> If you committed something that broke unit tests your colleagues would pass you a really ugly plush animal of shame that would sit on your desk until the next coworker broke the build.
We did have an ugly plush animal, but it served more obscure purposes. For blame of broken builds, we had an info screen that counted the number of times a build had passed, and displayed below the name of the person who last broke it.
Explaining to outsiders and non-developers that "Yes, when you make a mistake in this department, we put the person's name on the wall and don't take it down until someone else makes a mistake" sounds so toxic. But it strangely enough wasn't so harsh. Of course there was some stigma that you'd want to avoid, but not to a degree of feeling prolonged shame.
We did have an ugly plush animal, but it served more obscure purposes. For blame of broken builds, we had an info screen that counted the number of times a build had passed, and displayed below the name of the person who last broke it.
Explaining to outsiders and non-developers that "Yes, when you make a mistake in this department, we put the person's name on the wall and don't take it down until someone else makes a mistake" sounds so toxic. But it strangely enough wasn't so harsh. Of course there was some stigma that you'd want to avoid, but not to a degree of feeling prolonged shame.