This year felt like a series of twisting adventures I never saw coming, both personal and professional
Leaving Berlin to build Kudo in Amman at home, a quick stop at Amazon, and then diving headfirst into automating manufacturing, automotive and spacecraft industries with Simulator86.
Basically, doing the complete opposite of what a bureaucrat would do, taking accountability of my decisions and influenced by values rather than playbooks.
Bureaucrats
You usually find them inside bureaucratic hells, but you might also stumble upon them in public, around schools, in cafés. They might even live with you, labeling themselves as family members. They used to wear suits, but not anymore. A typical bureaucrat would still convince you that they only exist in suits.
When they decide to write, they write because the system asked them to do so, they write the most soulless, irrelevant thought provoking things whether it was technical or not. It does’t bring good or unique insights simply because bureaucrats fail to demonstrate interesting things. Because interesting work doesn’t follow “best practices” and you can’t optimize for interesting without ignoring best practices.
They keep their writing made out of short sentences, after all this is a best practice of writing, a lesson you learn whenever you take a writing training that cling short sentences so the reader’s cognitive load doesn’t go through the roof like what I’m doing right now by breaking that rule and writing a long, messy and complex sentence just to demonstrate what a bureaucrat can’t do.
Their achievements don’t come from novel experimentation but rather specialize in the painfully predictable, the decisions that no one would ever call bold, clever, or interesting.
If they were engineers, they’d spend months configuring something like clippy, biome or eslint for the sake of the “order”, or maybe because a bigger bureaucrat told them that it’s good engineering practice.
They won’t fix the real issue. Instead, they fiddle with appearances, rearranging the uninteresting stories, all because some rulebook says the actual solution is off-limits.
But one thing that stood out to me that they severely lack sense of humor. They confuse sarcasm with political events, work related matters or stock market.
They also have this ritual they call “meetings” typically done 3-4 times a day with each session lasting for 30 mins to a few hours, they don’t know when to join meetings and when to decline them.
Even Bureaucracies Punishes Bureaucrats
Bureaucracy is inevitable, it’s the only way humans managed to rule big systems that includes tons of unpredictability, the more overhead there are, the more bureaucracy is used.
Becoming non-bureaucrat means taking accountability of your own decisions that is driven by values rather than someone else textbook that might got recently outdated or never thought about your specific situation.
There are good run-books to do specific things that work some of the time, they should be treated more like a place to get insight and understanding their reasons rather than blind following. Ironically, the more implementation details a book has, the lower quality it is.
Good runbooks, give an abstracted specific rule, “Deliver Fast If You Work In a Software Startup post 2010s era“ and gives detailed examples (without omitting contradicitons) of those who delivered fast and slow. If there were implementation details, well guess what? it’s temporary rule that works sometime for specific details, “Deliver Fast” might become obsolete in many occasions, especially when mistakes are penalized.
If you insist in bureaucracy, ironically a good employer will punish you, either directly by firing you for thinking you are not smart and incapable of solving problems or not directly by withholding promotions and raises, this is the best case for a good bureaucracy.
Bad bureaucracies punish you all the time, whether you played by the book or not. Just because the leadership is incomponent and well, someone has to pay the failures and it’s not the big bureaucrat because the he was just following the system, it’s you, it’s the little bureaucrat.
I feel offended/nothing after reading the above
Still reading? you probably feeling amusement, annoyance or nothing. But most likely, if you feel anything whether positive or negative, counter-intuitively you are most likely not a bureaucrat.
If you feel empty, there is a high chance you are a bureaucrat.
Again a true bureaucrat runs by a sort of playbook rather than values.
You become a super-bureaucrat when you believe deep inside you of the useless approaches you do, but you still do it because you are lazy or unskilled which is a proxy of laziness.
Doing some of the above doesn’t mean you are bureaucrat, these are just signals, treat them accordingly.