A technical talk about smoothly running engineering organizations. Artificial silos should be torn down, team members should resist the thought “gosh I’ve already done the hard part, why are they taking so long?” A talk that clearly resonated with a lot of engineers, where the top commenter’s top point was “Don’t add process just for the sake of it.”
“Do not hire anyone who likes paperwork”
A short note on widespread difficulty to cut paperwork and reduce bureaucracy: she is speculating (I would call it “realizing”) that there are some people who don’t want to minimize the process.
This is another way of framing the point that pro-private-everything people make: when there’s not the profit incentive behind an organization, some other incentive will drive many of the decisions and structure; a natural metric people use for how important something is tends to be “how big is this organization?” or “how many people are working on this?” or (the academic version) “how big of a grant did this win?”
I suppose that many of these points are not strictly part of public/non-profit work. “Maximizing the number of direct reports” is can be the sign of a turgid for-profit company where middle-managers have taken over. Even in the startup world, some people’s heuristic for the importance of something is “how much money did this raise?”
Perhaps her distinction about the perspective of the person, not the industry, is the correct one. A process-maximizer can sneak their way up any organization an accelerate the bureaucracy.