Comment by whyenot
3 days ago
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.
I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.
I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.
The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.
While I was at Facebook they dropped the "and break thing" off the corporate values anyways. Turns out they just want you to move fast.
I think you’re absolutely right. I was using it in the more abused term, but I actually subscribe to the original intent of it. My wife’s organization would almost certainly be better off if they embraced this mentality even slightly more. Maybe most people would, for that matter.
But yeah, the movement did seem to become the primary goal, and breaking things seemed less about stress-testing and freeing from restrictions, and more like an inconvenience on the path of progress, whatever that might mean. It seemed like a lot of us went from being experimental and nimble to clumsy and incoherent at some point.
I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).
The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.
Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).
Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.
Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).
I work for the government IT.
Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.
Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.
An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.
There are many problems with individual ownership though. It is a whole large system where people constantly change. You need to have multiple owners and redundancy otherwise all the projects are dependent on one individual who might quit any time. Things happen in the past, people make mistakes and you start to incorporate processes to avoid it because people are and will always be imperfect, you end up with thise processes and bureaucracy.
Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!
And playing PoE!
This is my experience as a government worker.
Imagine taking the answer to an innocuous question like "what is your favorite part of the job?" in what I assume was a social setting and extrapolating from there to "they don't care about their job."