It seems the results (knowledge silos, review cliques, and rubber stamping) would be inaccurate often since the heuristics can’t actually capture what they say they do? I would be concerned about users not having much faith in it once it returns one too many false signals.
“Again, these are just assertions. I’m less invested in some of these than I’m presenting. The talk isn’t about any one of them. I’m not here to convince you that my reflections are valid. This is about the exercise of discussing and questioning.”
It’s news article titles like “Reckless American 777 Pilots Refuse Recorded NTSB Interviews” that fuel this sort of pushback that the pilots are giving about interviews.
I coined this term (https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/) and believe (productive and earnest) critique can be valuable when it comes to terms like this one. (See also “devops”, “agile”, “serverless”, “toil”, “technical debt”, and others)
As Cipriani points out, there is the term and there is the concept(s) the term is intended to convey. It does seem to me more folks know the term than have read the origin (my post above from 2012). This is fine, as long as productive dialogue continues in the industry about what the term was made to convey.
Possibly the concept existed but the “blameless” term is widely credited to the GP, John Allspaw, who became CTO of Etsy. At least I haven’t found anything definitive predating him.
Also impressive he’s had an HN acct for 12 years but only 5 karma!
The Paul Reed post is excellent. The term "blame-aware" is a useful frame for discussion: it reminds people that the goal is not to blame AND it's human nature to place blame.
Thank you for posting this, and, of course, for the original concept :)
