On 2012 Oct 26, at 08:18 , Mark Dennehy wrote: > It's a lovely idea; I've even worked in a place or two that it's true in. > But I've worked in more places where doing that will mean that you're going > to be fired inside of six months. > Unfortunately, I've never thought of a way of fixing it that would work; > unless everyone from the CEO on down is in on the idea, and unless the > inevitable office politicians are not tolerated by the rest of the office, > then the no-blame culture always seems to lose out and only those who paid > attention to their posterior's exposure seem to survive. > > (Personally, I think that that's a bad thing - I just haven't ever heard of a > way of changing it that seemed likely enough to work to bet the job on :( )
The time to change things is not when you have made the mistake, but when there is no serious mistake under review, or if there is, something for someone not in your team. Then you aren't seen as protecting your team when pushing for the change. Even if you can't get a no-fault attitude, you can push for an after action analysis that focuses on the "How can we prevent this from happening again", be it the junior SA taking action, or a change done by someone else who is better equipped to prevent that problem. I've seen shops where people are somewhat punished for mistakes, but one or two outages caused by a mistake in a year or two isn't going to cripple their career forever. They wouldn't get the star performer status that year, but that was understood and actually agreed to by most. It wasn't perfect, but it was more palatable to upper management. Note, I say mistakes, not uncovering of obscure bugs and you just happen to be the person at the console. I also don't refer to the case where the person at the console was following documented procedure, and the procedure didn't cover their specific case, so the docs needed updating. Especially for a more junior SA, they don't know enough to recognize when the docs are bad, and more senior SAs can readily be trapped by bad docs in areas that they are not an expert. ---- "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." Edward R Murrow (1964) Mark McCullough [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
