[StavrosK]

Best: We do not speak of mistakes in the active voice ("Stavros made a mistake and added a bug"). We use the passive voice, or the collective "we" ("a bug was mistakenly committed to the code"). Assigning blame only hurts the team, and you should be reviewing each other's code and actions anyway.

Worst: Sucking up to people and repeating competent people's advice can get you a looong way up to being a C-level while the competent people remain at the lowest levels of the hierarchy.

[awithrow]

I find the active voice makes it much more clear what is happening. But I do agree that assigning blame needs to be avoided so people are comfortable dissecting these issues. I think the key point is just removing names entirely. "An engineer introduced a bug" or "The on-call adjusted the setting". Having read through many a post-mortem, I cringe every time there is a section using the passive voice heavily. It conjures up an image of a cursed system where awful things descend from the heavens and the engineers are powerless to do anything about it.

Reading through a post-mortem with the active voice makes a much more clear picture to me. It becomes easier to understand the events that led to a problem. From there the key is to figure out "Why did the system not prevent this mistake".

[StavrosK]

Yeah, overusing this is awkward. The main point is not to assign blame, agreed.

[lazyant]

As a team lead, I try to assign success to the team ("they") and blame to me when possible (or the team, never a person publicly). I _think_ a soccer coach does this (want to say Bielsa) "the boys won the game" never "I won that game".