Hacking the bureaucracy to get stuff done (2020)
zainrizvi.io
zainrizvi.io
You'd be amazed how many things you can do - physical things you do with your hands, like, say, turning a storage room into an office, a thing I actually did - if you just ignore people telling you you aren't allowed to. If you ask the question "what will happen if I ignore this policy", and the answer is not "I will get a pay cut" or "I will get fired," then the policy in question isn't actually a policy. It's just a suggestion.
Figuring your management's pain points is also very very helpful. I work in a building with metal walls and no windows. As a consequence we get no cell service in the building. We've been asking for cell repeaters for nearly fifteen years; we were always told "we can't do that, it's a personal service provided to employees, we can't pay for personal services."
Eventually the fire alarm went out - for 18 MONTHS. During a lab wide conference call I pointed out that in case of a fire there was no way to alert employees in the building. They said "we'll send cell phone alerts", and I replied that as they knew, because I had been telling them every year for fifteen years, there was no cell service in the building, and that this was a lawsuit waiting for the next building fire.
Guess what is being installed as we speak?
The building itself is "owned" by a separate part of the government than the part that actually sits in it (and this is almost always true, no matter what part of the government you're talking about). As a consequence, getting the building fixed requires coordinating someone else's budget and personnel. Whereas installing unofficial cell repeaters can come out of your own budget, specifically because they're unofficial.
I like to phrase this as "never think you need permission to do a good job", but it's ever so true.
You pretend to forget about the policy, and they pretend to tell you off for it, and you pretend to be remorseful.
It sucks, but it's the effective way to do business in a bureaucracy.
District IT policy prohibits teachers from connecting their phones to the school wifi network (along with many other frivolously absurd IT policies).
For three years, I have sent email to various administrators, including to the school superintendent, pointing out how dangerous it is for teachers to have no cell signal, especially if there is an emergency such as an active shooter or whatever. Beyond a polite response promising that it'll will be "looked in to," nothing has come of my messages.
Last week, teachers across the district were told that they are soon to be required to use 2FA using their personal cell phones to authenticate to the school network for email, grading software, etc.
I have no idea how this will be able to work at her school.
I know everyone has a phone nowadays but the business should really be paying at least part of the cost for those devices.
Same with working from home.
School administrators aren’t capable of giving you more cell signal though. Those microcells don’t work that well and are specific to your carrier, I think? Complain to the carrier.
The 2FA is text but should be authenticator.
This! Doesn't matter what the "company" does, gives information to SEC, publishes Ads at the newspaper. A company is made of people - for good and bad.
It's important to remember when you are an individual you aren't the company. You typically hold no equity in the company, unless you are lucky enough to have it included in the benefits of certain professional and executive positions.
No the company is carefully constructed to make sure you aren't in it. You are a resource FOR the company, not part of the company.
But if your cell signal suddenly goes from zero bars to three bars in the building, nobody is the wiser.
I presume if no one is ratting you out for the repeater they're not going to rat you out for the fire alarm, and even if they do the consequences can't be worse for fixing a life-saving alarm vs a possibly frivelous repeater.
It's worth noting that a) this is a very complicated fire alarm, and fixing it is neither inexpensive nor easy; and b) the issue of warning employees applies to lots of non-fire emergencies. Such as an active shooter event.
If you work somewhere where a thesis is required to fix a fucking broken fire alarm, I don't know what to say, that just isn't the right environment the thrive in.
They do. Companies cannot be charged with criminal offenses, so "when a company is convicted of a felony" describes a non-event. Only humans can be charged and convicted of criminal misconduct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_convicted_of...
>Volkswagen AG (VW) has agreed to plead guilty to three criminal felony counts
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/volkswagen-ag-agrees-plead-gu...
>A four-count felony criminal information was filed today in federal court in the Eastern District of New York charging HSBC with willfully failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program,
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bae-systems-plc-pleads-guilty...
>Q. Can a corporation be held criminally liable in the same way as an individual can be held liable?
>A. Yes. A corporation can be prosecuted for essentially all of the same crimes as individuals and, if proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, convicted of felonies and misdemeanors.
https://www.mololamken.com/assets/htmldocuments/FAQs%20-%20C...
In quite a few criminal cases, but not all, the company was charged without any individual being held criminally liable.
>If there is no company then why don't individuals become felons when a company is convicted of a felony?
Convicting a mid-level manager of murder because he turned a valve on, when they to the best of their knowledge, had no idea it would result in 100 people dying in a fire would also not be justice - at least if the necessary records got lost by some lower level functionary somewhere else, and it never got fixed because an exec somewhere was prioritizing some other work elsewhere without having the records of how bad it was.
PG&E has 26,000 employees. Even with as screwed up as it is, the problem is the organization itself. Putting all 26k people in jail doesn't solve the problem either.
YUP. I first heard of it as "UOD" = "Unless Otherwise Directed".
Extremely useful, as in politely explain the basic reasoning and "UOD, I'll be implementing X, Y,, and Z starting Thursday..." make sure everyone gets that message and proceed. Works both within organizations and even with partners and customers. I also can't say I've ever heard a complaint when it was used.
The point is to present a solution and give them the chance to just say "GO" or "Woah" instead of handing them a problem with the expectation to work through it with you.
Moreover, the point of just notifying the "UOD, ..." is to minimize getting entangled in the bureaucracy. Calls can often lead to either massive time-wasting for everyone in playing phone-tag, or escalation and further pointless delay which literally benefits no one.
Distracting other people from their tasks to get a definitive answer on an item where it is reasonable for me/you to make an executive decision and give them an opportunity to check it before implementing it is really most often best for everyone.
Now obviously, if it is a real unknown on a critical item where getting it wrong will really fork-up someone's week, then you call and nail down a hard answer and then document it in writing.
But, the point is that for a surprisingly large amount of stuff, "UOD, ..." works amazingly well for everyone — and I do mean everyone.
> Manager: “There’s not actually an uber limit”
When the Man exploits you by keeping you guessing about the expense policy, it's your moral imperative to spend as much of the Man's budget as you possibly can.
> I booked that distant hotel and took an uber everyday. Now here’s the kicker: the hotel + uber cost more than what I would have paid if I had gotten a hotel walking distance from the venue.
I ran into the same problem. All the decent hotel rooms near a customer site were booked up, so I bought a blanket from Target for $20 and slept in my car rather than sleep in a bug-infested motel for $100. I couldn't expense the blanket, though. (In the company's defense, I think this is due to tax laws making it too complicated for the company to allow, rather than any particular person's incompetence)
But that's technically fraud, heh.
The dynamics change dramatically when the company needs you more than you need them.
Instead of you having to fight them to get what you want, you can simply notify them that they’re not gonna get any more money out of you unless the problem is fixed, and leave the “fighting” to your contact at the company whose paycheck depends on people continuing to buy services from them.
After being a founder of a small startup, the adjustment back to corporate life has been difficult, and the instances where the company cannot behave logically as an organism really take an emotional tole.
If you go and try to circumvent the process, there is a chance you will find out.
A good summary of the whole article
Unless you have equity in the company, why would you waste time doing that?
Some are my clients, who may need my help BECAUSE their internal bureaucracy is causing them problems. One recent personal example: a company has a hiring freeze or other policy preventing them from hiring a new full time member, but they still require technical support, and have some budget for an "outside consultant" to get them through this period. I have no equity in this company, but I am still being paid by them and incentivized to work through their problem even when another internal department of theirs is blocking or otherwise complicating the process with bureaucracy.
There have been times where I need to provision something for less than $20 dollars on a company card... and to justify that cost, I have to hold multiple hour long meetings with multiple higher level employees attending and discussing. My agency is billing them at least $100 for my hour alone, meaning that holding the meeting and deciding not to spend said money has already cost them more than just spending the $20 even if that was a complete waste of $20 on an unnecessary service.
Another common example is working with my client's clients, usually large platform or service vendors. While I might not have direct equity in a provider, there is usually a high cost to re-platform or replace a key service, even with a near-equivalent provider, and so it makes sense for me to spend time trying to work with the original service provider even if they are difficult to work with.
In my previous career as a teacher I had to deal with a metric fuckton of school bureaucracy and administrators. Not sure why the education system around my area is so bloated with non-teaching administrative staff members; not sure how you can justify paying more people as "administrators" than ground level workers like teachers and custodians, but some places seem to have the opposite allocation of staff resources.
A wise company would make sure any consulting contract had a fixed $500 or whatever for "incidentals" - and if they weren't needed and the consultant pocked it, who cares?