Comment by UncleMeat
5 years ago
I work at Google and have written more than a few blameless postmortems. You don't need to quote things to me.
Is what was described above "finger pointing or shaming"? I don't work in TI so I didn't experience this meeting but it doesn't seem like it is. It also doesn't sound to me like this was the only outcome, where the execs just wagged their fingers at engineers and called it a day. Of course there'd be all sorts of process improvements derived from an understanding of the various system causes that led to an outage.
Yes, if I were made to attend a mandatory training in which my leaders read customer emails saying that the outage caused them to lose trust in the company, I would feel ashamed. That was surely the goal of that exercise. The fact that there were also process improvements doesn't make it any less wrong.
Thankfully, other comments in this thread suggest that this is not how Google normally does things.
That's fuck up.