Bureaucrat Mode
andrewchen.substack.com
andrewchen.substack.com
Original link:
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
7. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reason-able" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
I'm just imagining a would-be saboteur convincing civil rights activists to be cautious about a bus boycott, and those activists doing just that and waiting until Rosa Parks got arrested to organize the boycott. I bet that poor operative got a real talking-to back at Langley!
But yeah, in the context of Cold War escalation of tensions number 7 makes a whole lot of sense.
When you're at the point of literally situating "founder mode" as the opposite of the CIA's strategy for disrupting activist groups, you're probably a step past even "received wisdom".
There's an obvious failure mode for 3rd-hand analyses like these: for years hapless dingbat founders tried to cargo cult Jobs and Gates success by just deliberately being assholes. This isn't quite that, but you can see where the wind is blowing.
† The Graham post that kicked off "founder mode" was in part a report on a recent private talk about things Brian Chesky had done to improve AirBNB's performance.
I own an extremely profitable small business and no one can understand it. It's really just... not like what anything says. My children can take it over, or not, and it doesn't even matter, because I built it and the business will never be a public company and they will get everything when my wife and I die. And it will exist in perpetuity because of reasons, mostly because of the government being the government.
So much advice here is obtuse. I wish I could shake people but no one ever understands.
There's a reason that founder mode is a contrast to the way Airbnb worked in the recent past, despite continuity of the founding team over that timespan. Context is everything, even for the best ideas.
> In Europe however… :)
It is fascinating how some people have the tendency to, when made very angry about something, find solace and comfort in writing missives about the superiority of their minds and ideals. It can sometimes result in a pleasant cross between evergreen internet quotes “don’t put in the paper that I was mad” and “in this moment I am euphoric… because I am enlightened by my own intelligence”
I think many Americans believe that because the American government is slow, unresponsive and generally painful that all governments must be this way. As a counterexample I would like to suggest Singapore, which has an online visa process (traveler visa) which was a breeze to follow and was approved in under 2 days. Compare that to the US legal immigration system (USCIS) which if you ever have the misfortune of dealing with, is a nightmare to navigate.
The government needs a UX department to streamline all of the painful processes it has. Make it easy to follow the law.
The US version of a traveler visa, ESTA, gets approved in a matter of hours after you apply online. The fastest I got it was 30min at an Italian airport a few years ago when they blocked me from boarding because my old one expired and I didn’t notice. Still made it onto the same flight.
If you aren't ESTA, you need to pay lots of money and undergo an in-person interview at a US embassy. This can take months to arrange, as embassy slots are scarce, plus you need to make travel arrangements to be in a city with a US embassy.
If you are ESTA, you can apply for the visa online and be done with it in 10 minutes.
It is very clear that if the US wants you in the country, they can make it happen very easily.
Sometimes the pain is a feature.
When I needed to get my US passport renewed, there were no appointments available in my state for the next 2 months. I had to fly to another state. I would love to know which “modern government idea” is preventing them from scaling up the service to meet demand. No, this is simply a symptom of neglect and indifference.
1. doing anything that would pose an existential threat to the fiefdom,
2. starting any project that would be the fiefdom's ultimate responsibility to deliver upon,
3. reorganizing in a way that would cause the the fiefdom's "slack", or continued underperformance (compared to the organization's usually-unrealistic expectations) to be made more legible,
4. doing anything to equalize and redistribute any special advantages that come with the fiefdom's existing responsibilities,
...and so forth.
The CIA sabotage manual applies perfectly to the usual sort of bureaucratic organization full of such fiefdoms, as such fiefdoms use exactly these techniques to prevent the projects that would threaten them from moving forward (at anything beyond a glacial pace.)
> There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company.
PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.
The best way we know of doing this is to put them in competition with one another and make sure there are at least a dozen. Keep barriers to entry low enough that if the incumbents suck, someone new can eat their lunch.
The bureaucracies, of course, want the opposite. A monopoly that allows them to dictate terms and extract rents, or failing that at least a concentrated cartel that can coordinate behind closed doors or through conscious parallelism. Inhibiting that is the way to achieve the desired result.
The bureaucracies can't do it internally because a bureaucracy without external competitive pressure has no internal incentive to improve efficiency to counter the intrinsic incentive for bureaucrats to capture and redirect surplus to protect and accumulate power.
I mostly agree with this, but there are a lot of failure modes that are known and should be avoided. e.g. running an incentive structure where success is not rewarded and failure is not punished. This broken structure seems to be the default in bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats won't see a cent if they find a more efficient way to do things. In fact, they will be punished with lower budgets.
The majority of the time, bureaucracies aren't prescriptive, a structure imposed; but rather, they're descriptive — that is, they're just the abstraction we use to talk about what is actually a bunch of pre-existing special-interest groups, groups that would continue to exist whether or not there were an organizational label to collect them all into.
For example, what is a municipal government, but a bureaucracy that evolves out of conflicting special-interest groups, with each top-level city-council seat beholden mostly to some particular special-interest group?
The NIMBY gridlock in most cities can be blamed, in some sense, on "bureaucracy" — but only in the sense that there is an explicit NIMBY interest group that holds many council seats through representatives, and which cannot be organizationally engineered out of existence. The NIMBY home-owners make up a large proportion of voters — and so hold power as a voting bloc — and this holds whether they are directly represented by a party that agrees with them, or whether they are just bribing some other party to implicitly do things their way in order to get their votes. And in the case of NIMBYs, "doing things their way" is exactly "doing all that sabotage-manual stuff, to create bureaucratic gridlock, to block any attempt to fix or improve the city that would come at the expense of the asset-value of homes."
There's no technology that can "fix" the problem of the majority of an organization being composed of groups with fundamentally opposed ideologies, with groups seeing the other groups in the organization as likely to fundamentally destroy the things they hold dear if allowed, and where the fundamental tool these group see as available to resist what they see as "regressive change", is degradation of the process of change itself, though such organizational-process sabotage. Make the organizational process more efficient, and you just enable the sabotage to happen faster. (It's a bit like accelerating an AI, just translating into it deciding to refuse you faster.)
And to be clear, I am not just saying that polities and their democratic proxies are like this; I am saying that most organizations are like this. Most orgs are inherently, definitionally made up of such fundamentally ideologically-opposed factions. Yes, even if you hire them to work in explicit alignment with one-another.
It’s comparing apples with…an olive tree?
US immigration process - among the countries one would care to immigrate to, of course - is much better designed than most countries. In fact, there are very clear paths one can follow, with very clear steps. Not everyone can qualify, sure, but it’s not complicated or bad. There may be complicated paths for those who don’t readily qualify but immigration lawyers think they can make a case, which is pretty much unheard of for other countries. They simply have no one to even process an out-of-band case.
I asked to reschedule a citizenship appointment because I had COVID and they had specifically instructed to do so in the case of COVID. My wife said my case would fall through the cracks, and that I would never get an appointment. 2 phone calls - actual person looking into my case on the phone, much better experience than most bank call centers - and I got a new appointment.
One gripe I had with the US greencard process was when they asked me to submit my vaccination records from 90s. I thought it was simply an impossible ask, and that was the end of that process for me. It would’ve been nice if they lead with “get these vaccinations OR bring proof of vaccination.” Obviously, I just got the shots and it was done.
Canada, NZ, and Australia may have better processes. But they also have much smaller volume and diversity of applications. Again, not quite the same fruit.
Simple sabotage for software (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695839 - June 2024 (75 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual – How to Destroy Your Organizations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36831946 - July 2023 (95 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448090 - April 2023 (129 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1945) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32356038 - Aug 2022 (3 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States Office of Strategic Services - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676964 - June 2022 (55 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070624 - April 2022 (8 comments)
Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597454 - Dec 2021 (209 comments)
1944 OSS Manual on How to Sabotage Productivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28507930 - Sept 2021 (5 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293804 - Feb 2021 (1 comment)
CIA's Declassified 1941 Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316292 - May 2020 (1 comment)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322041 - Feb 2020 (89 comments)
Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16045073 - Jan 2018 (36 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 - Aug 2017 (32 comments)
The CIA’s 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 - Aug 2016 (64 comments)
Updating classic workplace sabotage techniques - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702267 - May 2016 (280 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 - Nov 2015 (68 comments)
Declassified CIA documents detail how to sabotage employers, annoy bosses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490804 - Nov 2015 (21 comments)
How to make sure nothing gets done at work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393485 - Oct 2015 (3 comments)
Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 - Nov 2012 (67 comments)
From CIA: Timeless Tips for 'Simple Sabotage' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243649 - July 2012 (3 comments)
How We Beat the Nazis with Bureaucracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1398103 - June 2010 (22 comments)
WW2 "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" declassified [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905750 - Oct 2009 (6 comments)
OSS (pre-CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443 - Sept 2009 (29 comments)
Fascinating history though. They got kicked out of Micronesia in 1969, much similar to if the US just punted Detroit out of the US and it became the city-state of Detroit - in both cases drug-addled economic failures. The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip, and he said, "The beatings will continue until Singapore improves" and they've been delivering beatings, all day, every day, since then.
Never knew I'd see the day when Malaysia would be confused with Micronesia.
> The Mayor at the time, Kown Lee, cried on TV he was so distraught, then pulled together a stiff upper lip
Or Lee Kuan Yew with some random named Kown Lee.
When companies are founded, there must be people involved who can execute a large chunk of the value chain single handily (if not the entire thing). Like a restauranteer who can buy ingredients, cook them, put together an interesting menu, engage in entertaining chit-chat, knows how to advertise and is good with finances.
In a large company though accountability matters a lot more and comparative advantage becomes a factor. It is also hard to hire great generalists (50% chance someone has a specific skill, that combination above is already approaching 1:100, let alone being good at something). So you specialise - there is a procurement specialist, a chef, a menu designer, a hostess, etc, etc.
Shortly after that transition there are still old hands around in leadership positions who know the entire value chain, but they slowly leave the business. Eventually there is a group of subject matter experts who execute the known chain really efficiently but no longer have personal or even institutional knowledge of how to set up a valuable new process because they specialise (theory of comparative advantage style logic kicks in). At this point, the dictatorial centralised nature of the company becomes a problem. If change is required, it depends on a tiny pool of leaders who are personally unclear on how the thing they control works at the micro level because they don't have the skillset required to set up new businesses. The only safe option is to iterate on the existing process, the company simply isn't capable of radical change any more. Or if it is, success will be more of a fluke than a predictable thing.
If you just want to work at a startup, great, but if you want to work on a mission for more than a couple of years, that doesn’t work. You have to solve the emergence of collective self-interest, and just yelling “I am founder” will not help when most people hear that as the rantings of a disconnected CEO.
The idea that there is no good reason or value in those big bureacratic machines is equally naive as idea that it just has to be that way. Everything is case-by-case and 'big corpo ALWAYS bad' mentality is just stupid
In summary, leaders of major slices of the effort run their own show, merely informing the HMFIC, who retains veto power, regarding status.
> Command by negation first came into being on individual ships, where it made sense - a captain who delegated authority and exercised command by negation could easily monitor his staff and communicate with them because it was a small environment.
...which is more or less asymptotic to the pragmatism behind Agile methods advocating for smaller teams of competent individual contributors.
Followed by:
> Within wider naval engagements, however, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) still maintained a rigid control structure, because communications systems simply couldn't work efficiently enough to make loose and autonomous doctrines viable.
> The introduction of AEW&C systems, SOSUS and satellite-fed data risked overwhelming the OTC, and so forces were forced to shift towards granting individual commanders more autonomy - something that improved communications made possible.
I interpreted this as an intercommunication scalability problem exacerbated by adoption of new tech. Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month expressed this hazard as the n(n-1)/2 notional communication channels within a given team, to which effective segmentation (i.e. where command by negation comes into play) helps mitigate.
Bureaucracy is tool to manage large, complex, and heterogeneous systems. Ideally, efficient and effective bureaucracy goes unnoticed. Why can I plug my laptop into the power outlet anywhere in Miami or in Vancouver and it just works? Why can I drive on the right side of the road from Toronto to San Diego and be reasonably sure that everyone else will drive on the right side as well?
Because humans have self-organized into a multitude of governments, standards organizations, and corporations that all align to produce the same shape of power plug and teach compatible rules-of-the-road across vast geographical distances and unrelated communities. Without bureaucracy, we humans would not be capable of building a global society.
Pointing to broken, ineffective, and inefficient processes to scapegoat “the bureaucrat” reveals an ignorance of the underlying mechanisms that make human society function.
EDIT: To those of you downvoting this comment, please let me elaborate.
I am tired of the trope of the lazy bureaucrat because I refuse to believe that inefficient government and corporations are inevitable.
I do believe that we must strive for efficient and effective government to improve our society because the potential benefits are immense.
Those improvements must be driven by competent and qualified leaders who understand and foster the advantages that result from collaboration, communication, and making choices that benefit society as whole.
A failure of bureaucracy is a failure of leadership!
Because the status quo is that you’re a big successful entrenched organization.
They want you to be slow, predictable, reliable etc.
Based on his Linkedin profile, Andrew Chen has never worked in companies that are large enough to have most of the qualities. I have. For 20+ years now.
And the reason that these companies do things like check legal, brand and compliance before decisions or have committees or create complex approval workflows is because they need to.
Often they work in highly regulated environments or are in situations where not having the right people in the loop costs more and can be an existential risk to the company. And they always learn this the hard way. Just like Elon Musk has been learning every day with Twitter.
I don’t think the hacker/startup/founder persona is interested in going deeper. Because to their mind society should be very loosely coupled on all levels and that would just solve all such problems.
- OSS projects are small enough to have a “BDFL”
- Most things about companies are bad. But if they were small and not monopolistic they would be good
- Problems along the way are partially solved with disruption/geniuses of the gaps
The cooperation between all these very small entities would be fine. I don’t know. I don’t think it is often touched upon.
You shouldn’t hire a chess prodigy grand master to teach you chess. Probably. You probably want someone who is more in touch with what it feels like to be a beginner. Who at least has been there.
Similarly you don’t want sociological input from the hacker/startup/founder persona. They’ve already got it figured out. (Refer to Dilbert)
Not just that, most of them are “useless”. The median NPM package probably has zero downloads per month. That’s ok, it’s your time, so if you want to create a new terminal emulator for the heck of it I say go for it. But anarchy is hardly a perfect solution.
The most charitable reading of this situation, I think, is that the tech people routinely underestimate the leverage of even mediocre social technology vs. high-end computer-touching skill.
No. I've been there. It's absolutely awful.
Quite often those that "lead by conviction" are just narcissistic sociopaths. Their awful decisions are coated by a veneer of self-importance, and their conviction has no basis on reality.
Hell to the yes.
I have also worked at places where the leader was afraid of making critical decisions and tried too hard not to offend anyone.
Both are bad. Like most things in life, middle ground works best.
Remember: The powers that be forbid progress, as progress might disrupt the powers that be.
Mostly agree but would amend - what is actually forbidden is change. And since all progress involves change...you can fill out the rest.
Every bureaucracy ends up the same - serving only itself to preserve itself.