5 ms·

There's a refreshing humility in admitting how it went wrong, and what they've done to fix it, and not mentioning any names that I admire here. No attempting to

There's a refreshing humility in admitting how it went wrong, and what they've done to fix it, and not mentioning any names that I admire here. No attempting to lay the blame at someone's feet, just admitting that a process failed, and they've amended it so it doesn't happen again. Kudos.

nine_k 10y ago
Google's culture of blameless post-mortems is commendable. In internal post-mortems names are named when necessary for disambiguation, without consequences to the persons named. This results in all participants being candid, and the real source of the problem more easily uncovered. (I wrote two post-mortems for small incidents I triggered.)
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > without consequences to the persons named I would hope so (everyone makes mistakes some of which may lead to HUGE issues) and not giving them a chance to learn from it is a bit unrealistic. At the same time, however, I have been part of organizations where something has gone wrong and us engineers basically all had to "take the blame" otherwise the single person likely would have been fired. I'm confident Google is not like that but it's always something I think about.
  - ben_jones 10y ago
    We live in a culture where we invoke a draconian system of punishment as a "justice" system. The idea, which does not translate to software, is that fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station. So the fact that certain companies recognize a huge societal flaw and actively operate against it is rare (imo).
0xmohit 10y ago
Yes, you do expect transparency from such service providers. It sucks when somebody starts to point you at their SLA when you ask them about outages. I'm looking at you, AWS.
- hehheh 10y ago
  I've seen Google ask for an NDA before acknowledging a problem existed and was fixed. They are at best selectively transparent.

nine_k 10y ago

Google's culture of blameless post-mortems is commendable. In internal post-mortems names are named when necessary for disambiguation, without consequences to the persons named. This results in all participants being candid, and the real source of the problem more easily uncovered. (I wrote two post-mortems for small incidents I triggered.)

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> without consequences to the persons named I would hope so (everyone makes mistakes some of which may lead to HUGE issues) and not giving them a chance to learn from it is a bit unrealistic. At the same time, however, I have been part of organizations where something has gone wrong and us engineers basically all had to "take the blame" otherwise the single person likely would have been fired. I'm confident Google is not like that but it's always something I think about.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  We live in a culture where we invoke a draconian system of punishment as a "justice" system. The idea, which does not translate to software, is that fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station. So the fact that certain companies recognize a huge societal flaw and actively operate against it is rare (imo).

0xmohit 10y ago

Yes, you do expect transparency from such service providers. It sucks when somebody starts to point you at their SLA when you ask them about outages. I'm looking at you, AWS.

hehheh 10y ago
I've seen Google ask for an NDA before acknowledging a problem existed and was fixed. They are at best selectively transparent.