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ResNet | 3 years ago

> It's a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When something isn't working out, the first question is "who's the DRI on this?"

This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of blameless postmortems [1] adopted at Google et al. Does this culture lead to blaming said responsible individual, or is the feedback seen as constructive?

[1] https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

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Hayvok|3 years ago

That isn’t quite right. When you are appointed DRI at Apple it means you are responsible for getting that problem solved & you have the authority to move whatever mountains are in your way. I saw more people blamed for not supporting the DRI properly than I ever saw the DRI getting blamed for failing.

You usually don’t get that type of appointment unless leadership is confident you’re the right person to be successful at it anyway.

safarithrow|3 years ago

> This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of blameless postmortems [1] adopted at Google et al.

While teams may vary, in my experience postmortems seek to understand where in the process a breakdown occurred, rather than fault individuals.

lesuorac|3 years ago

Blame and responsibility can be orthogonal concepts.

An SRE may be blameless for a bug but they may also be the DRI for getting an incident resolved.