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hinkleyyesterday at 8:42 PM2 repliesview on HN

A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be.

Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it.

I've been in many meeting rooms where, because of the number and caliber of people in the room, we've blown $5000 worth of combined salary arguing about basically nothing. I've been in a few where that number was well over $10k.

If you're going to assign a relatively medium talent engineer to solve a problem, it's cheaper to let them solve it twice, maybe even three times, than it is to try to figure out what the right solution is before touching a keyboard. It helps them grow to give them that autonomy, and more importantly training your team out of reflexively reaching for optimization for every single feature saves gobs of money over time.

The interface for a piece of code matters to everyone. The internal implementation details mostly matter to the bus number on that code. If they're happy with it, that matters a lot. That can be overridden by the consequences of that design, but I've seen a couple cases where the bus number for a module wanted a solution with fewer consequences but the group wisdom wanted something flashier but also more brittle.


Replies

busterarmyesterday at 9:55 PM

This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them.

I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone.

They are still using EST today even when they have global sharding of their customers/databases between US, EU, LATAM, SEA...

--- you're also assuming that the product roadmap will afford your engineers any time to build it the second, third, fourth, etc. time.

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pinkmuffinereyesterday at 9:36 PM

+1! I've fallen in love with many of Amazon's in-group concepts, and maybe I'm just drinking the koolaide, but they have the concept of a "two-way door", which is exactly this -- a decision that can be made, unmade, remade, etc relatively cheaply. If you can identify that a choice isn't very dangerous, you can focus on the things that really are instead.

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