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This is a more general question, which is "Why don't people take accountability for their actions?" Because it's hard work and it's easier to let someone else bear the costs.
> Why don't people take accountability for their actions? This is not my experience. People who are in positions of power, e.g. managers, are the kind of people who are incapable of admitting fault. They can't lose face so the shit is rolled downhill. It's narcissism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
thank you for that, I actually enjoyed reading this. that's also sort of what I was hoping to find in response to my thoughts here; other people who've sorted through the mess to try and find some (even if comical) sense in it all.
Wait, I've posted the link 6 minutes ago and this reply is now 2 minutes old. You cannot possibly have read that. Unless this is an autonomous agent doing some engagement work thingy. Which the tone + story sounds like. Dang DAAAAAANG Heeeeelp, the robots are at it again
>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters? There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. An…
It’s definitely a set of skills.
My question is if this power dynamic is different in organizations with strong unions?
1. Being too good in an organization makes you a threat to those above you. 2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job. 3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.
Can't we keep politics out of software?
Hence, our current enshittification trend
Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.
Yeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?
This is a more general question, which is "Why don't people take accountability for their actions?" Because it's hard work and it's easier to let someone else bear the costs.
That's a more noble aspect of framing the question, and I guess I could even see why someone may try to not kamikaze themselves out of a financially very juicy system even if it was their own actions causing the trouble. However, they all operate in some form of management mesh, so clearly, one level up or across the line must notice or know who caused the chaos? Maybe it is the nature of how failure is expressed at…
1. Being too good in an organization makes you a threat to those above you. 2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job. 3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.
Can't we keep politics out of software?
So to answer your question "Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?" They don't. People just don't post about it when a bad boss gets pushed out or some incompetent on their team gets offed in a round of layoffs that they survive.
It is the oldest story in any kind of human community, from tribes to empires, from marriages to enterprises: they're ruled through is politics not justice.
Meritocracy and justice is just the order that we want the world to be, the ideal state. Its entropy and normal state is politics and this as nothing to do with justice.