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In my experience, it's rare that any blame is sufficiently concentrated as to make assigning it sensible. A failure by a human is more commonly a failure in th
by andrewaylett 8y ago
In my experience, it's rare that any blame is sufficiently concentrated as to make assigning it sensible. A failure by a human is more commonly a failure in the process they were following, or in the supervision they should have received.
And there's a big difference between "blame-free" and "unaccountable". It's not the fault of a team of developers if they aren't experienced enough to take responsibility for a critical production service, but the solution is not to berate them for being inexperienced: it's to give them the support they should (in hindsight) have had in the first place.
- late2part 8y agoSometimes that is translated as “a lack of training” which is often a euphemism for someone did something stupid and we have to put in place reactionary consequences (training on what not to do) if they or someone else does it again.
- user5994461 8y agoLack of experience is a nice word for incompetent. It remind me of an outage a few months ago. Lost a pair of systems, couldn't login and run anything anymore. Turns out, an operator ran a "rm -rf /home/user". He was following a procedure that includes cleaning a subdirectory. The subdirectory didn't exist so he figured out let's clean whatever top path exists!
- andrewaylett 8y agoI typically push back on conclusions that only involve trying to change people and don't also put technical safeguards in place. There are definitely things you can't fully automate, but the goal should be that doing the right thing is really easy and making mistakes is hard.