First they suggest that most computer programmers are bureaucrats:
> Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats.
Then they complain that Google is probably hiring bureaucrats, instead of real technical people:
> Do you think the extra 100,000 people Google hired over the last 5 years are actual engineers, or any kind of innovator? I’m willing to bet they’re all bureaucrats, and any of them would say “I work at a tech company doing tech things” and be indignant at being described as what they are: bureaucrats.
Well, if you re-define every job as "bureaucrat" then you automatically get the result that everyone you hire is a bureaucrat. The result is the consequence of how you've defined everything.
"Bureaucrats are also almost universally reviled for their lack of accountability and the lack of pride in their work. While there certainly have been great men; leaders who were great bureaucrats (Napoleon), they’re mostly seen as mostly a caste of sniveling eunuchs who flee from taking responsibility or attempting to make things better or taking any risks, even when that is in their job description."
This is very, very inaccurate. Criticism of bureaucrats starts with the 1960s. While you can find an occasional novel or story that critiqued some aspects of bureaucracy (arguably some of Kafka's work, also maybe Bartleby, the Scrivener, though that is mostly seen as a critique of alienation, rather than bureaucracy per se) the rise of the "bureaucracy sucks" as a genre can be dated to the 1960s.
Others often make this point, but you can really judge the cultural transition by the careers of leading business commentators, such as Peter Drucker. In 1946 he published his study of General Motors, the book Concept of the Corporation. In it, he examined the large bureaucracy at General Motors and celebrated it as the pinnacle of human civilization, the absolute peak of what the last 6,000 years of civilization had all been building up to.
Drucker was not alone. In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith published "The Affluent Society." A part of the book emphasizes the idea that "If we want to accomplish big things then we need big organizations." Once again, the book implies that large bureaucracies represent our success as a civilization, and those bureaucracies are what enabled that success.
Starting in the 1960s, there is a tremendous cultural backlash against bureaucracy. We are still living with that backlash today. It is noteworthy that the cultural backlash has not had a real world result nearly as significant as the cultural result: that is, bureaucracies have continued to grow, even as they have faced relentless criticism for 60 years now.
In my own consulting work, I've seen multiple promising startups fail because the founders were afraid of "becoming bureaucratic." I've seen other companies survive but never live up to their full potential because the CEO never set out to build a beautiful bureaucracy. My own sense is that the backlash against bureaucracy must come to an end at some point soon, because too much potential is being wasted by the lack of bureaucracy. At some point, business leaders must again commit themselves to building big, ambitious, beautiful bureaucracies, so they can capture the full potential of the organizations they are running.
Concur. Once an org knows what it’s good at, you need to start optimizing to scale. That means doing things that would have been counterproductive during the early exploratory work.
The phenomenon you describe is not constrained to the 60s. It happens during a collapse of the imperial order...usually when "the common folk" no longer experience the benefits of maintaining an imperial buercracy. When the military rebels against the court Eunichs in late Han China...with the French Revolution & the disparity written by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables almost a century later. When Charles Dickens describes the conditions of the poor. When many Hebrews rebelled against Roman authority.
Your work is about making companies more successful in this system & I'm sure you are quite effective at your job. However, many are left out with their wealth & agency transferred to these organizations.
The innovator creates a tide that rises all boats. That improves the quality of life for society at large. The bureaucrat administers the existing order. Order is a service that saves many lives but can become very expensive to maintain...eventually costing more than it's benefits, or the cost/benefits of an alternate system. Some systems are more effective than others in maintaining an empire or civilization. The feedback of growing antagonistim toward counterproductive beucracies should be an indicator or the health of an empire or society. Sometimes it's better to cut the Gordian knot of complexity & let the innovators reform the system, through buecratic innovations, tech innovations, & social innovations.
"It happens during a collapse of the imperial order.....with the French Revolution"
That is also ahistorical. In 1789 the court of King Louis XVI of France was struggling to find the money to pay for a bureaucracy of 500 people, but just 5 years later, in 1794, a revolutionary France had a bureaucracy of 5,000 people. The bureaucracy grew by a factor of 10 in just 5 years, thanks to the Revolution, which seized the property of the Church and sold it or taxed it, thus generating revenue that the King could never have dreamed of. The dramatic expansion of the bureaucracy almost allowed the French to catch up with the fast growing bureaucracy of Britain. Likewise, the Communist Revolution in Russia, after 1917, brought in a complex system of committees vastly more convoluted than anything the Tsar could have ever dreamed of. See here for some speculations on this theme:
I don't see how. The downstream evolution may have been the growth of bureaucracy, but was the impulse for the revolution caused by a desire to grow bureaucracy? I'm sure it has something to do with the over-production of elites who wanted a piece of the pie...but many of the "common folk" also went along. I doubt their intention was to have more bureaucrats. The sentiment was expressed as liberté, égalité, fraternité,. So, I think my point still stands. Also, the OP broadens the scope of bureaucracy, so I think he would also include the aristocrats & clergy in the ranks of the bureaucracy...in addition to the civil employees.
> which seized the property of the Church and sold it or taxed it, thus generating revenue that the King could never have dreamed of
I think this supports my point. When there is an influx of wealth, through honest or ill-gotten means (such as looting the Church...another bureaucracy), there is little scrutiny for having a large bureaucracy. When the ruling order is facing stress, then a bureaucracy is held under more scrutiny. The Chinese have a term, "the mandate of heaven", which is used to judge the ruling order. The moral is if the peoples' quality of life diminishes, the ruling order will lose it's legs to stand on.
Let's be honest here, the bureaucracy enforces the rules of the ruling order/ruler. The bureaucracy can take a life of it's own & can even become the ruling order. This happen with the court eunics in the late Han dynasty. Either way, the bureaucracy is a representation of the ruling order. When the ruling order loses the mandate of heaven, then the representations of the ruling order will face more scorn.
Btw, the eunics were scorned long before the dynasty collapsed...they just had enough power to punish the critics. Granted, there are many more complexities than having a monolithic bureaucratic bloc. There are different actors with different motivations. The eunics where a subset of the court bureaucracy who gained power through internal conflict. My criticism of the OP is that the author treats the bureaucracy as a single entity. It may be in effect to outsiders, but inside, many actors & factions compete for control...and I think bureaucratic innovation occurs.
It starts earlier than the 60s. Mises wrote it about it in the 40s [1] but his criticisms are all bound up w/ the rest of the package that comes w/ the Austrian school. I lack the expertise to say anything about it, sadly.
"criticism of bureaucrats starts with the 1960s" seems wildly off? I don't know much about the history of anti-bureaucracy but e.g., Lenin was using "bureaucratic" as definitionally negative in 1923: https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm
There's a weird standard established in this post: you're either a bureaucrat or an "innovator," with the implication being that only innovators do "real" engineering.
I don't know of any engineering profession in the real world that adheres to this standard: the gold standard for actual engineering is consistency within operational margins: building the cheapest and strongest bridge that doesn't collapse given the traffic allowed to go over it, airplanes that don't fall out of the sky, software systems that can reproduce their results, &c.
On top of that, the implicit assumptions about how to identify a bureaucrat, and the historical claims about what they've accomplish, get a wee bit expansive at the end:
> There are widespread popular revolts against the evil bureaucratic pyramids: Milei, yellow vests, the recent Dutch elections, the Trucker revolt in Canada, the Bukele revolution in El Salvador; even Elon buying X and firing 75% of the head count. This will continue to spread as long as the bureaucrat remains unaccountable. Bureaucratic reform is the defining problem of our time. Bureaucrats and their NPC enablers have ruined much of what made Western Civilization worthwhile. They’ve corrupted the scientific process, technological development, subverted governments, ruined health, created conditions of anarcho-tyranny in the cities and have generally wrecked most of what they’ve touched. Their proliferation is slowly strangling everything, just as a proliferation of intestinal parasites will weaken and ultimately kill if unchecked. Parasites have no natural predators. You need some kind of medicine to get rid of them. We can study the work of successful bureaucratic reformers; Lee Kuan Yew, St. Peter Damian, Napoleon, Park Chung Hee, Deng Xiaoping, Putin, Marius, St. Ignatius of Loyola: also the unsuccessful would-be reformers such as Nixon. The most important first step, though, is recognizing the bureaucrat.
That being said, it's probably because I don't know what an NPC means in this context. Maybe it's because I'm one myself.
The relevant context is that there's a right-wing meme of calling people who disagree with you NPCs with the implication that they're just regurgitating talking points that they've heard, similar to how video game NPCs tend to have a small fixed set of lines that they say.
Certainly! My goal wasn't to claim an equally ridiculous opposite position, only to observe that a lot of very good engineering is completely indistinguishable from what the author sneeringly calls bureaucracy.
>There's a weird standard established in this post
This post is just restating Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but in way too many words and with a bit more of a polemic bent that makes it slightly less accurate than it could have been.
The trick is separating "people there to drive an organization's goals forward" (or 'innovator') and "people there to advance the power of the organization" (or 'bureaucrat'). You need to protect the first group of people from the second group of people- the more protected they are, the more productive your nation... to a point. There have been many attempts at this- this is the key insight behind Marxist thought, after all (the fact that it ends in complete ideological capture 100% of the time is positive proof that the optimal amount of "parasitic load" on a society is not zero, and that you actually need competent leaders else you get taken over by unremovable, unaccountable grifters).
Recent examples of this class's parasitic excess and non-accountability are left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course, the post is also wrong in another way: these parasites actually do have a weakness. They get fed to a conquering society by the productive if they perceive the parasitic load the enemy would impose on them is less than the one imposed by the domestic parasites. The fact that societies capable of conquering any Western nation are in short supply doesn't change the fact that, historically (and even still today, in some parts of the world) this is how it has always been.
Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats.
Such people are not engineers in any normal definition of the word; they’re dealing with plumbing and protocol and social problems which come about from large groups of people.
As an actual Big-E Engineer (of the Civil|Mech|Electrical|Electronic Professional Member type with conferred degree in Engineering) I can state that Engineers are likely greater "bureaucrats" than software engineers.
Professional Engineering is almost entirely procedure and paperwork, documenting, ordering, checking specifications, identifying responsibility via chain of evidence, etc.
Big Engineering projects (eg: the multi year UK rail transport expansion, the London sewer mega build (both the original and the recent upscaling), etc.) require truly vast amounts of attention to detail to eventually complete.
Small engineering projects like building or safely removing bridges are very much the same; the work of an Engineer isn't to weild a spanner or press a plunger after cutting away steel to weaken a structure, it's to make a plan, order the ducks and line all the ducks up, to have a diagram of what steel to cut in what order (for both construction and demolition).
And, (and this is quite the thing), to be responsible in the case of resource over runs and|or lives lost.
Scott here has quite the romantic view of engineering, for Scott it seems that real engineering is all about single person | small team total control just have at it hacking about.
Don't get me wrong here, I love doing that - but that kind of activity is (to steal a quote from the author) not engineering in the normal several decades old definition of the word.
Looks like there are two confounding factors for this author: (1) his background is scientific, not engineering in nature, and (2) he appears to run his own consulting firm.
In other words: it's unclear to me that he's qualified to make blanket statements about what "real" engineering is; his closest professional qualification is being a consultant with limited long-term responsibilities. I say this as someone who is also a consultant.
In my experience we wouldnt need them if we were capable of doing their few simpel tasks. For some absurd reason people would rather argue needlesly.
My gut says half can be automated away and the other half needs a strictly defined job description free from any opportunity for freestyling. You could probably hire 2 or 3 extra for a while to hammer out the spec.
I love how the graphic undermines his argument. All those tentacles have their own intelligence. Any of them could therefore strangle him, even if they are all axed from the head.
Maybe we should change the term "red herring" to "de-tentacled octopus head"
OPs projects/expertise while they claim to not be a (weird af definition) bureaucrat -
“General things I can do for your business:
Mathematical and statistical modeling
Data architecture
Predictive analytics, statistical modeling and machine learning
Physics/technology assessment and development
Data science team building/recruiting
Data reporting engines
Technical writing
Writing for technical and general audiences
Time series databases”
No more explanation needed. Do not hire this person.
It's interesting to see the negative reactions to this post, which makes me think there is some uncomfortable truth being expressed that hits close to home. I won't be surprised if some buecratically inclined take this to heart & foster buercratic innovation. That being said, I resonate with the post. I have no interest in being a manager nor do i wish to be managed...but am interested in mastery of craft. I noticed there is much complexity lock-in in the tech ecosystem offerings & strive to strip away these complexities to uncover at the heart of the functionality. Tech solopreneurs & small teams still have a profound impact on the ecosystem & are empowered to bring innovation as a tide that rises all boats...to distill the essential functionality & focus on the essential complexity (within my control) to improve our conditions. There's all sort of different people & we have the ability to practice what we love & bring value to others.
Edit
I'm sure Lachlan will find it amusing that this post was flagged on HN. It does help to have a thick skin in light of critique...especially in the game of innovation. It is difficult to respect someone in a leadership position who cannot handle a critique...just sayin
If there are any valid points in the article, the critiques shown here are also valid, and seem all in all to outweigh.
Every bad or ultimately invalid ideology or philosophy that appeals to anyone, necessarily has some sort of bits of rationality here & there to hang all their other arguments on to do that appealing.
When a conservative or libertarian wants to sell the idea of deregulation, there are legitimate examples of disfunctional regulation to point to.
When a neoliberal statist wants to sell the idea of abolishing guns or home schooling or cryptography or anonymous cash, there are legitimate examples of individuals misusing their individual agency to harm others.
Those examples are real, and any sane person should agree those specific stories are bad outcomes, but that does not mean they actually support the argument or that the larger argument or philosophy is valid.
It's wrong that Bill Maher can't build a shed. That does not mean that therefor the entire concept of building codes, zoning, epa regulations, etc are wrong and life would be on the whole better and saner without them.
I think the bits of truth in this article are like that.
> I think the bits of truth in this article are like that.
It's fascinating that the article inspired some people to flag it.
> It's wrong that Bill Maher can't build a shed. That does not mean that therefor the entire concept of building codes, zoning, epa regulations, etc are wrong and life would be on the whole better and saner without them.
I do not interpret the OP arguing for the abolishment of the bureaucratic class & regulations. I think such talk is akin to art or architecture...people see beauty in things that they desire to move toward & an aversion against what they want to move away from...so the "art" or discussion skews toward a painting of a world free(r) from bureaucratic rules.
To your earlier point about taking ideas/philosophies too far...the article seems to imply that bureaucratic class is pushing for TOTAL bureaucratic control over the lives of everyone. That they want to take as much money & agency from everyone else...and I agree. Despite the work of innovators around the world, why are things so messed up? Why are there so many poor people? Why are resource rich countries full of starving people? Why are the profits of the commodities sold by these resource rich countries not distributed into the hands of the people?
That being said, there are many rules in the building codes, zoning, epa regulations that overtly or covertly diminish the quality of life of people. Some jurisdictions allow one to buy some cheap land, live in camper while building an alternative structure on it to save money...and many don't. It is also difficult to find small plots of land not run by an HOA which have their own building codes, such as a minimum square footage/footprint & style of the house. These sort of laws do nothing to improve the quality of life of people. They do cause housing to be more unaffordable & buffer the rentier class.
The EPA & some state environmental agencies enforce rules, in ways that are often counter-productive to restoring environments. Oregon has put people in jail for building a pond, which is used to capture water in a permaculture setting (slow, sink, spread). Florida has until recently banned home gardens for many people. The fires in Lahaina was made worse by poor water & land management. Upstream water rights are sold as long-term contracts to large corporations. Lahaina once had canals & the land was full of native agriculture & water management...not anymore.
Nobody is arguing to remove all regulation, but the over-regulation, taxation, & a cultural mandarin class imposes their vision on the rest us. They work for & facilitate the transfer of wealth from the have nots to the haves. Over regulation stifles innovation & promotes the interests of bureaucrats & their funders who grow wealthy even when they are a net loss to the rest of society (which they often are). People in many other countries are given the freedom to build & live in ways not allowed in the US...and find success & happiness with their effort. Why are we so restricted here in ways that have nothing to do with safety or the environment? The language used to justify actions & rules may sound plausible, but it's the implementation & the effects that really matter.
When you never outgrow your Ayn Rand phase, you will see someone working with "protocols" or "the JVM" (weird examples btw) as a bureaucrat or "scoundrel, a useless cog in the machine, a coward, a gold brick, a sower of chaos and a parasite". At least he is studying "successful bureaucratic reformers", like Putin. Okay.
Interesting that the thread cites Austrian economics. I quote Hayek in this piece of mine, and his welcome focus on unsystematic knowledge from the lifeworld. Yet he never took that argument anywhere other than saying "therefore markets are good". Yes in their place, they are, but there is much more in heaven and earth and we've been pretty bad at adapting organisations to respond well to those things.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 46.6 ms ] thread> Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats.
Then they complain that Google is probably hiring bureaucrats, instead of real technical people:
> Do you think the extra 100,000 people Google hired over the last 5 years are actual engineers, or any kind of innovator? I’m willing to bet they’re all bureaucrats, and any of them would say “I work at a tech company doing tech things” and be indignant at being described as what they are: bureaucrats.
Well, if you re-define every job as "bureaucrat" then you automatically get the result that everyone you hire is a bureaucrat. The result is the consequence of how you've defined everything.
"Bureaucrats are also almost universally reviled for their lack of accountability and the lack of pride in their work. While there certainly have been great men; leaders who were great bureaucrats (Napoleon), they’re mostly seen as mostly a caste of sniveling eunuchs who flee from taking responsibility or attempting to make things better or taking any risks, even when that is in their job description."
This is very, very inaccurate. Criticism of bureaucrats starts with the 1960s. While you can find an occasional novel or story that critiqued some aspects of bureaucracy (arguably some of Kafka's work, also maybe Bartleby, the Scrivener, though that is mostly seen as a critique of alienation, rather than bureaucracy per se) the rise of the "bureaucracy sucks" as a genre can be dated to the 1960s.
Others often make this point, but you can really judge the cultural transition by the careers of leading business commentators, such as Peter Drucker. In 1946 he published his study of General Motors, the book Concept of the Corporation. In it, he examined the large bureaucracy at General Motors and celebrated it as the pinnacle of human civilization, the absolute peak of what the last 6,000 years of civilization had all been building up to.
Drucker was not alone. In 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith published "The Affluent Society." A part of the book emphasizes the idea that "If we want to accomplish big things then we need big organizations." Once again, the book implies that large bureaucracies represent our success as a civilization, and those bureaucracies are what enabled that success.
Starting in the 1960s, there is a tremendous cultural backlash against bureaucracy. We are still living with that backlash today. It is noteworthy that the cultural backlash has not had a real world result nearly as significant as the cultural result: that is, bureaucracies have continued to grow, even as they have faced relentless criticism for 60 years now.
In my own consulting work, I've seen multiple promising startups fail because the founders were afraid of "becoming bureaucratic." I've seen other companies survive but never live up to their full potential because the CEO never set out to build a beautiful bureaucracy. My own sense is that the backlash against bureaucracy must come to an end at some point soon, because too much potential is being wasted by the lack of bureaucracy. At some point, business leaders must again commit themselves to building big, ambitious, beautiful bureaucracies, so they can capture the full potential of the organizations they are running.
Your work is about making companies more successful in this system & I'm sure you are quite effective at your job. However, many are left out with their wealth & agency transferred to these organizations.
The innovator creates a tide that rises all boats. That improves the quality of life for society at large. The bureaucrat administers the existing order. Order is a service that saves many lives but can become very expensive to maintain...eventually costing more than it's benefits, or the cost/benefits of an alternate system. Some systems are more effective than others in maintaining an empire or civilization. The feedback of growing antagonistim toward counterproductive beucracies should be an indicator or the health of an empire or society. Sometimes it's better to cut the Gordian knot of complexity & let the innovators reform the system, through buecratic innovations, tech innovations, & social innovations.
That is also ahistorical. In 1789 the court of King Louis XVI of France was struggling to find the money to pay for a bureaucracy of 500 people, but just 5 years later, in 1794, a revolutionary France had a bureaucracy of 5,000 people. The bureaucracy grew by a factor of 10 in just 5 years, thanks to the Revolution, which seized the property of the Church and sold it or taxed it, thus generating revenue that the King could never have dreamed of. The dramatic expansion of the bureaucracy almost allowed the French to catch up with the fast growing bureaucracy of Britain. Likewise, the Communist Revolution in Russia, after 1917, brought in a complex system of committees vastly more convoluted than anything the Tsar could have ever dreamed of. See here for some speculations on this theme:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/is-communism-inevitable
I don't see how. The downstream evolution may have been the growth of bureaucracy, but was the impulse for the revolution caused by a desire to grow bureaucracy? I'm sure it has something to do with the over-production of elites who wanted a piece of the pie...but many of the "common folk" also went along. I doubt their intention was to have more bureaucrats. The sentiment was expressed as liberté, égalité, fraternité,. So, I think my point still stands. Also, the OP broadens the scope of bureaucracy, so I think he would also include the aristocrats & clergy in the ranks of the bureaucracy...in addition to the civil employees.
> which seized the property of the Church and sold it or taxed it, thus generating revenue that the King could never have dreamed of
I think this supports my point. When there is an influx of wealth, through honest or ill-gotten means (such as looting the Church...another bureaucracy), there is little scrutiny for having a large bureaucracy. When the ruling order is facing stress, then a bureaucracy is held under more scrutiny. The Chinese have a term, "the mandate of heaven", which is used to judge the ruling order. The moral is if the peoples' quality of life diminishes, the ruling order will lose it's legs to stand on.
Let's be honest here, the bureaucracy enforces the rules of the ruling order/ruler. The bureaucracy can take a life of it's own & can even become the ruling order. This happen with the court eunics in the late Han dynasty. Either way, the bureaucracy is a representation of the ruling order. When the ruling order loses the mandate of heaven, then the representations of the ruling order will face more scorn.
Btw, the eunics were scorned long before the dynasty collapsed...they just had enough power to punish the critics. Granted, there are many more complexities than having a monolithic bureaucratic bloc. There are different actors with different motivations. The eunics where a subset of the court bureaucracy who gained power through internal conflict. My criticism of the OP is that the author treats the bureaucracy as a single entity. It may be in effect to outsiders, but inside, many actors & factions compete for control...and I think bureaucratic innovation occurs.
[1] https://mises.org/library/bureaucracy
I don't know of any engineering profession in the real world that adheres to this standard: the gold standard for actual engineering is consistency within operational margins: building the cheapest and strongest bridge that doesn't collapse given the traffic allowed to go over it, airplanes that don't fall out of the sky, software systems that can reproduce their results, &c.
> There are widespread popular revolts against the evil bureaucratic pyramids: Milei, yellow vests, the recent Dutch elections, the Trucker revolt in Canada, the Bukele revolution in El Salvador; even Elon buying X and firing 75% of the head count. This will continue to spread as long as the bureaucrat remains unaccountable. Bureaucratic reform is the defining problem of our time. Bureaucrats and their NPC enablers have ruined much of what made Western Civilization worthwhile. They’ve corrupted the scientific process, technological development, subverted governments, ruined health, created conditions of anarcho-tyranny in the cities and have generally wrecked most of what they’ve touched. Their proliferation is slowly strangling everything, just as a proliferation of intestinal parasites will weaken and ultimately kill if unchecked. Parasites have no natural predators. You need some kind of medicine to get rid of them. We can study the work of successful bureaucratic reformers; Lee Kuan Yew, St. Peter Damian, Napoleon, Park Chung Hee, Deng Xiaoping, Putin, Marius, St. Ignatius of Loyola: also the unsuccessful would-be reformers such as Nixon. The most important first step, though, is recognizing the bureaucrat.
That being said, it's probably because I don't know what an NPC means in this context. Maybe it's because I'm one myself.
When I search for the author, one of the only other sources I can find for him is bylines in a neo-Nazi-affiliated magazine[1][2].
[1]: https://www.takimag.com/contributor/ScottLocklin/161/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taki%27s_Magazine
Non-playable character
This post is just restating Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, but in way too many words and with a bit more of a polemic bent that makes it slightly less accurate than it could have been.
The trick is separating "people there to drive an organization's goals forward" (or 'innovator') and "people there to advance the power of the organization" (or 'bureaucrat'). You need to protect the first group of people from the second group of people- the more protected they are, the more productive your nation... to a point. There have been many attempts at this- this is the key insight behind Marxist thought, after all (the fact that it ends in complete ideological capture 100% of the time is positive proof that the optimal amount of "parasitic load" on a society is not zero, and that you actually need competent leaders else you get taken over by unremovable, unaccountable grifters).
Recent examples of this class's parasitic excess and non-accountability are left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course, the post is also wrong in another way: these parasites actually do have a weakness. They get fed to a conquering society by the productive if they perceive the parasitic load the enemy would impose on them is less than the one imposed by the domestic parasites. The fact that societies capable of conquering any Western nation are in short supply doesn't change the fact that, historically (and even still today, in some parts of the world) this is how it has always been.
Professional Engineering is almost entirely procedure and paperwork, documenting, ordering, checking specifications, identifying responsibility via chain of evidence, etc.
Big Engineering projects (eg: the multi year UK rail transport expansion, the London sewer mega build (both the original and the recent upscaling), etc.) require truly vast amounts of attention to detail to eventually complete.
Small engineering projects like building or safely removing bridges are very much the same; the work of an Engineer isn't to weild a spanner or press a plunger after cutting away steel to weaken a structure, it's to make a plan, order the ducks and line all the ducks up, to have a diagram of what steel to cut in what order (for both construction and demolition).
And, (and this is quite the thing), to be responsible in the case of resource over runs and|or lives lost.
Scott here has quite the romantic view of engineering, for Scott it seems that real engineering is all about single person | small team total control just have at it hacking about.
Don't get me wrong here, I love doing that - but that kind of activity is (to steal a quote from the author) not engineering in the normal several decades old definition of the word.
In other words: it's unclear to me that he's qualified to make blanket statements about what "real" engineering is; his closest professional qualification is being a consultant with limited long-term responsibilities. I say this as someone who is also a consultant.
My gut says half can be automated away and the other half needs a strictly defined job description free from any opportunity for freestyling. You could probably hire 2 or 3 extra for a while to hammer out the spec.
Maybe we should change the term "red herring" to "de-tentacled octopus head"
Edit: changed "dismembered" to "de-tentacled" :)
“General things I can do for your business:
Mathematical and statistical modeling Data architecture Predictive analytics, statistical modeling and machine learning Physics/technology assessment and development Data science team building/recruiting Data reporting engines Technical writing Writing for technical and general audiences Time series databases”
No more explanation needed. Do not hire this person.
Edit
I'm sure Lachlan will find it amusing that this post was flagged on HN. It does help to have a thick skin in light of critique...especially in the game of innovation. It is difficult to respect someone in a leadership position who cannot handle a critique...just sayin
Every bad or ultimately invalid ideology or philosophy that appeals to anyone, necessarily has some sort of bits of rationality here & there to hang all their other arguments on to do that appealing.
When a conservative or libertarian wants to sell the idea of deregulation, there are legitimate examples of disfunctional regulation to point to.
When a neoliberal statist wants to sell the idea of abolishing guns or home schooling or cryptography or anonymous cash, there are legitimate examples of individuals misusing their individual agency to harm others.
Those examples are real, and any sane person should agree those specific stories are bad outcomes, but that does not mean they actually support the argument or that the larger argument or philosophy is valid.
It's wrong that Bill Maher can't build a shed. That does not mean that therefor the entire concept of building codes, zoning, epa regulations, etc are wrong and life would be on the whole better and saner without them.
I think the bits of truth in this article are like that.
It's fascinating that the article inspired some people to flag it.
> It's wrong that Bill Maher can't build a shed. That does not mean that therefor the entire concept of building codes, zoning, epa regulations, etc are wrong and life would be on the whole better and saner without them.
I do not interpret the OP arguing for the abolishment of the bureaucratic class & regulations. I think such talk is akin to art or architecture...people see beauty in things that they desire to move toward & an aversion against what they want to move away from...so the "art" or discussion skews toward a painting of a world free(r) from bureaucratic rules.
To your earlier point about taking ideas/philosophies too far...the article seems to imply that bureaucratic class is pushing for TOTAL bureaucratic control over the lives of everyone. That they want to take as much money & agency from everyone else...and I agree. Despite the work of innovators around the world, why are things so messed up? Why are there so many poor people? Why are resource rich countries full of starving people? Why are the profits of the commodities sold by these resource rich countries not distributed into the hands of the people?
That being said, there are many rules in the building codes, zoning, epa regulations that overtly or covertly diminish the quality of life of people. Some jurisdictions allow one to buy some cheap land, live in camper while building an alternative structure on it to save money...and many don't. It is also difficult to find small plots of land not run by an HOA which have their own building codes, such as a minimum square footage/footprint & style of the house. These sort of laws do nothing to improve the quality of life of people. They do cause housing to be more unaffordable & buffer the rentier class.
The EPA & some state environmental agencies enforce rules, in ways that are often counter-productive to restoring environments. Oregon has put people in jail for building a pond, which is used to capture water in a permaculture setting (slow, sink, spread). Florida has until recently banned home gardens for many people. The fires in Lahaina was made worse by poor water & land management. Upstream water rights are sold as long-term contracts to large corporations. Lahaina once had canals & the land was full of native agriculture & water management...not anymore.
Nobody is arguing to remove all regulation, but the over-regulation, taxation, & a cultural mandarin class imposes their vision on the rest us. They work for & facilitate the transfer of wealth from the have nots to the haves. Over regulation stifles innovation & promotes the interests of bureaucrats & their funders who grow wealthy even when they are a net loss to the rest of society (which they often are). People in many other countries are given the freedom to build & live in ways not allowed in the US...and find success & happiness with their effort. Why are we so restricted here in ways that have nothing to do with safety or the environment? The language used to justify actions & rules may sound plausible, but it's the implementation & the effects that really matter.
https://clubtroppo.com.au/2011/12/21/designing-better-lives-...