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Comment by snozolli | Hacker News Reader

Do you make the CEO responsible even though she probably had no idea that this was going on?

You send the CEO to prison because they're responsible for what happens under them. CEOs always say they get paid so much because they're the ones bearing ultimate responsibility, so off to jail you go.

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The first person who went to prison for the VW emissions scandal was the engineer.

As it should be. The hands that physically commit the crime (or the code) are usually the dirtiest.

Ah, yes, giving management that sweet plausible deniability.

Just create an impossible demand on your workers and then act surprised when they employ unethical practices to meet those demands. Just like Wells Fargo.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_sc...

That isn’t what I said. I said that the person who commits the crime should be the first one to go to jail. That implies others should follow.

Often times, the crime that's committed is because the boss told them to do it, then threatened the engineer when they initially said No.

Yes well that’s how a lot of crime happens. We don’t avoid prosecuting a triggerman, carjacker, or bank robber just because they got the order and were threatened for not complying. Even the Eichmanns that were just following orders went to Nuremberg.

> We don’t avoid prosecuting a triggerman, carjacker, or bank robber

Well we do give them massively commuted sentences for cooperating

But we still require them to cooperate and take responsibility instead of what most software engineers try to do which is blame management (like the prior poster I was replying to).

That's completely unreasonable. The probability of any Fortune 500 CEO going to prison would basically be 100%. Should the US president go to prison whenever a government employee commits a crime as well?

The President isn't the CEO of America, Inc., and American government isn't a monolithic organization.

However, yes, if sufficiently illegal activities were going on within the President's cabinet, then yes, send the President to prison.

As for any Fortune 500 CEO going to prison, well, that risk would certainly incentivize the pursuit of good behavior from the top down, wouldn't it?

At some point it just makes the entire system untenable. Do you think, in such a world, you would ever hire anyone that you didn’t trust with your life?

In fact, you probably wouldn’t even hire anyone that wasn’t related to you.

The fish rots from the head down.

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