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Comment by f6v | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it’s a funny joke. But this attitude only upsets people who thought jobs were not transactional. Kind of reminds me of stories by people who paid for sex and found out the sex worker didn’t want to cuddle afterwards.

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> But this attitude only upsets people who thought jobs were not transactional

It's entirely possible to believe your job is transactional while expecting accountability for all underperforming colleagues, at all levels. Rather than just the rank-and-file.

This is why it is important to fire people who push regressions to production. Accountability is important!

Maybe? Depends on the severity of the regression, how much it cost, whether there was negligence or carelessness involved etc. And arguably you'd first fire the person who set up a process that allows regressions to be pushed to prod so easily.

Underperformance is not a single mistake. It's a pattern of behaviors that compound.

A CEO looking at the economic climate of 2020-2021 and thinking they needed to hire to support the growth in demand for their products is not being negligent, they simply lacked the crystal ball that would have told them the Fed was going to slam the brakes on the economy last year. Even the Fed said they wouldn't be doing that. In light of what's happened, companies need to get leaner to survive.

Now if these CEOs don't manage to turn the ship around in the next couple years it probably is in fact time to look for a replacement.

Who in their right mind thought interest rates would stay that low and inflation wouldn't eventually catch up?

Jerome Powell

What's the point in paying people tens or hundreds of millions of dollars if they make the same predictions and bad decisions as everyone else? And have exactly one contingency plan if things go sideways? Which is also everyone else's plan btw and not even a very good one. They hired in a seller's market for talent, and are now firing in a buyer's market.

You could hypothetically have a CEO that was good in a period of economic expansion but poor in a period of economic contraction. By the time you figure out you have one of these CEOs at the helm, it's probably too late to do much about it. And any replacement CEO you bring in is all the more likely to make drastic cuts to cost centers (headcount).

Yep, we just had this happen with a newer staff member. When we contacted the primary maintainer of the regressed system, they replied “you need to overwrite XYZ binary/config files using the backup build from ABC machine after patching”… like how is this suitable for a prod scenario? We’d have been foolish to fire the new staff member who technically pushed the regression.

Sounds like a lack of accountability. Heads must roll.

I mean it's not like the sex worker spends the entire session talking about how they're all in it together and they're a team and then at the end releases a public statement about how difficult the decision not to cuddle was for them.

Except the sex workers often literally offer the girlfriend experience, which is, arguably, exactly that, a "make believe" relationship for some agreed time.

Thank God they don't use the 'We're family" angle like companies do ... xD

NB: I'm just playing along for fun, never been involved in any way with sex work or sex workers.

The very idea of separating humanity from the system we live in will never sit right with me. Jobs are purely transactional on paper, sure, but in the end, we're not _just_ dealing with jobs, but people and their livelihoods. We're simply lucky enough to be in a field where saving up and building a financial security cushion is doable.

In practice, accountability only seems to go up so far. I shortly did consulting for a company that did large layoffs in early COVID days. The board played the "we take responsibility" card, cut in their own salaries, but scratch a little bit under the fresh coat of paint and most of the board's income isn't that mostly symbolic salary. The ones effectively paying the price were the file and rank, as usual.

I think it could be a bit easier to think of things this way if there were a stronger social safety net, especially in the USA.

Also I think the scale of the company you work at has an impact on this. The larger the company, the less personal treatment I would expect.

what about accountability to the people who took a risk investing in the company?

maybe the CEO didn't predict the future however many months or years ago to get to a point where no layoffs would've been necessary, but maybe this would've been at the cost of less growth, possibly having worse consequences

the idea of "humanity" is completely opaque, it's not that hard to look at the reality instead

"The reality" is jobs = people. We don't live in a vacuum. It's seriously not that hard either. Between the hundreds of thousands of regular people losing their livelihoods and some investors losing money ("don't invest what you can't afford to lose" something something), doesn't sound too complicated for me.

Humanity is not opaque unless you make it so, like this particular system does. It's just people.

if you don't have money to pay employees then they're out of a job, and if you don't grow you don't get investors and don't hire people

please explain how "humanity" solves this

It’s called “Japan”. Low performers are kept in corporations to do nothing all day while many of their peers work themselves to death.

Are you implying 100000+ people getting laid off in a handful of months merely is about weeding off "underperformers"?

No, I’m saying that not laying anyone off ever isn’t a good idea.

Termination and layoff are two very different things. You typically don't layoff people for incompetence, you fire them.

Humanity solves this by having an entrepreneur that just wants to have a business up & running in a sustainable, bootstrapped way, that will give jobs to X people earning Y in salary, while the founder in the long run will earn 5-7Y salary. Instead of having founders that want to be billionaires with VC money in a 5 years time-frame. There is still risk, and a business might fail and jobs be lost, but the scale is different.

Therefore coming back to my initial comment: the very system we live in is based on this conception that we have to forego treating people like humans and have to consider them as mere "resources" just to make it work. Not pretending like I have a solution in the current context. It just will never sit right with me, that's all.

> It's seriously not that hard either.

Hah. Suggesting an unworkable solution is of course trivial, never mind the centuries of debate of all the shades of economic systems like cutthroat capitalism, democratic socialism, dictatorship of the proletariat and everything in between.

I mean, this is like saying Robin Hood was a serious philosopher of social economics instead of a folktale, and "robbing the rich to feed the poor" is a legit strategy that can and should be implemented under the current capitalist system.

And somehow you'd think I was the arrogant one around here for saying there's a lot we don't understand (especially about humanity, i.e. ourselves!).

I didn't suggest a solution. I literally just said "humanity" is people, and our system treating people like numbers on a spreadsheet will never sit right with me.

The rest is you going on a tangent.

The problem isn't that CEOs don't get punished. The problem is when they virtue signal with "I'm sowwy " and claim responsibility without accepting accountability.

That's the defined procedure though, without that, you draw more attention. There is a clearly defined playbook at this point, and it WORKS, so why go making up your own words when they just wanna hear the song?

When the playbook has become a meme, I think there's a case to be made for updating it.

Exactly. The expected results of the playbook used to be Compassion, feels.

Now its eyerolls, cynicism.

Someone could have an entirely transactional understanding of their job but assume that - alongside many implicit elements of that transaction - there's a component of through-line longevity.

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