You need to have trustworthy people for this to work. I feel like its hard to steer an established culture for this reason, the problem is lack of faith and trust in the first place
A few words about Blameless culture
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#32I feel like people misunderstand what blameless culture is about?
Blameless does not mean it is ok to break stuff. Or that you are not supposed to feel shame. Or that doing shit job comes with no consequences.
Blameless culture was supposed to mean that it is more important to figure out why something broke and find solutions to fix it than pursue penalties for people who did it. That pursuing penalties and assigning blame tends to turn into this nasty political circus that frequently makes it impossible to figure out what really happened and if somebody is found to be responsible, it frequently is the person who is least adept at politics.
So we say: "The only way we know to be able to maximise improvements based on factual analysis is to stop clouding the process with politics of blame finding."
So this is more like getting away with murder on a technicality.
Not blaming is not the goal. It is the means to uncovering the truth and figuring the way to prevent it in the future.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#33I think the key for me when it comes to blameless culture is humility. For me and the teams I'm on I try to instill an attitude of humility that at its core says "Any of us on any given day have the possibility of making mistakes." Mistakes happen. Anyone can make one. Finger pointing is usually a sign of either overconfidence ("I would never be that dumb!") or insecurity ("I need this person to take the heat so I lo…
Humility is the key to solving a lot of engineering problems.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
One overlooked aspect in punnishing companies is that the workers getting the most done also cause the most bugs and trouble. They are essentially filtering for the very same "C players" they despise and mock. Like, the output disparity in bigger teams is extreme in programming if you let people loose. And you better not stick your head out in bad workplaces and the advice should be to do as little as possible to avo…
but what does 'done' mean here? quality is a thing and forward movement with quality is possible.
Quality is obviously a thing your team should care about, but quality is also a process problem. If an individual continually produces poor quality than the "process" should fix it via not merging their code or pip or something else.
What we are avoiding here is a CEO asking, "What caused the outage" and your manager responds "Bill wrote some code that caused a deadlock". It's possible Bill is working on fragile parts of the system, or writes most of the code. Blame at an individual level for an incident is unhelpful and, as OP points out, possibly creates a team with worse delivery incentives.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#35I like the article and I have been promoting a blameless culture for most of my career. To respond rapidly to failings, we need transparency about what has happened. The same is required to ensure it doesn't happen again. I have seen a lot of incidents and I cannot think of one where a single person was to blame. Sure, one person ran a command or made a bad commit. However, someone else granted them access, someone t…
I have worked years in a culture that attributes all mistakes to defects in the process. And the only possible individual mistake is not to follow the process. Process culture is just as bad as blame culture in some ways. It leads to ever more complex processes. The teams I've seen do best, the manager of the project will allow process to be informal and treated as best practices only. Then people are held accountabl…
I like that perspective on the fundamental attribution error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#36This "blameful, not blameless" wording is a bit confusing to me. Are we blaming or not? "Blameful" isn't even a word, according to my web browser. The browser is showing red squiggles and so is my brain. I think it'd be a little more potent to just say hey, there's a difference between saying someone is partially responsible for an issue, and pestering them about it (e.g. telling them they did a bad thing when they l…
pestering them? What people are actually worried about is firing them, which still happens even at companies that pretend they know better. I heard from friends at Salesforce that this guy was fired, for instance. https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/salesforce_root_cause...
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
One overlooked aspect in punnishing companies is that the workers getting the most done also cause the most bugs and trouble. They are essentially filtering for the very same "C players" they despise and mock. Like, the output disparity in bigger teams is extreme in programming if you let people loose. And you better not stick your head out in bad workplaces and the advice should be to do as little as possible to avo…
but what does 'done' mean here? quality is a thing and forward movement with quality is possible.
Let's say "done" as in God descends from the heavens and estimates every Scrum® team player's work output on a fair scale, to avoid going into meta discussions about almost unmeasurable value output.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do sometimes wonder if the (American) culture of blamelessness has led to a general lack of a feeling of responsibility among software engineers, leading to general carelessness. The idea of responsibility that becomes opaque as you move up the hierarchy sounds good, but I also expect that also has a lot to do with Japanese culture.
> I do sometimes wonder if the (American) culture of blamelessness has led to a general lack of a feeling of responsibility among software engineers, leading to general carelessness. I don't think there's some general "(American) culture of blamelessness," and I think your comment might misunderstand the point of it. My understanding about "blameless culture" is it's all about avoiding counterproductive things like s…
I understand the point of blameless postmortems, thank you. I am suggesting that Americans in particular take it too far, to the point of excusing negligent behavior (which you should be trying to prevent) rather than just avoiding punishing people for mistakes.
At the same time, we have made the words "you screwed up" almost a swear in the workplace. If you can normalize "you screwed up" so that everyone hears it (and let's face it, everyone screws up once in a while), those words don't hold nearly as much power. In a sense, the ideals behind giving every child a participation trophy have been extended into the workplace under the guise of avoiding counterproductive things like scapegoating, and I'm pretty convinced that's a bad thing.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#39"The org’s leadership was clear that the individual was not fired for making the mistake, but for the attempted coverup." Somehow I have a hard time believing that. The author using "individual" in prose is a give away for militaristic leadership style, where you quickly learn to cover up any mess up so the direct superiors don't lose face. Blameless ...
True, it still fails the game theory test. You should still assume the need to cover up, because it might work, and in a (common) poor intitutional culture, save you from reprimand/job loss. Worst case, you are found out, and fired, but you had the chance to hide or obfuscate the fault. In a common blameful culture, you may have been blamed simply for (being seen as) the one causing the fault, whether volunteered or…
Ye. Being fired for a "cover up" kinda validates the employees assumption that the author's boss at the time was the wrong kinda guy to be honest to.
Unless the sysadmin got 1000 mails because the fired guy did "sudo rm *log" trying to guess the admin password I don't even know how you find out if something is a cover up, a mistake or a set up.
"shortly thereafter termination of their employment"
There was no due process there that is for sure.
Re: A few words about Blameless culture
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do sometimes wonder if the (American) culture of blamelessness has led to a general lack of a feeling of responsibility among software engineers, leading to general carelessness. I don't think there's some general "(American) culture of blamelessness," and I think your comment might misunderstand the point of it. My understanding about "blameless culture" is it's all about avoiding counterproductive things like s…
I understand the point of blameless postmortems, thank you. I am suggesting that Americans in particular take it too far, to the point of excusing negligent behavior (which you should be trying to prevent) rather than just avoiding punishing people for mistakes. At the same time, we have made the words "you screwed up" almost a swear in the workplace. If you can normalize "you screwed up" so that everyone hears it (a…
Using the literal words: "You screwed up." -- can you make an example of a way that would be helpful in an incident, either during the process, or after?
I can't. There's no value in it. What did we, as a team, do that allowed the incident to happen? Yes, John Smith shouldn't have dropped the tables on production, obviously, but does he really not know that as part of the incident response that he's (presumably) also dealing with?
If he's truly not aware that was a mistake, there's an underlying transparency issue that goes way beyond telling an individual they screwed up.