Commenters call the trust logic self-contradictory
2 Yesterday 9:33 AM · 15h ago · 1 post · 5 comments · 2 sources · development 2 of 4
Readers on Hacker News argue the essay's own reasoning undermines itself: full trust would make even 'what happens next' unnecessary to ask, while partial trust requires knowing the details.
“If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.”
FartyMcFarterMichael Heap Author of the essaySVP of engineering (unnamed) Subject of the essay
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What people said 7 voices · verbatim
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In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.I think its entirely contextual as to what the size of the org is and the scope of the…
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I Don't Want the Details L: https:// michaelheap.com/i-dont-want-th e-details/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9815466 posted on 2026.09.23 at 09:04:44 (c=0, p=6)
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You answered your own question.> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that…
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> Then I realised that "I don't want the details" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".Something about this feels wrong:- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right…
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One thing that's often left out that tends to grind organizations to a halt is that continuous improvement processes tend to be additive.You always add rules, and alerts, and so on. You need to revisit existing processes to and see what can be removed or replaced.My other nit with these is a term that's abused a lot "Root Cause", most complex…
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I suspect the author still misunderstands the SVP. If I were the SVP of engineering saying this to someone, especially someone who is in a non-core engineering role like product, I probably recognize that they have a tendency to verbally spew and I want them to focus on the risk mitigation and response plan. I’ve already talked to my engineering…
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You can trust someone to know the details and reasons for why something happened, and still want to provide the specific direction of "what are you doing to make sure it doesn't happen again". The organizational default is often to explain a fault (or worse, focus on blame) without specifically working to find a process improvement to prevent it…
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