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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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