Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's popular to upvote this during outages, because it fits a narrative. The truth (as always) is more complex: * No, this isn't the broad culture. It's not even a blip. These are EXCEPTIONAL circumstances by extremely bad teams that - if and when found out - would be intervened dramatically. * The broad culture is blameless post-mortems. Not whose fault is it. But what was the problem and how to fix it. And one of t…
Can’t comment on most of your post but I know a lot of Amazon engineers who think of the CoE process (Correction of Error, what other companies would call a postmortem) as punitive
They aren't meant to be, but shitty teams are shitty. You can also create a COE and assign it to another team. When I was at AWS, I had a few COEs assigned to me by disgruntled teams just trying to make me suffer and I told them to pound sand. For my own team, I wrote COEs quite often and found it to be a really great process for surfacing systemic issues with our management chain and making real improvements, but it needs to be used correctly.