I'm not sure what "blame culture" is, but any professional software team should ideally have some kind of "accountability culture".
Whatever the fallout from people feeling "blamed" may be, attrition of all of your genuine programming talent due to tech-debt-machine peers being promoted ahead of them is not exactly an ideal outcome either.
What's more, very often genuine potential in naturally talented new programmers can be stunted if they're rewarded for lazy faux "productivity". I've seen this: a programmer has a genuine interest and passion for quality, but loses it over time due to a focus on doing (different) work that gets them promoted.
Code ownership (being required to "own" ones work along with the bugs & maintenance burden that come with it) is one of the most valuable ways programmers learn. This needs to be balanced, as one runs the risk of having a bus factor of 1, but it's still vital.
Blame culture is when bugs, downtime, etc. happen and people both look for somebody to blame and simultaneously look to exculpate their own behavior. It leads to CYA behavior, backstabbing and massive risk aversion. It can also lead to or be a result of a toxic work environment.
In multi causal bugs it can lead to people downplaying causes which they had something to do with and exaggerating the effect that co-worker thry don't like had something to do with. This often leads to confused attribution and poor rectification of systemic issues - e.g. writing more unit tests even when more unit tests won't really help.
"Accountability culture" sounds like it could be the same thing. Or not. I'm not really sure.
This sounds like a bad faith culture in general: i.e. "paying a price for mistakes", rather than "owning postmortems". Treating a mistake as an opportunity for punishment (be it purely social or otherwise), rather than for learning, is more about how you treat staff & peers than how you deal with mistakes.
> Accountability culture" sounds like it could be the same thing.
Can I ask what specific part of my description of accountability culture sounded like it lined up with your description of blame culture?
Yes, that’s what blame culture is: a dysfunctional organizational culture where, when mistakes are made, the organizational priority is to find and punish those responsible. The consequence is CYA and finger pointing.
There is "blame culture", where every problem turns into a witch hunt, and there is the opposite, call it "anti-blame culture" where no problem can be declared, because, well, it's never the only problem to solve, and thus can never be solved.
Competitive entities nearly never fall victim of the anti-blame kind, but where there is little competition, they are just as common as their opposite.
Whatever the fallout from people feeling "blamed" may be, attrition of all of your genuine programming talent due to tech-debt-machine peers being promoted ahead of them is not exactly an ideal outcome either.
What's more, very often genuine potential in naturally talented new programmers can be stunted if they're rewarded for lazy faux "productivity". I've seen this: a programmer has a genuine interest and passion for quality, but loses it over time due to a focus on doing (different) work that gets them promoted.
Code ownership (being required to "own" ones work along with the bugs & maintenance burden that come with it) is one of the most valuable ways programmers learn. This needs to be balanced, as one runs the risk of having a bus factor of 1, but it's still vital.