Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Professionalism has been entirely absent from the top-level handling of the pandemic. It's not entirely clear from the article who's responsible for this, but I note that the so-called "NHS" test and trace is in fact an outsourced organisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Test_and_Trace run by Tory placewoman Dido Harding.

> "She is a former chief executive of the TalkTalk Group where she faced calls for her to resign after a cyber attack revealed the details of 4 million customers. A member of the Conservative Party, Harding is married to Conservative Party Member of Parliament John Penrose and is a friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron. Harding was appointed as a Member of the House of Lords by Cameron in 2014. She holds a board position at the Jockey Club, which is responsible for several major horse-racing events including the Cheltenham Festival. "

> "In May 2020, Harding was appointed by Health Secretary Matt Hancock to head NHS Test and Trace, established to track and help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in England. In August 2020, after it was announced Public Health England was to be abolished, Harding was appointed interim chair of the new National Institute for Health Protection, an appointment that was criticised by health experts as she did not have a background in healthcare."

I mean let's call a cat a cat: this is cronyism thus corruption. Unfortunately, voters never care about these immoral practices. When a social system/administration is dysfunctional, corruption is often the first cause of these disfunctions. The result of corruption is always sheer incompetence.

OT: are you French? AFAIK, calling a cat a cat is a French idiom. The English equivalent would be calling a spade a spade.

Also Dutch

A spade is only a cat if you have tomatoes on your eyes.

I think the voters do care, but can't keep track of the details and only know what the media choose to focus on. This is why Donald Trump's "drain the swamp" pitch was so effective, despite the reality of the far worse corruption in his campaign.

Voters want less corruption, but their own tribalism leads them to unhelpful positions of "everyone is corrupt", "none of my tribe are corrupt", and sometimes both of those at once.

I have not yet watched this programme from the BBC but it claims the NHS Test and Trace system is a chaotic mess. In other words, as shambolic as everything our Conservative government has done over the pandemic.

Panorama - Test and Track Exposed:

> "Panorama hears from whistleblowers working inside the government’s new coronavirus tracking system. They are so concerned about NHS Test and Trace that they are speaking out to reveal chaos, technical problems, confusion, wasted resources and a system that does not appear to them to be working. The programme also hears from local public health teams who say they have largely been ignored by the government in favour of the private companies hired to run the new centralised tracking system. As Panorama investigates, it has left some local authorities questioning whether local lockdowns could have been handled better or avoided altogether."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000n1xp/panorama-test...

>She holds a board position at the Jockey Club, which is responsible for several major horse-racing events including....

I'll point out that Matt Hancock is MP for Newmarket - a centre for horse racing and associated businesses.

For those not in the UK, Dido Harding was already on front pages a couple of weeks ago when she was grilled by a Parliamentary committee about the shambolic Covid testing organisation and her reply was "no-one could predict such a strong demand for Covid tests"...

As the NY Times said yesterday, sometimes it feels like "Britain is operating without adult supervision".

She was also CEO of ISP TalkTalk when they had a massive personal data breach and told an investigation that she didn't know if the data was encrypted or not.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/people-want-to-know-wh...

In the anglosphere when you're in the managerial class, you fail upwards it seems.

We have a meritocracy apparently, so if you have got to the top you must be good and therefore your talents shouldn't be wasted.

Marketing director of one of the largest travel firms in the UK at 27! Such talent at such a young age (teeth grinding intensifies)

Which was the first of its kind and she was new to the role.

The whole NHS Test and Trace organisation seems very strange. Going by recent news reports, it's not just Harding who comes from a retail background, several of the other top people do, too. What they don't seem to have done is hire top people with a technical or management background in either public health or technology, which you'd think might be slightly important for an organisation with this remit.

In other news, I'm looking forward to hearing about how a system apparently hacked together from text files and decades-old Excel formats is complying with basic data protection principles, given that it's being used to process sensitive personal data and has profound implications for both public health and now (since violating an instruction from their people to self-isolate has just been made a criminal offence) individual liberty for huge numbers of people.

While that is true, I have a little difficulty imagining that Harding or anyone else senior was involved in the process of shoveling around spreadsheets. As the overall leadership she obviously has the accountability but just saying, "oh what do you expect when you put a crony in?" ignores the reality that a number of people on an operational level had been doing this for months and nobody seems to have stopped it.

The latest news is that apparently this was a problem with Public Health England's internal processes anyway, not NHS Test and Trace or any other kind of outsourced service: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54422505 I don't think that even falls under Harding's responsibilties.

Day one on the job of CEO should be requesting input about systemic organizational and operational problems. Both from your direct reports and from the underlings who actually know what is broken.

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