Thread by @mipsytipsy

This is a great question, and one that points at the difference between blame (bad) and responsibility (good).

The blameless emphasis isn't liberal squish. It's because assigning blame on the aftermath of trauma mostly just compounds the trauma, plus bonus scapegoating.

https://twitter.com/tylermauthe/status/1072192434912681984

We *have* to talk about technical judgment, good and bad. But there are a million times and places for this that aren't the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event:

* hiring conversations
* leveling and promo debates
* lunch discussions about *other* people's outages

Most of all:

* openly discuss the consequences of your own decisions, good and bad, where the full team can listen and chime in
* guide the conversation away from "good" or "bad" and towards tradeoffs. What scenario would this choice be optimal for? What are the edge cases?

The conversation of "what does it mean to be a senior engineer?" is almost entirely about technical judgment, imo.

Lots and lots of ways to have this conversation in ways that are less fraught than the aftermath of a site outage. And we should have them.

Responsibility is shared, it is diffuse, it permeates. Responsibility plays out over months and years and decades.

Blame is specific, and used to evade responsibility. When you scape a goat you let the rest of the responsible apparatus off the hook.