The reason for the existence of bloated bureaucracy is political will not the technical inability to automate processes before the advent of the current wave of AI.
Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.
If one of the most successful engineering organizations in history attributes part of its success to capable management, that undermines simplistic narratives where management is inherently the problem and engineers would naturally thrive if left alone.
If anything, the Bell Labs example supports the idea that exceptional outcomes require both strong technical talent and strong management working together.
Not saying the "MBAs" are helping the situation, but the hero developers and their resume driven development practices aren't exactly angels either.
Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.
I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.
I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems
I did not yet have a positive "oh shit" moment, but when the corporate manager types that could not deliver a "Hello world" if their live would depend on and would have had a sour look on their face when asked to pay license fees for a proper IDE a 10 to 15 years ago started pushing it hard, way before any but the resume-driven engineers: that has flipped a bit in me.
> I'm picturing Germany as Sideshow Bob walking right into another rake.
Speaking as a German with children: Completely apt image. Yet I would name several dozen of policies that are more serious "rakes in your face" than this. This is merely squeezing a little bit more out of the working population. Everyone knows that social security in the current state is a Ponzi scheme and what ever is collected is immediately redistributed.
This is nothing particularly new. People above a certain age without kids are paying a higher percentage from their income into the social security since 2005 when Gerhard Schröder was chancellor, and that's more than twenty years ago.
What this proposal would change is the concrete percentage. Currently 4.2%, 4.7% if it were enacted.
May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?
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