[robjan]

I have worked in companies where the focus was finding who is responsible for failures. The result was that minor incidents were covered up to save bonuses and the problems (in the Problem Management context) that led to them were invisible to the management. When problems are invisible there is a tendency to push into safety margins to cut costs (known as normalisation of deviance) which ultimately leads to uncontrolled incidents.

In my current role I promote a blameless culture and the result is my team proactively raise incidents. We have more incidents than other teams but the incidents are generally controlled and problems are visible, prioritised and closed off. Coincidentally, my teams have record high Mean Times Between Failures and I'm now working with the other teams to fix their safety culture.

The lack of thinking about safety culture in this way is one of the reason that I don't believe most "Software Engineers" should be considered engineers.