Be Bold and Experiment #

Life’s too short to wait for permission. Understand decision-making models and use them to make decisions when they are cheap and reversible (most decisions are). Worst case, you learn something new. Best case, you learn something and we all succeed.

Understanding decisions #

Broadly speaking, there are two types of decisions you can make: one that can be easily reversed and one that can’t. As you might imagine in software development, most decisions are the first kind.

When you’re faced with a decision and not sure how to proceed, determine if it can be easily reversed without spending too much time and resources. You’ll find that most decisions can be reversed without significant loss of time, money, or other resources. If this happens to be one of them, go ahead and do it. If not, then you go ahead and ask the team.

Experiment #

We will often come across problems no one has faced before. You can try asking for help but chances are that you won’t find it. At this time, you will have no choice but to “give it a shot”. Go experiment and see if it works. If it doesn’t, try something else. Solving problems isn’t easy and us engineers love a challenge.