Beyond Blame by Dave Zwieback

Author:Dave Zwieback
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Published: 2015-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11. The Downside of Blame

“Do you have a minute?” asked Ollie, poking his head into Raj’s office.

“Come in, buddy,” said Raj in a welcoming tone. “Sit down. What’s on your mind?”

Almost two decades ago, fresh out of college, both Ollie and Raj had met as trainees in the yearlong Technology Analyst Program at Waterstone. They were not exactly great friends, and did not spend much time together socially. Still, they kept in touch after they left Waterstone, and through the years had developed a habit of speaking honestly and openly with each other.

“I’m wondering who’s next,” Ollie said.

“Mike was our sacrificial lamb,” Raj replied without skipping a beat. “The gods are sated for a while. It’s not important. Why are you crying over spilt milk, buddy?”

“The next time it could be someone on your team. Or you. Or me.”

Raj raised his brows, revealing deep wrinkles on his forehead.

“Don’t you think,” Ollie continued, “that if we have an outage or some kind of malfunction tied to your group, that Roger and the E.C. will demand another head?”

“That’s how our world works. Are you really surprised? Do you remember our mantra from T.A.P.?”

“‘Don’t Fuck Up.’ Might as well have it tattooed. They’ve certainly taught us that—don’t fuck up, and you won’t be kicked out of T.A.P. Don’t fuck up, and you’ll have a long career on the street. Just don’t fuck up. Do you remember that D.B.A., the one who took down one of the market data feeds and then tried to erase the database logs so he wouldn’t get fired?”

“Certainly didn’t help him,” Raj said.

“No, it didn’t. And what did we all learn? Did we learn how not to take down data feeds?”

“My friend, we learned an even more valuable lesson: Don’t get caught!”

“Cover your ass better. That’s the main skill we learned. Not how to make our systems or organizations more resilient.”

“Look, buddy, nobody ever got a bonus for causing an outage. That’s just how this world works. That’s not what we’re paid to do.”

“Our incentives are making our systems fragile.”

“How so?”

“When something goes wrong, we’re quick to find the so-called root cause, which is usually just shorthand for ‘Who fucked up?’ And even if that person doesn’t get fired, the possibility is always in the air. It stops us from learning about the deeper underlying conditions for outages, or even what’s needed to make things work. So here we are, stuck with a kindergarten-level understanding, complete with tooth fairies and Santa Claus. Blame is the frigid, arctic air that stunts the development of a deeper understanding of our systems, which is the only way we can really improve them.”

“I’m not sure I follow, exactly.”

“You have a headache,” Ollie said, “you take aspirin, and it goes away for a while, but you never find out if it was a change in the weather or a tumor that caused the headache. We’re just treating the symptoms instead of getting a C.A.T. scan and finding out what’s wrong.”

Raj nodded slowly.

“In our

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