Comment by geoelectric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geoelectric | Hacker News Reader

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You can install business processes that give chances for unethical decisions to be reviewed and identified, though. Committees are shit for innovation but relatively effective for squashing interestingly bad ideas along with any interestingly good ones.

I read the apology letter as essentially saying he single-handedly drove the idea, in part because he was flailing due to COVID killing their bottom line, and was tunnel-visioned enough to not recognize it was unethical. Even at face value, that’s absolutely troubling for a CEO in TB’s domain. But smarter people have done dumber things under pressure, and sometimes dumb is at someone’s (or a lot of someones) expense by mistake.

So I’d like to think this was an exceptional occurrence, and I appreciated his personal post-mortem of sorts. However, taking this as charitably as possible, a process-oriented RCA focused on how he’ll keep his runaway ideas from being a one-man show—or whatever the problem actually was that saw this conflagration actually see light of day—wouldn’t suck.

I still don’t like the idea of hamstringing the CEO’s ability to make executive decisions because the CEO can’t be trusted to make ethical executive decisions. Processes are fine for preventing operational mistakes, but when it comes to ethics and executive judgment, they’re a poor substitute for having trustworthy people making the decisions.

I think you'd still want some sort of business process for "hire ethical people" - because there is a huge business process being implemented from all your team managers and all your board members for "make money in whatever way you can" (or, in the case of a startup, perhaps just "grow in whatever way you can"), and you want something to counteract that beyond just one person's conscience.

Potential business processes include "ask about ethics as part of culture fit, and have a good sense of what you mean by 'ethics'," "ask about ethics as part of promo / do not count projects that put user data at risk towards promo," "vet investors for their ethics and see how their other investments are doing before allowing them to take a board seat," etc.

An ethical CEO will probably be doing many of these anyway, which is fine. You don't need to formalize them. It's fine for the CEO to say, for instance, "Ordinarily I would have put the brakes on this via this particular means, but I failed to notice because of this unexpected circumstance. I'm sorry and this is how I'm going to make sure I notice and make the right decision next time." (That is't too far off from what was actually said, actually, except for the bit about how to make decision-making more robust in the future. Everyone, ethical or not, fails to live up to their expectations of themselves at least occasionally.)

> I think you'd still want some sort of business process for "hire ethical people"

I absolutely agree. But this only works if the top leadership are themselves ethical people. If they are unethical or even neutral, it’s going to backfire. Instead of hiring people for their backbone in terms of pushing back against unethical decisions, it turns into hiring people for their willingness to conform to what they are told.

> It's fine for the CEO to say, for instance, "Ordinarily I would have put the brakes on this via this particular means, but I failed to notice because of this unexpected circumstance. I'm sorry and this is how I'm going to make sure I notice and make the right decision next time."

Definitely. But you only get to use that excuse so many times before it starts to lose credibility.

> That is't too far off from what was actually said, actually

Here I disagree. To his credit, Ammon has taken full personal responsibility for pushing this through, even over internal objections. It’s not a failure to notice something that happened when you’re the one doing the thing.

The resolution is also more personal than procedural: be more conscientious about your users and listen to people who object to your ideas. Demonstrate that you can do that over time and you can regain trust.

They should be more trustworthy than this, for sure. But sometimes a poor or harmful decision is still an operational mistake that comes down to poor information or comprehension. If it were to become more apparent to me that this was a deliberate lapse in ethics, I’m sure I’d be more where you’re at.

As it is right now, I’m giving some charitable credence to the idea he’s the CEO equivalent of the skydiving photographer that, in his passion to get a great shot, jumped out of his plane with no parachute. It certainly may end up having an analogous effect on Triplebyte’s credibility.

Maybe so. But in the general case I think individuals typically have much better moral judgment than processes and organizations. And the individual whose moral judgment ultimately prevails is the one who makes the decision. It’s not something that can be delegated.

> Processes are fine for preventing operational mistakes, but when it comes to ethics and executive judgment, they’re a poor substitute for having trustworthy people making the decisions.

Exactly this. The only thing that _might_ actually make me trust Triplebyte with my data again is if their current CEO actually stepped down to a less influential role. If I were part of the board I'd actually be advocating for him to step down or be forceably removed if possible.

He didn't put a stop this catastrophic breach of trust after being made aware of it. Even worse, he seemed to have actively drove this forward in spite of opposition. I'm simply not willing to trust a company where he's the top-level decision maker with data as sensitive as they're dealing with, apologies or not.

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