[CapitalistCartr]

That sounds great, but hard decisions are hard because there isn't time, money, other resources to have all the facts, yet a decision must be made. There might not even be any way to know for sure without taking one path. Experience is all we have to guide us. Progress is full of such decisions, made in a gray fog. Fear of being wrong is paralyzing.

[galaxyLogic]

Exactly. My favorite metaphor for SW-development is playing chess. When you make a move, a decision, new choices, new decisions to make, open up and other ones may no longer be practical.

What you decide and do now, affects what you can and must decide next.

Except unlike in chess we don't really have the exact rules of the game anywhere. Still we must make choices which affect what moves can be chosen later.

It is also like building a house, once you decide how to build the ground-floor and what it stands on, that greatly affects how the floors above that can be built (not too heavy, not too light etc.).

It is often difficult to understand all the consequences of a design decision, what can be done and chosen after that, until you actually implement that design.

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

Path dependence.

[galaxyLogic]

I googled path-dependency https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/path-dependency.asp#:~:....

It happens all the time of course. But I wonder if it is a bit of a trivial concept. Of course what was done before will affect what is the optimal choice now.

But I agree it is good to keep it in mind -- when you are making the current decisions. If I decide this way now, what is the cost of my available options in the future? Pretty much the way chess-players evaluate their possible moves.

[jldugger]

> That sounds great, but hard decisions are hard because there isn't time, money, other resources to have all the facts, yet a decision must be made.

While I am sympathetic to the concept of reasoning under uncertainty, the way you've framed it is hardly engineering anymore.

Design projects come with a spectrum of data requirements, and each has its own cost function for improved accuracy. For example, knowing exactly how long the bridge you need to build matters greatly, and the cost of surveying should be pretty low. In contrast, measuring the soil at the site you build on top of has a variety[1] of options with varying costs. You can't ever be 100 percent certain that your sampling was good enough, but the samples more you have the more confident you can be. Depending on the project and design, you may not need the most expensive and most accurate option, but you probably don't want to just rely on priors built through "experience."

Translating this to the world of software, we have a variety of data collection strategies. A/B tests, canaries, software instrumentation, tracing, offsite monitoring, f-scores, beta tests, market surveys, and more. The best thing you can do as an engineer making an uninformed choice is to design the system to collect the data you are missing and to make it easy to change your design later. Amazon calls these "two way doors" versus "one way doors"; if your decision was wrong you can go back and make a different choice. As an example, if you are designing a caching system, spending a bit of time to generalize the API will allow you to swap between policies as you collect data about cache hit rates. If you don't, the cost of changing your mind goes up as more things depend on the nuances of your API.

Rather valorize making uninformed decisions, I'd prefer to valorize flexibility and continuous data collection. Seen this way, the old adage "There's never enough time to do it right, but always plenty of time to do it over" is a coherent philosophy.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotechnical_investigation#Soi...

[f1shy]

If you have to make decision, and lack information, time and money to even try something to understand the best decision, you are having problems bigger than technical ones; and even the best engineer in the world will probably not do better than a dice