I have some paradoxical feelings about "blameless" retro culture that I'll try to sum up.
In general, I'm in favor of the approach. I don't think singling people out and bullying or shaming them for their mistakes ever works. I think most well-intentioned engineers will already beat themselves up plenty for making a serious mistake, and they don't need any encouragement to do so. I know I do.
On the other hand, there is a red line. At a place I worked, a DBA was let go after he repeatedly brought production down for 45 minutes to an hour at a time by running intensive queries of his own design for data-gathering, in some cases, after being explicitly told not to do that against the prod database. This was a person whose job description required him to have access to prod.
There were process problems, maybe - being allowed to run whatever queries you want on production under your own authority, sure - but his cavalier attitude towards a production environment was still unacceptable. Process can only help when people are well-intentioned and doing their best; if people are malicious or negligent or just not good at their jobs, adding more process to get around that only makes things worse.
In general, I'm in favor of the approach. I don't think singling people out and bullying or shaming them for their mistakes ever works. I think most well-intentioned engineers will already beat themselves up plenty for making a serious mistake, and they don't need any encouragement to do so. I know I do.
On the other hand, there is a red line. At a place I worked, a DBA was let go after he repeatedly brought production down for 45 minutes to an hour at a time by running intensive queries of his own design for data-gathering, in some cases, after being explicitly told not to do that against the prod database. This was a person whose job description required him to have access to prod.
There were process problems, maybe - being allowed to run whatever queries you want on production under your own authority, sure - but his cavalier attitude towards a production environment was still unacceptable. Process can only help when people are well-intentioned and doing their best; if people are malicious or negligent or just not good at their jobs, adding more process to get around that only makes things worse.