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Accountability sinks

(aworkinglibrary.com)
493 points l0b0 | 2 comments | 19 Oct 24 23:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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TZubiri ◴[20 Oct 24 01:39 UTC] No.41892231[source]▶
I was thinking about something similar today. Sometimes accountability can be a blocker, for example for hiring.

If you have 1 candidate, it's an easy call, if you have 3 candidates, you evaluate in less than a week. If you have 200 candidates, you need to hire somebody to sift through the resumes, have like 5 rounds on interview and everybody chiming in, whoever pulls the trigger or recommends someone is now on the hook for their performance.

You can't evaluate all the information and make an informed decision, the optimal strategy is to flip a 100 sided die, but no one is going to be on the hook for that.

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1. from-nibly ◴[20 Oct 24 02:05 UTC] No.41892350[source]▶
You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do. At the end of the day it's a trolley problem (the real one, not deciding between two bad things, but looking at how people typically define reponsibility)

One way or another you gotta own the decisions you make and deal with it. Even if the decision is to let someone else make the decision.

The issue is that, yes, absolving yourself of accountability sure does free you to scale in ways previously thought unimaginable, it doesn't mean you absolve yourself of responsibility. The cure is keeping accountability in favor of scaling which means a much smaller scale to everything we have been doing.

Another way to think about it. If you said you would give me 1 million dollars but I had to fully own up to what 1000 random people do in the next 24 hours I'd say thats a pretty raw deal. Basically no chance that a million will cover the chaos that a few of those 1000 people could cause. What some people do is take the million and then figure out how to rid themselves of the reponsibility.

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2. bigiain ◴[20 Oct 24 04:14 UTC] No.41892812[source]▶
> You can still be on the hook for rolling a 100 sided die. And in some cases that's effectively all you can do.

Sure. And the article allows for that. You need to have "an account" that acknowledges that at the time you didn't and couldn't have enough information to completely de risk the decision, but that you'd discussed and agreed that the 1/100 (or 1/5 or 1/10,000) risk of the bad outcome was a known and acceptable risk.

"where an account is something that you tell. How did something happen, what were the conditions that led to it happening, what made the decision seem like a good one at the time? Who were all of the people involved in the decision or event?"