6 Comments
User's avatar
PeterL's avatar

On the other hand, there's "Chesterton's fence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence -- but that would be problematical in the "five monkeys" experiment.

As to useless reports - at one place I worked, it was standard procedure in the IT group to verify that each report was necessary by periodically not printing it and see if anyone complained. (It was also standard procedure to consider each system for rewrite about every five years, on the theory that by that time the system was either not needed or had so many new requirements that a rewrite made more sense than maintenance)

And a friend from one of the big agencies told me of an audit at a large electric utility where one person's job appeared to consist of receiving each month a large report, which he read and then threw out.

Expand full comment
Vladimir Bychkovsky's avatar

Re: not printing the report to verify if it is necessary

That’s a great practice! It should really be part of the culture :-)

I have seen this used to verify impact of a service. Partners using the service had trouble articulating the how much value it is generating for them. However, one day, when the service went down, the same partners screamed very loudly about how they are losing X thousands of dollar per minute of the service downtime, and impact/value became a lot more clear.

Expand full comment
Entropy Sink's avatar

This reminds me of a job many moons ago at a public institution. A small but important (in the rules & regulations sense) process involved passing pieces of paper around among representatives of a couple of different functions (in this case, HR and a set of labor unions.)

HR got a new manager, a sort with some initiative, and soon there was a request to the IT department to make this process no longer involve paper—to create a web version of the workflow.

Easy peasy said and done.

A brief bit of time passes, then in comes a feature request: "please introduce a timeout after which an errand is automatically marked as `closed approved`".

Done.

Years later, I bump into two of the folks who were involved in the specification of this little system, and ask them whether it is still serving its purpose. They look at each other, one shrugs and says "guess so, I haven't looked at it in ages", to which the other agrees.

They had shrewdly unburdened themselves of a meaningless—but apparently required—process by requesting it be automated such that even a token bit of human attention could be elided.

Expand full comment
Wilmer's avatar

.... And let's not even talk about how no running Unix system by now would have a `reboot` command that reboots instantly instead of kicking off a shutdown-then-reboot sequence through the init system, which would include all the sync'ing your heart may desire..

Expand full comment
Vladimir Bychkovsky's avatar

Thank you for this write up, Jos! I have used this story many times to explain “culture”. What makes your write great is the detailed examples... I feel like it would be fun to start a collection of these, and fill a whole book!

Expand full comment
Iustin Pop's avatar

Ha ha ha, spot on. About many things 👍

Expand full comment