Pain and Paper

Today I read another one of those posts designed to fire up the tech crowd:

“Want us to be more productive? Cut the bureaucracy, cancel the meetings, and stop asking us to fix the printer.”

The last part is a joke (though not too far off), but the rest often gets a lot of nods. I’ve shared the frustration.

But the longer I work in this field, the more I realize bureaucracy isn’t the enemy. Excess is. Nonsense processes are. But without structure, no team scales and no system holds.

Even when working alone, you need some bureaucracy.

It might sound like a big word, but it starts simple: a note to remember something, a calendar entry, a to-do list. Bureaucracy is structure. And that structure grows because what we’re managing is complex.

Nobody likes filling out a form just to deploy two lines of code. But we all love when a critical system recovers in minutes.

Often, what we’re avoiding isn’t the bureaucracy itself... it’s the accountability that comes with it. When nobody’s watching, it’s easy to push a change. But when you have to sign it, explain it, and own it if something breaks? That’s a different story.

But that responsibility is part of the job.

As for meetings—another topic for another day.

exit(0);