Comment by yobbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yobbo | Hacker News Reader

Article is trying to support a normative argument, which is fair and seems correct, with minutia in word definitions and different levels politeness.

Accountability is synonymous with responsibility. Identifying who is responsible for a failure is synonymous with blaming. We prefer to use "hold accountable" in formal and polite settings, and "blame" in informal settings, but it has the same meaning.

Using the correct level of politeness and formality is a hygiene factor.

"There has been a failure in accountability, and we're looking into preventing in the future" can be equivalent to (informally and impolitely) "someone here isn't cutting it and we need to figure who that is so we can start getting rid of him".

What the article actually means is that the consequences for failures in accountability should be measured such that it encourages learning, and disclosing problems, and so on. But this needs to happen through demonstrated actions, not language. It's actually preferable to be blunt, honest, and fair: "someone here fucked up; if you can figure who did what, fix it, and coach everybody up on how to prevent it, you will be more respected. if you hide your mistakes you will be less respected, and eventually of little use here."

It is crucial to not forget that sometimes theblame is in the system itself.

If you e.g. push your employees over the limits and tell them to ignore all kinds of reasonable safeguards and regulations. And then, one day, after a ton of near misses Joe slips and falls into the meatgrinder, it would be very easy to blame Joe for skipping the safeguards.

But the true reason for the accident was the environment and culture Joe had to work in and it might have also hit a random different person.

Absolutely,

The most evil variation of this is "we'd rather have the increased productivity than spend the resources to actually avoid X so our guidelines say they're to avoid X but really they're to blame a line worker when X happens so we can keep saying we don't want X". See the rash of train derailments and toxic spills we're lately now that railroads have imposed "precision railroading/precision crew scheduling".

Are you joking? In your example, the responsible party is the boss, not "environment and culture."

Guess who is responsible for overseeing/establishing that environment and structure?

Also: A organization can have foggier responsibility structures than "the boss says $X which is why $X is done".

E.g. you could have a boss who says safety is truly important and even does a ton to help with that, while lower management is so obsessed with other metrics that they sabotage that on a conscious or subconscious level while emulating compliance to their higher ups.

This is very common.

The "evil boss"-scenario is the simple one where it should be very clear that Joe is not to blame. This is precisely why it is important to also look at less clear ones where it would be easy to blame the accident on individual human error — instead of finding the actual root causes.

One factor with informal blaming is it makes it easier for it to be done to whoever has less power or whoever is less popular, etc. And this naturally leads to people just acting defensively rather than making an effort to avoid a given problem. At worst, people can incentivized to make other people screw-up, 'cause when other people are being blamed for X, you can't be blamed for Y.

A formal blaming process means that the question of who to blame is decided objectively and people have more of an incentive actually act correctly.

And as others mention, blaming the process itself is reasonable.

And you're right that the article itself only presents accountability as essentially greater politeness.

> A formal blaming process means that the question of who to blame is decided objectively and people have more of an incentive actually act correctly.

I am not sure the creation of a formal process (created by those who have the power to create formal processes) is inherently more fair to those without power than an informal process.

Especially if formality is confused for objectivity or correctness. The latter two are likely impossible for human beings to acheive, so a starting point for a better process is going to be recognizing that the it is going to be affected by the blindspots, flaws, and other foibles of the people who created it.

I am not sure the creation of a formal process (created by those who have the power to create formal processes) is inherently more fair to those without power than an informal process.

A formal process isn't inherently more fair. It's only potentially more fair. You need to look in detail at the process to see if it's more fair.

The rest of your argument is a bit like arguing mathematics won't help you build a bridge - "The math could wrong and the user could be biased and even the best can't reflect reality exactly".

Similar is the distinction between reasons and excuses: The words are synonyms, except to the extent an excuse is a reason I don't like.

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