Bureaucratic Breakdown: Opportunities and Collapse
An insiders perspective on the disillusionment of the functional organs of governance:
In the last year or two, many people have noticed a substantive slow-down in the response-times of bureaucracies. What once took a week to pass around faceless bureaucrats in some distant office now takes a month, or longer. This seems to be true both of company bureaucracies and government bureaucracies.
I’ve been blessed with first-hand experience in some of these environments. This article exists to explain why that incredible slow-down has taken place and what we’re likely to see going forward depending on changing economic and social conditions. This article also delves into possible consequences and how best to position ourselves as the bureaucratic system of governance loses function.
Retirements
In the last two years most of the remaining boomers in upper management have finally retired. This is an ongoing process that will continue for another two years or so. Most of these silver-aged individuals ended their working days early due to the recent pandemic; some of them have finally aged out, and more than a few are tired of walking on political eggshells. There’s many reasons a man in his mid sixties doesn’t want to work any more. Most worked this job for 25 years and I don’t blame them at all for leaving.
What many could be blamed for is the fact that almost none trained replacements. Company, and government, bureaucracies have been courting each-others workers instead of training their own. This means that these upper-management individuals almost never have some one ready to step in who knows how the systems work at a deep level. Thus, when Greg the 68 year old boomer finally retired, he took half the functionality of the institution with him.
Upper Management: Hire don’t promote
The fact that many of these aged individuals didn’t train replacements speaks to the hubris of their generation. It also speaks to executive negligence. The Executive Suite in most organizations has been running on borrowed money and momentum since 2008 and hasn’t really considered the need for a complete restructuring of their internal bureaucracy.
Now that the upper-management leaders have almost all retired in a comparative eye blink, executives are reeling and trying to find replacements. A conversation at the executive level and Human Resources (HR) often resembles the following:
Exec. “Gary in Accounting is retiring.”
HR “Ok, sir, we’ll need some one to replace him. He’d been working here for 25 years, we’ll need some one experienced to do the job.”
Exec. “Can we find some one else with 25 years of experience?”
HR “… no… no we can’t. They’ve all retired.”
Exec. “Well, how about we find some one with 12 or 15 years of experience?”
HR “That won’t be cheap.”
It’s understood by almost every young worker in the modern age that the best way to get a promotion is to get a new job. Those who change jobs, on average every 2 years see a substantial increase in their income above those who do not.
As a result of cultural momentum and a total lack of on-job-training, the executive suite would prefer to hire some one new with “12 years of related experience.” They would rather not promote some one directly from mid-management to upper management. This doesn’t come cheap. Usually a new manager from a different company or agency that has the “experience” also has a lot of other job offers and a high asking price. Especially when looking at the current inflation in almost every global currency. On top of that, this new guy coming in with the “experience” doesn’t have the equivalent institutional knowledge. He/she has knowledge of how a completely different institution works.
“Ok, that’s fine, just hire him, and he’ll get the hang of it in a few months.”
The executive suite hires a new top-level manager with “12 years of experience” in the hyper-specific subcategory of work that they’re doing. Thus, the executives swallow their pride and offer a new hire $175k/year to do this specific job. It then takes the new hire 9 months to actually build up some real institutional knowledge on the internal workings of the system. This takes longer than it would under normal circumstances. It’s a natural learning process, but made worse because the former upper-manager didn’t leave a manual, didn’t teach any one else how to do his job, and couldn’t care less what happens to the institution as long as he’s receiving a pension.
9 months later, the new upper-manager quits. Another company with the same problem, just offered him $200k/year to do the same job, and just like that, he’s gone. The executives are once again thrown into disarray as they attempt to hire some one else with “12 years of experience.” For most executives of 2022, that’s how it’s always worked: you hire some one with “experience” you don’t train people. Thus, they hire the next guy, for $175k, who learns a little slower, and has a little less material to learn from, and takes a little longer to develop institutional knowledge, and so on.
This has only been going on for 2 years, it will get worse.
Entry Level Positions
While the uppermost portions of the bureaucracy disintegrate, the lowest levels are having different problems that stem from the same organizational hubris. At the lowest levels of any bureaucratic institution, HR has become a bloated mess of Karens, box-tickers, and paper-pushers. It is not uncommon for a team manager to say “I need another person for this job” and HR to then create a job-posting with an arbitrary and unrelated set of qualification criteria. Those who occasionally look for jobs with online tools will sometimes see truly outrageous requirements for positions that offer only minimal pay within a company or agency.
Stupid and arbitrary job requirements are not a new phenomena as of 2022. People have been lying on their resumes for years and jumping through stupid hoops created by stupid bug-girl drones of HR officers for decades. It’s something that the current working generations are quite accustomed to: childless 40-something clueless withered prunes of women using arbitrary qualifications that are, in many cases, objectively impossible to meet. I think it’s a power-trip for them, as they’ve no control over the rest of their lives.
What is new as of 2022 is the reaction to the offered pay. Most global currencies have gone through extreme inflation shock (and are still inflating). Whether or not ones time is worth $10 per hour or $8 per hour depends heavily on what you can buy with 40 hours of work each week… not much.
So, when a job is posted it often looks like:
Entry Level
Just know how to use basic Excel
Just needs to know how to type and speak English
Also requires 5 years of experience with law enforcement and 3 years experience in leadership.
$9 to $11 per hour
… and then managers and HR are confused when no one “who is qualified” has applied for the job.
You Pretend to Pay Us, We’ll Pretend to Work
In addition to the problems with bloated bureaucracies and useless HR departments, there is another issue that very few seem to understand. Ultimately the problem comes down to both arrogance and willful ignorance on the part of institutional employers over the last 14 years or so. Since 2008, large institutional bureaucracies have taken it for granted that they are permitted to abuse and underpay staff and employees. These institutions have also taken it for granted that there’s no reason to promote when one can hire from outside. The results have been that an entire generation has now grown up in a working environment where they know they’ll be offered as little as possible no matter how hard they work. This young generation is also fully aware of the fact that they will never afford their own home with wealth earned from a regular 40 hours-a-week office job. Unfortunately for these large bureaucracies, all they can offer is a 40-hours office job. More advanced employers can do something else, but large bureaucracies can’t.
These issues are the origin of things like the /r/antiwork subreddit. While that subreddit is progressive leftist cancer, some posts do have a point, they just completely fail to understand why they have a point. As a side-note if haven’t seen the /r/antiwork tranny interview with FOX NEWS, and you get the chance, do it. It’s hilarious.
After 14/15 years of economic turmoil, both Gen Y, and Gen Z, have been well trained by their boomer predecessors. These groups (especially those who work in offices at large institutions) will only ever do the bare minimum to avoid being fired. These employees (some already in middle management or now hired into upper management) are fully aware that their job could (and probably should) be automated. Millennial and Zoomer employees are fully aware that if they work really hard and put in all their time, they will receive nothing but more hard work.
Why would any of them do in a day what could be done over the course of three days? I’ve expressed in action this mentality at my bureaucracy, and have still been upheld as a useful and dedicated employee. The recent inflation has only made it worse.
Employees whose lives have been trapped in a quagmire of bureaucratic morass are offered the option of “work hard to receive little” and “work little to receive little.” They’re tired of selling their time when they could easily be more productive somewhere else. This has been demonstrated in some cases when employees will work two 40-hour-per-week jobs at the same time by virtue of working remote. Each job only takes 10 hours of actual work on a given week the rest of the time is spent sitting on your ass looking busy for your boomer boss. It’s a waste of time. Employees know it. Mid Management knows it. Upper management knows it. Every one but the HR Karens seem to know it.
The bureaucratic system is breaking down. Those who know what they’re doing will convincingly pretend it takes them 8 hours to file a few forms, and those who don’t know what they’re doing will spend the day trying to figure where to send those forms so some one can file them. If you accept that the systems of bureaucracy we rely on have become a clown-world parody, it’s funny.
A Culture of Terror
The final nail in the coffin is the cultural rain of terror that’s being conducted by political extremists in most bureaucratic systems. Offensive statements like “women have a vagina” or “that’s a nice hat, Linda.” or “Hitler did nothing wrong, next time it’ll be real” can easily end with an individual in sensitivity training, suspended, or fired.
It’s gotten to the point that lawsuits are being thrown around like candy at a homecoming parade. There is a panopticon of political puritanism that will destroy those who deviate from the accepted narrative. Simultaneously, there are few people who actually do adhere to the accepted narrative. In the US the legal system supposedly supports free expression, thereby creating all these happy little lawsuits.
The bureaucratic systems have become where this challenged narrative now plays out. Regular employees vs mentally ill Karens and trannies demanding special statuses. The proverbial commissars of the new narrative are the same power-tripping Karens that are incapable of writing a half-decent job posting for managers that desperately need a competent employee. The result is that even for those workers who do work hard, who did get hired, and who are sufficiently oblivious to how undervalued they are in the office… even they have to keep their heads down due to the constantly shifting orthodoxy of leftist partisanship in the culture war.
There’s a Chinese proverb “The tallest tree is the first one ripped down by wind”
An environment of partisan paranoia does not lead to productivity in the office, it leads to quiet rebellion at every level. Like the old union guys who would throw a wrench in the machine or intentionally work slow to hold up the assembly line. Bureaucratic workers have constant opportunities to intentionally slow and damage the systems they operate in. Bureaucrats are almost impossible to catch or blame when they “make mistakes” because no one really knows how the systems work in the first place. Not any more, the guy who knew how it all worked retired.
Our bureaucratic systems are collapsing.
Grey Markets
The structure of the bureaucratic office is failing because it no longer relates to the needs of the larger society. Many functions could be automated in one way or another. Economic and cultural momentum isn’t going to see the bureaucracy actually go away any time soon, however. Instead what we will see is longer wait times, less function, less competence, more rules that make no sense and that no one bothers to enforce.
Bureaucracy is the actual enforcement arm of governance. Rules, permits, licenses, dispensations, etc. are handed out by the bureaucracy. Across the West these systems are so bloated, byzantine, and underfunded that they’re slowly grinding to a halt. In some ways this creates huge logistical nightmares for many companies and individuals.
This is also an opportunity. In my region of the United States it is not uncommon for property developers and landlords to take a “beg forgiveness don’t ask permission” perspective when it comes to building codes. The bureaucracy is more trouble than it’s worth, so they ignore it until they’re caught ignoring it. Because the bureaucracy barely functions, they’re rarely caught.
There are a lot of smaller businesses transitioning away from business models that exists purely above-board. Now is a good time to begin considering what types of licenses or certifications a given type of business requires and how one could theoretically undercut the market if those requirements were ignored.
This is happening in numerous industries. Below are a few examples from medicine alone…
At a large scale: there is a prescription drug service that’s been started which radically undercuts the markets by ignoring the insurance bureaucracy of the United States.
At the small scale: There’s dozens DIY providers that sell hormones and hormone blockers to children without going through the medical bureaucracy. (This isn’t a moral statement, there’s some crazy shit going on in our culture and there are a lot of groomers that belong at the end of a rope. That’s not the point here, the point is that they get away with it.)
I am aware of a few doctors locally that have established retainer contracts with groups of individuals as an alternative to the medical insurance system. There will not be a citation to an occurrence immediately local to myself.
That’s just in medicine, and that’s just off the top of my head.
There are a lot of industries that are beginning to ignore the “normal” way of doing things. It’s a good time to look for weakly regulated markets due to bureaucratic failures of both government and competing businesses. It’s a lot easier for small private businesses to ignore rules than large national ones. If you can think of a way to undercut the market while remaining legal enough not to trigger the attention of law enforcement, go for it. Continued collapse of bureaucracy will produce more opportunities.
If you work in a bureaucracy, feel free to continue doing what you’re doing: as little as possible. Every one should be looking for alternatives, things are changing, fast.
In most regions we aren’t quite to the point where it’s possible to run home medical clinics or unregistered bars, but we’re a lot closer than most people seem to think. Consider: how can you break the market now that there’s few effective bureaucrats to enforce the rules? Many of the rules were dumb anyway.