12 ms·

This. If an individual's mistake can take out your business you have a process control problem and that is owned by management.

• iancmceachern 4y ago
  Exactly, management shouldn't allow this kind of situation to occur by designing the xomoanies processes such that there are checks and balances
• thisarticle 4y ago
  The days of management taking responsibility for anything are over. See: not a single CEO stepping down for over hiring.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • lotsofspots 4y ago
    Oh, they take full responsibility, it always says so in the mails they send out. It's just that taking responsibility doesn't appear to actually result in anything happening.
    • parsimo2010 4y ago
      A cyncical take might be that they are saying that they take responsibility (credit) for reducing the monthly payroll expenses. They may also have overhired in the past, but what's in the past was already paid for. The savings next month is how they justify a large paycheck.
    • shapefrog 4y ago
      Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515267
    • j33zusjuice 4y ago
      Their punishment is in bearing the shame of having been wrong. That’s the price of leadership.
      • randomdata 4y ago
        What shame is there in being wrong? Being wrong is the ideal state, paving a path to gaining an education, which is a source of pride and a benefit.
  • cc81 4y ago
    They only take responsibility for the profit margins. Over hiring affects those but often not significant enough and can be corrected with layoffs.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      No, they only take responsibility for short-term market cap. Margins and profit don't matter. That's why they chase whatever fad hits the investor class.
  • duckmysick 4y ago
    There's plenty of companies replacing their CEOs. Just today Toyota announced theirs.
    • Octoth0rpe 4y ago
      The CEO of Toyoda is becoming the chairman of their board, that doesn't feel like a CEO being replaced as punishment for poor performance in the way that people are talking about in this thread. But even when CEOs are fully ousted over issues, the golden parachute makes it barely feel like a punishment anyway. I'm having trouble thinking of a case where a CEO actually seemed to be significantly financially impacted by such an event, though maybe FTX will provide an example shortly.
      • hgsgm 4y ago
        Are the golden parachutes bigger (as % of annual comp) than employee severance packages?
        • Octoth0rpe 4y ago
          Do you think that honestly matters in the 10s of millions of dollars range? I certainly don't. The problematic parachutes in question are beyond enough for an excessively wealthy standard of living for the rest of their natural lives, even if it's proportionally smaller. Whether or not CEO comp should be as high as it currently is is another question entirely.
  • noisy_boy 4y ago
    I don't see why we reward scale-out/scale-in in the cloud but punish CEOs when they do the same with real people /s
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      How will those poor decommissioned computers get enough bytes to feed themselves?
  • oxfordmale 4y ago
    They are taking responsibility. They are just delegating the consequences to their staff. I suspect this will change soon. Activist investors are already surrounding companies like Salesforce and I can see CEOs being promoted sideways (board member only).
  • logifail 4y ago
    > The days of management taking responsibility for anything are over. See: not a single CEO stepping down for over hiring The list of managers stating that "they were taking responsibility" and then immediately stepping down was always fairly short.
  • itsoktocry 4y ago
    >See: not a single CEO stepping down for over hiring. Wait, what? You think a CEO should step down because their management over-hired a relatively small proportion of employees and had to do some layoffs?
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      It's not relatively small. All the companies are experiencing similar chaos to the NYSE because people in the middle of important operational work suddenly vanished. The people laid off weren't idle like H&R Block tax preparers in May or Target clerks in January. The people laid off and the people not needed were a different set of people, at the time of the layoff.
    • DrBazza 4y ago
      I'll make an extreme comparison: "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror" If you make some idiotic financial decision near the bottom of the management tree, such as... over hiring, you'll likely lose your job or get demoted. Do it as a CEO, and get a huge bonus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Rostand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Rostand
      • zaroth 4y ago
        But it’s absurd. Companies are not supposed to only ever hire. Some things are cyclical and you need more people for some amount of time, and then you find you need less. It’s not always predictable/seasonal like farming or holiday rush. Is it wrong for a company to respond to market effects? That there was a layoff isn’t necessarily a sign a company did anything wrong… I think how they actually do the layoff certainly can be done well or poorly.
        • DrBazza 4y ago
          It’s not hiring though. It’s overhiring. I’ve forgotten which FAANG it is. But one of them still has more employees than last year even after layoffs. It’s offensive.
  • wonderwonder 4y ago
    This is because the CEO's core job is to raise stock price. Nothing else. They hired in covid and profits & share price spiked due to the economic state at the time. Now the economic state has changed so they fire employees and the stock goes up. By that metric, the CEO will get a bonus at the end of the year. CEO does not get a bonus for not laying people off. Employees are not humans once you get to the csuite. An employee can be a person but multiple employees are just numbers on a ledger. They just send out "I'm sorry" emails to placate the masses and to get good media, no one really cares if the lower level people are upset. You only count once you get to a certain level.
• cm2187 4y ago
  If you have processes where there is nothing an employee can do to affect the outcome of the company you successfully built a legacy bureaucracy that is waiting to be disrupted.
  • yourapostasy 4y ago
    In this specific case, I don't think that's necessarily the outcome. Our industry has yet to accept a universally-acknowledged equivalent of a lockout/tagout (LOTO) interlock. There is no need for a bureaucracy if we have cryptographically-enforced multisig Shamir secret sharing keys where a LOTO prevents (in this case) a system from spinning up while another system (the backup system apparently in this case) is running. Allow it to be overridden by a sufficiently senior manager or say a sufficient number of lower-seniority managers, which leaves an audit trail. Integrate with a change management, notification, secrets storage infrastructures, and infrastructure as code, and it encodes these infrastructure dependencies into code, and can be queried to auto-construct change interlock sequences for a particular desired state. Of course, once you take advantage of such a representation at scale by deploying tremendously more complex infrastructures, you then have to deal with the dependency network meta challenge lest you inadvertently fall into dependency hell. While towards there lies NP-hard problems, they're still computable to a reasonable degree and I dare say a more robust situation than doing it all by hand like we do today. The real challenge is the vast majority of devops staff today would really dislike reasoning about such a representation when it blows up in their faces, and I can't blame them for that kind of reaction.
    • quantgenius 4y ago
      It's very easy to talk about completely automated systems and LOTO and you need these when you have under-skilled staff. The NYSE likely does NOT have under trained staff. If you have LOTO systems etc, what do you do when a sensor fails and you can't figure out why your method for checking whether the other system is running incorrectly thinks it is. Do you allow the stock market to simply not open? What if multiple sensors fail or it's an ambiguous situation like say you are deciding whether or not to fail over a power circuit and it's a brownout but not a complete power failure? What if there is a systemic problem and it's likely the backup power source is going to brown out too? At some point you need highly skilled individuals, like say trained airline pilots flying a plane who have the authority to override systems immediately without having to jump through hoops. This is especially true for mission critical systems. Many of the mission critical systems we rely on are NOT built on the cloud, i.e. other people's computers because you want to be really careful about what hardware you are using, precisely how your data center is setup and want to make sure things like a noisy neighbor do not impact you. Like it or not, these highly trained individuals are going to make mistakes every now and then. A failure like this once every decade or so really isn't so bad. The individual who made this error is likely not a "grunt". I suspect the individual in question will not necessarily suffer any major consequences as a result of this unless it wasn't a mistake but a flagrant disregard for the rules like say bringing a bottle of water into a data center that then spilled or something. Have you built a mission critical, distributed system that hasn't failed for 10 years? It's a lot harder than it looks. That's how often the NYSE has a problem like this, about once a decade. A lot of things that work in theory, don't work for the edge cases and things that lead to problems once a decade or so are extreme edge cases. In the grand scheme of things a mucked up opening auction is a minor problem and anyone who did not take the precaution of sending a limit order and sent a market on open order despite it being standard practice to essentially always use limits and go hurt badly will be made whole.
• gonzo41 4y ago
  Everyone makes mistakes. HOWEVER, Mordern leaders get to the heads of large organizations by never making mistakes, by blaming the little guy, or coworker and hustling up. They'll only fix this because they have too. There isn't a problem until it happens.
• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > individual's mistake can take out your business It didn’t.