Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Accountability sinks

aworkinglibrary.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 316 posts

Re: Accountability sinks

#81

Post by mediumsmart »

you can't have accountability in a world where you can be a good family member and work for a company that manufactures bombs that kill families. This doesnt compute in humans. They cant deal with that. If you cant handle accountability for that ... who cares about you getting into your hotel room a little later or missing a flight or not getting health insurance ... no biggie.

what you can have is a discussion about this or a blog post that is read by people and maybe some new subscribers, so no worries - all is not lost. :)

Re: Accountability sinks

#82

Post by _kidlike »

solatic wrote: post #65

Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee B doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee C doing their job correctly according to the process, and the end result is shit, then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible…

I think "accountability" here was the wrong word to begin with. I believe they are more talking about "ability for feedback" or even better "just in time corrections". Feedback exists, but from my experience nobody reads those form submissions - maybe an AI these days that will create a summary... The latter is purposefully removed from all processes :(

Re: Accountability sinks

#83

Post by rini17 »

spencerchubb wrote: post #45
alilleybrinker wrote: post #15

Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction" (2016, Penguin Random House) is a good companion to this concept, covering the "accountability sink" from the other side of those constructing or overseeing systems. Cathy argues that the use of algorithm in some contexts permits a new scale of harmful and unaccountable systems that ought to be reigned in. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...

It's much easier to hold an algorithm accountable than an organization of humans. You can reprogram an algorithm. But good look influencing an organization to change

You now have to not only find someone responsible for the algorithm but also competent and with permission to do it. Isn't it clear that this is very hard?

Re: Accountability sinks

#84

Post by solatic »

jldugger wrote: post #69
solatic wrote: post #65

Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee B doing their job correctly according to the process, passing work to employee C doing their job correctly according to the process, and the end result is shit, then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible…

> Too focused on the bottom level. If a given business process results in employee A doing their job correctly according to the process... then the person who is accountable for the end result being shit is the manager who is responsible for the process itself. The book's point is that while this _should_ be the case, all too often it's not. AFAIK, nobody has been charged with forging documents in the case of Wells F…

> nor the executives who built that system

This is exactly why being an executive of a large organization is so incredibly difficult to pull off well. Sure, you can let your assistant fill your calendar with a bunch of meetings you don't want to be in to spend 95% of the meeting listening, 4% being the arbiter who tells people what they already knew they needed to do but refused to do it until asked by someone in authority, and 1% saying you'll take it further up the ladder. You will also fail hard because you will be constantly blindsided by people either fucking up (at best) or gaming (at worst) the processes for which you are responsible. Small example litmus test: in organizations that use Jira, whether the executives are comfortable with JQL and building their own dashboards to tell them what they need to know, or whether they expect their direct reports to present their work. If it's the latter, how can an executive be surprised that their reports are always coming in with sunny faces and graphs going up and to the right?

That too many companies are not willing to hold executives accountable for processes that they are, in theory, supposed to be accountable for is an entirely different problem. The law proscribes, the officer arrests, and the judge presides, but all rests upon the jury to convict. If a company's "jury" is not willing to "convict", because the crime is one of negligence and not treason, then the company has larger problems and I'd like to short their stock, please.

Re: Accountability sinks

#85

Post by jiggawatts »

mediumsmart wrote: post #81

you can't have accountability in a world where you can be a good family member and work for a company that manufactures bombs that kill families. This doesnt compute in humans. They cant deal with that. If you cant handle accountability for that ... who cares about you getting into your hotel room a little later or missing a flight or not getting health insurance ... no biggie. what you can have is a discussion about…

That suddenly reminded me of a Redditor talking about how some acquaintance of theirs works for a US military technology company, but is only involved in non-weapons research that has civilian applications.

When pressed, the Redditor said that the their friend was working on the mathematical theory for computers to control planes that have no power, such as under emergency landing conditions. I.e.: If the engine dies, the auto pilot can help steer the plane onto a runway.

"No, your friend is working on precision glide bombs. The emergency landing thing is just marketing to make it palatable. She might not even know, but that's definitely what she'd doing."

That stuck with me: someone could be working on bomb technology and not even know it.

Talk about an accountability sink!

Re: Accountability sinks

#86

Post by gregmac »

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 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 to try rebooting." (Pause)... "thank you for your call click"

First off, rebooting doesn't solve my problem. But I guess I have to try anyway?

So I call back, this time I do pick to reboot, and get "your modem will reboot in the next few minutes, and could take up to 10 minutes to come online. 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.

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)

Made me wonder if I should have switched.

Re: Accountability sinks

#87

Post by closeparen »

shkkmo wrote: post #62
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #56

I liked this article a lot - it made me think about the ways large companies operate from a different viewpoint. At the same time, though, I think it's a mistake to leave out the fact that, in many ways, modern society is just so fundamentally complex that we (as a society at large) deliberately forego demanding accountability because we believe the system is so complex that it's impossible to assign blame to a singl…

I think you are conflating accountability and blame when I don't think those terms can be used interchangeably here. Accountability can be used as a way of assigning blame, but that isn't all that it is good for. Accountability, at least as presented here, is about feeeback between those affected by a decision and those making it. In a "blameless culture", people are still held to account for their decisions and acti…

A blameless postmortem culture says that when a human error is identified in the causal chain leading to an incident, there will be no consequences for the individual. In a sense it embraces blame but eschews accountability.

Re: Accountability sinks

#88

Post by Eisenstein »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #70
busyant wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should make yourself unavailable for contact, when you suspect someone is trying to blackmail you. Maybe I'm missing something, but how often does blackmail happen that it rises to the level of needing strategic advice like "make yourself unavailable" ? Who is Tom Schelling's audience?

> Who is Tom Schelling's audience? Politicians setting policies for use of nuclear weapons during the cold war, IIRC. Among others, at least. I read parts of that book many years ago, I recall the major theme is that voluntarily sacrificing control over the situation can be a powerful way to force the other party to do what you want. Like if you and me are playing "chicken", speeding towards each other and wanting th…

This is how we get a Dr. Strangelove situation. If both people take that advice then they both crash into each other, even if they realize at the last minute it was a terrible idea.

Re: Accountability sinks

#89

Post by jiggawatts »

stana wrote: post #53

Interesting. Wonder sometimes how much of consulting business is motivated by accountability avoidance - "accountability sinks" for hire

Consultant here: A lot of it.

Ideally, a consultant is hired for their specialist skills, rare experience, sage advice on niche topics, etc...

In practice, about half the work I do is to act as a lightning rod so that the guy with the power to sign the cheque for my time doesn't get fired if things go sideways. Instead, they can just blame me, shrug their shoulders, and hire another consultant.

I've had a customer where I got "fired" for an "error". My coworker replaced me. Then he was fired, and I replaced him. We alternated like this for years. Upper management just saw the "bad" consultants get fired for their incompetence, they never noticed that we were the same two guys over and over.

Re: Accountability sinks

#90

Post by eloisius »

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…

I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to track it down.
Post reply on HN