Speaker
Abstract
Building a culture of continuous improvement requires that teams value psychological safety, blamelessness, and admitting error. This can sometimes feel in conflict with an organization's desire to see accountability and ownership of the work. This talk provides a set of norms, practices, but also antipatterns for balancing accountability and blamelessness in organizations. It covers ways folks can avoid having postmortems and retrospectives feel like punishment. It also describes small things managers, technical leads, and other folks can do to make finding faults fun, safe, and celebrated.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2022 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Tuesday 25 October
10:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Engineering Culture Generous, High Fidelity Communication Is the Key to a Safe, Effective Team Denise Yu Engineering Manager and Rubyist, Previously Engineering Manager @GitHub A team's ability to communicate effectively and disagree productively is directly related to its resilience towards incidents and interruptions. 11:50 Ballroom BC Session Panel: "Just" Engineering Culture Denise Yu, Jacob Scott, Jessica DeVita, Vanessa Huerta Granda The hardest part of technology is rarely the tech itself. Systems are designed, used, and operated by people. People make mistakes, but they are also critical to keeping systems safe and reliable. 13:40 Seacliff D Session Unconference: Engineering Culture Shane Hastie Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com What is an unconference? At QCon SF, we’ll have unconferences in most of our tracks. 14:55 Pacific DEKJ Session Engineering Culture Recipes for Blameless Accountability Michelle Brush Engineering Director, SRE @Google, Previously Director of HealtheIntent Architecture @Cerner Corporation & Lead Engineer @Garmin, Author of "2 out of the 97 Things Every SRE Should Know" Building a culture of continuous improvement requires that teams value psychological safety, blamelessness, and admitting error. This can sometimes feel in conflict with an organization's desire to see accountability and ownership of the work. 16:10 Ballroom BC Session Engineering Culture How Did It Make Sense at the Time? Understanding Incidents As They Occurred, Not as They Are Remembered Jacob Scott Staff Software Engineer @stripe When we encounter undesirable outcomes, there is a natural instinct to look back, find something that went wrong, and fix it. 17:25 Pacific DEKJ Session Engineering Culture Reckoning with the Harm We Do: In Search of Restorative Just Culture in Software and Web Operations Jessica DeVita Sr. Software Engineering Manager - SRE @Microsoft “Psychological Safety” and “Blameless” postmortems are not enough. We’ve heard that we need a “Just Culture” but does that matter if your people are “stressed, exhausted, depleted, spent, drained”?