[arkh]

> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.

Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed. The root is then bad hiring decision and bad management of problematic people. You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.

[Aurornis]

> You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.

In theory maybe, but in my experience the blameless postmortem culture gets taken to such an extreme that even when one person is consistently, undeniably to blame for causing problems we have to spend years pretending it’s a system failure instead. I think engineers like the idea that you can engineer enough rules, policies, and guardrails that it’s impossible to do anything but the right thing.

This can create a feedback loop where the bad players realize they can get away with a lot because if they get caught they just blame the system for letting them do the bad thing. It can also foster an environment where it’s expected that anything that is allowed to happen is implicitly okay to do, because the blameless postmortem culture assigns blame on the faceless system rather than the individuals doing the actions.

[bad_haircut72]

agreed, the concept of a 'blameless' post mortem came from airplane crash investigation - but if one pilot crashes 6 commercial jets, we wouldnt say "must be a problem with the design of the controls"

[vladms]

So what do they say actually in aviation? There was a pilot suicide with the whole plane Germanwings Flight 9525, I find it more important the aviation industry did regulatory changes than the fact that (probably) "they blamed the pilot".

I think there are too many people that actually like "blaming someone else" and that causes issues besides software development.

[throw310822]

I hope that the pilot responsible was fired and got his license revoked!

[bad_haircut72]

Fair point

[efitz]

Blameless postmortems are for processes where everyone is acting in good faith and a mistake was made and everyone wants to fix it.

If one party decides that they don’t want to address a material error, then they’re not acting in good faith. At that point we don’t use blameless procedures anymore, we use accountability procedures, and we usually exclude the recalcitrant people from the remediation process, because they’ve shown bad faith.

[philipallstar]

> Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed.

This is just a proxy for "the person is bad" then. There's no need to invoke a system. Who can possibly trace back all the things that could or couldn't have been spotted at interview stage or in probation? Who cares, when the end result is "fire the person" or, probably, "promote the person".

[vladms]

I think as an employer you would prefer not to hire another person that is not productive.

Your customers would prefer to have the enterprise doing stuff rather than hiring and firing.

[philipallstar]

Of course everyone would prefer that, but hiring is by far the most random thing an org does, even when it spends a huge amount on hiring.