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Comment by Buge | Hacker News Reader

> The paper also suggests a potential change to regulation—making individuals within a company responsible for what goes wrong within that company’s IT systems. “When you personally are liable, and you can be made bankrupt or sent to prison, it changes [the situation] a great deal, including the amount of attention paid to it,” Warren says. “You treat it very seriously, because it’s your personal wealth and your personal liberty at stake.”

Being sent to prison for buggy code... that's quite extreme. Are people even fired for buggy code? If we want to get more extreme than firing, how about losing 1 year's compensation in addition to being fired.

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The negligence on this migration sounds breathtaking: they have a four-nines availability requirement and decided to do a big bang migration with what sounds like virtually non-existent, or at least grossly inadequate, testing and no ability to rollback.

People, often contractors, do get fired all the time for buggy code. Companies get sued for buggy code. However, the issue here isn't really the code, it's the management of the project. Bugs happen all the time, and at every stage, during development which is why large migrations like this need to be done very carefully with ridiculous amounts of testing and rollback procedures. Even when you think you've got everything covered, it's amazing the things that can go wrong on go-live.

In projects like these, I think the only thing that ever exists is a virtual ability to roll back. I’ve never actually seen that happen successfully.

Such a move would cause a dramatic shift, but not a good one: it would cause the best and most experienced people to leave for less risky work.

It’s like any contract negotiation, you’re always able to push for more favorable terms, but eventually you’re just weeding out people who aren’t smart enough to walk away.

It might also put some brakes on rampant "disrupt" capitalist overdrive we're in. I honestly can't think of any tech that I NEED to progress badly enough to compromise customer safety.

Bear in mind that the ultimate root cause of this mess wasn't "capitalist overdrive" but an ill-thought-out intervention by the EU forcing Lloyds TSB to split up because they thought there wasn't enough competition in British banking, without properly considering the practical implications of their systems having become completely integrated over the two decades that they were one company. To put this in some context, the article meantions problems with internet banking - that didn't exist yet when the two were last independent companies. The first, very broken, version of SSL had only been released a few months before their merger.

Yes, EU is the cause of all British ills... </sarcasm>

Or perhaps it was the usual incompetent planning of the owners of TSB - banks splitting up is not a new or impossible thing, you know. And complexity of IT systems is the most absurd argument against splitting up LloydsTSB - why would any regulator consider this at all?

„Too big to fail” is the last thing we need. And I’m not sure how the SSL part in consumer-facing part of IT relates to a botched internal data migration.

I'm non payed enough to be legally liable for the code I do at my job.

...and moreover, what about the usage of third party software? (worse if it's free software...)

In a situation in which the consequences are so grave, you end up never vouching for the software as fit for purpose. Rather you claim best efforts to ensure fitness, and what you do vouch for is the testing you performed. If people at the top end of the pay scale signed off on your test plan, and you fully completed all testing successfully, it’s very difficult to find you blameworthy.

Our local Post Office is seriously lacking man power. They pay roughly minimum wage. On top of that, since the postman also delivers money and other special mail (such as serving legal notices), they would be legally liable if the job is not done right.

Is it any wonder that they have been trying to find another person for years!?

Look it in another way. Almost every worker in the not software world is legally liable for his work. For the chef in the kitchen (no poison in food) to construction worker (the building should not falling apart) or electricians (proper insulation and ground, etc). I work in industry automation and I really would see if software would be simple again. Todays software depend on so many external things.

In Germany, and I guess in most countries, almost no worker is legally liable, as long as they are not actively ignoring the safety regulations applying to their work. So to make a software developer legally liable, you first have to set up a clear framework of "safety regulations" by which they can be judged.

Yes every job has it regulations, except for pure software. Just software guys seems to have no rules at all.

I assume you never saw a 'workmanlike manner' clause in an independent contractor contract?

Any industry, including ours, has best practices.

For the chef in the kitchen (no poison in food) to construction worker (the building should not falling apart) or electricians (proper insulation and ground, etc)

Yes and no. Those people are all responsible for doing their own jobs to a certain standard. If a building falls down it is extremely unlikely that it was due to poor workmanship by an individual bricklayer. The root cause will be in the design and the bricklayer isn’t in a position to challenge the design.

At least in Poland an employee can only be held liable up to an amount of 3 monthly salaries.

And then who was really responsible for that bug? The engineer who didn't care to write tests? The QA person who didn't ensure it worked? Or the manager who pushed their workforce to the brink? As we have seen with Volkswagen, it is the bottom of the chain which tends to be blamed.

If you follow the professional liability model used in other fields of engineering (civil, etc), the buck stops at whoever sealed the report / letter of assurance / drawings / etc). We usually call them the Engineer of Record (EOR) in my field, and they are usually someone at the top.

I'm not advocating for that model in software, but it does provide a very transparent way of determining who is responsible. As the EOR, you may not design every member or do every calculation, but ultimately it's your ass on the line. I suspect it also changes your behavior when you know you are the one taking responsibility.

The industry I used to work in used an Independent Assurance Reviewer (IAR) role. The IAR signed off a go-no-go review, whose primary content was identification of the risks that the business would incur if it proceeded past a specific review gate. If an IAR failed a review, the business could still proceed, but the responsibility for subsequent failure then explicitly lay with the leadership rather than the engineers / reviewers. This would be rare though, in most cases IAR failures would lead to mitigation of the identified risks.

In an ideal case, the IAR was identified at the outset of a piece of work and was then involved throughout the project life cycle (waterfall or agile). Review points included bid release and contract acceptance as well as design and test readiness reviews.

Really? I’ve noticed the opposite — people tend to want to blame people at the top, or the whole company, or whoever has the deepest pockets.

Most people want to blame the top but if you go through the legal system, liability will likely be on the bottom rung of the company. If people are personally liable, they will probably need to find their own lawyers and upper management will easily find ways to shift responsibility.

“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”

– Thomas John Watson Sr., IBM

Neither https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/prudential... nor https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/consultation/cp19-32.pdf seem to contain phrases that actually say what's quoted in the article. The closest I can see is that these documents suggest that senior management is supposed to be aware of what they are responsible and accountable for. Putting blame on the other end of the chain would be counterproductive anyway. There's pretty much no way the root cause of such a large scale failure would be in some minor technical role.

The part you quoted does not talk about buggy code. Bugs will always exist, the idea is to prepare for them. Migrate systems incrementally, run versions in parallel, have tested rollback strategies at every step, so on and so forth. Not cut corners on backups and contingency plans. Don't rush to launch.

Buggy code is not the problem, but a buggy process is.

If contracts had to include terms that held developers personally liable then it would simply force them to buy personal indemnity insurance. This might not be a bad thing as it is how things are done in the medical world but I wouldn't expect to start seeing developers going to prison.

The paper also suggests a potential change to regulation—making individuals within a company responsible for what goes wrong within that company’s IT systems

We all know how that looks in practice - Experian’s senior management pointing the finger at a single lowly sysadmin. Or VW blaming their emissions scandal on a single engineer.

There is one individual responsible: the CEO. That’s why he or she is paid the big bucks. Maybe make all the C-level jointly responsible. They can share cells afterwards.

Perhaps flogging would achieve the same goal while being financially neutral.

yeah, this is obscene. Too many people participate in such systems, and placing blame on anyone is impossible.

Also, that's the whole reason LLCs exist as one of the pillars of our economy. Having so much risk would make any endeavor so risky as to not be worth it.

"We've made the cars drive themselves, but I guess figuring out who's responsible in an organization is just an unsolvable problem."

Blame is on the company, and not the individual employees.

Criminal negligence also exists, but the way it was phrased didnt seem to imply it.

Responsibility in an organisation is the orgabisation's problem, and people can be fired/sued.

Sure, but those protect the shareholders, not the people doing the work.

Employment in general protects workers. If a worker makes a mistake that costs money that is the employers problem.

This sounds like a very bad idea. Why would anyone go into IT if you run the very real risk of going to prison for making a mistake. Software deployments would slow to a once a year thing, 3 months to code and 9 months of testing. I would not be surprised to see the suicide rate in developers sky rocket as they dealt with the stress.

You mean we might stop releasing crap software every sprint and developers would actually be careful and responsible? I fail to see any downsides to this.

You weren't paying attention when we were doing all paperwork by hand.

No more software = computers are bricks. You go back to manual operations. Emails? Replaced by letters.

Writing "I fail to see any downsides to this" is pretty much equivalent to "of course we should ban cars, that way we stop car accidents; I fail to see any downsides to this".

I just checked - the former CIO (who surprisingly is still there, but in a different role ) was a SMF18 according to the FCA, so he was personally liable for failures in his area- looking at the Slaughter and May report findings I would suspect they are working on an enforcement action and have been for some time.

I believe Sarbanes-Oxley already makes individuals responsible for what the computer systems spit out, at least in the accounting domain.

Plausibly you can trash all your customers’ data without affecting the company’s accounts, so I guess there is room for improvement.

That Warren would fit USSR nomenclature perfectly.

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