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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of the objections here aren't really bureaucracy in terms of government employees doing things. A lot of what people mean when they complain about "government bureaucracy" is really that it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks. So discussions on this tend to get confusing.

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Regular people (including me) think the same thing about why software projects take so long. In fact I consider engineering to be a form of bureaucracy. And I've had long conversations about it with friends who are developers, but it's still hard for an outsider to fully grasp why it's so hard. In turn, they can't understand why my job can't be replaced by AI.

Maybe there's an equivalent of Knoll's Law for non-media concepts.

Everything I know how to do is complicated and people don't understand why it's complicated. Everything else is obviously excess bureaucracy and could be done with a LLM running on a ZX80.

The reason bureaucracies seem efficient is that they must be able to (1) complete the mission reliably over long periods of time, in the face of (2) staff churn and loss, without (3) collapsing the first time a critical mass of experts leaves the org. This means you have to sacrifice systems that rely on the enthusiasm of "10x experts" in favor of systems that can reliably recruit talent (at GS salaries.) And this is before you get to the mountains of political crap placed on an org by elected leaders.

It is incredibly challenging to create orgs that reliably stay on-mission over many years.

Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

As for the terrible salaries and mountains of political crap, that's the real issue here. But these are changeable and shouldn't just be accepted as inevitable as is so often done by defenders of government bureaucracy.

> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Do they?

The first two results on Google for "government vs private efficiency" are https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publicati... and https://www.epsu.org/article/public-and-private-sector-effic..., which both suggest that it is a myth that companies are inherently more efficient than government.

It's also worth mentioning that governments and companies inherently must operate differently. Governments are not set up to recoup investment; in fact, proponents of small government (as opposed to no government) generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons" by funding initiatives and programs that fundamentally do not make sense for a single market player to address. I.e. government helps when there isn't a good path for a single market player to see a good/reliable economic and market-competitive return from their investment.

> The report examines evidence from nine sectors - electricity, health, waste management and water, prisons, buses, ports and airports, railways and telecom,.

Yeah, if you examine only utilities and monopolies they are not more efficient than the government. That's not a surprise because they don't face competition and are heavily politically controlled.

Do you have evidence suggesting a clear discrepancy in efficiency in other sectors?

Only every single interaction with the government I have ever had and the experience of everyone I know who works in industries where they have to deal with the government on a regular basis.

If lived experience is the only bar of evidence you will consider, there are plenty of stories of fraud, corruption and anti-competitive behavior in industry that have hurt real people. Insurance (duh), devs who get shafted by Apple store policies or other entities without recourse to a human, outright scams and spam i.e. cryptodumps, every major game release that seems to either get delayed or released with show-stopping bugs, etc

EDIT: s/accept/consider

I think once you join the workforce and are employed you'll start seeing some company inefficiencies.

I see it every day and it doesn't come close to the insanity of government

>> generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons"

Not anymore. Great many now believe that there should be no commons, that everything should be owned by someone and leased back to those who use it. Such people see it as the duty of government to efficiently disperse the commons to the highest bidders. Those bidders will then "protect" their asset by ensuring it is put to the highest economic use.

> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Have you… never worked for a large company? They’re incredibly inefficient! And also, the staff cost a whole lot more.

A profound number of companies fail every year and cease to exist, which is probably more inefficient (and also not an outcome that many would consider acceptable in a government context.)

Of the ones that survive[1], some may be more efficient, but whether they remain efficient, effective and extant in the long term is not a given.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Can you tell me which companies have run very, very large financial systems in the US for the last 250 years?

Efficiency and resiliency are generally at opposite ends of a spectrum. COVID supply chain disruptions demonstrated that in spades

> it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks

Sounds just like "enterprise" IT to me, tbh.

Leadership can reform enterprise IT, sometimes including staffing cuts while also improving productivity. I have personally seen this happen. It can actually get better.

This is why some people are optimistic about recent efforts at doing the same in government bureaucracy. It's possible to trend upwards.

I’ve seen that happen in government too: GDS. As a rule it does not though.

Leadership needs to be seen as both competent and trustworthy by employees to pull this off. Otherwise it’s the death spiral.

Sure, it's possible, but unlikely. And nobody ever notices or appreciates the efficient and effective goverment agencies.

Honestly the main problem is the fed gov has terrible pr.

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