The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. -- Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics
When I worked at Azure, one of the things I was responsible for was the "deep link" code to get to the management page for a resource.
So I became intimately familiar with Azure "resource ids". I could not for the life of me figure out why they were designed the way they were designed. They should have just been a random or custom alphanumeric hash/permalink. I asked my questions and raised my concerns internally but failed to get things fixed (politics is not my strong suit).
My most probable explanation for them was that they were designed by a mole Jeff Bezos had gotten into the Azure org to work on behalf of AWS.
I've read this five times now, and each time I read it I flip on whether it's a joke or some kind of (semi-)anonymous tip being leaked to a journalist through a pre-arranged drop site.
I understand your perspective. Thanks for sharing.
"Any sufficiently bureaucratic system is indistinguishable from a cabal of enemies"
Exactly like it is written. Have you ever been in a 100k+ employee corporation, which has thousands of suppliers?
I have and I do believe it is a pretty good description. Again and again the simplest tasks turn into monumental disasters, again and again you see incomprehensible "reorganizations", which break up functional structures and turn them into dysfunctional ones, again and again top management forces insane decisions, which everyone at the bottom knows do not work.
>I've recently started seeing bureaucratic organisations as a simple one-/few-cellular organisms. I.e. one person is smart and intelligent with 90 billion neurones contributing to its behaviour, but bureaucratic organisation with 1000 people is like an organism with 1000 neurons (or less).
That is not a good description at all. Bureaucracy happens because every single node is infinitely complex and responds to wildly different inputs.
I'm not sure that's a good description, either. Each bureaucracy has an "owner" - the person (or group of people) who decides how it should work. Bureaucracies that have an owner are highly functional, and we don't normally notice them. We notice, however, abandoned bureaucracies, where nobody even knows why and how this particular bureaucracy was designed and can't change it in response to the changing environment. That's where bureaucratic organizations start resembling kind of intelligent (yet stupid) organisms whose goals are not necessarily aligned with ours, but we have to live in the same world with them.
It's a refreshing thought to think about organisations as living creatures with their own "brain" and agenda. We are kinda so used to living among them. Perhaps living alongside AGI systems would not be drastically different from this experience.
For another pop culture reference, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals", Men In Black.
A non-Mac computer you mean? I bought a desktop in parts, which I assembled myself and installed Linux on it. I don't doubt there may be some hidden Microsoft tax somewhere in the stack but I certainly didn't pay any Windows license nor any other Microsoft software.