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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes June 2014 - Less Wrong
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I would call it "being taken over by bureaucracy", but I basically agree.
At private companies the bureaucracy is constrained by market pressures (unless the company finds a particularly juicy spot at the government trough), but for colleges and universities these pressures have been largely absent. Until now.
I expect the next decade to be pretty painful for, um, institutions of higher learning.
I disagree- you'd be amazed how inefficient you can be and still be profitable. Lots of very large companies are being strangled by their bureaucracy even while remaining at least somewhat profitable (generally the existence of a huge company is all-in-itself a barrier to entry for competitors). I've worked for a surprising number of companies that have the basic problem of "I used to be very profitable, but now I find I'm slightly less profitable despite selling more products at higher margins." Even worse, I've seen attempts to solve the problem derailed by the same management apparatus.
A former boss was fond of blaming MBAs. He had a saying something along the lines of- the core problem with MBAs is the idea that you can good at "business" without being good at any particular business. MBAs march in, say "we need to quantify these decisions" and add a ton of process (which invites the managers in). A decade later, they notice that despite generally better conditions they aren't as profitable, they higher some big data consultants to come in and we say things like "you are spending $x+100 dollars to better quantify decisions that are only worth $x, and thats not even counting all the time you waste for all the paperwork that the process requires."
Constrained, not eliminated :-) If you have certain advantages -- e.g. you are a too-big-to-fail bank -- you can be horribly bureaucratic and nothing bad will happen to you for a long time.
Generally speaking, I think of the standard trajectory of successful companies as looking something like that:
I guess I have less faith in the constraint. Maybe its because I constantly work with companies who have been between stages 3 and 4 for a very long time.
As an anecdote, many years ago I worked with a fortune 1000 retail company whose inventory system was so bad that I was legitimately surprised they were able to operate and make money. ("According to this you have more shirts in inventory in one store in San Francisco than the entire population of California..."). Much of their IT resources were being eaten by building weird one-off work arounds to the problems (i.e. making sure the shipping system didn't stop sending items to the store in California just because the inventory system claimed it had infinity shirts). The business side of management was clueless enough about all that they dropped a lot of money hiring people to try to model with the inventory data. The IT side of management told us, point blank, that hiring us wasn't their idea and they wouldn't be offering any support. Near as I can tell, the company operated entirely because a bunch of mid-level employers were fighting to get their work done in spite of the ridiculous systems in
Maybe they eventually got their house in order, but I doubt it. Still a highly profitable business that has actually grown since I worked with them.
I don't think I've ever worked with a company that didn't have at least some production code that had been developed and was currently running in excel spreadsheets, entirely because nearly everytime they tried to do a project through IT it crashed and burned. So business users develop and then run important business processes in excel. A lot of consulting projects start with "all right, let me collect the 5 dozen excel spreadsheets you use for your crucial business processes. Oh, you each have your own version that does things slightly different? Wonderful..."
That's because companies between these stages lose the capability to do anything effective themselves, but still have the money to hire lots of consultants :-)
And yes, I am quite familiar with the spectacle of a dozen and a half of mysterious linked Excel spreadsheets which work ("work" is defined as not crashing, it's not like anyone can check what they output) only if the stars are aligned correctly and no one touches them, ever X-D But that's usually less a consequence of the metastasing bureaucracy and more a case of not very competent people in over their heads.