Comment by whyenot

My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.

I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.

I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.

I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).

The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.

Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).

Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.

Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).

Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!

This is my experience as a government worker.

Imagine taking the answer to an innocuous question like "what is your favorite part of the job?" in what I assume was a social setting and extrapolating from there to "they don't care about their job."