In general, the chief compliance officer at any company has ...

In general, the chief compliance officer at any company has a dial in front of her that she can turn to get More Crime or Less Crime, and at a normal company — a bank, for instance — her job consists of (1) turning it most of the way toward Less Crime, but (2) not all the way, and (3) acting very contrite when politicians and regulators yell at her about the residual crime. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for crime,” she will say, and almost mean.

If you squint this is almost like the relationship software engineers have with performance optimization. You want things to be fast, you say we don’t tolerate anything slow, etc. but you actually need to allow slow code to operate a product.

www.joshbeckman.org/notes/473002145