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Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

> that was their procedure so it was my fault for not complying

This is the most fascinating (infascinating? like, infamous/famous distinction? whatever) things about bureaucracies, to me: they sincerely expect everyone to follow their internal rules and procedures, even the people who are completely outside their jurisdiction by any stretch of imagination.

Like, "we require the application of your personal seal to the papers" — "Personal seal?.. we use signatures in this part of the world, you know" — "No, we don't accept signatures, it has to be a seal imprint" so then you just stamp some absolutely random rubber stamp and they accept it because even if they can't actually read Cyrillic, it's a stamp and that's all that matters.

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Oh, don't get me started on rubber stamps.

I taught at a German university for a few years. And they way grades were handled was, you had to print a standardized piece of paper for every student with their name, date of examination, and grade, and drop them off at the secretary's office.

The secretary would stamp every such Schein with a rubber stamp. Then the students would pick up their Scheine at the secretary's office and bring it to the examination department themselves (!) to get the grade registered. Only at the very of my time there, they changed the system and I could hand in the grades directly to the examination department.

At any rate, the system was so stupid. It was trivial for students to print a new Schein with a better grade and register that (there must have been a lot of fraud). But the counter argument was 'no, it's very safe because the students do not have a rubber stamp'. Of course, the rubber stamp was just the university logo with something like the faculty name next to it. Trivial to copy (or make a rubber stamp for more enterprising students).

Probably the procedure had been followed since 1573, well before home printers, scanners, phone cameras, or get-your-own-rubber-stamp-for-a-few-bucks internet shops.

> Probably the procedure had been followed since 1573, well before home printers, scanners, phone cameras, or get-your-own-rubber-stamp-for-a-few-bucks internet shops.

This is almost always how these seemingly silly bureaucracy hoops become established. They were created in a prior time where a third party obtaining "magic item Y" with which to authenticate was significantly difficult to near impossible. Then, over time, the world, and technology improve, to the point where anyone, willing to spend $9.99, can have an exact duplicate of "magic authentication item Y" manufactured via any one of 78 different makers. But the bureaucracy continues using the now outdated process because "this is the way it has always been done".

It is largely a real world example of "The Monkeys, Bananas and Ladder Experiment": https://psychologyfor.com/the-monkeys-bananas-and-ladder-exp...

I recently joined a very old company, with many lifers, I continuously run into this mentality. “I can’t explain it now, but I’m sure there was a good reason for it, so we’re gonna continue doing it this way”

Of course it is typically wise to consider Chesterton's fence.

The real issue is that most business just don't document anything to do with their processes. Chance are that there are a hand full of things that there are a good reason for doing and they do need to be done that way. Except the people that identified that original problem and came up with original solution have all left the company so now there is nobody around that has put in the effort (or been given the time to investigate) to figure out why things are done the way they are, and the last time one of the things that had been done forever was suddenly stopped it caused untold amount of chaos so now the directive is to just keep doing everything we've always done.

Per Chesterton's Fence, isn't this the right course of action for any individual who is unsure of why the practice was started?

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence

I like that fence, but I consider the best course of action to be going and finding out why the thing is done the eay it is, even if it necessitates careful investigation.

I'd wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of the best course of action. To the points raised in the conversation above: there is definitely too little understanding of the pattern and too much blind adherence to the pattern as a widespread institutional practice across many institutions.

I always understood chestertons to be that you should leave the fence there while you are investigating why its there and whether its still needed. Not blind "dont do anything"

The extension to that is making it illegal to own/buy/use 'magic item Y', on the basis it enables fraud.

When they could just cut out the middle man and just make fraud itself illegal and not require the magic item at all.

ARM had a huge headache when the CEO of their Chinese subsidiary stole the company seal and refused to give it back. That meant they effectively couldn't do business at all.

Ah, offloading the physical movement of papers between the offices onto the general populace... why don't they just mail each other directly, isn't the part of their job is to communicate with other offices? Lolnope.

Sometimes it becomes truly ridiculous: I once had to apply for some thing, and was told I need to grab and provide them some certificate from a different government service to prove that I'm actually eligible. Okay, I do that, and then they spend two weeks verifying the certificate by physically mailing and inquiring info about me from that other service and waiting for them to respond (also by physical mail).

Of course, the rubber stamp was just the university logo with something like the faculty name next to it. Trivial to copy (or make a rubber stamp for more enterprising students).

My entire career is predicted on the things I did with a stack of university letterhead 40 years ago.

Had something like this years ago when we were trying to get an EV code signing certificate from GoDaddy (for our Windows application).

They wanted a government issued identification document with both photograph of the individual as well as their physical address on it.

No such document exists for South Africans, I offered to get attestations from lawyers, police, but nothing was good enough.

Then I had to threaten charging back the credit card to get a refund (as opposed to credit) on the not-insubstantial fee for a service that their verification policies made impossible to be fulfilled by South African entities.

We succeeded with DigiCert, was a bit involved including getting sign off by a certified security consultant that we had appropriate procedures in place to protect the private key, but eventually got through the process.

I have had nothing but trouble with GoDaddy and their ridiculous identification routines. We've spent hours with (allegedly) real humans who will tell us "ok I've released the domain for transfer. It will be clear in about 30 minutes" (or whatever it is at the time) and it never is, and then we have to start the entire process over with a new rep. There are other reasons to hate them too, but I won't go on a rant :-D

My initial philosophy with GoDaddy was "as long as it works, it's good enough".

But generally happy to not be using them these days. I do our domain registrations through Namecheap and can't say I've ever had an issue with them, also had to interact with support on occasion and also no negative experiences there.

If something goes wrong and you followed the procedure, the chances you're getting fired are very low. If something goes wrong and it is discovered you didn't follow the procedure, the chances of you being assigned the blame and fired are very high. It doesn't matter how stupid the procedure is or what's at stake - 99.999% of people you'd be dealing with do not care if the bank as a whole loses business or money, but care very much whether or not they are getting in trouble. Following the procedure is the easiest way of CYA.

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