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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

In the tech sector, "taking responsibility" means admitting your decisions led to the situation yet you'll externalize the consequences to employees.

In other words, it means nothing.

Taking actual responsibility could include stepping down, canceling bonuses, reduced compensation for leadership. It could include steps to become better at forecasting rather than randomly guessing. It could include ironing the business model to become less dependent on the whims of advertisers. It could include re-education and internal placement of the excess employees or reducing their hours rather than firing them.

Why would you do that though when not only can you get away with doing nothing, the market rewards it.

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> yet you'll externalize the consequences to employees.

If a F1 driver admits his driving led to them loosing the race even though engineering did everything right, it's still the entire team that doesn't get the price. And if the entire team doesn't get enough funds in from their endeavor they might have to carry out layoffs. And you can be sure they'll lay off one of the 40 engineers before they lay off the driver.

That does not mean the driver can't mean it when he says he's sorry and taking responsibility. Trust me, he would rather be on the podium than loosing.

The mob mentality of "fire the driver first" will only leave you with 40 engineers starring at a car in a lot. You might say they need to change the driver, and that's certainly what's going to happen if management sees an opportunity for a better driver, but they can't just switch drivers between every race, imagine the spectators outrage at this team that's completely unpredictable and only ever keeps a driver for multiple races when he's first on the podium. And what driver would ever want to sign such a contract? Leave which ever team they are on for the chance at a higher pay, conditioned on getting 1 every time, otherwise the contract is void.

I think this analogy fails in a number of ways, the biggest being that the assumption is the driver has "just started" and fails "one race". Neither are true for the executive in question.

Not only that but the analogy even fails for F1 because there are reserve drivers and an infinite number of people who want to be F1 drivers, there'll never be an "empty seat"

>Not only that but the analogy even fails for F1 because there are reserve drivers and an infinite number of people who want to be F1 drivers, there'll never be an "empty seat"

Plenty of people wanting to do the job, but how many can actually do the job.

Tim Cook had his compensation cut, and Reid Hoffman left the CEO role (becoming exec chairman). AFAIK, all other bigco CEOs did the 'taking responsibility' thing of doing absolutely nothing.

I can see why Spotify is reluctant to dump the CEO. Theirs is a business model that's never been profitable anyway, so keeping the founder on couldn't make things any worse.

You nailed it! I'm always wondering how someone takes responsibility and then absolutely nothing changes for him personally.

I'm sure you took responsibility for your bad stock markets returns in 2022 by saying you'll never make investment decision ever again and hand everything to your partner, right?

I've never in my life owned a single stock, nor has my partner.

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