After this weeks’s stereotypically sad experience with the DMV....
(spent 3 hours waiting in lines, filling out forms, finding out I didn’t bring the right documentation, going to get the right documentation, taking a test, finding out somewhere earlier in the process a computer glitched and I needed to go back and start over, waiting more, finally getting to the end only to learn I was also missing another piece of identification which rendered the whole process moot)
...and having just looked over a lot of 2018 posts investigating coordination failure…
I find myself wondering if it’s achievable to solve one particular way in which bureaucracy is terrible: the part where each node/person in the system only knows a small number of things, so you have to spend a lot of time rehashing things, and meanwhile can’t figure out if your goal is actually achievable.
(While attempting to solve this problem, it’s important to remember that at least some of the inconvenience of bureaucracy may be an active ingredient rather than inefficiency. But at least in this case it didn’t seem so: drivers licenses aren’t a conserved resource that the DMV wants to avoid handing out. If I had learned early on that I couldn’t get my license last Monday it would have not only saved me time, but saved DMV employee hassle)
I think most of the time there’s just no incentive to really fix this sort of thing (while you might have saved DMV employee hassle, you probably wouldn’t save them time, since they still just work the same 8 hour shift regardless. And if you’re the manager of a DMV you probably don’t care too much about your employees having slightly nicer days.
But, I dunno man, really!?. Does it seem like at least Hot New Startups could be sold on software that, I dunno, tracks all the requirements of a bureaucratic process and tries to compile “will this work?” at start time?
I can’t easily find it right now, but there was a comment thread a while back on Slate Star Codex where we concluded that, actually, the problem isn’t with DMVs.
The problem is with DMVs in California.
Any attempt to analyze the problem and/or solve it, must take into account this peculiarity!
EDIT:Found it. The situation’s a bit more nuanced that my one-sentence summary above, but nonetheless it’s clear that “DMVs are just terrible” does not generalize. Some are (seemingly more often in California); many are not.
I recall them being terrible in NY, although it’s been awhile.
I was also in a uniquely horrible situation because I moved from NY, lost my drivers license, couldn’t easily get a new from from NY (cuz I don’t live there anymore) and couldn’t easily get one from CA because I couldn’t prove I had one to transfer. (The results is that I think I need to take the driving test again, but it’ll get scheduled out another couple months from now, or something)
Which, I dunno I’d be surprised if any bureaucracy handled that particularly well, honestly.
After this weeks’s stereotypically sad experience with the DMV....
(spent 3 hours waiting in lines, filling out forms, finding out I didn’t bring the right documentation, going to get the right documentation, taking a test, finding out somewhere earlier in the process a computer glitched and I needed to go back and start over, waiting more, finally getting to the end only to learn I was also missing another piece of identification which rendered the whole process moot)
...and having just looked over a lot of 2018 posts investigating coordination failure…
I find myself wondering if it’s achievable to solve one particular way in which bureaucracy is terrible: the part where each node/person in the system only knows a small number of things, so you have to spend a lot of time rehashing things, and meanwhile can’t figure out if your goal is actually achievable.
(While attempting to solve this problem, it’s important to remember that at least some of the inconvenience of bureaucracy may be an active ingredient rather than inefficiency. But at least in this case it didn’t seem so: drivers licenses aren’t a conserved resource that the DMV wants to avoid handing out. If I had learned early on that I couldn’t get my license last Monday it would have not only saved me time, but saved DMV employee hassle)
I think most of the time there’s just no incentive to really fix this sort of thing (while you might have saved DMV employee hassle, you probably wouldn’t save them time, since they still just work the same 8 hour shift regardless. And if you’re the manager of a DMV you probably don’t care too much about your employees having slightly nicer days.
But, I dunno man, really!?. Does it seem like at least Hot New Startups could be sold on software that, I dunno, tracks all the requirements of a bureaucratic process and tries to compile “will this work?” at start time?
I can’t easily find it right now, but there was a comment thread a while back on Slate Star Codex where we concluded that, actually, the problem isn’t with DMVs.
The problem is with DMVs in California.
Any attempt to analyze the problem and/or solve it, must take into account this peculiarity!
EDIT: Found it. The situation’s a bit more nuanced that my one-sentence summary above, but nonetheless it’s clear that “DMVs are just terrible” does not generalize. Some are (seemingly more often in California); many are not.
I recall them being terrible in NY, although it’s been awhile.
I was also in a uniquely horrible situation because I moved from NY, lost my drivers license, couldn’t easily get a new from from NY (cuz I don’t live there anymore) and couldn’t easily get one from CA because I couldn’t prove I had one to transfer. (The results is that I think I need to take the driving test again, but it’ll get scheduled out another couple months from now, or something)
Which, I dunno I’d be surprised if any bureaucracy handled that particularly well, honestly.
Fwiw, my experiences with DMVs in DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York, and Minnesota have all been about as terrible as my experiences in California.
Unless there was a bureaucracy that used witnesses.