and celebrated it as the pinnacle of human civilization, the absolute peak of what the last 6,000 years of civilization had all been building up to.

Drucker was not alone. In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith published "The Affluent Society." A part of the book emphasizes the idea that "If we want to accomplish big things then we need big organizations." Once again, the book implies that large bureaucracies represent our success as a civilization, and those bureaucracies are what enabled that success.

Starting in the 1960s, there is a tremendous cultural backlash against bureaucracy. We are still living with that backlash today. It is noteworthy that the cultural backlash has not had a real world result nearly as significant as the cultural result: that is, bureaucracies have continued to grow, even as they have faced relentless criticism for 60 years now.

In my own consulting work, I've seen multiple promising startups fail because the founders were afraid of "becoming bureaucratic." I've seen other companies survive but never live up to their full potential because the CEO never set out to build a beautiful bureaucracy. My own sense is that the backlash against bureaucracy must come to an end at some point soon, because too much potential is being wasted by the lack of bureaucracy. At some point, business leaders must again commit themselves to building big, ambitious, beautiful bureaucracies, so they can capture the full potential of the organizations they are running.

In other words: it's unclear to me that he's qualified to make blanket statements about what "real" engineering is; his closest professional qualification is being a consultant with limited long-term responsibilities. I say this as someone who is also a consultant.