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by iancmceachern 878 days ago
If the right decision isn't obvious to everyone in the room, including the least experienced person in the room, you don't have enough data to make the decision. You should break, get thr data, and regroup when you have the data to make thr proper decisions.

Data driven decisions.
2 comments
calderwoodra 878 days ago
I'd love to ask anyone who's worked on present day Instagram/Facebook what the long term effects of data driven decision making is. My understanding is that it's been a toss up.

I think PG has a tweet a while back like "some decisions are so bad, no one in their right mind would agree to this if there wasn't data to back it up". More of less saying, you can find data to support any decision, so why even be data driven?

EDIT: Found the tweet, which pg responded to but didn't actually create: https://x.com/dadiomov/status/1553474933010755584?s=20

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iancmceachern 878 days ago
I'd say their experience is an outlier. They are not the norm.

I'm speaking from a 20 year background designing medical devices and other critical infrastructure. In my world, like with airliners, it's important to get decisions right or people can be killed. Therefore, data driven decisions.

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calderwoodra 878 days ago
Yes, if safety and livelihood are on the line, get the data and be sure.

But most companies have to implement purchase flows, marketing sites, software onboarding, etc. Examples like this are where folks are more likely to cherry pick data to justify whatever their biased to believing.

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feoren 878 days ago
Yeesh, I don't know. I think we have enough data to decide the shape of the Earth, yet there are still Flat Earthers. Your approach works in an idealized world where everyone is perfectly rational and emotionless and all facts are perfectly knowable. That's really not the world we live in. This is basically a hardline stance at the extreme "endless debate" side: if literally anyone in the room is disagreeing, then you must not have enough data to make a decision yet? I don't see that working in practice.
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iancmceachern 878 days ago
This is reducto ad absurdum. It's not a 100% or 0% thing.

Obvious means that there is a 51% chance that decision a is better than decision b.

I'm advocating against just guessing when it's 50/50

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feoren 878 days ago
A lot of decisions come from experience and expertise. There are hundreds of little data points that all come together in my brain when I make an engineering decision, and I can't even necessarily enumerate them all. It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others. Gathering data on 100 approaches that don't work is just too expensive. Sometimes you should just let experts be experts and defer to them, even if they can't exactly say why.
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iancmceachern 878 days ago
>"It's exhausting to have to justify every decision to others"

You sound like a real pleasure /s

It's our job to. It's why they teach us to show our work. It's why we have building inspections. It's a necessary "evil". The sooner you accept, and embrace it, the more fun you will have in your day to day life, and more joy you will bring on others.

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