Reckoning with the Harm We Do: In Search of Restorative Just Culture in Software and Web Operations

“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”?

  • “I remember being yelled at by my CEO.” 
  • “I was told to “take the blame or be fired” by my CTO”. 
  • “I was running on 36 hours of adrenaline”.
  • “Very stressful, a lot of anxiety, a loss of sleep, and a profound sense of disengagement”
  • “I’m not coping well. Having a good support network and therapy helps, but this industry can be absolute s**t”

I was inspired to do a qualitative study of practitioners’ lived experiences after reading the “Just Culture Manifesto” where the first two commitments are“Ensure freedom to work, speak up, and report without fear” and to “Support people involved in incidents or accidents”. Through surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews, participants were asked about the likelihood of being blamed after an incident, the likelihood of blaming themselves, and whether they were considering leaving their jobs as a result. Participants were asked to describe what “blameless” and “accountability” meant to them, and if there was a conflict in the two concepts.

Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of folks working at the "sharp end", reckon with the harm reported by study participants, and think about what we might do to meet their needs. We will explore how a ‘forward looking’ accountability could help organizations in search of a 'Just Culture'.


Speaker

Jessica DeVita

Sr. Software Engineering Manager - SRE @Microsoft

Jessica DeVita has 20+ years of experience in IT operations in a variety of roles and industries including healthcare, entertainment, and cloud computing. She is currently working on her MSc. thesis in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University. Jessica's publications include Learning from Incidents and To Deploy or Not to Deploy, That is the Question and her conference talks include DevOps Days New Zealand: Retrospecting our Retrospectives and CodeBeam: Unreachable Code: A Conversation about Safety and Human Factors. Jessica most recently served as SRE Manager for the AKS team at Microsoft. Previously she was at Netflix, Chef Software, UberGeekGirl, Inc., and St. Jude Medical.

Read more

Date

Tuesday Oct 25 / 05:25PM PDT ( 50 minutes )

Location

Pacific DEKJ

Topics

Engineering Culture Web Operations People Skills

Share

From the same track

Session Engineering Culture

Generous, High Fidelity Communication Is the Key to a Safe, Effective Team

Tuesday Oct 25 / 10:35AM PDT

A team's ability to communicate effectively and disagree productively is directly related to its resilience towards incidents and interruptions.

Speaker image - Denise Yu

Denise Yu

Engineering Manager and Rubyist, Previously Engineering Manager @GitHub

Session Engineering Culture

Recipes for Blameless Accountability

Tuesday Oct 25 / 02:55PM PDT

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.

Speaker image - Michelle Brush

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"

Session Engineering Culture

How Did It Make Sense at the Time? Understanding Incidents As They Occurred, Not as They Are Remembered

Tuesday Oct 25 / 04:10PM PDT

When we encounter undesirable outcomes, there is a natural instinct to look back, find something that went wrong, and fix it.

Speaker image - Jacob Scott

Jacob Scott

Staff Software Engineer @stripe

Session

Panel: "Just" Engineering Culture

Tuesday Oct 25 / 11:50AM PDT

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.

Speaker image - Denise Yu

Denise Yu

Engineering Manager and Rubyist, Previously Engineering Manager @GitHub

Speaker image - Jacob Scott

Jacob Scott

Staff Software Engineer @stripe

Speaker image - Jessica DeVita

Jessica DeVita

Sr. Software Engineering Manager - SRE @Microsoft

Speaker image - Vanessa Huerta Granda

Vanessa Huerta Granda

Resiliency Manager @Enova, Co-Author of the Howie Guide on Post Incident Analysis

Session

Unconference: Engineering Culture

Tuesday Oct 25 / 01:40PM PDT

What is an unconference? At QCon SF, we’ll have unconferences in most of our tracks.

Speaker image - Shane Hastie

Shane Hastie

Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com