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When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. This is the cost of a blameless culture. There are places where that’s th

• hypeatei 2y ago
  I've never seen it put so succinctly but this is the issue I have with blameless culture. We can design CI pipelines, linters, whatever it is to stop certain issues with our software from being released but if someone is incompetent, they don't care and will find a way to fuck something up and you can only automate so much.
  • liquidpele 2y ago
    There’s a 2x2 matrix you can put employees into with one side being smart/idiot and the other being lazy/industrious. There is no greater threat than the industrious idiot.
    • wffurr 2y ago
      There’s a quote from a German general: “ I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
      • liquidpele 2y ago
        Ah that’s the original, I was going off an old memory.
  • stoperaticless 2y ago
    I guess we should not take blameless to the extreme. Some feedback must exist. (calm, obective and possibly private) Eventually it is up to the manager or manager’s manager to be aware what is happening and take action if critically needed.
  • chikere232 2y ago
    Everyone, including the most competent, makes mistakes though. If single small mistakes have disastrous consequences, the system is probably too brittle. Approaching it from a blameless angle gives you a better chance of fixing it, as people will cooperate to fix the issue rather than be busy not getting fired You can still identify and fire/relocate/retrain incompetent people, but that is better done as a continuous thing than as a response to a mishap
• linuxlizard 2y ago
  >When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. Holy crap, I'm going to save that quote forever. I have a co-worker who treats every line of bad code committed as a reason to add ever more layers to CI. Yo, we caught it in testing. There's no reason to add another form we have to fill out.
  • cma 2y ago
    Why does CI require forms?
• SupremumLimit 2y ago
  This is a wonderfully insightful comment! I’ve encountered a similar phenomenon with regard to skill as well: people want to ensure that every part of the software system can be understood and operated by the least skilled members of the team (meaning completely inexperienced people). But similarly to personal responsibility, it’s worth asking what the costs of that approach are, and why it is that we shouldn’t have either baseline expectations of skill or shouldn’t expect that some parts of the software system require higher levels of expertise.
  • jiggawatts 2y ago
    There is the reason Haskell or F# are relatively unpopular and Go has a much wider footprint in the industry: high expertise levels don’t scale. You can hire 100 juniors but not 100 seniors all trained up in the same difficult abstractions. Conversely, one skilled senior can often outperform a hundred juniors using simpler tools, but management just doesn’t see it that way.
    • SupremumLimit 2y ago
      Indeed, specialist knowledge is a real constraint, but I think it’s possible to at least _orient_ towards building systems that require no baseline level of skill (the fast food model I guess) or towards training your staff so they acquire the necessary level of skills to work with a less accessible system. I suspect that the second pathway results in higher productivity and achievement in the long term. However, management tends to align with reducing the baseline level of skill, presumably because it’s convenient for various business reasons to have everyone be a replaceable “resource”, and to have new people quickly become productive without requiring expensive training. Ironically, this is one of the factors that drives ever faster job hopping, which reinforces the need for replaceable “resources”, and on it goes.
      • stoperaticless 2y ago
        Also there is no easy way for management to know if somebody has required level of skill.
• poulsbohemian 2y ago
  But there's also an element where this isn't due to system failure, but rather design. Companies want to make their processes bureaucratic so that you won't cost them money in support and so you won't cancel your subscription - making the process painful is the point. Likewise in government - it isn't that government can't be efficient, it's that there are people and organizations who want it to be encumbered so that they can prove their political point that government is inept. One side wants to create funding for a program, the other side puts in place a ton of controls to make spending the money for the program challenging so they can make sure that the money isn't wasted - which costs more money and we get more bureaucracy.
• schmidtleonard 2y ago
  Just one tiny problem: I've played the blame game before. I've worked there. You can't sell me the greener grass on the other side of the road because I've been to the other side of the road and I know the grass there is actually 90% trampled mud and goose shit. The blame game drives the exact same bureaucratization process, but faster, because all of the most capable and powerful players have a personal incentive to create insulating processes / excuses that prevent them from winding up holding the bag. Everyone in this thread at time of writing is gleefully indulging in wishful thinking about finally being able to hold the team underperformer accountable, but these expectations are unrealistic. Highly productive individuals do not tend to win the blame game because their inclinations are the exact opposite of the winning strategy. The winning strategy is not to be productive, it's to maximize safety margin, which means minimizing responsibility and maximizing barriers to anyone who might ask anything of you. Bureaucracy goes up, not down, and anyone who tries to be productive in this environment gets punished for it. "Blaming the system" doesn't prevent bureaucracy from accumulating, obviously, but it does prevent it from accumulating in this particular way and for this particular reason.
  • tdeck 2y ago
    This also multiplies with hierarchy. In a blame-based culture, your manager is partly to blame for what you do. Their manager is partly to blame for what your manager does. Therefore everyone in a reporting chain is incentivized through fear to double check your work. That means more sign-off and review and approval processes so that people can avoid any kind of fuckup, and it also often means a toxic environment where everyone is spending at least 20% of their brain power worrying about internal optics which in my experience is not a good thing for people engaged in creative work.
  • Spivak 2y ago
    Thank you! A blame focused culture rewards the least amount of risk taking, the most ass covering, and so much useless bureaucracy because you naturally accumulate systems to convert individual blame to collective blame like change review boards and multiple sign-offs for everything. Folks do the bare minimum because that's the safe subset. I'm never going back to that kind of culture, it's soul crushing.
• cyanydeez 2y ago
  Geez. Someone has no idea how modern human psychology is the only thing creating any of these super structures and their frailties. We aren't ever going to be your super ant organism, get over it.
• jancsika 2y ago
  > When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. Eloquently put. Also, likely false. E.g., soft-realtime audio synthesis applications like Pure Data and Supercollider have had essentially the same audio engines since the 1990s. And users see any missed audio deadline as a negative outcome. More to the point-- for a wide array of audio synthesis/filtering/processing use cases, the devs who maintain these systems consider such negative outcomes as systemic failures which must be fixed by the devs, not the users. I can't think of a more precise example of "blameless culture" than digital artists/musicians who depend on these devs to continue fitting this realtime scheduling peg into the round hole that is the modern (and changing!) multitasking OS. While there have been some changes over the last 30 years, in no way way have any of these applications seen an explosion in the number of systems they employ to avoid negative outcomes. There's one I can think of in Pure Data, and it's optional. IMO, there's nothing noteworthy about what I wrote-- it's just one domain in probably many across the history of application development. Yet according to your "law" this is exceptional in the history of systems. That doesn't pass the smell test to me, so I think we need to throw out your ostensible law.
  • stoperaticless 2y ago
    Different kinds of systems? > devs who maintain these systems What is meant by “system” here? Computer application? Hardware?
• gamblor956 2y ago
  A negative outcome is a system failure, even if it is a personal failure that drove the outcome, because that is a failure of the system to prevent personal failures from causing negative outcomes. You can't stop personal failures from happening because people are people. You can design processes to minimize or eliminate those personal failures from yielding negative outcomes.
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    But too much system can also cause negative outcomes, because all that system has a cost, both in money and in time. If you add a protection to prevent every negative outcome, your system will never produce anything at all, which is a negative outcome. Every check has a cost. For some checks, the cost is more than it prevents. Don't add those checks, even after the negative outcome happens.
• tom_ 2y ago
  The past was allowed to play itself out. Why not the present too?
• throwawayian 2y ago
  This approach is what’s caused so many cybersecurity, privacy and preventable data breaches. When everyone is responsible, nobody is.
• chikere232 2y ago
  This might be true if your only options are "find someone to blame" or "add more bureocratic process", but in a lot of cases you also have the option "fix the technology" Even in aviation and surgery, improving the technology tends to be more effective than firing the pilot/surgeon or adding more paperwork. If you find there's a button that crashes the plane, fix the button. Don't fire the pilot or add another hour of education on how to not press that button.
• oooyay 2y ago
  I feel like this comment is emblematic of a dramatic misunderstanding of blameless post mortems. They're pretty simple; systems that fail can be attributed to teams, practices, systems of understanding, etc which is diametrically opposed to individuals. Blameless culture isn't a culture without blame, in fact there's plenty of blame that should be listed in contributing factors - including the accountable team (if there is one). There's just no, "John Smith did x and y failed" because that's rarely, if ever, succinctly how systems fail.
• potato3732842 2y ago
  Part of the problem is the asymmetry between defined concentrated harm and diffuse hard to quantity loosely spread harm. It's easy to quantify the harm of any specific failure. It's hard to quantify the harm of incentivizing people who can fly by the seat of their pants (metaphorically and literally) and generally succeed out of an industry and incentivizing button pushers, checklist runners and spreadsheet fillers into an industry. Say nothing of the fact that a bureaucracy built of these people has every incentive not to study it and to find in their own favor if they ever do.