[Alupis]

> The current CEO was supposed to be a down to earth, technical, no bureaucracy guy as well.

Turning a ship the size of Intel is a super power in it's own right. Especially one with such a large entrenched bureaucracy as Intel has.

Politics aside for a moment - we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE - the main difference is the fight is in full public view instead of behind closed doors. We can only imagine and speculate at the resistance Pat and others met while trying to change Intel's course.

The infamous Oscar Wilde quote is very applicable: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Ever large bureaucracy eventually exists largely to preserve itself. This is why it is so incredibly difficult to reduce the size of a bureaucracy. Every member is convinced the organization will fail tomorrow if they are let go today, and every member fights/resists any and all changes that threaten their bureaucracy and the status quo.

Best of luck to Tan - I truly hope they succeed where many have failed at Intel. AMD needs a healthy Intel to drive motivation and competition. The world will be watching.

[zvr]

Bureaucracies are about processes.

I do not live in the US, and I don't follow all that's happening too closely, but from what I hear it seems that most of DOGE actions are about eliminating people and cutting budgets, which may be a valid way to save money. This has nothing to do with bureaucracy.

If, to complete a process, you needed approval by three people and you still need the same approvals, the bureaucracy is untouched -- it will just take longer without people and money.

[rowanG077]

Bureaucracies are about process. Process require people, a ton of people if you have a ton of processes. If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient. This becomes problematic only once your processes are reasonably optimized. The later is what I view is essentially the vision of DOGE, they say processes are not efficient. Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.

[consteval]

> Letting people go should not meaningfully decrease the efficacy of these institutions in the long term.

I disagree, of course it will meaningfully decrease the efficacy. The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.

Of course, the same amount of stuff needs to get done. The workload doesn’t actually decrease because these jobs are complex in nature. There’s a lot of citizens to provide services to, or a lot of organizations to regulate. Those factors stay constant. The hope is that they’re unable to do their jobs in time, and we get more “asbestos in baby powder” type incidents as a result. Or shitty water (literally) or listeria, or watergates, or pick whatever bad thing you want when regulation goes down.

I truly don’t understand how people make such bold statements as “letting people go changes nothing!” Really? What’s the mechanism for that? Process just… become more efficient? Do we even know how efficient the processes currently are? Because something tells me you have no idea. You’re assuming they’re inefficient because that’s easy to believe and requires no analysis.

[rowanG077]

> The purpose of DOGE is to dismantle organizations which provide accountability for the private sector and the executive, including organizations which literally focus on optimizing processes.

If you working from a bad faith PoV like this it really makes no sense to talk about it.

The mechanism is pretty obvious to me. The pareto principle is well studied.

Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has. As far as I understand it. DOGE is trying to be that.

[consteval]

> Like a government agency has no self cleaning mechanism like a cooperation has.

What? No.

1. Unlike the private sector, the public sector is built on hard budgets, not speculation. They don’t balloon up like your typical money-burning tech company.

2. They can, and do, fire people for performance. No idea where the myth that they can’t do that came from.

3. They run probationary periods just like the private sector to make firing easier and, in fact, their probationary periods are much longer!

4. There are inspectors and agencies directly responsible for optimization.

[rowanG077]

1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap.

2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about department wide processes.

3. Oke, see my prior point.

4. Well yeah now there is, it's called the department of government efficiency.

[sifar]

>> If you can slim the processes, a.k.a reduce bureaucracy, then a ton of people can be let go. Also if you let go a ton of people, processes are forced to become more efficient.

Or broken. The latter has a higher a probability.

This is pretty naive, one dimensional thinking. Making things efficient requires deep systems understanding and lack of which is on display here (Chesterton's fence). And one can achieve it reasonably for physical/technical things, however dismantling social processes that have evolved over the years for variety of reasons indicates neither the capability nor the desire to improve them.

[specialist]

What's DOGE's plan for process improvement? Is there a policy and legislative framework in the works?

[arunabha]

> we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE

That's one interpretation, sure. I hope you'll concede that another equally valid one is that we're hearing the deliberate shattering of the only institution in the country capable of standing up to the oligarchs.

So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget. However, a lot of has been cut so far has been very favourable to the ultra rich. The most obvious ones being cutting the IRS enforcement budget and gutting the CFPB.

It's possible to argue that all of that is good policy, but the facts make it very to claim that all of the destruction being wrought is going to make a meaningful dent in the government's spending.

[specialist]

> So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget.

IIRC, less even than the govt's subsidies to Musk's enterprises.

[rowanG077]

Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.

Anyway at this point it's impossible to predict what will happen. There is no doubt a ton of inefficiency at these bureaucracies. You are making the point that cutting the budget will mean they will become less effective. But that doesn't follow if the departments are totally inefficient. Look at twitter. Musk fired like 80% of the software engineers. I'm not a heavy twitter user but I haven't noticed any difference in terms of reliability.

[specialist]

Have you read the misc "why can't America build things any more" criticisms? Like why our mega projects are super expensive, late, and over budget.

The recurring punchline is: Lack of administrative capacity.

The trials and tribulations of California's ill fated high speed rail is such a case study. Decades of outsourcings and privatization eliminated CA's ability to manage the effort.

[chuankl]

> Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.

A tenth of one percent. So not 10%, but 0.1%.

[cinntaile]

There is a massive difference though. It doesn't matter to anyone if Twitter works or not, while a lot of people depend on functioning government agencies.

[rowanG077]

And there are people who rely on it that aren't appropriately handled today. What I mean with that the current state is far from perfect too.

Your argument is essentially change is risk. Which is true. But what is also true is that never changing will yield a much worse system in the long run.

[cinntaile]

No, my argument is you can't compare the two.

[rowanG077]

Just because one is something people rely upon and the other isn't is not really a reason they are incomparable. Just because the end goal is different doesn't suddenly mean nothing applies.

[huxley]

After getting rid of most third party app support, 99.9% of all API access, losing massive chunks of active userbase and virtually all advertising except penis pills and scams, site performance probably isn’t terrible for casual users, it would difficult for it to not be adequate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[UltraSane]

"we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE"

DOGE is just Musk bribing Trump into letting him settle scores and shut down agencies that are investigating him or that he doesn't like. Finding and eliminating "inefficiency" is just another one of Musk's myriad lies. I'm shocked at how many people still consider him to have any credibility at all.

[la64710]

It’s a well written comment. Just because you disagree is no reason to downvote a well written comment.

[gessha]

"Politics aside for a moment" and then following up with politics is at the very least a logically inconsistent statement.

Logical inconsistencies aside for a moment, the comment would've carried a little more weight if cited any sources for their claims.

[signatoremo]

we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE

What is political about that statement? You may disagree with him, I certainly don’t think all of what happened with DOGE is justified, but that was a neutral statement.

[brookst]

Disagree. It was both political and speculative.

It presumes that DOGE will be successful in a political fight, which is possible but not certain. The statement is no more neutral (and less accurate IMO) than saying “we’re seeing the culmination of a decades-long war on competence”.

[freejazz]

It's political because it assumes anything happened besides what actually did, which was arbitrary number of people were fired from the agencies that Musk was most easily able to do so at, with no regard for what their roles were or their relation to the actual functions of the agencies.

[bee_rider]

The comment (despite protests to the contrary) injected politics unnecessarily and a bit randomly (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar).

[ethbr1]

> (there’s no particular reason to believe Intel and the US government are very similar)

Large monopolies with limited market pressure to innovate?

[bee_rider]

Not really, no. Governments aren’t businesses. There isn’t much of a market for governance, people mostly become citizens by birth instead of by shopping around.

Governments have natural “monopoly” over their territory (if there is competition for governing inside a territory, you have a civil war going on).

Or, there is no monopoly, since you can “shop around” by moving to other countries. It depends on how you want to line up the analogy. (There’s room to line up the analogy in multiple ways because it is an analogy, and not a description of what countries actually are).

Governments don’t innovate much on governance. They might enable innovation in other sectors. But the process of governance itself should generally be pretty slow-and-steady because the stakes are higher than an individual business. The goal of a government is not to create new and interesting governance-products and then sell those products, but to rule over an area in a way that doesn’t annoy the populace too much.

[gessha]

How are the concepts of a state and a business the same?

[brookst]

Also they both own real estate?

Not all things that share some attributes are similar in general.

[freejazz]

My shirt today is red. Do you know what else is red? Those buses in London!

[bee_rider]

Hah. Not even, though. Redness is a characteristic that means the same thing in the context of your shirt and a bus. Because there isn’t generally a competitive market for the service of “being governed” monopoly doesn’t even make sense there.

It is more like saying strawberries and ethyl methylphenylglycidate are both red tasting.

[freejazz]

Fair point. Is that what they put in Code Red? Because that drink tastes damn red.