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“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally” As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingl

“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally” As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…

BloondAndDoom 6mo ago
This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude
watwut 6mo ago
But we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not. They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.
- evanjrowley 6mo ago
  Agree that this is a very messy situation. Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention. Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.
observationist 6mo ago
People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible. You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe. They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers. This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.
- metalliqaz 6mo ago
  > with no market feedback It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows. government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"
  - observationist 6mo ago
    Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional. When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops. Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership. They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it. Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians. What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.
    - alibarber 6mo ago
      I thought the “performance reviews” they were alluding to were elections. Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.
geysersam 6mo ago
In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.
- GlenTheMachine 6mo ago
  It's more complicated than that. "The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers. And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on. In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification. What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality. So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works. In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.
jiggawatts 6mo ago
Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc. Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing. I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work! As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!
- ykonstant 6mo ago
  I have often heard this story. To my ears, inexperienced in the tech industry, but experienced in others, it sounds absurd. If a modification improves performance even in the slightest perceptible way (of course it needs to be perceptible by the user), it is the job of the sales team to hype it up to the heavens. To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.
  - jiggawatts 6mo ago
    The incentives don't align. If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement. Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever. Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't. I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails. Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is. Nobody does! That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.

BloondAndDoom 6mo ago

This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude

watwut 6mo ago

But we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not. They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.

evanjrowley 6mo ago
Agree that this is a very messy situation. Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention. Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.

observationist 6mo ago

People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can. Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences. I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible. You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe. They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers. This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.

metalliqaz 6mo ago
> with no market feedback It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows. government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"
- observationist 6mo ago
  Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional. When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops. Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership. They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it. Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians. What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.
  - alibarber 6mo ago
    I thought the “performance reviews” they were alluding to were elections. Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.

geysersam 6mo ago

In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

GlenTheMachine 6mo ago
It's more complicated than that. "The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers. And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on. In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification. What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality. So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works. In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.

jiggawatts 6mo ago

Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc. Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing. I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work! As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!

ykonstant 6mo ago
I have often heard this story. To my ears, inexperienced in the tech industry, but experienced in others, it sounds absurd. If a modification improves performance even in the slightest perceptible way (of course it needs to be perceptible by the user), it is the job of the sales team to hype it up to the heavens. To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.
- jiggawatts 6mo ago
  The incentives don't align. If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement. Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever. Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't. I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails. Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is. Nobody does! That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.