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Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

> Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too.

I am curious about others' track record doing this.

My employer (a university) recently started enforcing a certain rule making us fill out more paperwork. I emailed the person responsible, and did my best to be polite, but basically asked "Is this really necessary?"

This provoked a very negative response. All I accomplished was to generate ill will, to piss off everyone involved (including myself), and to take everyone's attention away from their jobs. I felt like a fool.

I'm reminded of PG's quote that "rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience". To fight bullshit is to focus my mental energy on bullshit, and I wonder if it would have been better to make the minimum effort needed to comply, and move on. Perhaps others fared better?

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"a university"

Your problem is that you are an indeterminate number of iterations deep into people not fighting bureaucracy, and now it has completely metastasized. The number of administrators at universities is so ludicrously high that I have to imagine on some level the vast majority of them are aware of how useless they really are, and as such, the removal of bureaucracy is an existential threat to their job.

Consider this an object lesson in the importance of preventing this systematic failure from occurring as early and as often as possible.

In this particular case, yes, the correct choice is to bend like the willow and move on with life. Not only can you not defeat this process, the rewards for victory would be negligible. If the degree of fatalism that seems to entail is too much, consider changing jobs. Contrary to the loud people on the internet, there are jobs that are not just bureaucratic garbage, but you're not going to find them at a university. (They do have some jobs that are important by any measure, and if you value what you are doing because you have one of them, then by all means stay if you like, but they will pretty much all be encrusted with garbage as part of the price of entry.)

> jobs that are not just bureaucratic garbage

I would say that most of my job is very much not bureaucratic garbage. (I love research and teaching.) I just hope it stays that way.

In that case, I would say this even more suggests bending like a willow.

But I would suggest putting your finger in the air every year or two. The creep of bureaucratic garbage in the university system has been monotonic in the past several decades, sadly.

I'm not advising anything I don't do myself; frankly I advise everyone to have their finger in the air every year or two. Places change. I've been where I am for quite a while, actually, I'm not a job hopper at all, but only because my job keeps proving itself to me, not mere inertia.

In the meantime, enjoy it as much as you can! I may sound really cynical here, but I actually don't mean it that way. This is a long-term strategy designed to maximize my chances of enjoying my job on a succession of short-term bases. Once you have that enjoyable job by all means enjoy it, and hope it will continue... just don't count on it continuing.

I think maybe your problem was starting the conversation with the form custodian. Their job is the form. They understand the form. They like the form.

I think you have to go up a level to have a chance of those conversations going anywhere. Someone with a little more perspective can go “oh yeah, shoot, good point that concern is OBE we really don’t need to be using that form.”

OBE?

I think it’s important to understand the context you’re operating in. Universities are highly bureaucratic organizations. This is not an entirely bad thing; we don’t actually want them to operate like startups (for instance we expect them to prioritize longevity over risk-taking: we expect them to preserve capital, etc). It doesn’t mean you did a bad thing - perhaps you were correct, although it’s also possible that what seems unnecessary to you is necessary for some other reason you’re not aware of.

What concerns me is that everyone got angry including you. I might suggest reflecting on that a little bit. Is there a path where you didn’t get your way but you also didn’t get upset? And where you didn’t upset anyone else? If not, then accepting you work for a bureaucracy is one possibility, and if you dislike that, you could work for a nimble startup instead. The tradeoff is you won’t have a pension. ;)

> what seems unnecessary to you is necessary for some other reason you’re not aware of.

In this case this was more-or-less true. As my counterpart in HR explained, there are federal government rules mandating this bit of bureaucracy. Of course, one can presumably get away with ignoring them... but, as it turns out, the rules weren't something she made up.

> Is there a path where you didn’t get your way but you also didn’t get upset? And where you didn’t upset anyone else?

If her response was "Sorry, I realize this is annoying, but [explanation]", then certainly."

Given the tone of her response, then in principle still yes, but it seems to require a lot of mental fortitude. Kind of like how a skilled boxer can take a punch in the ring and remain basically unfazed.

"we don’t actually want them to operate like startups (for instance we expect them to prioritize longevity over risk-taking: we expect them to preserve capital, etc)".

I'm not sure you need bureaucracy to do this? It is just the easiest and laziest way to do it. Adding processes that are by design wasteful as an attempt to slow down change is perhaps the most inefficient way of getting to that goal. It would be much more efficient to just have far far far less people with far more responsibility and work to do. That combination would be equally slow at less cost.

Bureaucracy is very very difficult to fight if you are not in charge, and conversely wasteful bureaucracy is almost entirely in the domain of fault of the person in charge ( the CEO, the President, etc of a company).

If you are in charge, you can stop it. I do it all the time, and I rather enjoy when someone tells me I need to fill out a useless outdated form to do something, and I say 'So, if I don't, do I get fired?'. The answer is either 'yes, you will', or 'no... um.. I guess this might not really be needed.'

The message to eliminated wasted time and wasted process has to come from the very top, with such authority and clarity that it leaves no room for 'that is how we have always done it'.

Yeah, it's good advice if you're CEO, if you're not you better have nothing to lose and be willing to leave the job even if you think you are a good diplomat. I think your last sentence is often the only play, do just exactly what you need to do to appear to be all in and a model supporter of the "initiative" without putting any real effort in to it. But it's also a skill to know when you can, and when you can't change a course of action. Sometimes something silly is happening that no one cares about and you can just change it by speaking up and taking ownership of it.

Well, the rub of that quote (seen in isolation at least) is that it's still less stupid.

I think with stuff like this, you can make an earnest attempt to understand why it's necessary, but it's on them to, if not convince you, at least convince you that they have reasons to believe it's necessary.

Everybody has their role to play, and these people are at least ostensibly hired so that you don't have to waste your energy understanding and problem solving certain things like compliance, process, etc. But as someone who's worked in admin for some very flat organisations, i.e., organisations with allergies to beaurocratic procedure, I've always seen it as important that the people subjected to my next brainchild at least have a feeling that I know what I'm doing.

I haven't seen the email thread, but failing to do that and responding negatively is a failing on their part. That said, admin can feel like hearding cats nost days, and sometimes a "polite enquiry into the necessity of a procedure" isn't just a polite request for clarification, but a threat to make the next 6 months of your work a living hell because people refuse to follow something you need to get your work done.

So I guess the prescription in those cases is cognitive empathy and finding the right tone. On both sides.

Fighting is risky, it’s damaging, it’s hard and you’re gonna come out bruised.

It’s not a fight if someone just says yes.

You might not be properly armed. In that case the correct move might be to build your arsenal, recruit allies, etc before attacking

I've personally decided to minimally comply. Sometimes I'll just skip steps and if no one calls me out on it then great. If they do... Well, I guess I have to waste more time. Easier to ask forgiveness and all that.

I often call bullshit out when I see it with little regard to the consequences, because it just goes against every fiber of my being - but when I call it out, I try to show evidence as to how it's bullshit, and if possible a better way to approach a problem said bullshit is trying to solve. That way I don't just tell people I don't like something, I also present evidence as to why and potentially a solution. Seems like people are more inclined to see your POV this way and not feel attacked.

> > Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too.

>I am curious about others' track record doing this.

I nearly lost my job fighting bullshit and bureaucracy at my current gig and have been relegated to a small corner of the business where I am unable to call out the incessant nonsense coming from the vast army of project managers and other professional meeting attenders that have infected this place. At 54 I’m past my sell-by date from new projects and customers, so my only option is to take the daily humiliation so I can keep paying the rent.

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