Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

This classic short-termism is all too common in software engineering. The reputational damage and likely compensation will exceed by far the costs of identifying and fixing these bugs. However, the CTO at the time has long moved on, and likely got a decent bonus at the time by cutting software engineering resources.

View on HN

Which is why such reputational fallout needs to taint not only the MBA careers involved, it has to burn everyone involved and really hurt. The schools who educated them, there future employers, such shenanigans with the lifes of others have to make you radioactive. Taking the money for the responsibility has to involved some damocles swoards hanging over the boards.

We need laws that allow historical clawback of bonuses/rewards that later turn out to have been given in the context of significant failures.

That should only trigger when there are legal proceedings with injured/wronged innocents. Otherwise you'll have companies clawing back bonuses when poorly conceived products flop.

I'm not drawing a connection between your two sentences there. Like, that still doesn't sound like a bad idea!

So you do great work and get a bonus, but then the marketing department botches it, or executives decide to price it in some inane way that consumers reject and now you owe your employer money? Dystopian.

This is a general problem in business, not just software.

Management are motivated by short term bonuses.

The biggest shareholders are fund managers who get judged on their annual performance (In the UK there are annual performance tables published. I assume it is similar in other countries) so they have a short term outlook as well.

Private equity have a slightly longer term view, but not much more so.

No one has a stake in what happens a decade from now.

There would have been to compensations if they just had not persecuted the people for a known software bug. Might still have been cheaper to wait for a new system

Reply on news.ycombinator.com