Naming names in incident writeups
I take the opposite approach: I never write any of my reports anonymously. Instead, I explicitly specify the names of all of the people involved. I wanted to write a post on why I do that.
I understand the motivation for providing anonymity. We feel guilt and shame when our changes contribute to an incident. The safety literature refers to this as second victim phenomenon. We don’t write down an engineer’s name in a report because we don’t want to exacerbate the second victim effect. Also, the incident is about the system, not the particular engineer.
The reason I take the opposite approach of naming names is that I want to normalize the fact that incidents are aspects of the system, not the individuals. I feel like providing anonymity implicitly sends the signal that “the names are omitted to protect the guilty.”
My strategy in doing these writeups is to lean as heavily as I can into demonstrating to the reader that all actions taken by the engineers involved were reasonable in the moment. I want them to read the writeup and think, “This could have been me!”. I want to try to get the organization to a point where there is no shame in contributing to an incident, it’s an inevitable aspect of the work that we do.
