Hacker News Reader

Comment by HdS84 | Hacker News Reader

One of our managers uses Ai to summarize everything. Too bad it missed important caveats for an offer. Well, we burned an all nighters to correct the offer, but he did not read twenty pages but one...

View on HN

I don't know if this is the case but be careful about shielding management from the consequences of their bad choices at your expense. It all but guarantees it will get worse.

Letting a thing implode that you could prevent is a missed opportunity for advancement and a risk to your career because you will be on a failing team.

The smarter move is to figure out how to fix it for the company while getting visibility for it.

You are right. I don't think the only alternative to shielding management from the consequences of their bad choices is letting things implode and going down with the ship.

> Letting a thing implode that you could prevent is a missed opportunity for advancement

No matter how many times I bail out my managers it seems that my career has never really benefit from it

I've only ever received significant bumps to salary or job title by changing jobs

That means you’re not getting visibility for it. When I say “get visibility”, it means to your manager’s boss and peers.

yup, an employee is more than just a gear, better keep the motor running than explode along with the other parts.

I don't know what your experience is, but mine is the opposite. Nobody ever notices people who put out fires, and it's hard to should "hey guys! There's a fire here that John started, I'm putting it out!" without looking like a jerk for outing John.

Fewer still notice the fire-preventer.

Oh, no, neither prevent the fires not put them out. Instead, predict them, and then say "see?" when they break out.

That's a risky business, you can get the blame if you're not careful. "Why didn't you try harder if you knew this would happen" etc.

If you say "look, the stuff they're doing there is risky, you should <do thing>", and they don't do it, how can they blame you? If they do do it, then mission accomplished, no?

E.g. "the way that team builds software isn't robust enough, you should replace the leader or we'll have an incident", how can you be blamed for the incident when it happens?

Management should be hiring lawyers for those details anyway...

Yes. Reliable domain experts are very important.

Should I mention that yesterday I just saw a diagram with a box that said “Legal Review LLM”?

Maybe you should point them to the news stories about that sort of thing blowing up spectacularly in court. Or maybe you could just let them learn that by themselves.

Wasn't even legal but concerned the scope of the offer. Nuance, but nuance can be important. Like "rework the service and add minor festures" VS "slightly rework and do major features" - this affected the direction of our offer a lot.

Did he pull all nighters to fix it? If not, it wasn't "too bad" for him. I doubt he'll change his behavior.

Where's the IBM slide about "a machine cannot be held accountable, therefore a machine should never make a management decision"?

Of course, often it's quite hard to hold management accountable either.

Isn't a solution to assign vicarious liability to whomever approves the use of the decision-making machine?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com