Nexus by Yuval Harari covers bureaucracy in the same vein.

> The OP’s surprisal is surprising, given that 95% of all support interactions across the board are exactly like this

If your point is "it is today's norm, let's accept it and shut up", I feel the opposite. If the "norm" is like that, expressing it aloud is my way of contributing to society.

That is clearly not his point.

Bureaucracy didn’t emerge in the 21th, contrary to lack of customer support for big companies. Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification, the root cause is Monopoly (direct or through organized shareholders across an industry). You don’t need support or good service when customers don’t have the choice to go elsewhere.

They can go elsewhere , but then they would have to pay. And users hate to pay when there is a free offer.

I would even go a step further, and say that bureaucracy, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of a large organization: you need more measures in place to keep track of things when there are too many for people to keep track of in their heads.

The problem arises when the bureaucracy becomes, at least for portions of the organization, the end in itself rather than a means to an end (the end being something like better service, efficiency, and accountability). That's when it starts to contribute to frustrations and bad experiences (and, if allowed to continue in this vein, enshittification).

Yes. In fact I was referring to bureaucracies in general as a state’s “support” organization.

> Bureaucracy is a symptom part of the enshittification

Bureaucracy does not cause things to get worse. It's not a bad rash that the system displays when it's about to get worse or the puss discharged when it's irritated.

Bureaucracy is a response to a system that works well. It adds rules and hierarchies and red tape to maintain the system state as it is. It's organizational glue.

Bureaucracy is only a problem when trying to change a system.

Thats last part is either naive or just shilling.

The problems isnt the cogs, its the business owners setting up the incentives. Providing reasoned support is expensive from a time and effort perspective, so they dont invest in it. Service reps are specifically trained and incentivized to just fuzzy match the SOPs

And AI cant reason either, so it wont be able to provide any real reasoned support either. And the pwners dont care because they already provide shit service, people like you will just hype the AI up and then make excuses for it when its just as shit

Shilling what? AI in general? What’s the incentive? Hype is harder to argue. LLMs are defective attempts at AI, but that’s also a huge blind spot— effectively confounding AI and AI progress with a specific instance like LLMs.

Business incentive— if you can make an argument on why would a corporation provide shit support to its own employees you win. Also make an argument on why support is actually good at Amazon and others like them. So I don’t buy your argument on incentives either. Although there are other implications related to incentives and AI in general, but those are off topic.

The part that seems to be missing these days, that was historically present in support orgs, is escalation.

You’re always going to do the bulk of support through L1, and L1 support is going to be limited in terms of training and access.

But! The intended flow is that L1 recognizes when an issue exceeds their ability and escalates it up to L2+. And that’s where your talented (and empowered!) support engineers work.

That escalation just doesn’t seem to happen any more.

My hypothesis is that it’s a consequence of L1 being outsourced, where now they’re heavily incentivized to avoid escalating and impacting their probably-contractual KPIs.

Yet another cost for adding too many parties to something that could be better if it were simpler.

> Yet another cost for adding too many parties to something that could be better if it were simpler.

But its not a cost from the perspective of the companies doj the outsourcing: the incentives are the way they are because the result is intended. Its not a cost of adding an extra party, it is part of the reason the party is added.

I think you’re overestimating intentionality in bad outcomes.

It’s entirely possible for a whole organization to want a good outcome, but construct an org chart where bad outcomes are guaranteed by the misaligned and incomplete incentives for sub-divisions.

E.g. the IT support org that is only measured on total spend and time to ticket closure

> It’s entirely possible for a whole organization to ... construct an org chart

You changed actors mid-sentence. The workers in the organization may want good outcomes but they are near-invariably separate from the people making decisions for the organization.

No, I said it exactly as I meant it.

The organization (including the bulk of employees and executive leadership) may want a good outcome, but sub-divisions’ (aka the org chart) may have have their self-interests set to inevitably produce a bad outcome.