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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> and gives us a name to actually blame.

Understanding the dynamics is great, and we can learn from that, and apply it to other situations.

As for who to blame for something a company does, shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company? That's our interface, and also how we can hold the company accountable for its collective behavior.

It's also a defense against scapegoating: it wasn't just one person who made a unilateral decision, and everyone else -- up to and including the board, as well as down the tree, to those who knew and could walk and/or whistleblow -- was totally powerless. The company as an entity is responsible, and a lot of individuals were key or complicit.

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> shouldn't outsiders blame the entire company

No, I firmly believe that this level of indirection over-diffuses responsibility in a way that enables the malfeseance we're observing.

It's a social dark pattern that I'm keen to identify and disrupt.

Yes, I agree with you but it goes both ways.

I had the unfortunate experience of running a startup with a couple of guys from a name brand fintech. They absolutely demolished the company before we got our first sale.

I couldn’t quite work out if these guys learned their mendacious trade from $bigcorp or if $bigcorps simply attract these kind of people.

My sense is that it’s a bit from both columns - I think that huge, profit driven megacorps, in general, are bad for society, in part because corporate culture itself is rapacious, and in part because they deliver enormous power into the hands of incredibly selfish people.

You need to do both

The company should be held responsible for bad actions AND so should the individuals.

Absolutely true

I disagree, because this ends up with implying that if you just got rid of That One Fucking Guy, then everything with Google Search would be good.

Which... is not a claim I'd agree with without extremely convincing evidence.

Someone can still be responsible for decisions made in a system with poor incentives.

Oh, yes, I agree that we should name and shame, but I suspect the list of names to be a lot longer than one or two people.

Ehh, I don't think that's really what it implies.

It implies that getting rid of That Fucking Guy is a necessary but likely insufficient condition for improving things.

Orgs that have been dysfunctional for a long time tend to have very complex dysfunctions, but there are still ways to fix these orgs, and it often starts by removing poor leadership from their posts.

Does it immediately make everything sunshine and lollipops? Of course not, but removing leadership that's actively working to counter your goals is still a necessary step towards the greater goal.

I think there are often two camps when it comes to organizational dynamics: "Team Incentives" (everything is about org structure and incentives) vs. "Team Great Person" (everything is about a small set of specific high-level people)

The reality is often somewhere in between. IMO "Team Incentives" often errs too much in that belief - especially because dysfunctional incentives are often downstream from a surprisingly small number of people.

In terms of understanding the dynamic though, That Fucking Guy doesn't really help. At best it can be emblematic of the underlying dysfunction, but in reality, with complex organizational dynamics, it's the underlying forces that empower That Fucking Guy that are important to understand, because the whole problem is that their function in the organization are an inevitable consequence of the dysfunction, and with proper function the organization would be able to harness their skills productively.

Err, I'll walk it back a little. Corporate decisions are just people's decisions, and though it's probably not just Raghavan, it was _somebody_'s decision to have Google spam our homepages.

Maybe we just need to be better at navigating who _somebody_ is, organizations can only be so complex at the top.

It's nice to think that with the right leadership, companies will behave differently. "Organizations can only be so complex at the top" implies that only the dynamic at the top of the company drives its behaviour. It's simple, and it helps to justify tremendous compensation. It's just not true. PR came into Google with a relatively modest role. He only became elevated to a more significant role because of the dynamics of how the company functions, and you'd have to think him a fool for his decisions to not be informed by those dynamics. Sure, he came out on top and his choices were his own, but it's foolish to think that if someone else had come out on top, their choices would really be all that different. The organizational dysfunction ensured that whomever was in that role would make those choices.

Yes, 100 percent. These dipwads pay themselves 100x salaries. The only way to defend that is that they take 100x responsibility for screwing things up. I would say differently if it was just a rank-and-file IC but this individual has enriched himself greatly. He can endure a little bit of scrutiny for that.

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