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Thousands in Norway told they had won life-changing sums in lottery error
42 zqna 40 6/30/2025, 8:47:54 AM theguardian.com ↗
I'm very interested to know if there is any coverage of automated tests at all for this system? This seems like the kind of mistake that would be picked up immediately with a bare minimum test suite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpwesfKJ1AI
But it used to be the case that leaders were expected to take responsibility for the culture and systems underneath them, rather than just taking as much of a salary as the business will bear from it.
That is, if a low level employee makes a significant money-handling mistake on this scale, that's a systems failure. There should be checks and testing and a software development culture which makes this kind of error unlikely. This is what was lost with "move fast and break things". After all, it's only other people's money.
(edit: it seems not to have been an actual money-handling error, but a notification error. Still fairly serious in terms of angry customers)
I believe we should impose a statutory burden on boards for such outfits to establish that their executives are not idiots, so that when inevitably this happens again the executive is obliged to agree either they are an idiot who couldn't have known they were doing awful things but, they also lied over and over in this mandatory paperwork - and so they go to jail for lying, or, they weren't an idiot after all, they're guilty.
We use this same approach for drink driving here. You can let us take the sample, proving you were hopelessly drunk, then you get banned for drink driving, or, you can refuse the sample, we can't prove you were drunk but you refused and the same penalty applies for refusal.
I'm sure some people will protest - why should I have to put myself at jeopardy, surely I should be allowed to do crimes without consequence? OK, well lets try it out, if every CEO job goes vacant once such a rule comes into effect I guess we'll have discovered every single one of you is a crook, which is good to know. But I suspect instead we'll have no trouble finding candidates and this was simply mispriced - we won't fix the criminality but now those responsible will sometimes end up behind bars at least.
I don't know a CEO outside of smaller strictly-tech companies who would have any familiarity or direct involvement with testing procedures.
This is a weird head to roll for a developer's typo.
CEOs are the public faces of companies; with which comes higher pay but more responsibility. Conversely, employees shouldn't be sacked for honest mistakes, since they are supposed to be faceless. If an employee makes a mistake at a company, and that company does not have procedures in place to protect against that mistake; then it's the company's problem, not the employee's. And when it's the company's problem, it becomes the CEO's.
It other words: Management (steering group or CxO level) should ensure there is a QA organization to handle this. I don't know if this was the case here or if somebody just 'tested in production'.
That said. The ceo is responsible regardless of their knowledge - in tech heavy companies, like this apparently is, they'd usually appoint a trusted cto for things like this.
But failure always run up the chain of command, and ofcause it should. It is after all why CEOs are paid well. They are responsible.
If they aren't responsible for that, what else would a lottery CEO be responsible for?
CEO doesn't want to invest the resources to match the delivery demand
Quality goes down, safety and security standards are lowered
Also known as the Okta-effect
Hence the CEO is practically a political appointee. And in politics, you want to see heads roll. Probably the Prime Minister told her to resign.
That was always implicitly in the job description for any public sector CEO role.
It won't affect the ceo's job prospects in any way, they will pop up in a new gig soon enough.
https://www.vg.no/sport/i/KMAxP4/varsler-gigantbot-til-norsk...
https://www.nrk.no/innlandet/norsk-tipping-far-bot-pa-36-mil...
> “It is during this conversion that a manual error has been made in the code that is entered into our game engine,” the company said in a statement. “The amount has been multiplied by 100, instead of being divided by 100.”
That sounds like a problem a CEO should lead the charge to address, not resign from. I wonder if there are still deep issues.
You don't hear the phrase "pour encorager les autres" very often these days, but it's one of the classic justifications for punishment: not just for the punished, but also for everyone else in a similar position. Sometimes called "skin in the game" these days. If there's no penalty for failure, there's no incentive to pay attention to the routine operations of the business.
Conversely the naval tradition of the Captain being the last person to leave a ship in distress embodies the idea of the responsibility of staying to deal with the problem. See recently the Costa Concordia incident.
That's totally opposite to my impression. She took responsibility, left and the company has now shown externally and internally that these kinds of errors have large consequences.
Also: This was not the first sign of mismanagement and bad culture at Norsk Tipping.
But it's not an accepting of responsibility in the sense of we made a grave error -> it must be made right. Someone getting fired doesn't help the people who were improperly notified. It likely doesn't help prevent improper notifications in the future.
Taking responsibility could mean setting up a quality control process for future changes as well as validating all current the notification strings are appropriate and accurate. And sending an apology to the affected people.
That said, it is perhaps a time for reflection when considering this:
> The company acknowledged it has experienced “a number of technical problems” over the past year.
If you're responsible and things continue to go wrong, perhaps someone else would do a better job, and the best choice is to let someone else have a try.
You wanna be in charge? You want to apply pressure that pushes for growth over quality? You're responsible.
We seem to live in a world where CEOs are considered both gurus heroically pulling their company along and blamelesz victims of the wills of the organization whenever there's a failure. They get the best of both worlds, compensated like the first and treated like the second between gigs.