What's the REAL Cost of Blame Culture in Software Engineering

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all right happy Saturday um I'm just getting sat in the sit down in the car here they moved the seats I'm real short and I can't reach now to even start it there we go ah okay um yeah I'm headed to CrossFit um and it's bright as hell man can't see anything but we're in the clean car it's finally clean feels feels good they unplugged everything that was in here it was super annoying so they like literally gutted all the stuff from the console and all that so they left like I didn't realize they let they didn't put everything back in the car so overnight there was stuff from the car that was like uh still just like sitting out front of my house whoops that's okay um yeah I headed to cross oh man the seats all man I'm never getting someone to clean

my car again he we go this is still I feel like they were touching the buttons on the side of the seat though because uh you can adjust like all the settings to to Really grab you and it feels like I can't even fit in the seat and I'm not not a very big person um probably a little wider than your average 5'4 person from going to the gym for a little while and and eating a lot of food but otherwise oh there we go um no I wanted to talk a little bit about what I wrote in my newsletter last night um cuz I think it's an important topic and I'm actually kind of man you messed up my window or my mirrors holy crap lady what did you do here oh man my my side mirrors are pointed like in the outer space

right now I hope I uh don't need to look anywhere when I'm driving today God okay I wanted to talk about the topic from my newsletter which was uh about like blame culture and I think this is like super important to talk about and it's like it's really unfortunate that I guess I shouldn't be surprised I'm a little bit surprised there's still places like this but I mean like I said I probably shouldn't be surprised because uh where's his microphone is that it's in my mouth um shouldn't be surprised cuz I think a lot of people have to deal with this but I feels like archaic almost um and I guess I've never worked in a spot that was like this so I've been very for like I need to acknowledge that I must be very fortunate that I've never been in an environment where

people are just like blaming others and uh and that was even like the expectation through management and Leadership and stuff like that so uh do want to acknowledge that it's probably some uh fortune on my side at least but um this came up because I had uh someone I talked to on LinkedIn messaged me and uh they were asking for some advice on a particular scenario and it was essentially just like extreme blame culture so when I was chatting with them uh I was saying like obviously I'm not going to I can't tell them what to do in their position and their career and stuff that's for they have to decide that just like you listening to this or watching my YouTube videos and reading my content like I can't tell you how to go live your life and what you should do in your

career and I like quite frankly I don't want to um I just want to give you perspective insights things like that and then and you make the best decision that you possibly can and that's great right like that's just I think how it needs to be so yeah they they were sharing this with me and they said look like I like I man I can't see a thing it's a stupid mirror oh one sec at least on this side it's very problematic for driving actually I didn't realize how bad these mirrors were um but yeah I said basically like here's some perspective I have like based on everything I was hearing it was extreme blame culture like almost like gaslighting for for thinking that what was being discussed was not okay like to like outright call people out blame them and like you know like

demanding they take full responsibility but not supporting them like all this like none of it's good stuff none of it's good and uh so I was sharing my perspective on it but I said like look like I think this is important to write about so I'm going to like I dedicated my newsletter to that that topic for them and then obviously when I do my maybe not obviously when I do my live stream on Monday that'll be the topic that I go over as well so it'll get more air time but I figured on in on this drive I wanted to talk about it too because um like maybe you're working somewhere like this maybe you participate in a culture like this and um and like it's it's worth hearing some different perspective on it right so uh I think I think it's almost the

easy way out that when things don't go right you're doing like a postmortem or post incident review on something it's it's almost like easy just to say well the person who pushed the code up and broke the thing like it's their fault like they literally wrote the code that caused the bug right and um I just think that that's like the easy way out and it's not really valuable um and the reason I say that is that it takes the perspective that like one person has something to improve on like the person who broke the thing that you're you're blaming like one person now has responsibility to say hey like go be better um which is better than zero people right so better than zero but it's on one person um depending on how that's done like if you're doing this in a a setting

that's a discussion and there's other people around now you're basically putting them on the spot with a spotlight and saying like you messed up like you're basically isolating them uh they're probably not going to feel great about that right um even truly like if they were the one who wrote the code and pushed the button to deploy it and it broke like yeah like I said it's probably easy to say they it's their fault but the reality is there only one part of that puzzle right unless you're unless you're doing this and you're a solo Dev and you're blaming yourself then I mean yeah like you're you you are the team team so the team will be responsible and it's just you but I think that's the only exception to this this uh well I should be careful I always say this I think it's

the only exception to this perspective I have cuz I don't want to I don't want to say it's a rule right um I just think that when you have a culture that starts blaming people what ends up happening is that people instead of trying to correct behaviors um there's avoidance there's fear and Aid avoidance instead of like uh empowerment oh man someone got in a good accident there they two fire trucks um so yeah you have fear and avoidance instead of empowerment and then generally what happens is that people become afraid to make changes and they're afraid because they don't want to be put on the spot they don't want to be made to look like an idiot um so instead of being empowered to go make changes and drive improvements they go well I'm just going to avoid that altogether I'm going to try

to get my work done and just not go near whatever that is and then I think the side effect of that is like two things one is like your Innovation starts to stop because there is zero risk taking or near zero it starts approaching zero and then I think you slow down tremendously and you slow down down because sure people are going to be more cautious which might be a very good thing depending on what the state of things was like maybe it's good there're being cautious but I feel like the motivation for being cautious is is not right and it's back to being fearful it's not I'm cautious because I want to be paying attention to these things because I value what they are because I understand it's like I'm being cautious because I don't want to be singled out and I feel like

that's not a a sustainable type of motivation because it's fear so I'm really against blame culture if it's not obvious and uh when I was writing about this in my newsletter that went out this morning wrote it last night the um the phrase that I wanted to use and I was kind of leaning into uh to radical cander which I I thought was a great book and I like the the philosophy around radical cander a lot uh I called it radical accountability because I'm not original um but in my my explanation of radical accountability is like taking the exact opposite approach to blaming a single person and it's instead you could argue like no one's at fault or everyone's at fault so I framed it like no one is at fault but everyone is responsible and accountable and I think it's because the word fault

carries like a lot of negative connotation uh so I don't necessarily I just don't I want to take all of the blame out of the picture and not blame the entire team not blame a single person but instead say look like no one no single person is to blame here but we all have accountability to try and make everything better and I think when you lean into this perspective more and instead of you going well how do I find the one person who is at fault for this you can instead start taking a more like positive proactive approach which is like the idea of like what what could I have done to have helped prevent this or to make this better next time what could we do to help identify this help make it better for next time and I like this approach significantly better

because I feel it is empowering right it's not it's not fear-driven so you're not looking at things and going how do we prevent it and like sorry avoid it right I'm afraid of that like being put on the spot how do I avoid it it's instead like look like we didn't single anyone out so you don't have anything to be afraid about in fact you know know and you feel supported because you see other people chiming in to go like here's something I think we could do here's something I could do better and not hey you it's your fault right so you go from being isolated and Afraid in in situations like this I'm using words that might sound exaggerated by the way but I think that those are the the emotions and the feelings just as a heads up I'm not trying to like

make it sound exaggerated I'm just picking words that I feel address the uh the feelings so instead of isolated and afraid it's more like supported and cohesive and solutioning right these are other words that I think come to mind when you approach things this way um so something I said earlier too was like this idea that when you have the blame culture it's like if anything one person is kind of focused on on the Improvement via fear because is they're the one going I don't want this experience to happen to me again so now it's on that one person and it's through avoidance and instead with radical accountability you have a whole team or whoever's participating in the activity to go like I am also going to be part of this solution right it's uh just a a completely inverse approach and person personally I

think that this kind of thing works extremely well uh I actually don't think it's that and I maybe I can't say this but I don't personally think it's that big of a a shift to to try exercising but I do think it's a very big cultural shift if you're used to blaming people because if you're used to blaming people like I said it's a shortcut so it's just the easiest thing is like well whoever whoever pressed the button and broke it like obviously it's their fault or whoever coded it it's your fault or um I don't know you have testing roles and the tester didn't test it so now it's their fault like it's easy to assign blame and I think that it is more effort to put more thought into like how do we constructively how do we work together to to come up

with solutions for these things so I think it's more work that's probably the the barrier and a bit like it is certainly a culture change but it's not like you need new technology like I guess that's what I'm trying to say is like the barrier is like is ourselves it's not like you have to go build different types of products or you need to go buy different tools or hire certain roles it's like there's there is no like physical or technical limitation to this it's truly just like a a philosophical thing so you can you can start and there's nothing actually stopping you except you and your team which I guess arguably is sometimes the hardest part but anyway that's that's my thought on that stuff I think uh I think blaming in general there's too many things like this where it's just like we

don't have to be pieces of crap to each other and then suddenly everything gets significantly better so like why are we like this why do we do this I don't know I have another topic I want to talk about on the drive back from Crossfit so uh it's from a LinkedIn comment I saw this morning on one of my posts which they weren't like bashing me which is nice nice change is that a spot come on my wife's already here yeah nice we had to drive separately cuz she had a physio appointment oh of course I can't back in the spa cuz my mirror I'm going to have to redo this maybe not that's my wife that's her see you