Beyond Blame

Chapter 5. Holding to Account

Ollie shifted in his seat, uncomfortably. “The way things are going,” he spoke slowly, “we’re all going to be out of jobs soon enough.”

“The firings will continue until morale improves,” said Linda.

“The firings will continue until there are no humans left,” said Bill, “and their human errors will no longer break our beautifully designed systems.”

“I know you’re kidding, Bill,” said Ollie. “But when was the last time that we had a big outage, and we didn’t manage to find somebody to blame?”

“Or, as we say, ‘hold accountable,’” Bill said, raising his hands to make air quotes.

“All the while, accountability has nothing to do with punishment,” said Ollie. “Accountability and punishment are mutually exclusive.”

“That’s a pretty strong statement, Ollie,” said Linda. “We may not want to fire anybody, but we do need to make sure these things don’t happen again.”

“Wouldn’t you say that in order for these things not to happen again, we need to understand what happened?”

“Well, of course—that’s why we do postmortems.”

“How likely are you to share the full story of what happened, if your job is on the line? Especially the bits that might get you fired?”

“Well, it’s my job to say what happened, and it would be worse if I held something back and it came to light later. I see what you mean, but I don’t think it happens that much here.”

“Really?” Bill said. He was surprised by how loud his words came out, and lowered his voice. “I didn’t hear Raj talk too much about ...