Scale isn’t an excuse. If I personally rented out hundred of thousands of cars a day, the judge isn’t going to tell me, “Well, don’t worry about those dozens of false police reports, nobody’s perfect.”
Ok, they’re many many people. Are the individuals who made these false reports being held responsible, then?
That’s the problem: if you try to hold the corporation accountable, people say that it’s made up of many individuals and most of them had nothing to do with the crime. If you try to hold the individuals accountable, people say that they were acting on behalf of the corporation and it’s not right to punish them alone.
I don’t know what the solution is, but allowing large companies to get away with crimes that would ruin my life if I committed them myself is not the way to go.
Holding C-level executives responsible for the companies they're supposed to be responsible for, for starters. That's their whole job. They get paid enough for it.
Secondarily, regulation of software quality when it can cause problems this big.
Let's try to apply that to the case in this article. There are two speculated causes:
* some bug in the backoffice systems that causes cars not to be flagged as rented;
* failure of first-line employees to properly enter cars as rented.
It seems plausible that neither potential cause has a single decision or a single decision-maker who could plausibly have known that this was a likely outcome of some decision or decisions.
After a lot of investigation, it might be that we can reasonably lay the bug at the feet of someone who (e.g.,) decided to ship at time T instead of waiting for more QA and acceptance testing. This has been going on for some time, apparently. Is "Go to jail in 2020 for false imprisonment" an outcome that makes sense for a product owner on a library that was built in 2005, or a college student that put out a quick lib on github in 2012 to solve a problem encountered on her own website? Of course, there's a whole chain of decision makers in between: the Hertz coder that used the library, the manager signoff and/or legal signoff for using the library, the decision to ship without 100% use case coverage, and many, many more.
When people talk about "people who make the decisions", though, they typically mean executives. It's not clear to me that any executive's decision necessarily led to this. If everyone implementing those decisions were perfectly competent and always did the right thing, then nothing would have gone wrong. Since they never are, it was quite possible that something would go wrong, but "imprison dozens of people" was probably not a reasonable anticipation for screwing this up.
If we look at the other speculated cause, there is superficially more responsibility: whoever put off entering the rental changes "caused" the arrests in a slightly more direct way. There might be a number of factors found in the analysis, such as
* poor task design, so that papers could be lost or so that cars could be driven away without the computer being updated;
* overwork, leading to customer-facing personnel believing that they do not have time "right now" to enter rental changes
Behind those people, though, it's possible there's no decision which clearly caused this. If there's no way to anticipate some terrible outcome, and if our legal system decides to punish "decision makers", then being an executive in any business is gambling with your freedom.
I have a different solution: legal consequences for people who take actions, and allowing trade in those like any other liability, such that an employment contract could specify which kinds of consequences for which the employer does and does not accept employees' liability. There may be a detail or two still to work out... ;)
I think we should take the opposite approach for executives. Rather than say they probably didn’t make any decision that specifically led to a given outcome, let’s assume that they are responsible for any given outcome within their organization unless proven otherwise.
Isn’t that the whole point of leadership? You’re in control, and in exchange you’re also responsible.
I don’t think this means being an executive in any business would be gambling with your freedom. Businesses could be set up to have better processes and better control. One of the reasons that many businesses are set up so that huge problems can happen without any explicit decision from an executive is because this means nobody is held responsible. The entire system is set up so that you can get away with absolutely heinous shit as long as the chain of responsibility is unclear. Of course we end up with unclear chains of responsibility being the norm!
I do suspect that a world where executives are held responsible by default would involve much smaller companies than we see today. And that seems just fine. If a company of 38,000 people can make dozens of false police reports resulting in arrest and jail time and get away with it with no real consequences because responsibility is too hard to pin down, then 38,000 is too large for a company to be.
> Isn’t that the whole point of leadership? You’re in control, and in exchange you’re also responsible.
When contemplating giving executives that responsibility, are we going to give the needed flexibility to immediately dismiss employees who represent part of the chain of threat to the company's customers?
You can have almost outcome you want; you can't have every outcome you want. If you want strong employee protections, you can't have ironclad and exhaustive executive responsibility.
How about we make executives only responsible for acts that can’t be traced back to individuals under them? If a bad employee fucks up and makes a false police report, nail him. If the entire organization fucks up and you’ve cleverly designed it so it can’t be pinned on anyone in particular, nail the person in charge.
Being responsible for an organization you lead is distinct from the notion of being innocent until proven guilty. Proving guilt would consist of proving that the organization did the things it was accused of, and proving that you led it.
Person or corporation, a case always begins with presumption of innocence and then trying to prove guilt. It should be the same for executives of that company.
I'm not sure if you're speaking from a point of naivety, but the only point at which the presumption of innocence enters into the justice process is when you step into a courtroom.
Everything prior to that - in all your interactions with police, jails, prosecutors, before your day in court, they will all presume guilt, and will treat you like the criminal scumbag that they think you are.
Oh, and most defendants never even get their day in court.
Sure, you’d start with the presumption that the accused didn’t lead organization or that the organization didn’t commit the crime in question, then try to prove otherwise.
That's more subtle to prove though. Negligence and malice, while both resulting in the same outcome, do deserve different punishments. And my comment was coming from a position of "you have to assume negligence before anything worse".
It is actually much simpler. You should look at those who filed false reports without proper investigation of an issue and checking the circumstances. If they blindly trust their computer system that tells them "Report John Doe", it is their fault. They should have proper procedures to double check the details for such cases.
Programming bugs are unrelated to the issue.
I might be wrong, but if you submit false tax statements then excuses like "program bug" won't help you.
If you think in terms of promoting a culture of safety rather than finding the right people to blame, I think there are more creative solutions available.
Despite Boeing's recent problems, the airline industry is very good at safety. Government regulation has a lot to do with this. (And allowing Boeing to use in-house workers as a substitute for government regulators seems to have been part of the problem.)
In criminal conspiracies, we routinely hold all members responsible for the actions of individuals. If you and I rob a bank and I shoot the guard, you can be held responsible for my violence, even if you were just sitting in the car waiting to drive us away.
Ok, they’re many many people. Are the individuals who made these false reports being held responsible, then?
That’s the problem: if you try to hold the corporation accountable, people say that it’s made up of many individuals and most of them had nothing to do with the crime. If you try to hold the individuals accountable, people say that they were acting on behalf of the corporation and it’s not right to punish them alone.
I don’t know what the solution is, but allowing large companies to get away with crimes that would ruin my life if I committed them myself is not the way to go.