"We're not interested in assigning blame."
I heard this phrase from a VP yesterday while doing a post-mortem. Has anyone ever heard management use that phrase and mean it? I was reflecting upon my past experiences, and it always includes lots of trying to find someone to blame.
“But we need someone to write the postmortem.”
Here's a comment from a former boss in the Navy. "I'm not as interested in getting to the root of the problem as I am in seeing someone punished." That one sentence explains why Navy ships are crashing into other ships and why it's not going to improve.
That’s why you suck /s. Finding someone to blame causes people to hide the actual truth instead of really digging into why there was a failure.
Facebook's Sev reviews are done pretty much like that. There are cases where incidents are caused by human errors. Even in those cases, the review focuses on getting to the root of the problem, and how to make systems to automatically prevent such a mistake from getting committed, or at least provide them enough info so that the engineer can check and make sure that it doesn't cause problems.
Have used that line countless times. If there's a behavior issue it should be coached and managed. Not interested in that, just need to assess risk, remediate, and prevent future issues.
The system should be built so behavior issues aren’t going to cause problems.
I would agree, if a bad change or code goes into prod, its a systemic issue. If qa is catching a lot of issues its a behavioral issue. If prod and uat are configured differently slightly differently(always is no matter how many people have tried to disagree) that's what needs to be addressed
Humans are fallible. There's always going to be mistakes. If the plan for improving reliability is to discipline (or fire) people who make mistakes, the team is completely doomed to fail. People who think that way need to be fixed or fired, for the benefit of the team.
There are companies that truly do that and mean it and even embrace the “failure as learning” model. And there are companies that don’t (Amazon being the biggest offender I know of).
I'm sorry for the teams that gave you that impression