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Comment by goosejuice | Hacker News Reader

I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society.

I suspect accountability without authority might not be as accurate as one might seem when there exists middle management. You might be accountable but your boss probably is more so, thus the reluctance in giving full autonomy. They of course won't be able to take credit in that case either :). Perhaps an overly cynical view I admit.

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If barriers harm more than abuse then abuse should be accepted.

Reminds me of that bits about money blogpost title :

"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero"

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32701913

Matt Levine has a recurring bit on this in Money Stuff too, adjusting the crime/fraud/risk dial back and forth as companies decide to do more or less compliance.

Yes and the optimal amount of test coverage is never 100%

And the optimal uptime of b2b saas is not 100% or even 99.999% and yet...

This is true about a lot of things.

The optimal number of (minor) crashes when training for a mountain bike race is non-zero. If you never crash, you cannot be sure you were going fast enough around that turn.

In a vacuum that's certainly the most pragmatic way to look at it. The problem is that tolerance of abuse tends to create more abuse, to the point that usually it's not a sustainable policy.

Random audits can put enough fear into people to keep them honest for much lower cost.

It's not tolerance of abuse. Abuse when detected will be punished. The important thing is, stopping ALL abuse preemptively causes more pain than it's worth.

Measuring the losses due to abuse is much easier than measuring the cost of bureaucracy.

It's precisely the other way around. Cost of bureaucracy is easy to measure, abuse is not measurable (only caught abuse). Nevertheless, the point is that it is difficult to compare a known cost to an unknown cost, so that still stands.

People are risk averse, so a known cost is preferable, even if expectedly higher than dealing with abuse. This is in part why insurance is so profitable.

Nope. Abuse should never be accepted. The right solution for actual abuse of a policy like this as opposed to an error is to immediately fire the person conducting the abuse. The inability or unwillingness to make decisions like this fast is the root cause of a lot of nonsense that goes on at businesses.

If it's an error, you correct and accept errors as the cost of doing business.

I think this is all too common due to a small few who take advantage which leads to the construction of barriers to prevent abuse. This isn't limited to large orgs -- it's everywhere in society.

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

Those who act selfishly poison the well for everyone.

There is a lot of knee-jerk reaction in the line of "but what if someone abuses it! OMG!". As mentioned everywhere, the optimal amount of fraud is not zero, and the optimal test coverage is not 100%, and the minimal budget will certainly not get you there fastest, etc, etc. Some managers DO understand the problem and make it easier on their reports - but it doesn't take too many jerks to bring civilization to a grinding halt.

> when there exists middle management

That was the most interesting thing about this. I still reported to the CEO directly, but some of his tasks had been delegated to finance and project management teams. So the project management folks were running their MS Project models and I had to keep them updated weekly on where everything was at, and if I spent money out-of-pocket without having it pre-approved by finance my expense claim would be denied.

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