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Comment by souterrain | Hacker News Reader

Forget for a moment that a bureaucracy is involved.

If your company was bidding on a request for proposal (RFP) for a potential client, wouldn't you want to follow the customer's requirements?

Often RFP teams use failure to follow directions or specifics in a proposal submission as an informal measure of the likelihood the respondent will fail to deliver on other requirements.

I have worked for a company where I had spent 80 hours building a demo for a potential client. We did not make it to the demo phase due to a failure of our proposal writing team to address some technicality in the written proposal. I don't hold this against the client we lost; this falls on those whose jobs are solely writing and submitting technical proposals.

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I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and we endlessly tell clients to follow all RFP requirements religiously and precisely. See https://seliger.com/2008/02/25/what-does-a-grant-proposal-lo... for example:

Read the RFP carefully for formatting instructions and follow them precisely. For example, if the RFP says the proposal is to be double spaced, and does not make an exception for tables, double space all tables, no matter how silly this looks. The Department of Education, for example, will often reject proposals for non-compliance for just such nitpicking instructions.

We've seen innumerable proposals rejected for slight page limit violations, font violations, and similar minutia. Is this bullshit? Maybe. But if a funder is looking for reasons to reject you, and some are, try to give them as few reasons as possible.

The explanation for this phenomenon that I've always heard has been a matter of time.

If you're the bureaucrat reading applications, and you have a lot of applications that you need to narrow to one, you'll toss them for even the most minor rule violation.

"A sequentially numbering stamp"? Can't Word add page numbers by itself?

I think this is ridiculous. Formality to the absurdist extreme. Any mildly competent human being would overlook the letters “A3” not being above a certain safety paragraph.

If a robot were processing these applications then the error might be forgivable. But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.

I think the sort of person that would reject Skip’s application is someone that society would be better off without them in their current position. Hopefully one day they realize how their incompetence is hurting both people and progress, and either work towards using those reasoning skills or find a position better suited towards them.

>But if you’re a human on the job, society expects you to use the reasoning skills of a human.

Except it doesn't. Then society labels the process as biased, unfair, subject to the whims of the reviewer, open to corruption, and so on. One of the down voted comments jumped right to bribery for example.

Bureaucracy is this way not because it has to be but because society actually wants it to be.

I really think that no one would judge a reviewer for adding a heading where it needed to be. This is trivial, there isn’t really a political connotation here.

If a reviewer cannot do something trivial like this, then we don’t need them anyways. If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated, just run the application through a software that checks for word count and header presence and call it a day, and use those tax dollars towards a cause that would actually benefit society.

I would not be surprised if they had a safety specialist assigned to evaluate paragraph A3 of each proposal, in isolation from everything else. For fairness, that specialist may not have even been given access to the other parts of the applications.

In this case, the employee tasked with separating out the application pieces and sending them to the relevant specialists is likely not highly-trained, and there may be no-one in the organization competent to do this: the people that process the application as a whole aren’t qualified, and the people that are qualified can’t look at the whole application for fear of introducing bias.

> If the content doesn’t matter, as this bureaucracy has demonstrated...

I saw no indication that the contents of properly-formatted applications were being ignored. I believe it’s more likely that they set up a complicated review process that relied on applications being formatted as requested, so Skip’s application couldn’t be put through the pre-planned approval process.

I disagree with this. If they can't follow the formatting requirements of the application, then "what else are they overlooking, or likely to overlook once operating?" is a valid concern. They don't seem to indicate that it was an unknown requirement ("If the information does not have the letter A and the number 3 and then the paragraph below it, then it’s not there and you’re disqualified", [the CEO] said).

I see something of an analogy to the brown M&M's rider[1]. They don't particularly care that there are no brown M&M's, but the presence of them is a massive red flag that you have cut corners or not done your due diligence.

[1] https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9

Wait, this doesn't sound right. The thing about brown M&Ms was that they'd had too many safety problems, and if numerous small things in the spec were violated that meant there was a safety problem. That's the core problem they were trying to solve. If numerous small things are violated in a form, like the ones mentioned elsewhere in the thread, then that's actually pretty minor.

In this analogy, the violations on the form aren't the equivalent of the safety problem, they're the equivalent of the brown m&ms.

The selection process needed to hold up in court, so no, I don't find it ridiculous that not answering a question clearly would disqualify you.

I do find it ridiculous that they were not able to present a correctly field document for what such a crucial RFP.

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