I recently came home from a busy day of work to my wife blaming me for allowing our 18 month old son to reach some paint and get it all over the carpet. She was concentrating on the fact that he could reach the paint not on the fact that she had brilliantly got the paint out of the carpet.

My instinct on being blamed is to deny it, or start throwing blame back at her. It is possible I put the paint in his reach, it is also possible it was someone else.

It is very easy to blame someone else. For example, looking through the git history to find out who changed a specific file is only a few clicks.

But is it ever productive to blame someone? Is it not better to focus our energy on fixing the issue at hand?

In the world of business it is easy to go from blaming other people until you have a blame culture. When you have a blame culture everyone starts looking out for themselves so it’s not them that gets the blame and productivity will suffer.

I think it is more important to put in place​ processes to minimise issues happening again. If a deployment causes downtime, don’t ask who’s fault is it and sack them. Instead what can we do to reduce the chance of it happening again?

As someone who has an interest in DevOps, I often break things and don’t want to get blamed for that, I do want to improve my processes so I am not always breaking the same things.

What do you think about Blame? Is what can we do differently always better than who did this?