Comment by adontz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adontz | Hacker News Reader

    "We do not want the risk. The 3rd party must be accountable for this."

    Repeat ad infinitum.

While it may look like that, dialog happens not because client representatives are dumb. It's because they are afraid. They have toxic corporate culture. It's not safe to fail or discuss possibility of failure. The usual, honestly. So they just want to have a chance to blame someone else and survive when everything goes south. And everything goes south quite often, because nobody is prepared, because issues are not discussed to say nothing about addressed.

Another fun red flag is vague definition of goals. Define goals as vague as possible to be able to report achieving them no matter what. For example I've seen a mobile application development company reporting success every quarter. It was logins, or downloads, or clicking some button. If your system is big enough, some metric grows compared to three months ago. The trick is to find that metric, report growth and get credit for good work.

> It's because they are afraid.

Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just because they don't have to make themselves accountable for it because there will be no consequences - if it fails, you get to keep your current position and compensation but also if you succeed you also get to keep those without any gain. In these cases, not making yourself accountable is just the path of least resistance, and one could argue it's the right call for the individual in charge.

> Another fun red flag is vague definition of goals.

100%. I've been on clients where one of the criteria to determine success was "repeatability". When pressed to understand what that means, I could only get further vague and wildly abstract concepts. Nothing measurable, nothing even remotely helpful. Similar things happened for pretty much all other "requirements" we were given.

> not making yourself accountable is just the path of least resistance, and one could argue it's the right call

I’ve been frustrated with colleagues who would just do their job to a point of a project critically failing. But in retrospect, I must say they did the right thing.

Taking heat as an employee should be voluntary, and it should be compensated, and it usually isn’t.

When you see an employee just doing their job, when a lot more is needed, you can trace it to a spineless leader who does not lead by example.

> Taking heat as an employee should be voluntary, and it should be compensated, and it usually isn’t.

It must be compensated! At the vast, vast majority of companies, the worker bees' compensation is multiple orders of magnitude lower than leadership's. Why should they shoulder the accountability? When you question these stratospheric executive compensations, one of the retorts is always "Well, they are responsible and accountable so that's why they're paid so much."

Don't feel frustrated with a colleague who doesn't get fired when the project fails. Get frustrated with the executive leader 4 notches up on the totem pole who makes $10M/yr for "being responsible", who gets a bonus when the project fails.

At times, people are very insistent on doing the wrong thing. At a certain point as an employee, you have to shrug your shoulders and do what they ask. It's their company.

> if it fails, you get to keep your current position and compensation

Sounds driven by fear of loss

Human emotions do not have an infinite range unlike our human languages.

Economic stability or the loss of is a primary driver of productivity in our society

> Sounds driven by fear of loss

How can it be fear of loss when there's absolutely no risk of loss?

> Economic stability or the loss of is a primary driver of productivity in our society

Precisely the point I was making.

Generally people don't care about the corporations they work for, so the only motivation to be better is the possibility of better outcomes for them as individuals - or in some cases, to avoid losing what they have (best performers in theory have a better chance to survive a layoff). Note that I'm not making any judgement on whether this is the best way of motivating people - only that it's the one we currently have.

If there's no risk of loss and no recompense to win (i.e. the only possible outcome is to stay exactly where you are regardless of how much or how little effort and accountability you put in the project) doing as little as possible and taking no accountability is just inertia - it's not moved by fear.

What if managers asked people to set goals with the explicit expectation of failure?

Not just “moonshot” but “set 5 goals and you will be judged to succeed if you hit 3/5”

Or “set 5 goals and if you hit at least 80% of all 5, you get credit for making them all”

The concept is already known to sales orgs with quotas and OTE.

If you have five different goals and only need to hit three of them, you're incentivized to focus all efforts on the three easiest ones, and ignore the other two entirely. Or if you only need to hit 80% of each, to go for all low-hanging fruit until hitting 80%, then shift focus.

Non-cynical colleagues will act in as much good faith as they believe the manager is doing when setting the goals. But Goodhart's law lurks everywhere.

>If you have five different goals and only need to hit three of them, you're incentivized to focus all efforts on the three easiest ones, and ignore the other two entirely.

That assumes that the three "easiest" goals have known, straightforward, guaranteed ways of attaining them. Naturally there will be some uncertainty, some extrinsic factors, some good and bad luck that will get in that way of any of the goals, so ignoring two goals entirely all year risks that you catch some bad luck on one of your 3 "easiest" goals and don't end up hitting all of them.

>Or if you only need to hit 80% of each, to go for all low-hanging fruit until hitting 80%, then shift focus.

Does that sound so bad, if it's by design?

> Does that sound so bad, if it's by design?

Not at all. Just important to keep in mind when setting those goals.

If you need to hit 3/5 you need to set the goals so that they are easy enough to surely succeed. Maybe you fail two to make them look hard, after you know you passed three.

that's ironic.

If you choose a 3rd party partner in the company I work for and that partner fails: it reflects badly on you, do it more than once and it can be pretty detrimental to your future inside the company.

You are responsible for the third parties you vouch for.

FWIW this is not ideology, this actually happened.

Only if the third party need vouching for.

IBM survives in large part because they are a third party you can hire without really putting your own neck out there as the biz folks trust them.

At a prior job it was CGI. CGI got a ton of work as when they failed, the lower level people didn't get blamed. Any other vendor would have led to the negative reflection you mentioned.

Depends, my CFO got a lot of flak for choosing to use PwC when it turned out they couldn't deliver.

PwC was seen by him to be the safe choice because they were so large and essentially industry standard. He got flak because he didn't do appropriate due diligence. That was his job, so...

and, did it materially change his career advancement, promotion, labor market prospects, etc?

Yes

Perhaps an exception. 99% this does not happen.

could also be that we dont talk about it when it happens

I don't want to jump on a man's career, but that is a step in a more competitive direction.

If a CFO chooses PwC, 98% of the time they should be fired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com