Being Blameless Toward Yourself


Team-Driven Developer

A newsletter with tips and tools for building software as a team

I returned to work last week from a short vacation.

When I logged back in, I quickly saw there had been some problems while I was away. Some code that processes authentication requests was running extremely slow.

As I read through the thread, I realized this was code I had worked on😳

And for the rest of the week, even though my team had solved the problem quickly and prevented an outage, I kept apologizing over and over. I was casting blame on myself.

This week's article dives into the differences between taking responsibility vs. blaming ourselves for errors (big and small).


Team-Building Exercise

This week's Team-Building Exercise is about helping your team avoid the trap of self-blame. Look for ways to encourage someone out of a "blame spiral" where, like me, they apologize profusely and ignore the progress or learnings that came from the error.

Navigating the different emotions and factors that come into play when recognizing a failure can be difficult. You can't just say, "Don't worry about it." You have to acknowledge the failure and address it while moving beyond it.

One way I've found to help redirect attention away from the person and toward the learning is to reframe things in light of the team and not one person.

When they say, "I broke XYZ," I remind them that the code went through a code review and, therefore, other engineers missed the same bug during the review.

I remind them that our code has automated tests that didn't catch the bug either.

I remind them that we tend to prefer shipping quickly in some cases rather than having perfect code, and there is accepted risk when we do.

Then, we have to keep the focus on learning. What can we improve to avoid this bug (and ones like it) in the future? What tests do we need to write? What could we have done differently?

In either case, creating a culture of encouragement and a focus on continual improvement is the basis for creating a safe and blameless culture.

Find a teammate to encourage in either a failure or a job well done this week.


Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!​

  • Code Review Champion - My book on code reviews will help you become a world-class code reviewer. From giving kind feedback to navigating conflict, this book can help anyone wanting to sharpen their code review skills.
  • Questions for Devs - Building a team takes more than catching up about your weekend at standup. I've used these questions to build relationships with my team and push past the same old surface-level conversations.
  • Pull Request Template - Maximize your efforts in pull requests by giving context right at the beginning of a new pull request. Copy and paste this template into your repo, and voilà!
  • Code Review Metrics - Start measuring how your team tracks against a few common code review metrics. This python script will pull your GitHub pull requests and generate a CSV you can slice-n-dice to get the data you want. It also has graphs! As this is an open-source project, your contributions and feedback would be great!

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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Learn the tips and tools for building software as a team! Every other week, I send a long-form article, a team-building exercise, and resources to help you build better software teams so you can build better software.

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