[Vinnl]

That seems consistent. If there's a 1% chance of a meaningful improvement, and 99 out of 100 changes do not meaningfully improve things, than the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be.

[exikyut]

Meta-question: does the cognizance, cohesion and awareness that goes into identifying that 1% emerge from the 99% quotient of inefficient aimless wandering, or somewhere else?

Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?

(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)

I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).

[seoaeu]

> the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be

If the payoff in the 1% case is high enough, then you don't have to know beforehand! Just do all 100 changes and the one winner pays for all the rest.

[Vinnl]

Yeah that's what I meant: 1% of engineers might be doing the most impactful work, but all of them have a claim to potentially being that engineer.