Comment by antman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

On my part I avoid any feelgooderies, and one should have a case in court on why a mistake took place.

Why it should not potentially affect compensations on progressions is beyond me. It might not as a singular event but but patterns of risky or disorganized behavior are commo rather than individual mistakes. Errors come in bulks but they might not express at the same time. In my experience there are people that do zero,every blue moon or infinite mistakes, and there are people that are good in zero,one or very many domains.

What an organisation needs for growth and coworkers need for sustainable stress reduction is the minimization of mistakes/output ratio.

If people get blamed a lot they switch to stereotypical behaviors and cant work in an innovative, creative fashion. A mistake took place? Is it institutional, personal? What other mistakes would present themselves if that mistake was a pattern? What is better for morale than finding another mistake due to analysis before it expresses itself?

But the blameless culture as highlighted in the article does not prevent to identify when someone messed up personally or is not doing effort to follow the process/bring the results. It means to start by assuming the best of intentions, and see how one can avoid repeating the same mistake in the future. See the example with the fire department in the article.

Note that you bring in the example of a court, and this is how a court works: a suspect is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

The main point is that a blameless culture fosters honesty and team work. A blameful culture fosters covering up and lying to look good to the manager. But if someone is careless, they will get into trouble in both cases. See the example with the person who deleted the production DB: they would likely never have said "guys, drop everything you are doing, I deleted the prod database and need help" in a blameful environment - even though this is the best reaction to have for the business. But even in a blameless culture, it takes a lot of courage to admit such a mistake and ask for help. Assuming that people are not afraid to do such mistakes just because they will not be immediately fired for it is quite absurd.

One overlooked aspect in punnishing companies is that the workers getting the most done also cause the most bugs and trouble.

They are essentially filtering for the very same "C players" they despise and mock.

Like, the output disparity in bigger teams is extreme in programming if you let people loose. And you better not stick your head out in bad workplaces and the advice should be to do as little as possible to avoid being fired.

but what does 'done' mean here?

quality is a thing and forward movement with quality is possible.

Quality is obviously a thing your team should care about, but quality is also a process problem. If an individual continually produces poor quality than the "process" should fix it via not merging their code or pip or something else.

What we are avoiding here is a CEO asking, "What caused the outage" and your manager responds "Bill wrote some code that caused a deadlock". It's possible Bill is working on fragile parts of the system, or writes most of the code. Blame at an individual level for an incident is unhelpful and, as OP points out, possibly creates a team with worse delivery incentives.

quality is not a process problem, process is generally put into place to protect against bad decisions which often also constrains good decisions (because it typically does so by constraining decisions).

avoidance of negative quality is not quality.

Let's say "done" as in God descends from the heavens and estimates every Scrum® team player's work output on a fair scale, to avoid going into meta discussions about almost unmeasurable value output.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com