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Comment by mglz | Hacker News Reader

The damage to Boeing is already done I am afraid. But moving forwards there needs to be accountability for management types that destroy companies in such a way. This is a massive destruction of capability for the USA and will continue to be extremely expensive in the future.

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NNT wrote Skin in the Game, which discusses such types of managers who cause similar damages.

He argues that there should be clawbacks to managers that harm a company to the degree Boeing’s current management has.

He invokes The Code of Hammurabi to illustrate how ancient civilization used to deal with such class of professionals.

The Soviet Union would actually send managers to GULAG for "wrecking," or other labor crimes, and it didn't really help. In fact, "accountability" was the only thing the USSR did not have a short supply of. Extraordinary punishments don't help if the system for figuring out who's doing a good job, and who isn't, is not working in the first place.

If only there was some middle ground between a golden parachute and gulags.

According to NNT, there is. He claims that if a company doesn't want state intervention then it should not ask for bailouts when things start to go wrong. And, should they want or need to be bailed out, then it's the state who determines how much all employees from such a company can make in compensation. So, no more executives making $30M/year despite terrible years such as those Boeing has had.

That's a good idea. Another idea I've had is that the state could become an investor in that company.

In shark tank if you want money you usually sell a stake in your company.

If a company needs a bailout. The executives would lose their stocks and give them to the state in exchange for bailout money.

If the company then starts to be successful again later the state gets money back by having a portion of the company.

I think this is the key point, one that gets neglected in these discussions. It's easy to say we should reward people for doing a good job, and punish people for doing a bad job, but that determination will be made by people, and those people can have an agenda. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Wouldn't the best punishment be "just no longer give them any public money, until they show in the private sector that they improved their quality of work"?

That is way less brutal than Hammurabi or Stalin, and still gets the point home.

Sending management to the gulag because they didn't meet a stupid an unrealistic quota is NOT "accountability". The USSR did NOT have accountability. If Stalin liked you, you rarely went to the gulag. If Stalin didn't like you, you went to the gulag. That's not accountability and no citizen ever parsed it as such.

You can't just shoot random people and pretend that's accountability.

Yes, that is my point. If the bureaucracy is corrupt to begin with and rewards and penalties are distributed on a internal political basis, imposing harsh penalties will make the few good managers desperate, and corrupt what's left of the system.

The challenge with this is how far back you have to go. A lot of the damages that ultimately led to the 737 MAX and now this space boondoggle started under James McNerney, who was CEO from 2005 to 2016 and is now 74 years old.

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