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Does anybody have any insight on how a process like this is debugged at Apple? I've heard, for example, that at Amazon there is a process of blame-finding afte
by phuff 14y ago
Does anybody have any insight on how a process like this is debugged at Apple? I've heard, for example, that at Amazon there is a process of blame-finding after a major issue/outage like this, whereas at Google I hear things are more post-mortem let's fix the process that led the human error involved in the outage, rather than blame the person who made the faulty commit.
Anybody know how things work inside Apple's culture?
- CervezaPorFavor 14y agoNobody ever lives to tell the story...
- SpikeGronim 14y ago"that at Amazon there is a process of blame-finding" Ex-Amazonian here. It's important to note that Amazon's Cause of Error (COE) process is not about blame. It is about determining what happened, why it happened, and what concrete steps are being taken so that it does not happen again. Individuals are not blamed as part of this process and that's in the official rules. The goal is to iterate and avoid making the same mistakes again.
- phuff 14y agoI've heard from a lot of ex-amazonian's that in practice there's a lot of blaming as part of the process at least in part because of the compensation/promotional processes. But maybe that's changed recently? Of course, I've also heard that there is a wide diversity of culture between teams, so maybe that plays in to it, too.
- RandallBrown 14y agoI'm sure it depends a lot on your team and your manager. Also, some people see a process like that and automatically assume blame is being assigned even if it isn't.
- SpikeGronim 14y agoTotally happens, even though it is not supposed to. If a dev didn't outright break the rules then they shouldn't be blamed. The rules in this case would be something like "a peer must review before deploy" - if you bring down the site after breaking that rule, you're going to get fired most likely. I've never had COEs come up in my or others' performance reviews. If the boss who owns the COE "gets it" and has internalized the old-school Amazon culture then there won't be blame. The bosses really take the hits here, they do get personally blamed for these things. If they can't stand between the team and the more senior management then they are not doing it right. If you and your boss mutually hate each other (which unfortunately I have seen) then it won't go well.
- oemera 14y agoThis is Apple culture at its best: No one ever talks about it. All employees are so loyal to this company that you can't even imagine one speaking about such insights.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago>All employees are so loyal to this company that you can't even imagine one speaking about such insights. I think it is more of fear about losing their job rather than loyalty. It is not uncommon to find that any leak will be tracked down and the leaker summarily fired.
- Flow 14y agoAlso, if you like to speak and write about how things work, I'm sure you have loads of opportunities to do that inside Apple. It's just unprofessional to babble around about new tech like it's a cookie recipe.
- snowwrestler 14y agoFear of what, getting fired? Is it hard for Internet-scale application engineers to get a job in the Valley these days? Is it really so hard to imagine that employees at Apple feel loyalty to the company? Employee loyalty is not an uncommon thing.
- usea 14y agoLoyalty? More like fear. I'm not saying that we should be privy to the inner-workings of every company, but a lack of transparency is hardly a culture worthy of praise.
- oemera 14y agoWhy shouldn't it be? Only cause people don't like it doesn't mean it is a bad thing... You don't have to put all your efforts and insights in blog posts!
- vacri 14y agoNot sharing ways to do things is good? Another example of Apple being the antithesis of open source philosophy.