Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com