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Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

Without getting into all of the hazards about legislating morality it's impractical in our current climate. I don't think this should be illegal, personally.

I do think that it would be helpful to make the decision making public though. Limited legal liability isn't limited moral liability. Rather than saying "amazon fired" someone they should tell us "Jane Doe a manager at Amazon made the decision to fire."

People shouldn't hide behind the company logo when they do shitty things to other people. And if you want to rationalize it, cool, do it with your name attached so your pastor, spouse, friends, and kids know the things you'll do for a paycheck and you can justify it all you want to your community.

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I would immediately implement a special role for the head of HR: official decider of all firing decisions. No one will blame the head of HR because they'll know that they were only carrying out someone else's decision, while no one would blame the original decider because no one knows who it was.

Why would you want to create a workplace without personal responsibility for decision making? All I'm saying is to make that personal responsibility public.

It's pretty telling to me that I'm being downvoted for saying that I think people should own up to their decisions in the workplace that impact other people and are questionable ethically. Removing any kind of moral liability for those decisions is how we wind up with businesses that employ good people that do shitty things to other good people.

Because that would just require corporations to have a "fall guy", which is basically what a lot of executives are already. Vessels into which the corporation can dump it's moral debt.

I just had a minor epiphany. This is exactly what compliance officer is supposed to be.

But it sounds like your recipe for responsibility is mob justice. What other possible result could come from publicizing the name of "the person responsible" for the firing?

The corporate structure institutionalizes immorality, it cannot be avoided. By law shareholder profits come first, everything else is secondary to that goal.

In a company the size of Amazon, the decision to fire probably didn't come from Jane Doe. She gets stuck delivering the message though. Should we just say Jeff Bezos fired these employees? We don't know if he played a role here but surely he could have prevented their firing if he so desired.

In a company the size of Amazon, no one gets fired without paperwork, and termination has a process. Someone initiated that process and made the decision to follow a policy.

I don't know what the policy is explicitly or if it's justified, but there should be visibility into that kind of decision making from the outside. It's in the lack of visibility that we see bad shit happen with hiring and firing.

It is a bit more tricky than that. Here is a simple hypothetical situation I just thought of.

Imagine you are an engineering manager running a team of 10. You got an email from your boss that the project revenue is way lower than projected, so the funding is getting cut and you need to get rid of one of your worst performers, but you have to pick who it is yourself, as your boss probably doesn't even know the actual people on your team. You have to fire them, even though you personally don't want to, because they are performing fine, just worse than all your other engineers.

Whose fault is this? Is it your boss' fault? They don't even pick the person and neither do they know any of them. Is it your fault? You've made the decision to fire that person, even though you don't want to fire them.

The person filing the paperwork still isn’t necessarily the one who made the call. In fact, it usually isn’t; they are just the ones whose responsibility it is to carry it out, or else their head is on the block.

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