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Accountability sinks

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Re: Accountability sinks

#171

Post by maccard »

ginko wrote: post #111
gregmac wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with. I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want t…

>If things still aren't working, try our online support chat >So, basically there doesn't seem to be any phone technical support (with a human), at all. I wish everything had support chat. IMO it's much less hassle than having to call. It's usually trivial to get through the first layer of automated support and get a human on the line.

I agree, but;

Support chat is universally shitty. My mobile provider's website only works if you keep the browser window open, and times out if you go away for 2 minutes. The replies often take more than 2 minutes. I can only access "certain" information about my account if I'm on mobile data, except my carrier's website doesn't work if I am out of data. (granted, I am on a super budget mobile network, but still). In the last 18 months, the chat experience has been taken over by LLM's which are just acting as full text search for the doc pages that don't solve my problem.

I still choose web chat over any other method of interaction though.

Re: Accountability sinks

#172

Post by miki123211 »

I experience this pretty often with the newfangled, automated government e-filing systems.

As a screen-reader-using person who cannot use pen and paper without assistance, I was once quite enamored by them, but I've changed my stance a bit.

The thing about pen and paper is that it accepts anything you put in, and it's up to a human to validate whether what you put in makes any sense. Computers aren't like that, if they tell you that the numbers in your application have to match up, you need to lie to the government to make them match up, even if you're a weird edge case where the numbers should, in fact, be slightly off and "inconsistent" with each other.

I called the local govt office responsible for this specific program, and they essentially told me to lie to the government in not so many words. Their system is centrally managed, they have no power of introducing updates to it, they wish they could fix it, but even they aren't empowered to do so.

Re: Accountability sinks

#173

Post by ernst_klim »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #156
larsrc wrote: post #133

I've long thought that that is one of the main functions of corporations. There's a reason they're called limited liability. The fact that you can conjure up new companies at a whim makes it easy to shuffle responsibility into an obscure corner. This is a strong reason that corporations should not be considered people. People are long-lived entities with accountability and you can't just create or destroy them at wil…

Yeah, this dysfunction is not a bug, it's the feature. In some ways, it's useful, because it allows positive risk-taking that could not be taken if anyone was actually held (or even just felt) accountable. But at this point, as a society, we've shifted too far towards enabling accountability-free behavior from corporations. I think a good example of the dichotomy here is Starlink. On one hand, it's an incredibly usef…

Sorry but I find your example totally wrong. Things like radio frequencies and space launches are hard regulated by govs, no corporation can launch satellites at will without permission from the government(s).

Re: Accountability sinks

#174

Post by gyre007 »

My theory is all developed societies converge on having no accountability in the governing positions. Of course, I may and most like am wrong but if you look at say politics you must at least think about this being a real possibility

Re: Accountability sinks

#175

Post by smugglerFlynn »

xg15 wrote: post #114

My suspicion I'd that one of the major appeals of automation and especially "app-ification" for management and C-Suite types is specifically its ability to break accountability links. A lot of corporations now seem to have a structure where the org chart contains the following pattern: - a "management layer" (or several of them) which consists of product managers, software developers, ops people, etc. The main task o…

If you think back to less automated times, management was the programming —- you built instructions and procedures that allowed organisation to scale and improve your end product.

The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of better word, “meat programmers” aka organisational execs.

Interestingly, the end result customers get has not changed, despite many people coloring it that way. People still get same cup of coffee or a taxi ride, just quicker/cheaper/marginally better. But such incremental improvements were achievable in the business world before IT era using same exact means, through internal product management and imrovement of org procedures, applied to people and processes instead of pieces of software.

Re: Accountability sinks

#176

Post by InsideOutSanta »

dale_glass wrote: post #170
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Then there's that there's nothing really special about Starlink" I didn't say there was, and this isn't about Musk. I'm just using Starlink as an example, my point is not about Starlink. "I don't see how that is polluting" Starlink satellites create light pollution and disrupt radio frequencies. Astronomers are already running into issues with research due to the light from Starlink satellites. There's also the issu…

I don't think it works at all, no. There's no accountability sink to speak of here. "Accountability sink" in the article's meaning means that accountability got obscured, something bad happened (eg, lies on TV, terrible customer service), yet nobody can be clearly blamed for giving the order. Here, it's Musk's invention, and he's clearly to blame for it. In fact Musk has a propensity to take more credit than he deser…

Musk is not accountable for Starlink. Starlink is an LLC, a limited liability company. There is no single person who is accountable for Starlink's satellites.

Re: Accountability sinks

#177

Post by Moru »

maccard wrote: post #165
atoav wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the root of all that? Privatization.

No, it's not. It's bureacracy, and it exists in every big organisation, private or public. I'd actually suggest that public sector bodies are often worse for this.

They are only worse because they are bigger. If the private replacement organization gets as big, they get the same problems.

Re: Accountability sinks

#178

Post by Moru »

someoneiam wrote: post #155
bojan wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.

Well, they say that, but in my experience at least, that is just conjured up as a more palatable explanation after the fact. While I do think that a certain, even significant, amount of automation is good, there is also a large mass of unemployed that can undoubtedly be trained to fill these "human interaction" kind of roles (support). This workforce is still not hard to find at all. We just don't want to do that - t…

Yes, it's only a profit thing. If you cut out the humans you can make more money. If not for your boss then for the company that gets the contract to make the automation.

Re: Accountability sinks

#179

Post by smugglerFlynn »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #121

Systems Theory would describe this as "intrinsic responsibility". From Donella Meadows: “Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.

Super interesting concept, because these complaints tend to end up at the bottom of top management backlog due to amount of time and attention required to analyse these. In real life it just does not work unless your org is in the low hundreds of customers.

This could change if technology could solve aggregation and analysis problem, making ready-made decision propositions to management. High risk of this mechanism just becoming another accountability sink, though.

Another solution is to build large organisations out of federated micro-orgs, where such intristic responsibility is feasible.

Re: Accountability sinks

#180

Post by xg15 »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #175
xg15 wrote: post #114

My suspicion I'd that one of the major appeals of automation and especially "app-ification" for management and C-Suite types is specifically its ability to break accountability links. A lot of corporations now seem to have a structure where the org chart contains the following pattern: - a "management layer" (or several of them) which consists of product managers, software developers, ops people, etc. The main task o…

If you think back to less automated times, management was the programming —- you built instructions and procedures that allowed organisation to scale and improve your end product. The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of b…

Yes, in principle nothing has changed since at least Fordian times - back then we had factory workers on one side and owners, managers and engineers on the other side, with the intermediate role perhaps being the foreman or something similar.

I still think there is some difference in kind, not just degree: A human operational exec at least has to engage with the workers personally, witness the conditions they are working in, is exposed to complaints, etc. Even the most uncaring foreman is therefore forced into a position where he is subjected to accountability. He also has personal contact with the upper layer and can pass on that accountability to his higher-ups.

In contrast, a software layer is physically unable to hear complaints and to pass them back up the chain. Because it's not a human, it cannot take accountability itself - however, it can still give higher-ups plausible deniability about "not having known" about problems. (A knock-on effect is also that it will prevent workers from even attempting to communicate the problem, because no one wants to talk to a wall)

Therefore it creates an accountability sink where there was none in the old structure.

(None in theory at least, of course there were enough other ways to be shielded from accountability even before computers)

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