Yes, they do – if done well. These are supposed to be blameless postmortems, focusing on what we can do better in the system to prevent similar issues from happ

Yes, they do – if done well. These are supposed to be blameless postmortems, focusing on what we can do better in the system to prevent similar issues from happening in the future. The answer is never “get better programmers”. Typical action items from the couple of recent postmortems I led/were a part of were along the lines of “decrease this alert's threshold, so we know about it earlier” ; “we need to invest in a proper local testing environment” ; “let's make our service independent of that other service” etc.