The pithy quote is just the opening sentence to the piece. The substance is far more interesting and describes a law about the growth of bureaucracies. I strongly recommend anyone interested to just read the whole thing, because it's only 5 pages.
Why doesn't manager A, who is manager of official A, keep track of the work that official A does? That person could deny the unnecessary budget for more underlings and hold official A to be accountable for their work.
I don't think these can really be called statistical proofs either. There are some proof like axioms but it's being applied to social orders where there's nothing very logical happening.
The original paper was published in 1955. Now that we have issue tracking software which management can easily use to determine the efficiency of each worker, isn't this type of bureaucratic bloat a bit harder?
Would you consider issues to be easily measurable in terms of work required? Given more time would you clean up those unit tests and cover some additional cases?
One of the modern equivalents of this is allowing a meeting to eat up the entire time allotted, regardless of the utility. There’s something to be said for longer, lingering discussions when you’re coming up with ideas. But for status updates or decision-driven meetings, it seems like the meeting should always end immediately upon the completion of the agenda.
My anecdotal sense is that a person’s reaction to abruptly ending a meeting depends on their role and bent, similar to pg’s maker vs manager essay [1]. I’ll note that execution driven managers will happily walk out of a now defunct meeting though, so it isn’t strictly “maker vs manager” as much as a sense of “I don’t have something better to do currently”.
In my company it’s very common that people come late to a meeting but it almost always ends right on time, never early. I always get weird looks when I ask “are we done?”.
I see your point, but suspect it has to do with expected productivity vs effort. As long as employers aren't seeing an overall decrease in productivity, and as long as employees don't have a significant increase in effort, efficiencies would make it win-win.
This of course presumes that efficiency continues to increase with advances in methods, technology, etc.
I have a strategy based on the inverse of this. Sometimes there's a task that I know I'll spend too long deliberating about, or stretching out by getting on and off task due to procrastination. So I leave it until that last minute, that way I can't waste time by spending more time on it than I should.
The cost you will pay for this is nearly chronic stress. Also you will find that the start of that 'last minute' tends to creep closer and closer to the deadline as a natural consequence of you still managed to make the deadline last time.
I think there may be multiple factors at play here that result in the same outcome.
While I don't dispute his observations on organizational dynamics, I have a theory that this behavior exists at the individual contributor level as a result of metric dysfunction.
If you have two weeks to work on something and you get it wrong, then the ugly question of "you had two weeks, and this is all we got?" happens. After a few rounds of this awkward conversation we start acting defensively.
So if the problem feels pretty simple, we sense a trap that may or may not be there. But the trick is not always obvious, and so we may take on some tech debt payback or overengineer, only to discover that in fact there is more to the original problem or to the additional work we volunteered for (+ sunk cost fallacy).
So now not only has the work expanded but the work is now late. And then that gets turned into a narrative by your boss or their boss about how we're all terribly busy and we need more people to get the work done. And then we are still late.
I have found that in one environment, without the confidence of my boss, every mistake is taken as an indication I'm stupid and incompetent. In another, where my boss is convinced I'm very smart, if I do something badly it's taken as strong evidence the task is very difficult. In either case, if my efforts don't affect my bosses' view of me, then I have no pressure to do a good job.
Doing things ten times as fast as expected easily turns into an expectation of always doing things ten times as fast, and then doing them wrong because of being in an extreme hurry.
You are correct. The book Parkinson's Law, or The Pursuit of Progress can be had for around $8 used at your bookseller of choice and is a great read. The ten essays within are:
1. Parkinson's Law, or The Rising Pyramid
2. The Will of the People, or Annual General Meeting
3. High Finance, or The Point of Vanishing Interest[1]
4. Directors and Councils, or Coefficient of Inefficiency
5. The Short List, or Principles of Selection
6. Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block
7. Personality Screen, or The Cocktail Formula
8. Injelititis, or Palsied Paralysis
9. Palm Thatch to Packard, or A Formula for Success
the company I currently contract for had 2 administrators, a general admin girl and a payroll lady in 2010. In 2019 it has 19 full time administrative staff who are always busy. They still produce the same quantity of widgets and recently sacked some production staff to reduce costs.. Go figure.
Parkinsons law was originally about an observation from the British navy. The number of ships used by the British navy decreased but the number of administration of the ships increased. Parkinson law can be applied to almost any public administration. "He notes that the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done""
Parkinsons law can also be applied to agile software engineering.
> “There were fewer people and less work to manage – but management was still expanding, and Parkinson argued that this was due to factors that were independent of naval operational needs.”
The next thing I want to know after reading this passage is just what those needs are and if they are by themselves tied to quantitative or qualitative work products. And even within quantitative production there are issues of quality and waste.
Simply, if you’re a cook making hamburgers to order for MacDonalds you have a set amount of time. Your work is quantitative. If you’re making gourmet hamburgers you can grind your own chuck, bake your own bread, make your own condiments—hours of work. Yum.
I remember this law when in college taking project management. I have a terrible habit of working until the deadline is imminent (submitting via dropbox/email/electronically is terrible for people like me). I wasn't really procrastinating since I started early as soon as the assignment was given. But I would keep writing, rewriting, refining, deleting until my report was a monster.
[1]https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
edit: Thanks. Fixed.