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My favorite is ignoring or downplaying a problem. 95% of apparent 'problems' are best ignored in favor of solving the worthwhile 5%.
Sometimes this means 'creating' a new problem by pointing to something unconsidered that's 10x more important.
I do this at work a lot and often the problem goes away because the stakeholders above me couldn't agree on the problem being important enough to solve for a long enough time.
When a problem survives this, usually it's worth solving.
That's lesson number one for GP's. Second lesson is to pay attention to correctly catch the remaining 5%. You can get help to solve them later.
Choose your battles.
Yeah, benign neglect is a good response for a wide variety of problems. FWIW, I also call it "the healing power of apathy".
Nice article, interesting to keep an open mind.
On "No. 0002. Preserving problems", it can happen to people too, no need for a complex system at the size of a company. I have often noticed recognized experts keeping the root of the problem unsolved because it was justifying their position. I may even have been subject of this curse. As an expert, you may know the root cause but have no incentive to solve it and it can be harder to mobilize ressources to solve the root cause than to keep solving the superficial issue. It is management or outside help role to identify and push for solving problems at their root, but it takes time and dedication because of expertise. As most of the time, incentives explain nearly everything.
I often found the opposite can be be true, people can, for decades on end, be totally ignorant of what happens next door. When you show them the effect of their ignorance you often get something akin to the stages of grief. Definitely the anger, and with you in particular. The, 'I don't care whose fault it is, I'm not here to apportion blame' line only goes so far, especially since other managers and even the CEO might be very interested in apportioning blame. At least they are allies for the change that needs to happen
In terms of the expert observation, I've seen this happen a number of times in conjunction with "not invented here" (and probably been guilty of it myself at times) - "the commodity solution doesn't do X that we want", "yeah our in house solution doesn't do x,y,z that the commodity solution does but just a little more effort and it'll be perfect"
Spoiler: neither the commodity solution or the in-house solution will ever be perfect, and you should be really self critical of whether you're building something in-house to scratch your own itch.
If you can find a commodity solution with the right extension points that's often the best solution, failing that many times it's worth accepting the limitations, rarely it's worth investing in the totally bespoke thing (outside of your core domain/proposition).
This specific problem reminded me of Batman.
The "meta" problem is that political in-fighting usually results in local optimization everywhere. Various departments throw each other under the bus to steal budget/people/resources. When leadership finally decides to right the bus, they hire an outside consultant; this is an important signal to the departments to stop the nonsense and tell the consultant what everyone knows but doesn't want to talk about. Serious problems require serious solutions. It is much easier to say if Y department would give us X, then line go up forever.
This is a gross oversimplification of my experience with conservative vs. liberal friends.
But there is enough truth in it to at least be worth the humor.
My conservative friends respond to a problem by mashing all its symptoms, and often operate on assumptions they have never tested. And would resist testing.
My liberal friends respond to a solution, veering away hard from the solution's costs, without first asking how they can be mitigated or if the accounting still works out positive.
Disclaimer: Could be anecdotal. Could be projection. But for my population of five people, the correlation is 100%! They would all likely agree too. Given enough beer, and with my recorder out of sight.
Do you have any concrete examples of this? I'm having trouble picturing these.
Seems related to the four risk management strategies:
- Avoidance
- Mitigation
- Transference
- Acceptance
Sounds like the classic 5 stages ... Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.
You make two big assumptions - 1) The problem is really a problem, it is not invented by the consultant, it is well defined, deserves "solving", 2) the person or team is the one who is responsible for doing something about it. 3) "Solving" is justified by overall cost-benefit view.
The "pushing around" could be about letting the right person/team handle it. "Preserving" could be due to lack of business justification to "solve" it. Promoting new problem could be due to poor understanding of the problem and solution, usually due to consultants pushing for it.
People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame.
If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the problem often have the least incentive to do so.
Problems like those don’t just get “solved” one time. They require ongoing maintenance to keep levels low/manageable. If that isn’t understood by those in government, I would say that is a level of incompetence.
This can play out in a couple ways. People can avoid solving the problem, because they think at that point the work is done forever. This is incorrect. People can also be scared (for good reason) that whoever is in charge will mistakenly assume no maintenance is needed after “solving” a problem and let everyone go. This would be incompetence in leadership.
I see both of these things play out on a smaller scale at work all the time. We keep solving the same problems, because ever time it’s “solved” people move on to new projects the upkeep falls behind, and the problem grows again.
I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings.
I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?
Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.
While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).
Am I wrong in thinking this comment is absolutely bonkers? It's basically a conspiracy theory.
When I lead teams and thought of how to motivate them to get certain things done, like code quality, I found it best to frame why certain things got done as a mixture of constraints and incentives. ie. What was preventing people from doing a thing and what motivated them to do thing.
You're basically arguing that there's no constraints to these problems and that people are incentivized to proliferate them. Do you distrust people that much?
Isn't it easier to surmise that there could be a lot of constraints and not a lot of incentives to solve these issues?
Or heck... just a shit ton of constraints than incentives?
I mean... there are people who are incentivized to keep drug use going: drug dealers and kingpins. And I'm sure there are some with their hand in governments. But there's no way that's the default.
3 groups are suspect: Doctors, Police and Firemen. If they did their job well, they would have no job.
Politicians too, by having big problems they guarantee they can get people to vote for them by promising to solve those problems. But people are getting smart to that. The Who said it well: We won't get fooled again.
Doctors have their Hippocratic oath. Do police and firemen have something similar, or don't they need it?
> If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.;
Crime is really hard to solve, but many cities in the USA and elsewhere have managed to largely do it.
Homelessness is something I think is very much an American problem among developed nations. It’s always shocking to see the campgrounds in American cities, some of the richest in the world, coming from Europe. I suspect it’s mostly related to drug abuse and the lack of social assistance for those in need which the Americans are allergic to solving due to the culture of freedom, or autonomy at all costs (which somehow gets interpreted as not having to pay taxes to help those in need).
It becomes a "problem farming" situation. Someone who profits from a problem existing, will work to preserve the problem either consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps even just through a process of evolution.
This applies to both public and private spheres. Just as justice systems farm criminals, dating apps farm romantically frustrated people and so on.
The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?
It's just an incentive problem. If the people in the government would get fired or lose their personal income if they did not deliver results, then they would be effective like you wouldn't believe.
As it is, they're spending other people's money on other people's problems with effectively no accountability.
Possibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on HN.
Like politicians are going "without the homeless, I won't have anything to do anymore!". Like the street workers are thinking "shit, what'll I do if this goldmine dries up"?
Ridiculous.
Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!
The company for which I work seems to be run by engineers. When learning to be an engineer you're taught that doing nothing is always a valid option. In Army leadership courses we were taught that ANY decision is better than NO decision.
My company is stifled by a bunch of engineers in leadership positions who always choose to defer up the chain rather than make a decision themselves.
As another commentator said "do nothing" is a decision. There's a distinction between "don't make a decision and hope someone else makes a decision" and "we acknowledge we're deciding to do nothing about X until/unless Y"
The people in leadership positions should be active participants, and not all decisions will be ones they are are able to make locally - but they should feel comfortable to present a POV and recommendation/tradeoffs upwards when that's the case. If the buck stops with them then they should be aware that "do nothing" is a decision that they are making.
> … they inadvertently perpetuate the problem
“Inadvertently”? Seldom.
reminds me of an old meme
> have "problem"; don't care: no problem
Good article. I think a lot of people in the software development field should ponder over "No. 0002. Preserving problems", because a lot of rhetoric is basically advancing this position.
Software development traditionally is expensive, slow, adapts poorly, and so on. This worked in our favour as it gave us high paying jobs where we could always blame a framework, Microsoft, whatever, and estimate a week to move a button. These people are the ones who are the loudest at filling the silence with anti-AI propaganda because they desperately want to hold onto that problem.
There is a fourth that the author would never mention:
Hire consultants about the problem
Somehow made me think of every 'modern' HR department.
The pushing problems around under the guise of solving them for political gain is what corporate and government malfeasance is all about.
The better you are at the game the higher you climb!
One doesn't need to be a consultant to realize how people respond to problems (other than solving them).
But it helps. Perhaps. Maybe even more so if you (=consultant) leave with just the recommendations, without actually implementing them. Which is what most of the Big 4 consulting companies do.
(Guilty, to be honest. And that's why (partly) I gave up mgmt consulting)
But it helps to understand where people are coming from to realize why the problems exist in the first place.
How are (tech) consultants typically hired? They also go through the nonsense of live coding / systems design interview? Or they get asked specifically about the problem they need to solve and see if they are a good fit or not?
My favourite pathology is change the problem. Piggybacking on an organisational problem to solve it while promoting a personal objective. This is a subtle pathology, quite common e.g. when a new framework is introduced etc.
No. 0004. Pretermit new problems
The most common response I see is "unfortunately this problem is impossible for us to fix because I can't be bother.. err I mean because of these technical reasons. Yes definitely that."
It's neglecting a fourth: Refusing to actually solve the problem so that they can continue to complain about it being someone else's fault.
Not my problem - the best kind of problem.
Three more common ways of responding to a problem:
Weaponize it.
Study it.
Blog about it.
There’s a fourth: deny
>The most obvious example of how AI destroys the human ability to learn and think critically is its ubiquitous use in high schools and colleges. A study released in October 2025 found that 84 percent of high school students use AI to brainstorm ideas, edit or revise essays, and/or conduct research and find sources. Another 69 percent use ChatGPT to help with school assignments and homework.
Perhaps I am not as smart as author, but how is "brainstorming ideas" doing the "destroys the human ability to learn and think critically"? It is just cooperative work! Rich kids have private tutors, and do the "brainstorming" all the time!
I heard similar arguments when google search become widely available!
The problems you have are solutions to the problems you don't want to admit to yourself are actually having.
hug of death?