A screw-up happened. The screw-up is ultimately due to a crucial piece of information not being relayed to the right person. Multiple levels of seniority were in the loop, all of whom could have caught the omission, but nobody did. Who bears responsibility for the screw-up?
A — Everyone, jointly.
B — The most senior person involved.
C — The person who would have normally been "most likely" to catch the omission.
D — Someone else. (You pledge to add a comment who that would be)
@xahteiwi
The person that has to fix the screw-up.
Which is most likely also the one pointing it out.
And who wants to kill themselves for being so honest.
@xahteiwi Well, I voted B on the basis that the seniority also implies a hierarchy.
But it's not that easy, since there also should be verifiable playbooks and appropriate documentation. i.e. if the information was discovered in a meeting, it should be clear by the documentation that it should be relayed, and ideally you have something like an action item tracker that allows the responsible person to check the "has been sent" item.
That is a major process slow-down, though, so a tradeoff.
@xahteiwi D - the „the right person“ failed to investigate if the crucial information was available and/or failed to implement a process where the crucial information is caught and relayed if available. This doesn’t mean the person needs to suffer from retaliation in hindsight, but it should be clear in the process what information needs to be collected and shared to avoid similar issues in the future
@xahteiwi I picked A. I first leaned towards B, but the "most senior person" here gave me the same pause that it did to some others.
The most senior person isn't necessarily the one highest in the chain of command. Heck, I've experienced situations myself where I was the most senior but had no power at all.
If with "most senior" you meant the one highest in the chain of command here though, then yes, B. It's their responsibility to create a working process that prevents screwups like this.
@foosel "Most senior" does mean to me what you call "highest in the chain of command", but I didn't use that phrase because it makes some people balk at the (originally) military nature of that concept.
There are quite some companies out there, where seniors are not in the positions to influence that environment, because they stay in technical positions, away from the Peter's principle trap ...
Hence I mentioned abstract "management" as the main factor, because it could include seniors but not necessarily..
@xahteiwi hard to say - „seniority“ is a vague concept, „person who is most likely catching omissions“ too, and nothing is said about who is normally responsible to provide all necessary information to „the right person“ and why „the right person“ couldn’t have asked themselves for all necessary and relevant information. but in general, everyone who knows an important detail that hasn’t been mentioned yet should say so. therefore A.
@xahteiwi
I'm in for "Management", as it was not able to build an environment where everyone with knowledge is comfortable to speak up, if something is fishy...
@isotopp@xahteiwi Or maybe D, an even more senior person who was not directly involved in the specific screw up but indirectly by not fostering the right culture.
@xahteiwi Went for B, like someone said, they're being paid the big monies to be held responsible.
It depends a bit on the repercussion, but in most cases it doesn't matter who's responsible, focus instead on fixing the issue and improving the process so it doesn't happen again.
@xahteiwi I apologise in advance for polluting the comments with an observation which is perhaps tangential to the question at hand.
If you can set up a well known process for documenting a genuinely blameless post-mortem, then in my experience, people are more likely to chime in and help describe what happened and… the spreading of that knowledge can inoculate against future repeats.
@xahteiwi I was tempted by A, but took B because the "jointly" suggests the responsibility is shared and reduced by the sharing. But responsibility is not a zero sum game: even if someone below you in the heirachy is responsible, it does not reduce your own.
Higher ups need to hire the people to ensure fuckups dont happen and design the workflows and processes that work for the people they hired.
@xahteiwi In many real world cases it's D and "the person who if assigned responsibility shields the organization from liability in the easiest way", i.e. the most junior person in the loop or whoever was the last non-regretted leave.
I chose A of course as communication screwups like these have to be addressed blameless or you end up with people gearing up for D next time something happens. B is acceptable as well if you see this as organizational failure that needs buy-in at the top to fix.
@oliof You're referring to the concept of a scapegoat which, I believe, harkens back to the Old Testament. So it's safe to say that this thinking was present in very early stage proto-capitalism already.
@xahteiwi the old testament scape goat was an actual goat you stuck your grievances onto to send into the desert, so I would say this is more like one of the typical Agile Retrospective Rituals, only this particular one is not commensurate with modern animal protection regulation.
@xahteiwi I picked A but could definitely make an argument for B. It depends on what “responsibility” means here. If we mean “blame”, then I choose A, but if we’re talking about whose job it is to accept responsibility for fixing the issue and preventing it from recurring, then it’s clearly B.
@xahteiwi eh, wait, senior means with more experience or higher in the hierarchy? To me those two are completely different things, and I associate seniority with experience, not echelon, Peter principle and all. I have worked in too many companies where that is the only way to progress, and I miss the very few were it wasn't.
@xahteiwi if there is a group of people in the loop but things catch fire if one specific person doesn't get info then the entire process is fucked up by the numbers and should be redesigned. As such, it's a joint failure.
Ultimately, though, the most senior person bears responsibility for the operation so they should be held a little more accountable than their underlings.
@jens@sandzwerg@xahteiwi I agree but every single entity in that chain of command could have had a formal process created. Nobody did -> all of them failed. Since upper manglement is ultimately responsible (that's why they're being paid a lot more than I am) they should be held accountable for that.
As the person sending the information, if I knew who the "right person" was, I should have included them in the loop. If I didn't know, I should have inquired, or explicitly delegated to one of the seniors.
Most likely, though, there was no clear "sender", or the sender thought (reasonably so) that one of the people in the loop was the right person, or ...
-> joint failure
@xahteiwi at NVIDIA, we have the concept of a "PIC" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_in_command) for every project. That is the person who is responsible and accountable for the delivery of the project. Doesn't mean they are the one doing all the work, but they need to ensure it gets done.
@felixf Yes, I should have worded that less ambiguously — I simply wasn't aware that some people read "most senior person" as something like "person who has been with the company for the longest time" or "most experienced person" or perhaps even "oldest person".
That said though, even if one misreads the meaning of "senior", doesn't it also require misreading the meaning of "responsibility" (specifically, misreading it as "blame") for an A response to make any sense?
I was reading the scenario coming from my usual experience of: There will be X engineers and two or three managers (on different hierarchy levels) involved. The latter bear the responsibility, and also have to lean heavily on the most experienced engineers (who will often have domain seniority over the managers).
So my mind went to what I call "domain seniority", which should never confer responsibility in this scenario. (In this we are agreed I think.)
@felixf Yes, but again: it's the manager(s) that should manage (it's in the name).
So if there's a communications fuckup, then it's clearly a manager's responsibility to take it upon themselves to fix the fuckup and prevent it from happening in the future. All discussions about details of seniority aside, how does one come to the conclusion that "everyone, jointly" shares responsibility for the fuckup?
I'm not dunking on you, I am genuinely interested in understanding that train of thought.
@xahteiwi Reading "multiple levels of seniority" and "most senior person", my mind pretty much cut management out of the picture and tunnel visioned on engineering/architecture.
Even re-reading it now, I notice this bias, but can also more clearly see the intended meaning.
Also FWIW, I don't see how to word this better, without introducing a different bias by mentioning explicit hierarchy or whatever.
@felixf Right. Would it be fair to assume that you haven't worked with many managers who took their responsibility, as described, seriously? (This would not be out of the ordinary, based on anecdotal evidence.)
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