Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

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> And that includes the finance department, of which I've certainly seen some of the most stupid ideas.

I've heard some tales about a town in Michigan - let's call it Flint - where water was distributed using some older provider, while some newer company existed which charged less. A newly hired CFO decided, logically, to save some funds by going to the cheaper one. CFO didn't know that pipes in the town were made in the old fashion (lead metal?) and the new company, which used iron pipes, used some chemicals in water which helped to keep pipes clean. This chemical wasn't used by the old water supplier. When flown through old pipes, the chemical caused dissolving the lead into water. By the time the population of Flint switched to bottled water for everything the CFO was long gone with earned bonus for saving money to town.

I wonder what such stories, if true, teach us for the future. Just general mistrust towards financiers doesn't look quite right...

> “Just general mistrust towards financiers doesn't look quite right...”

financiers, including startup investors, focus on money above all else, and that alone justifies mistrust (aka skepticism). with that kind of focus, it’s inevitable that decisions are made selfishly and greedily. that doesn’t mean it’s a tool that can’t be wielded for generally positive outcomes, but that the deck is (intentionally) stacked against it. beyond that, the flint situation sounds like a real failure of leadership all around (at the very least, basic due diligence/risk analysis). that often happens when decisions are made far removed from the expertise needed to make them.

> I wonder what such stories, if true, teach us for the future.

That if you're looking to maintain [water] quality, you need to have monitoring in place.

Switching to the new provider was a good idea, not a bad idea. There is no way to keep track of everything that might have happened in the past that might be affected by unspecified changes in the future, so there can't be an expectation of doing it either. But you can watch what kind of results you're getting.

Switching to the new provider was a bad idea, because it is not that hard to find competent civil engineers who could tell you that rather than being a mysterious unquantifiable risk, putting the new chemical in the lead pipes would cause a problem. "Every decision that went badly was a good decision if it seemed good at the time," only holds water when it's not easy to figure out in advance what's going to happen. After all, to a sufficiently ignorant person, 50% of all decisions seem better than average.

You might be right. Or not too much - at least for me, when I heard that story, this particular decision seemed odd - surely such obvious ways to save on expenses were considered before, so why they were rejected? In general, if something seems good on the surface it doesn't necessarily actually is - and in complex systems, like a town, some checklists - I'd expect - should be followed.

But I agree that we might lose track of why some decisions were made. Yes, we may want to revert old decisions, sometimes even have to. Just some responsibility, which comes with power.

Whoosh

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