When you’re humble, you’re hard to hire

Being humble is an admirable trait. When candidates succumb to words like “team” and “we” and “us,” it’s possible they’re just being humble. But it’s also reasonable to conclude that the word “I” is absent from their pat answers because they didn’t actually do anything.

I’m compelled to press candidates, “what was your role in that project?” I have many questions I’d love to ask, and I don’t relish using our short time together asking questions to clarify vagaries. You’re easier to hire when I know what you did.

Take the blame? Take the credit

If you’re not the kind of person who shifts blame when things go wrong, then why shift the blame when things have gone right? Writers and speakers use the passive voice to hide who’s responsible for an action. “Mistakes were made” rather than “I made a mistake.”

An easy trick to detect the passive voice in writing is to inject the phrase “by zombies” after the verb:

Like: “Mistakes were made by zombies.”

Or: “The ball was thrown by the boy by zombies.”

There must be a corollary rule for job interviews.

Just say I: the unaccountable zombie rule of interviewing

You’re making it hard to hire you if you’re talking about the unaccountable zombies you worked with: “We The unaccountable zombies I worked with decided it was more sensible to use boring technologies, so we the unaccountable zombies I worked with went with MySQL.”

Just as I’d have to stop the interview to inquire, “I’m sorry, did you say the team of unaccountable zombies you worked with?” I’d have to stop the interview to clarify, “who exactly is we?”

The not-so-secret secret of hiring is: I want to hire you. I’m interviewing you after all—you must be one singular human being!

If you agree, just say “I.”

What is a blameless postmortem?

A postmortem is a written record of an incident, its impact, the actions taken to mitigate or resolve it, the root cause(s), and the follow-up actions to prevent the incident from recurring.

– Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure, Site Reliability Engineering

If you’re doing things, you’ll eventually break something.

A blameless postmortem is a document recounting what you broke, how you fixed it, and what tripped you up and made you break it. The goal is to fix whatever made you break it in the first place.

In a complex system, the cause of a problem is far from obvious. Toyota famously developed the Five Whys method of problem investigation to traverse the layers of causality to find the underlying cause of a problem.

The practice of the blameless postmortem is excellent. The term blameless postmortem could use some improvement.

The negation of 𝑥 implies 𝑥

“Blameless” implies “blame.”

Apophasis is a term in rhetoric that I just learned, wherein a speaker denies a topic should be brought up so they can bring it up. It’s like when you say, “I don’t care what anyone says, I like you.”

By calling the process of finding the root cause of an incident “blameless,” it’s tantamount to: “I don’t care that everyone blames you; I want to know the real cause.”

It feels a little hostile right from the start.

Postmortem is macabre

The earliest definition of “postmortem” is still in use: “an examination of a body after death to determine the cause of death”¹.

This definition is a pretty heavy thing to lay on someone who’s already sheepish about breaking the website. Especially combined with the term “blameless.”

It’s like saying: “We can all agree you basically killed somebody, and even though others believe you’re to blame, I know you’re probably maybe innocent.”

Feature, not a bug

I get that sometimes we need to be reminded that the goal is not to place blame and that sometimes it’s worth being explicit. But I think that becomes a problem when it’s at odds with its own goals, as I believe the term “blameless” is.

Postmortem has also come to mean “following the event.” Language evolves. But language is also laden with historical use, and that history, too, can muddy our meaning.

I’ll admit the term “blameless postmortem” is useful as it represents a shared idea. But I still think we could develop a term that is a better fit for our goals.

After digging in a thesaurus for a few minutes, I’ve landed at “Disquisition.”

(/^ヮ^)/*:・ﾟ✧ dict disquisition
1 definition found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Disquisition \Dis`qui*si"tion\, n. [L. disquisitio, fr.
     disquirere to inquire diligently, investigate; dis- +
     quaerere to seek. See {Quest}.]
     A formal or systematic inquiry into, or discussion of, any
     subject; a full examination or investigation of a matter,
     with the arguments and facts bearing upon it; elaborate
     essay; dissertation.
     [1913 Webster]
  
           For accurate research or grave disquisition he was not
           well qualified.                          --Macaulay.
     [1913 Webster]

And the only connotation I can attribute to that term is: “Nobody expects a software disquisition!” which is clearly free of any negative historical baggage.