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Accountability sinks

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Re: Accountability sinks

#181

Post by jowea »

rougka wrote: post #64

I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought. It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers. Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but comput…

Does Germany have a consumer protection agency? I might have complained there after the flight.

Re: Accountability sinks

#182

Post by smugglerFlynn »

xg15 wrote: post #180
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

My experience: only the good operational execs engage personally, and only for specific reasons of gathering feedback and improving the overall system.

You’d be surprised how often decisions are made without ever seeing people at work, or communicating with them in a meaningful way. There are managers who do engage first hand, but they are not real decision makers, and just relay the report on situation and context upstream / execute on decisions of others. Relay of accurate first hand information from workers to execs almost never happens.

As one of the neighbor threads accurately highlighted: this is by design, both on customer side and on worker’s side. Customers get vouchers, workers get retainers, among both there is a calculated percentage of people facing what they see as “accountability sink”, what is in reality a machine intentionally designed that way.

Re: Accountability sinks

#183

Post by RobotToaster »

m463 wrote: post #76
rougka wrote: post #64

I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought. It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers. Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but comput…

Many businesses build walls around themselves like this. Hiding the customer service number. Making an FAQ that is missing the common but time-consuming questions. Chatbots instead of people. I remember when amazon sent me a package once, said it was delivered, but it was nowhere to be found. There was no way to get help. They did have an FAQ at the time that said to check in the bushes. What was annoying was the sea…

I've started just sending physical, paper, letters if I need to communicate with a company. It seems to have a better success rate.

Re: Accountability sinks

#184

Post by pzmarzly »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #43
RachelF wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. The modern company is a very very limited liability company: - Cut corners so your jets crash and kill people (Boeing)? - Cheat on emissions testing so your product kill people (VW)? - Hush up drug trial results so you kills people (Pfizer)? - Sloppy security leads to hundreds of millions of people's personal data being leaked (too many to mention)? What happens to those in charge? Nothing. Perhaps they leave w…

Liability and retroactive clawbacks need to be introduced, particularly for very large organizations that like the government, don’t face real competition.

The EU and the FTC are slowly reintroducing the concept of liability to big corps, especially the big tech. Is the world healing?

Re: Accountability sinks

#185

Post by TJSomething »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #176
dale_glass wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The chief difference here is that you can plausibly point at every investor in Starlink and say if they have the slightest idea of Starlink's business plan, they know that causes light pollution. There is exactly one degree of separation from putting satellites in the sky to causing light pollution. There's no plausible deniability there.

This article is more about the phenomenon where decisions are removed by multiple degrees. The locus of decision making is either obscured or non-existent, creating plausible deniability. This is often done by rewarding activities that don't obviously create harm but nevertheless require causing harm to carry out.

Re: Accountability sinks

#186

Post by pzmarzly »

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…

In my opinion it's even more complicated, as the "management layer" is also using these tactics against itself. "You must use an iPhone", "You cannot expense this trip with company card", "Your permission request to do XYZ in our cloud was automatically declined", "This tool only works in Google Chrome". Why? "The rules say so" / "The system says so". Who set "the rules"? Who set up "the system"? Nobody seems to know, and digging into it yourself is a herculean effort and usually a waste of time.

Re: Accountability sinks

#187

Post by sethammons »

eru wrote: post #126
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…

> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot. How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out??(Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting) Why is rebooting offensive to you? State is hard; resetting your system to…

If your microwave had an error, you would be put off if you had to power cycle the whole house. Installed a new receptacle, sure, but operating an appliance? No way. Now you would have to reset your clocks everywhere at a minimum.

I have a linux computer running a public server that has not be restarted in three and a half years. This is what I expect.

Every time I have to reboot my work laptop due to work pushing some updates or that I have to reboot my windows machine because it is running unreasonably slow, I am reminded that inconsiderate assholes have become more lazy and are ok with polluting the whole system, mismanaging state and resiliency, and when the equivalent of the microwave has an error, the only solution is rebooting my house. We can do better.

Re: Accountability sinks

#188

Post by Panzer04 »

atoav wrote: post #138
nh2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is somewhat rubbish. I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing. Syncing the app…

And the root of all that? Privatization.

Really?

The more focused a company is (the more reliant it is on its core service) the more accountable it can be. I'd argue many companies are if anything more accountable than the government. It doesn't have to be true, but I'd argue it often is.

Re: Accountability sinks

#189

Post by ksec »

Ma8ee wrote: post #39
ksec wrote: post #37

>> In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Government and Civil Servant are the biggest example. I guess its time to re-watch "Yes Minister".

That is a problem of organisation size, not so much whether the organisation is private or public.

I dont believe the largest company on planet earth by market cap has the problem as bad as government, even in a smallish country.

Re: Accountability sinks

#190

Post by fredgrott »

ahem at least in the Western world corporations were invented by the Church, an entity well known to me not accountable....look at the 94 apologies and the Pope's words before and after each apology....

By the way this is what bitcoin was set up to solve...notice it not being solved.

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