Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Just to play devil's advocate, in some cases the point of firing an employee in a situation like this isn't about that one employee but more pour encourager les autres. So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously and they need to be diligent about following procedures.

In this particular case no real harm was done and firing would probably be excessive.

View on HN

Which is ironic, since pour encourager les autres in this context comes straight from the pen of a great satirist making fun of a dumb, blunt, broken institutional culture -- specifically Voltaire, mocking the British in Candide for responding to the loss of a naval battle not by training their admirals better but by executing one of them "to encourage the others."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide#Satire

Yes I'm well aware of the irony and not advocating this as a general management practice. Just pointing out that it's a complicated decision and there are rare cases where firing is the least bad decision for the organization as a whole.

That was Admiral Byng, and the move worked, it made two generations of navy leadership reckless in the face of danger.

>pour encourager les autres

If someone really, as you suggest, recklessly disregarded some procedures because they just couldn't be bothered. Say there's a checklist and they just winged it instead. But maybe there isn't a checklist and they made a mistake.

In general though, firing people to send a message or to throw a sacrifice to the crowd isn't particularly admirable practice.

Some procedures are impossible for human beings to follow with high nines levels of accuracy. (Look at attention blindness, for example.) All that is done with harsh punishment in such cases is damage to morale. Or worse, it causes people to think they have "fixed" the problem when they have in fact done no such thing. The solution is to _change the process_ so that it can achieve the desired level of accuracy.

So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously

Why not fire the manager of the person who made the blunder? That would work better on every level.

If that's what always happens, it would be pretty easy to get rid of your manager.

Yep, it should be as easy for you to get rid of your manager as it is for your manager to get rid of you.

I think it would do a lot more good for the other employees to see that their superiors will have their backs even when things are going very badly.

> no real harm was done

I wish to believe, but probably there was real harm, probably someone will come up with some million figures.

Statistically, probably someone died during those minutes of terror and someone will try to attribute to this incident.

What is interesting that employee probably meant no harm, but compare this to that SWAT murder a month earlier. The prankster meant no harm either, but he's going to spend years in jail. Both for sending a wrong alert.

>What is interesting that employee probably meant no harm, but compare this to that SWAT murder a month earlier.

Swatting is intentional, triggering the alert wasn't (at least, so it seems). It's not like the operator pressed the button knowing that it would trigger an alert and expected it not to be taken seriously; he didn't mean to trigger the alert at all.

What I am pointing at is the paradox of intention.

Ongoing car slams into you and kills your whole family while you were driving drunk; you go to jail for manslaughter and get sued by other driver for all you've got.

> The prankster meant no harm either,

Are you kidding? The people who were involved in this didn’t do it to introduce the swattee to new friends. They did it to terrorize someone who made them mad.

He didn’t mean the outcome (murder), terrorize is probably better word than a prank tho.

What I meant is that “oh I didn’t mean it” going to be interpretted differently.

Edit: if you downvote me thinking that I somehow support prank swatters - you are wrong. Otherwise you fail to see the paradox of intended vs unintended outcomes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea (as I understand it's interpreted very different in the US).

I expect that the downvotes are because you are arguing that “he didn’t mean murder” is equivalent to “he didn’t mean harm”.

> What is interesting that employee probably meant no harm, but compare this to that SWAT murder a month earlier. The prankster meant no harm either

The prankster intentionally sent a false alert and intended, at a minimum, to cause emergency response resources reserved for use in circumstances that pose a grave danger to be misallocated and to cause terror in the intended target; that involves both a diffuse but significant public harm and a narrowly focussed private harm.

It is not at all a case where no harm was intended.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com