[jspaw]

I coined this term (https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/) and believe (productive and earnest) critique can be valuable when it comes to terms like this one. (See also “devops”, “agile”, “serverless”, “toil”, “technical debt”, and others)

Paul Reed has made a great case for ‘blame-aware’ (https://medium.com/@jpaulreed/why-blameless-postmortems-migh...)

Rein Henrichs also explores the topic very well through a unique lens (https://youtu.be/KXrsvLMqF1Q)

As Cipriani points out, there is the term and there is the concept(s) the term is intended to convey. It does seem to me more folks know the term than have read the origin (my post above from 2012). This is fine, as long as productive dialogue continues in the industry about what the term was made to convey.

[googlerx]

"blameless postmortem" was a thing at google well before 2012.

[xref]

Possibly the concept existed but the “blameless” term is widely credited to the GP, John Allspaw, who became CTO of Etsy. At least I haven’t found anything definitive predating him.

Also impressive he’s had an HN acct for 12 years but only 5 karma!

[jspaw]

The SRE book authors cited the post specifically (https://sre.google/sre-book/bibliography/#All12), and Googlers I’ve spoken to mentioned its influence there.

[thcipriani]

The Paul Reed post is excellent. The term "blame-aware" is a useful frame for discussion: it reminds people that the goal is not to blame AND it's human nature to place blame.

Thank you for posting this, and, of course, for the original concept :)