I think this no-fault mode of incident recovery is a bit overdone. In every HN thread, I find people advocating it as some sort of major revelation. The mindse

I think this no-fault mode of incident recovery is a bit overdone. In every HN thread, I find people advocating it as some sort of major revelation. The mindset that problems are caused by failures in process, and not people is probably right. Even if not, I think it has become popular because it describes a world we would like to live in. It reduces anxiety, and might not negatively effect people's diligence because there tends to be diminishing returns with such negative feelings (c.f.: why the fear of starvation does not promote entrepreneurship). It might, however, be misapplied when used for companies. Gitlab is the best example here: It seems like they actually came out ahead in the famous incident you're referring to, even though that incident was the most breathtaking series of organisational incompetence imaginable. So it's completely ok to spare the one guy's head who happened to issue the final 'drop db;'. But let's not congratulate them too often for at least telling us that of their three redundant backup mechanisms, one had never worked, one silently stopped working months earlier, and last was just erased by 20-something who mixed up his terminal windows (paraphrasing from memory).