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There's kinda a flip side of this in modern life too - which is the getting away with murder that goes on in commerce and other organisations. By this I mean an

by sgt101 7y ago

There's kinda a flip side of this in modern life too - which is the getting away with murder that goes on in commerce and other organisations. By this I mean an executive or engineer can do something exploitative and unprofessional - load a company with debt, release a tranche of necessary employees, increase a dividend... or for engineers, make false claims about business cases, delivery schedules or technical capabilities. There are no consequences (provided the timing is done cleverly), a bubble of sucess is created - the act is lorded or claimed on a CV and the person moves on and up the ladder. When the company gets into trouble or the project catastrophically failes the exited individual is rarely confronted with this, and if they are they simply say "it was great when I left - I don't know what went wrong but they really blew it!" There is no community of disapproval, and there is no genuine mechanism of reputataion management.

bob33212 7y ago
Maybe an executive did choose a technology to pad his resume over functionally. Without an email from him stating that he is just padding his resume, how can you prove that the new technology wasn't going to be successful?
mars4rp 7y ago
Yes, and it is happening a lot everywhere especially in finance. When they sell the mortgage they collect the commission but life of mortgage is 30 years. Nasim Taleb has a great book about this called skin in the game
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
This seems like a place where you should apply Hanlon’s Razor: don’t assume malice when incompetence will suffice. Executives and senior domain experts make a lot of stupid decisions borne out of overconfidence and attempts to do flashy things for bonuses or promotions. It’s extremely tenuous and would require huge evidence to argue this sort of thing is malicious or criminally negligent, as opposed to just someone sincerely doing their job in a way that leads to a mistake or is punished by market trends or competitor advancements or whatever.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Even if it’s incompetence you can’t get better if you never realize you made a mistake.
  - sgt101 7y ago
    I'd make a comparison with the Space Shuttle. The overall problems of the program - a massively overweight orbiter, compromises on spec, the failures of the ceramic tiles... these are examples of mistakes to learn from. Launching challenger outside of the design envelope? In a deep sense the lesson was: use the knowledge of engineers, hard won over 300 years and behave professionally. 7 people did not have to die for us to know this - we KNEW THIS ALREADY. Learning from blowing up a large company by overloading its balence sheet is equivalent to learning that sticking a fork in your eye is likely to hurt. The fact that the "learners" end up with £5m or more stuck in their bank accounts indicates that there is little or no incompetence, and frankly a gallon of bad.
    - chillacy 7y ago
      > The fact that the "learners" end up with £5m or more stuck in their bank accounts indicates that there is little or no incompetence, and frankly a gallon of bad. I'm not sure it's possible to tell on a case by case basis. Certainly the incentives are not aligned, but I myself don't see the point of blaming individual actors for taking advantage when the system itself is broken. The better solution would be to align incentives (by legislation if the market won't) and you'll magically see people acting "morally" out of self interest.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    Sure, but a lot of the folks making these mistakes inside of companies also don’t care about getting better, just getting paid. If you wanted every such type of mistake to be susceptible to crimimal or civil litigation, boy, you’d be legislating morality for one (deciding exactly when someone can value money or believe a certain risk is worthwhile), and have almost no way to enforce it (how can you prove a sincere mistake I “learned from” vs negligence I never cared about, without something like smoking gun email admissions or something?), and further no competent people will agree to do these jobs if they feel they cannot have a perfectly healthy and normal process of making mistakes without great risk someone will try to turn it into a lawsuit or criminal charges? You might say these are all matters of degree, and you just use targeted legislation to make it punishable according to specific guidelines, but it’s just a giant slippery slope, and very susceptible to political subversion for people who have the same malicious intent only operating on the regulatory or legislative side rather than in private firms. It’s a huge moral hazard problem, but one that can really only be solved by rare, upstanding management, and hardly ever by litigation.
anovikov 7y ago
That's the flip side of tolerance to failures. If it weren't that way, people who created startups, attracted VC funding and failed would go to jail, or at least shamed and put on a black list and become unemployable for life. You really want that to happen?
- sgt101 7y ago
  Failure is fine, reckless disregard of sense and professional practice is really not - in my opinion.

by sgt101 7y ago

bob33212 7y ago

Maybe an executive did choose a technology to pad his resume over functionally. Without an email from him stating that he is just padding his resume, how can you prove that the new technology wasn't going to be successful?

mars4rp 7y ago

Yes, and it is happening a lot everywhere especially in finance. When they sell the mortgage they collect the commission but life of mortgage is 30 years. Nasim Taleb has a great book about this called skin in the game

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

This seems like a place where you should apply Hanlon’s Razor: don’t assume malice when incompetence will suffice. Executives and senior domain experts make a lot of stupid decisions borne out of overconfidence and attempts to do flashy things for bonuses or promotions. It’s extremely tenuous and would require huge evidence to argue this sort of thing is malicious or criminally negligent, as opposed to just someone sincerely doing their job in a way that leads to a mistake or is punished by market trends or competitor advancements or whatever.

chillacy 7y ago
Even if it’s incompetence you can’t get better if you never realize you made a mistake.
- sgt101 7y ago
  I'd make a comparison with the Space Shuttle. The overall problems of the program - a massively overweight orbiter, compromises on spec, the failures of the ceramic tiles... these are examples of mistakes to learn from. Launching challenger outside of the design envelope? In a deep sense the lesson was: use the knowledge of engineers, hard won over 300 years and behave professionally. 7 people did not have to die for us to know this - we KNEW THIS ALREADY. Learning from blowing up a large company by overloading its balence sheet is equivalent to learning that sticking a fork in your eye is likely to hurt. The fact that the "learners" end up with £5m or more stuck in their bank accounts indicates that there is little or no incompetence, and frankly a gallon of bad.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    > The fact that the "learners" end up with £5m or more stuck in their bank accounts indicates that there is little or no incompetence, and frankly a gallon of bad. I'm not sure it's possible to tell on a case by case basis. Certainly the incentives are not aligned, but I myself don't see the point of blaming individual actors for taking advantage when the system itself is broken. The better solution would be to align incentives (by legislation if the market won't) and you'll magically see people acting "morally" out of self interest.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  Sure, but a lot of the folks making these mistakes inside of companies also don’t care about getting better, just getting paid. If you wanted every such type of mistake to be susceptible to crimimal or civil litigation, boy, you’d be legislating morality for one (deciding exactly when someone can value money or believe a certain risk is worthwhile), and have almost no way to enforce it (how can you prove a sincere mistake I “learned from” vs negligence I never cared about, without something like smoking gun email admissions or something?), and further no competent people will agree to do these jobs if they feel they cannot have a perfectly healthy and normal process of making mistakes without great risk someone will try to turn it into a lawsuit or criminal charges? You might say these are all matters of degree, and you just use targeted legislation to make it punishable according to specific guidelines, but it’s just a giant slippery slope, and very susceptible to political subversion for people who have the same malicious intent only operating on the regulatory or legislative side rather than in private firms. It’s a huge moral hazard problem, but one that can really only be solved by rare, upstanding management, and hardly ever by litigation.

anovikov 7y ago

That's the flip side of tolerance to failures. If it weren't that way, people who created startups, attracted VC funding and failed would go to jail, or at least shamed and put on a black list and become unemployable for life. You really want that to happen?

sgt101 7y ago
Failure is fine, reckless disregard of sense and professional practice is really not - in my opinion.