Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryant | Hacker News Reader

They know what accountability is. That's why they never use the word.

Yeah we know you're responsible for it, but how are you being held accountable for it?

No one will remember in two years time, but my hope is it'll factor into candidates' decisions around whether to pursue a career with Stripe. If I've got senior executives without accountability, it's a distraction to my ability to deliver the product as well as to lead my own teams supporting their vision because it means I can't rely on them, and this outcome with absolutely no accountability behind it is a good enough reason for me to never want to join Stripe in the future.

View on HN

Do you have an example handy of a CEO who has provided acceptable accountability in a situation like this?

Not a CEO, but I'm reminded of the incident on a Navy vessel that struck a fishing boat and resulted in a number of fatalities. The captain was actually off the vessel at the time and not in charge. He still resigned because he was accountable to the decision on who he left in charge.

(Tbf, I'm sure he was told to resign. But that's largely because the Navy has tried to institute a culture of accountability, albeit imperfectly)

Satoru Iwata took a large pay cut when Nintendo was in a downturn in 2014ish

That's actually not uncommon in Japan. CEOs are basically married to their companies, and take their performance quite personally.

Also, Japanese execs are paid substantially less than their US/UK counterparts.

I doubt that it has happened in quite a while, but there have been CEOs that have committed suicide, when their companies failed.

Doubt that will catch on, in the US.

The salaries of Japanese execs are indeed tiny by US standards. However, as Kalzumeus says, instead of paying money so you can buy status, Japanese companies give status directly: company cars with drivers, company villas, very generous expense accounts, etc etc.

Similar to the US entertainment industry.

A lot of the nice stuff that musicians and actors have, is actually owned by the company.

Gilded cage, so to speak.

Good call. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25941070

Came here to say this one.

Patagonia has an interesting story about this.

After having to layoff a lot of their staff in the 90s, Chouinard decided to switch his compagny values and reason of being.

This article sums it up I guess, https://medium.com/@adamler/limiting-the-engines-of-growth-a...

The former CEO of Netflix, Patty McCord, who helped create a culture of firing people "when it was time", was fired as a result of said culture:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/she-created-netflixs-cul...

Remember, “companies don’t exist to make you happy. You know that, right? The business doesn’t exist to serve you. The business exists to serve your customers,” reminds McCord.

*former head of HR of Netflix

she was apparently a big deal but i think you gave her more credit than deserved there heheh

Good examples of self accountability? Sadly not. (Edit: see huffmsa for a good example)

Good examples of accountability to the board? All over. But boards care (by mandate) only about profit unless specified otherwise. There's no incentive for a board to care about whether people are put out on the street either; it's one of the major reasons for why unions exist and are successful: they provide a mechanism for accountability that ties adverse employee decisions back to future revenue loss.

Tl;Dr: nope, and that's sadly by design because why would anyone be self-accountable when the consequences hit the wallet? I was hoping for a ray of light to pierce the dark.

Unions have a range of outcomes for business success. Yes, some may hold management accountable and ultimately help companies; others screw over everyone besides long tenured employees. Suppose Stripe was unionized and somehow the union had convinced management to stop hiring in February 2022 which is the level they’re reducing headcount to now. Would the laid off employees been better off in that world without a year of Stripe employment, income, and benefits? It’s very unclear.

>somehow the union had convinced management to stop hiring in February 2022

Why would the union do this? It seems like a contrived example to prove a point. Unions would conceivably benefit from more hires because they would have more union membership.

My anecdotal experience is that unions are a massive benefit to laid-off employees. Laid off employees were given 80% pay while they waited with a known re-hire date. In other cases, they are given priority when the company is looking to rehire with an unknown rehire date. Unions have downsides, for sure, but I don't think your example points them out here.

There are plenty of unions that keep supply low. Nearly every labor union in California, for example, has underfunded apprenticeship programs for exactly this reason. I’m surprised you aren’t aware this is a phenomenon. Unions answer to their current members, and there’s plenty of incentive to keep the current membership smaller.

And my example was simply continuing the original poster’s insinuation that a union could have helped management avoid the over hiring mistake they were about to make by making the consequences of that mistake greater.

To be clear, I was technically a non-union employee in a union shop so that may explain some of my ignorance. (Most of the white collar employees were non-union. The controls engineers were in a quasi-union status without actually joining the union. It was a weird situation because of some ongoing legal battles.)

What you said does make sense though. The union apprentiships were extremely competitive, possibly because they were constrained to low numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com