Bureaucrat mode

Andrew Chen reveals how organizations naturally drift into 'bureaucrat mode' through well-intentioned values like 'collaboration', 'consensus', and 'inclusiveness' that paradoxically create dysfunction. Symptoms include creating committees for every decision, endless pre-meetings and status reports, punishing individual initiative, complex approval workflows, celebrating vanity metrics, and rewarding projects based on team size rather than output. The consequence is 'self-replicating bureaucrats' who hire more bureaucrats, slow decision-making, inability to respond to market changes, and entrepreneurial employees fleeing. Engineering leaders will learn that incentive structures rewarding team size over actual output accelerate this drift, but it can be counteracted by maintaining startup-like agility, rewarding actual output not process, keeping decision-making lean, encouraging individual initiative, and regularly challenging existing processes. Chen's key insight: the cycle is inevitable—'a new, nimble startup emerges' then scales, becomes bureaucratic, and gets disrupted by the next nimble startup.