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Comment by tryitnow | Hacker News Reader

Not shocking at all.

It's a lack of leadership which shouldn't be surprising given that most corporate executives don't really know how to act in situations outside of their realm of experience.

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Even the CDC and WHO seem to be a bit out-of-sorts on handling this thing. Google's Zurich office isn't the only one.

The top-down restrictions of who is allowed to get tested have been quite limited, so there's easily tons of people infected who we don't know about, many of them asymptomatic - yet who could still be transferring the virus to vulnerable/less healthy people [1].

Access to testing kits is going to be another constraint going forward if this thing continues spreading and testing criteria does indeed expand (which no doubt are probably correlated).

I have a feeling once the CDC and WHO expand the criteria for who gets tested there is going to be a significant spike in the number of people who we know have it. There's going to be a lot of post-de facto reviews and lessons learned from this experience in the coming future, no doubt.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/health/coronavirus-asympt...

The response difference between the people I interact with regularly (friends, coworkers, HN people, twitter people) and I guess "the rest of the world" is crazy. I just watched a video on Fox News where they interviewed this dude with his kid on his lap talking about his experience in coronavirus quarantine now that he's released. He couldn't stop coughing throughout the interview, was sharing water with his kid... madness.

That was a very scary video. I was physically cringing all throughout watching it and when he drank from the same bottle vocalizing 'no!'. Very depressing.

Sad, but I’ve seen this type of behavior before. It should really be built into the liability insurance covenants or companies will often not care.

I was working at a high rise in Manhattan on 9/11, as a fresh new analyst. After the horrific incidents of the day, we were told to continue working. That continued for about 90 minutes until the company announced an evacuation.

Next we were told to carry all our binders (full of analyst reports) home, so a group of us Brooklyn residents did the 7mile trek with backpacks full of binders plus a 2001-era laptop, one of us had a roller bag because there were so many binders.

The hundreds or thousands of lives that could have been saved if evacuations began after the first tower was hit are hardly ever mentioned. No job is worth dying for, but apparently employers think their jobs are. I wonder what the death toll would have been if more people had common sense and started evacuating immediately.

The south tower had begun evacuation when "an official" announced over the building wide intercom that everything was fine and the people in the stairwell needed to turn around and go back to work. This story, told by survivors who ignored the command, was vehemently denied until the 911 commission reviewed an audio recording in which the message could be heard.

Source?

This page has a massive amount of information about evacuation problems, including a false assertion made over the intercom that the building was safe, and that people needed to turn around because doors were locked, but nothing about "go back to work" except baseless speculation by a sibling of a victim.

It doesn't even make sense, why would management of a building with dozens or hundreds of tenants care who is working?

http://www.mjbarkl.com/locked.htm

This is shocking because, ... why? Because you didn't have appropriate computer network-wide off-site data back-ups to the contents of your binders?

It’s shocking because even after terrorists murdered thousands of people by ramming a plane into a building ,corporate executives were asking people to stay at work in the surrounding buildings.

I was asking because of their 3rd paragraph, not their 2nd.

Because when you are escaping/trekking across bridges and 10ish miles of road on foot in a suit and fancy shoes — you don’t really want to be encumbered carrying weight.

Also remember this is 2001. We did not have VPN in our project office, though I know it existed. We had a modem dial in for remote access and none of our work was on network drives. HOme DSL/CableModem had only recently become popular amongst professionals.

Regardless, I continue to remember the burden of carrying those gigantic binders as I ran across the 59th street bridge and through Queens and Brooklyn...all while wearing wingtip shoes. Awful.

That sounds awful! On such an otherwise lovely morning, too.

What do you think the correct response by management should have been? 15 minutes after the 1st plane hit, everyone shut down, go home, leave the files and binders?

Talking glibly about a situation in which thousands of people died is not a great way in general to get people to your side.

No, when people’s lives are on the line and a building might be brought down due to an airplane crashing into you, you should not even think about binders or paperwork, much less making others think about binders.

BTW: I do get your point (I think - it's hard to brain-meld, but I think I do), but I believe that I have made my point badly. Which is simply: Managers are made out of people. People are made out of monkeys. Monkeys don't know how to deal with anything they've not got exposed to. So they are left with analogy (and direct experience) and morals and values and frameworks for morals and values. And incentives.

Gosh! That's a lot!

If an airplane hits the world trade center, would I push the fat man in front of the train? (Sorry - moral philosophy question)... Ummmm. I don't know! Would you? WOuld I? How long would I brain freeze? Would I ask people to stay? Go home? Take books? The vault? I don't know! What would you do?

My point here is simply this: You don't know what you were do, in real time, until you are in the hot-chair. You don't! Nobody does. And you will get it wrong. And anything you decide (anything!) will be criticized for decades. By people who were not there.

I'm not here to get people "on my side". Or even to make a particular argument (which would require actually having a "side")

I am here to understand the thinking of people who thought management should have "done better".

It could well be that this is correct, but it was a very confusing morning, if you will recall, and nobody knew what the hell was going on.

One stupid example is that my friends at Bear Stearns in WTC-7, left the building (evacuated) when the stock markets in NY shut down, and all lived. But the other friends on the bond-desk (traded out of Chicago, which didn't shut down), stayed and all died. (Hard to get a bond trader off his desk!).

It was a horrible day. And also unprecedented. I think it is a little unfrair for people to expect managers to know how to react (immediately and pro-actively!) to an unprecedented event. If I had an argument, it would be that: If I were a manager on that day, I would have been confused. And so would you.

> realm of experience

Most can't even do that. Their paper experience is with tech and product, but the experience they actually got hired for is political maneuvering.

I thought nobody knew how to act outside the real of experience, I mean, that's the all point of experience.

You can learn from other people's mistakes. Of course, you need the experience of learning about them, but that's more scalable than experiencing all the mistakes yourself.

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