9 ms·

I'm seeing a lot of this "screw up = get fired" narrative lately and I think it's a bit ironic. Talk about screwing up in engineering contexts and suddenly the

by lhorie 4y ago

I'm seeing a lot of this "screw up = get fired" narrative lately and I think it's a bit ironic. Talk about screwing up in engineering contexts and suddenly the tune changes: now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. Imagine a youtuber saying googlers should be fired because some decision was made that affected the youtuber's income negatively. Or imagine an Uber driver saying that. Or a small business owner dealing w/ a Stripe mishap or whatever. If you are the one being targeted by these calls for loss of employment, then comes out the "I'm not the responsible person here" card. So on the one hand, you hear people with pitchforks about how CEOs or whoever need to take responsibility in some movie-esque "bad guy ending" fashion, but turn the tables and nobody wants to step up to be responsible for their own shit shows. Even if we entertain the idea of firing CEOs, is the implicit assumption that companies can run fine without one? By that logic, anyone could just give a bunch of money to a bunch of fiverr code monkeys and that business would run just fine? I don't really get what the logical conclusion of this whole line of argument is supposed to be.

josephcsible 4y ago
Executives should be held personally responsible for kinds of things that low-level employees aren't. That's why executives get paid so much more.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Do you want execs that never take risks and simply milk cash cows until they die? Do you want golden parachutes? This is how you get these.
  - Clent 4y ago
    If we don't let them be bad in the job in one way, they'll be bad in the job in another way, therefore why bother. I reject these defeatist attitudes and question the engineering skills of anyone who thinks this way. It is always better to try something. Human created systems are inherently problematic and do not fix themselves. The dream is to engineer a system that does not have faults.
    - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
      Have you ever tried personally? Because it’s a hell of a lesson.
    - pm90 4y ago
      I get the sense that when it comes to innovations in organizing and leadership, there is very little solid innovation. We’re pretty much working with the same dictatorial hierarchy that has existed since forever. Some exceptions are perhaps Valve. Most other companies try to make a change at the margins and even that is heralded as a great innovation but generally fails to get adopted widely.
  - piva00 4y ago
    That's exactly where every single big corporation goes to: risk-averse and being milked as cash cows. Being a corpse in the way of others. So why not speed up the process and at least cut the suffering from thousands of lives and skip the step when those risk-takers inevitably fuck up and overhire? Let all companies be boring cash cows after the initial stage, might even improve innovation from smaller players. I vote for punish the CEOs.
    - pm90 4y ago
      Yeah it’s a bit silly to push workers at a Big Tech behemoth to work like they’re at a startup. This is completely delusional and leaders who propose these things should get fired.
- iamwpj 4y ago
  Ok, then fire them from not improving quarterly expectations. Seriously -- this is a real functional system that can work. You're acting like C-level accountability is an edgy suggestion. It very much isn't.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    That happens all the time.
jclulow 4y ago
I suspect people would be more sympathetic to the plight of CEOs if they didn't make hundreds or thousands of times as much money as everyone else, even and perhaps _especially_ when they commit random acts of economic violence on their staff.
Apocryphon 4y ago
> now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. That makes me wonder why investors, particularly activist shareholders who drive the direction of boards, are never under scrutiny. Maybe their decisions to chase unrealistic growth, which forces the hands of CEOs and lesser executives, should also be reviewed. Maybe they should be somehow penalized or sanctioned for driving companies towards failure. Shouldn't a massive event like mass layoffs trigger a change in corporate boards? Why shouldn't responsibility go all the way to the top, why stop at the CEO level?
- sdz 4y ago
  The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured every day, and if they underperform for a number of quarters in a row, their investors will absolutely “fire” them by withdrawing money from their funds.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Then sounds like their incentives are inherently not conducive to the business of running businesses built on reasonable growth, and causes them to fall prey to the groupthink of expecting unrealistic macro environments to continue indefinitely.
    - mohamedattahri 4y ago
      Their role is not to run businesses. Their role is to allocate capital while weathering the macroeconomic environment to create returns. Sometimes the best way to do that is to invest in a business, other times it’s to buy other assets, and other times cash is king. Lastly, they are only involved because the shareholders of said companies involved them. Going public is not mandatory.
danaris 4y ago
When you've been subjected to decades of drivel asserting loudly and repeatedly that the reason CEOs get paid big money is specifically because they are the ones who hold the responsibility for screwups like this, you start to think that maybe they should actually be held accountable, just like they say they deserve. When an individual engineer screws up, if the processes in place are working correctly, that screwup should only cost some time and possibly a bit of money—most likely within an order of magnitude of a few days and $100. This is why we have processes in place: because people are fallible, and it's not good to give any one person that much power. When a CEO screws up, there's no one to catch that screwup. The buck stops there. So many of these companies are structured specifically to give the CEO some significant degree of autocratic power—the power to say "this is what we will be doing, because I say so", whether or not they have other justifications backing them up—and now that we're saying, "Hey, that kind of power is supposed to come with accountability," you try to tell us they shouldn't? As for "companies can run fine without one," I'd say that's a very useful hypothesis to test. But your strawman of "give a bunch of money to people on fiverr" isn't the logical way to test it: it's "set up a system with democratic processes in place, create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for".
- skt5 4y ago
  > create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for". this sounds very similar to a government where politicians are elected (un)fairly. likely, this just presents another set of trade-offs.
  - danaris 4y ago
    Whenever you have to make decisions involving multiple humans, tradeoffs are pretty much a guarantee. However, over the past few hundred years, we've been gradually coming to the collective conclusion that autocracy is inferior to democracy for systems involving larger numbers of people and decisions of larger stakes. I don't see why that should apply any less to replacing the hierarchical model of companies, where a CEO can walk into any room and say "You're fired," with a (more-)democratic system, than it did to replacing kingdoms, where a king could walk into any room and say "Off with your head," with a representative democracy.
bradleyjg 4y ago
now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. I’ve seen lots of public post mortems for engineering screw ups. Can you point me to a Fortune 500 public post mortem for a bad acquisition or something else CEO driven?
- lhorie 4y ago
  Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. Screw ups are something else. When you think about cases like WeWork or Theranos, then I think we get into more familiar territory: gross negligence is a widely acceptable reason for firing, no matter if you're the CEO, Joe developer or a janitor. An operational mistake by a SWE might be something like picking the wrong technology, and for a CEO, an operational mistake might be something like a bad acquisition. Just as a technology is a tool for the dev, an acquisition is a tool for the CEO. Both of these are examples of getting bad outcomes from their tool usage decisions, but they're still categorically operational mistakes, as opposed to gross misconduct. So my two cents is that if one wants to argue that operational mistakes categorically warrant firing personnel, then yeah, I think I'm gonna have a problem with that line of thinking.
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. This is bullshit. An earnings call is nothing like an engineering post mortem for an outage. There’s zero introspection or root causing. It’s typical Silicon Valley style hypocrisy, where founders and CEOs claim there’s a certain company culture but never walk the walk themselves. Give me a NY bank any day. At least they aren’t constantly blowing smoke up employees’ asses. Everyone knows the score.
    - lhorie 4y ago
      > There’s zero introspection or root causing You mean unlike the Experian breach post mortem, or the numerous "everything is green" Slack outages? IMHO, Costco talking about container costs is introspection. I'll grant that taking analogies too literally does indeed lead one to conclude the other party's arguments are bullshit, but I think that's just a matter of perspective and unwillingness to engage in good faith discussions.

by lhorie 4y ago

josephcsible 4y ago

Executives should be held personally responsible for kinds of things that low-level employees aren't. That's why executives get paid so much more.

foobiekr 4y ago
Do you want execs that never take risks and simply milk cash cows until they die? Do you want golden parachutes? This is how you get these.
- Clent 4y ago
  If we don't let them be bad in the job in one way, they'll be bad in the job in another way, therefore why bother. I reject these defeatist attitudes and question the engineering skills of anyone who thinks this way. It is always better to try something. Human created systems are inherently problematic and do not fix themselves. The dream is to engineer a system that does not have faults.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Have you ever tried personally? Because it’s a hell of a lesson.
  - pm90 4y ago
    I get the sense that when it comes to innovations in organizing and leadership, there is very little solid innovation. We’re pretty much working with the same dictatorial hierarchy that has existed since forever. Some exceptions are perhaps Valve. Most other companies try to make a change at the margins and even that is heralded as a great innovation but generally fails to get adopted widely.
- piva00 4y ago
  That's exactly where every single big corporation goes to: risk-averse and being milked as cash cows. Being a corpse in the way of others. So why not speed up the process and at least cut the suffering from thousands of lives and skip the step when those risk-takers inevitably fuck up and overhire? Let all companies be boring cash cows after the initial stage, might even improve innovation from smaller players. I vote for punish the CEOs.
  - pm90 4y ago
    Yeah it’s a bit silly to push workers at a Big Tech behemoth to work like they’re at a startup. This is completely delusional and leaders who propose these things should get fired.
iamwpj 4y ago
Ok, then fire them from not improving quarterly expectations. Seriously -- this is a real functional system that can work. You're acting like C-level accountability is an edgy suggestion. It very much isn't.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  That happens all the time.

jclulow 4y ago

I suspect people would be more sympathetic to the plight of CEOs if they didn't make hundreds or thousands of times as much money as everyone else, even and perhaps _especially_ when they commit random acts of economic violence on their staff.

Apocryphon 4y ago

> now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. That makes me wonder why investors, particularly activist shareholders who drive the direction of boards, are never under scrutiny. Maybe their decisions to chase unrealistic growth, which forces the hands of CEOs and lesser executives, should also be reviewed. Maybe they should be somehow penalized or sanctioned for driving companies towards failure. Shouldn't a massive event like mass layoffs trigger a change in corporate boards? Why shouldn't responsibility go all the way to the top, why stop at the CEO level?

sdz 4y ago
The investors you refer to typically manage money on behalf of their investors and are actually under constant scrutiny. If they run mutual funds, their performance is measured every day, and if they underperform for a number of quarters in a row, their investors will absolutely “fire” them by withdrawing money from their funds.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Then sounds like their incentives are inherently not conducive to the business of running businesses built on reasonable growth, and causes them to fall prey to the groupthink of expecting unrealistic macro environments to continue indefinitely.
  - mohamedattahri 4y ago
    Their role is not to run businesses. Their role is to allocate capital while weathering the macroeconomic environment to create returns. Sometimes the best way to do that is to invest in a business, other times it’s to buy other assets, and other times cash is king. Lastly, they are only involved because the shareholders of said companies involved them. Going public is not mandatory.

danaris 4y ago

When you've been subjected to decades of drivel asserting loudly and repeatedly that the reason CEOs get paid big money is specifically because they are the ones who hold the responsibility for screwups like this, you start to think that maybe they should actually be held accountable, just like they say they deserve. When an individual engineer screws up, if the processes in place are working correctly, that screwup should only cost some time and possibly a bit of money—most likely within an order of magnitude of a few days and $100. This is why we have processes in place: because people are fallible, and it's not good to give any one person that much power. When a CEO screws up, there's no one to catch that screwup. The buck stops there. So many of these companies are structured specifically to give the CEO some significant degree of autocratic power—the power to say "this is what we will be doing, because I say so", whether or not they have other justifications backing them up—and now that we're saying, "Hey, that kind of power is supposed to come with accountability," you try to tell us they shouldn't? As for "companies can run fine without one," I'd say that's a very useful hypothesis to test. But your strawman of "give a bunch of money to people on fiverr" isn't the logical way to test it: it's "set up a system with democratic processes in place, create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for".

skt5 4y ago
> create a management committee, possibly with a rotating chairship, and in general give the employees more say over the direction of the company they work for". this sounds very similar to a government where politicians are elected (un)fairly. likely, this just presents another set of trade-offs.
- danaris 4y ago
  Whenever you have to make decisions involving multiple humans, tradeoffs are pretty much a guarantee. However, over the past few hundred years, we've been gradually coming to the collective conclusion that autocracy is inferior to democracy for systems involving larger numbers of people and decisions of larger stakes. I don't see why that should apply any less to replacing the hierarchical model of companies, where a CEO can walk into any room and say "You're fired," with a (more-)democratic system, than it did to replacing kingdoms, where a king could walk into any room and say "Off with your head," with a representative democracy.

bradleyjg 4y ago

now people will talk about improving processes, blameless postmortems, and how the individual is not at fault. I’ve seen lots of public post mortems for engineering screw ups. Can you point me to a Fortune 500 public post mortem for a bad acquisition or something else CEO driven?

lhorie 4y ago
Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. Screw ups are something else. When you think about cases like WeWork or Theranos, then I think we get into more familiar territory: gross negligence is a widely acceptable reason for firing, no matter if you're the CEO, Joe developer or a janitor. An operational mistake by a SWE might be something like picking the wrong technology, and for a CEO, an operational mistake might be something like a bad acquisition. Just as a technology is a tool for the dev, an acquisition is a tool for the CEO. Both of these are examples of getting bad outcomes from their tool usage decisions, but they're still categorically operational mistakes, as opposed to gross misconduct. So my two cents is that if one wants to argue that operational mistakes categorically warrant firing personnel, then yeah, I think I'm gonna have a problem with that line of thinking.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  Earnings calls are post mortems for the performance of the previous quarter. A post mortem itself is just an analysis, it doesn't even have to be about a screw up. This is bullshit. An earnings call is nothing like an engineering post mortem for an outage. There’s zero introspection or root causing. It’s typical Silicon Valley style hypocrisy, where founders and CEOs claim there’s a certain company culture but never walk the walk themselves. Give me a NY bank any day. At least they aren’t constantly blowing smoke up employees’ asses. Everyone knows the score.
  - lhorie 4y ago
    > There’s zero introspection or root causing You mean unlike the Experian breach post mortem, or the numerous "everything is green" Slack outages? IMHO, Costco talking about container costs is introspection. I'll grant that taking analogies too literally does indeed lead one to conclude the other party's arguments are bullshit, but I think that's just a matter of perspective and unwillingness to engage in good faith discussions.