So what is it in practice? If nothing happens, in any way, what's the point of saying it? If it means nothing, then sure, I'm accountable too, why not?

> (of a person, organization, or institution) required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible

This is from the OED. There’s no mention of consequences. You are expected to account for your actions. Like an accountant is expected to keep an accounting of transactions.

I’m an on-call engineer, I’m accountable for outages. That means that I give a root-cause analysis when they happen. I’m not given disciplinary action when outages happen, because there are many factors that cause an outage and that’s too much for one person to bear.

> what's the point of saying it?

This is basic corporate comms. If you’re silent, people may assume something worse than the truth. So you give some explanation (some kind of account is given by the person held accountable).

> You are expected to account for your actions. Like an accountant is expected to keep an accounting of transactions.

If an accountant lies in his numbers, they go to prison.

Why are you missing the most obvious explanation, it’s simply a political point they have to be seen saying, but have no intention of doing

- I.e. it’s a lie

There are lots of scenarios where a CEO can go to prison.

I don’t think we get a lot of mileage when we argue about the right words used in corporate comms. Like, “this person is accountable to some extent, but not enough for my standards, so the word ‘accountable’ should not be used here.”

what makes it even worse is just the usage of the word accountable is technically correct but awkward as shit because no one actually uses that word in that manner, they use it in the manner you suggested.

I doubt that. More likely people are just motivated to interpret it negatively because it supports their point if they do.

most people would say on-call or responsible-for, both having vastly different connotations than accountable.

saying accountable isn't wrong per se but it's definitely not the connotations anyone would say on the spot when on-call or responsible-for are vastly more accurate.

in particular, on-call brings with it all the baggage that being on-call requires. responsible-for implies you have a responsibility, it does not imply a negative consequence if you fail to meet that responsibility (it doesn't preclude it, but it doesn't imply it either).

accountable implies being held accountable which implies a negative consequence.

saying you're held accountable for a system very strongly implies there will be a negative consequence for failure whereas responsible-for does not.

it's what's technically allowed vs what people actually say.

It means he’s responsible for making tough choices like initiating a layoff. Obviously all CEOs would prefer their headcount growth initiatives had generated significant revenues to justified continued employment of those heads. But that doesn’t always happen and resets are sometimes in order.

It doesn't mean nothing. It just doesn't mean being punished. You can look it up if you are interested.