Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality for a release?

Re:Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality f... by ResNet on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:49PM (#31074849)

> It's a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When something isn't working out, the first question is "who's the DRI on this?"

This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of blameless postmortems [1] adopted at Google et al. Does this culture lead to blaming said responsible individual, or is the feedback seen as constructive?

[1] https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/

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Re:Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality f... by Hayvok on Monday April 18, 2022 @10:30PM (#31079235)

That isn’t quite right. When you are appointed DRI at Apple it means you are responsible for getting that problem solved & you have the authority to move whatever mountains are in your way. I saw more people blamed for not supporting the DRI properly than I ever saw the DRI getting blamed for failing.

You usually don’t get that type of appointment unless leadership is confident you’re the right person to be successful at it anyway.

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Re:Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality f... by safarithrow on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:48PM (#31075531)

> This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of blameless postmortems [1] adopted at Google et al.

While teams may vary, in my experience postmortems seek to understand where in the process a breakdown occurred, rather than fault individuals.

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Re:Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality f... by lesuorac on Monday April 18, 2022 @05:22PM (#31076734)

Blame and responsibility can be orthogonal concepts.

An SRE may be blameless for a bug but they may also be the DRI for getting an incident resolved.

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