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Comment by throwaway_fjmr | Hacker News Reader

How do you, or how should anyone in a similar situation learn that actions have consequences?

I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes.

I often find that wishy-washy post-mortems smear responsibility and deflect accountability. This doesn’t incentivize a change in behavior, and when people blindly get more trust, they often seem to simply repeat mistakes.

I think I’ve yet to master post-mortems and transforming “I told you so”s into improvements - I’d appreciate tips and ideas, thanks!

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If you ingrain a culture of "actions have consequences" you disincentivize actions. This is why everyone is fine with letting nowhere projects run ahead, and adding to technical debt, or just keep on incurring running costs instead of cutting them.

"If I don't make a choice, it's not my fault".

It's much better to establish a culture of "try doing good things, and we're in this together". If you trust your colleagues and are good at recruiting, you'll get a lot more done.

I don't know if I have any specific tips and ideas for post-mortems as it usually... "depends".

If you work for an eCommerce company, then invest in mops. Hackers love eCommerce companies that fail to learn from mistakes.

Someone mentioned "bad corporate culture." In fact, the OP was really a sort of indictment of dysfunctional culture.

The Japanese are heavily process-oriented (not always a good thing). They have a consensus-based approach, where all stakeholders agree to a common set of rules and remedies before the meeting begins. If a problem is found, then the meeting doesn't end until there is a plan (and responsible person) for a remedy. Assigning tasks (not blame) is a goal. People are assumed to accept personal responsibility for their own mistakes. It's not the job of the meeting to do that (there's a common cultural mythology of responsible managers committing suicide, if they screw up badly enough. I never saw it, so I can't speak to its accuracy).

> I work for a large (not FAANG but spatially close) ecommerce company, and I’ve yet to see substantial changes or learnings after outages or mistakes.

I worked for Amazon and postmortems were taken seriously and done regularly - but things can be different in other teams.

If people warned about a risk in the past this would be noticed.

If nobody flagged the risk people would start asking why.

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