Calling a Bureaucrat by Its Name
10th December 2023
I find it delicately amusing how many “white collar” people are incapable of admitting that they are bureaucrats. Call it being a clerk, a functionary or a bureaucrat; if you have a job which says “management” and involves people reporting to you, and you reporting what they tell you to other people, you are a bureaucratic brick in a pyramid. Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats. Such people are not engineers in any normal definition of the word; they’re dealing with plumbing and protocol and social problems which come about from large groups of people. The fact that such people have to do their work with a programming language simply indicates that they are a low level bureaucrat. This is analogous to working as a policeman; a policeman is a sort of low level bureaucrat within the legal system who might get his hands dirty. Low level bureaucrats have to deal with real problems, but just as a policeman is not a peace engineer or social scientist, but more of a low level bureaucrat craftsman of applied psychology, the low level bureaucrat software developer is a low level bureaucrat craftsman dealing with programming uncertainty.