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Comment by crimsonalucard1 | Hacker News Reader

>or discipline team members who regularly show poor judgement.

Isn't this contradictory with the original premise? If you discipline an individual you are blaming the individual.

You're saying you can praise individuals and you can discipline individuals and you must also follow this: "Good teams don't blame individuals. You can praise individuals, but you take blame as a team."

Do you not see the contradiction? I'm literally getting voted down because of slightly miffed feelings.

Despite all of this the logical correctness of my statement stands and you have inadvertently agreed with every aspect of my statement.

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People are down-voting because they disagree. While it's not something I agree with, it's officially sanctioned on HN.

If I'm continually pushing buggy code, that's something that I'm going to be personally held accountable for. Blamed if you will. That's because I'm the only one involved. My team isn't constantly writing buggy code, I am.

If I push buggy code into production and take down the site then the team is to blame. Why is our process setup such that I can do so. EVERYONE, even the best programmers will make mistakes, and if the process allows those mistakes through to production then the TEAM has failed to build a suitably robust process, not the person who happened to write a bug, because every human being will be that person one day.

Your taking a once sentence philosophy about how to deal with technical incidents and treating it like we're advocating it as a universal and moral absolute. No one is claiming that if I throw a rock through someone's windshield my whole team should be arrested. What we are saying is that is I make a slip up and write a bug that takes down DDG, I shouldn't be held accountable for taking down DDG. If there's a larger pattern of poor decision making I'll be help accountable for THAT, but it's completely 100% separate from the outcome of knocking production offline.

>People are down-voting because they disagree. While it's not something I agree with, it's officially sanctioned on HN.

I think a lot of vote downs are emotional and reactionary rather than genuine disagreement. I think that's the majority. I can't fault people for this as it's part of human nature but I don't think this type of voting is ever officially sanctioned by HN.

>If I push buggy code into production and take down the site then the team is to blame.

And you are not? I propose that you and the team should take the blame. People make mistakes but all the time and they shouldn't be singled out for it, but I don't think it's good etiquette for the team member who made the mistake not to own up to the mistake either.

>Your taking a once sentence philosophy about how to deal with technical incidents and treating it like we're advocating it as a universal and moral absolute

It's a one sentence philosophy that doesn't hold any logic in my opinion. I'm not saying anything is morally absolute here, I'm trying to say that the quotation doesn't even hold up in even the most basic situation.

It's elegantly written, no doubt, but I think that elegance is deceptive and that's why I wanted to say something. The real world in my opinion is nowhere even remotely close to that philosophy. I would argue that philosophy is just a surface level special case. In the real world people get blamed and fired all the time.

Blame is for incidents. Discipline is for patterns.

Also, just a bit of friendly Internet advice, this isn't the best way to interface with people:

> Despite all of this the logical correctness of my statement stands and you have inadvertently agreed with every aspect of my statement.

>Also, just a bit of friendly Internet advice, this isn't the best way to interface with people:

Well I'm getting massive vote downs and the original poster literally called what I'm stating as initializing stupid blame games to win the stupid prize. Kind of rude and insulting. I think it's reasonable to say that my reaction is reasonable given the attack.

It's not exactly the real world on HN either as people are harsher than normal, ruder and less receptive of differing opinions.

I would say that Giving people a piece of "friendly advice on interfacing with people" won't exactly win you any friends either. If you teach people things using that methodology you will get a retaliatory response whether it's on the internet or the real world as the tone is a bit domineering and elitist.

>Blame is for incidents. Discipline is for patterns.

This doesn't make sense to me. I can't blame people for patterns? I can't discipline people for incidents?

The sort of short and terse elegant expressiveness of the phrase ultimately hides a statement that makes no logical sense. Typically someone is blamed first before he is disciplined. Both go hand in hand.

Either way, you're probably just trying to say that let the team get blamed but if you see patterns then blame the individual. Not as elegant but no linguistic tricks that decorate ultimately illogical statements to appear as philosophies of life.

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