We should expect the resignation of the CIO, at the very least.
My classes in finance said that rule #1 is to make your payroll (followed closely by pay your taxes). Failure to do this - even when the problem isn't cash flow, but IT failure - is inexcusable. It's the CIO's job to ensure that any risks to this are mitigated.
Fireing the CIO only helps if you give the next one enough power to solve the issues, even if it means serious disruption in the organization, with unhappy unions, middle managers etc, which may lead to resignations, short term cost increases and even operational downtime (though hopefully less critical services than payroll)
A lot of organizations, the company culture becomes so entrenched that almost no amount of C-level meddling will make a big difference. And this is especially common in government organizations (and in companies with very strong unions).
Unfortunately, suits and other manager types rarely take responsibility for their failure of leadership. They'd rather blame a contractor or a junior IC than admit they don't know what they're doing.
Why shouldn’t the contractor and junior IC also lose their jobs for this level of fuck up? This is literally someone’s kids’ food on their table. Why does anyone in the chain get a pass?
Because firing people at random isn't likely to prevent future errors.
Errors of this magnitude are either a symptom of some deep-running problem with an organization, or (much less likely) freak accidents.
In the former case, random firings aren't very likely to improve the organization; in the latter case, you'd be firing the people best qualified to do a post-mortem and making sure the same or a similar failure never happens again.
Have you ever worked with large-scale, historically grown systems? More likely than not, the people that have actively made the wrong decisions (or have, through inaction, allowed an initially-working system to degrade) are long gone.
Dilution of responsibility is a real problem, but harsh punishment of everybody that, under some (your?) metric that made an error is definitely not the solution.
If you're truly interested in this (and not just angry and looking for somebody to take it out on, even though the root cause here is probably systemic – which is not the same thing as "inevitable!"):
The aviation industry and its culture of failure analysis and prevention is a great place to start, in my view. We have a lot to learn from that in our industry.
"Large scale, historically grown systems" get like that because there wasn't sufficient accountability in the first place. Things like this don't happen in the aviation industry because there are regulatory bodies holding people accountable, something almost entirely missing from the software industry. That was the original point made in this thread.
> Things like this don't happen in the aviation industry because there are regulatory bodies holding people accountable
Important to note that this has been largely diluted in the US via regulatory capture, leading to things like the 737 Max disasters - so looking at the aviation industry a few decades ago is probably the way to go.
The reason we have hierarchy in business is to ensure the burden of error is shared. Bosses and managers are there to ensure their employees are providing a reliable service (among other duties). Was a process of sign-offs implemented to prevent errors like this? Was there a process by which the employee circumvented processes that lead to a disruption of the service? Or did the boss/manager not keep tabs on what was happening within their purview?
exactly yes - because in a large bureaucracy, "stall and blame" are the daily routine, and your skill at competitively doing this in a crowd, is how you got your promotion.. not everyone has seen this in action, but once you see it .. and it often takes years to see it.. you will know the truth of it..
I believe that this USPS situation is a degeneration of internal fights that are lasting more than a decade now.. it is about money and authority, indeed
My classes in finance said that rule #1 is to make your payroll (followed closely by pay your taxes). Failure to do this - even when the problem isn't cash flow, but IT failure - is inexcusable. It's the CIO's job to ensure that any risks to this are mitigated.