To me the problem you describe is orthogonal to the fact you have a writing culture or not. I bet if you didn't have that writing culture you would still have all those problems and just a ton more meetings and conversations with managers. I've been at places like that in the past and the best solution for me was to quit, I just couldn't stand it.
For example, promotions: I've been in that hunger games you mention where you have to promote yourself to death to have a promotion, and I hated it. Agree with you it was a real problem, specially for people that don't like to do marketing of themselves. At my current company your team lead is ultimately responsible of the output of the team, so with consideration of the team's opinions, he ultimately decides if you get a raise each year or not. If he wants you in the team you get a raise, if he doesn't you get a lower one or none at all. You can look for another team within the company or you can leave, up to you. Leads are professional enough like to not promote just friends, because they're also accountable in the same way up the chain. And that's it. At the end of the day your team, the 6 or 10 people you work with every day, they know very clearly if they want you or not, no need for 100 page essays about your awesomeness.
Since I have no context on your company or their process, can't say anything specific.
You're totally right that not every thing requires the full process. Processes must be flexible to accomodate the simple cases as well as the complex ones.
That said.. most of my experience is that developers do like to complain about following documentation process even for many cases where it is very much necessary.
We obviously write a ton of docs but only when we need to. Personally I code 60% of the time as an IC L5 (software engineer)
I’m an individual contributor. In theory, my job is to build stuff, which - again, in theory - involves writing code, debugging, solving deep technical problems, and so on. Unfortunately, due to the culture of writing and reading I spend most of my time mired in documents. Every breath we take produces a wall of text that must be reviewed and commented on. At this point it’s been about three weeks since I’ve written code.
Not every question deserves the dreaded one-pager. Not every potential code change must be foreshadowed by an exhaustive treatment in a peer reviewed design doc. Not every potential failure mode must be imagined and written up in detail, including all hypothetical gory details.
And don’t you dare protest! You’ll be labeled not a team player, poor communicator, a lone wolf. You’ll get a negative performance rating in the next cycle and then “managed out” for non-compliance with prevailing culture.
Oh, performance reviews are a special kind of joy. For a few weeks each year the economy of writing traffics mostly in documents written by employees who must openly brag about work they did over the past year. It’s a kind of literary hunger games in a corporate setting.
Oh, and this Kafkaesque machine has feelings too. It’s weird about “tone”: disagree with someone’s writing and they see a personal attack. Sickly sweet praise is the name of the game, whereas legitimate critique of another’s writing must be circumspect and formed such that it cannot be “taken the wrong way” or else!
I’m so done.