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Engineers who won’t commit

seangoedecke.com · 1,173 words · saved by 1 readers

Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven or synchronous way? Well, it depends: there are many strong technical reasons on each side, so it’s better to keep an open mind and not come down on either side. This strategy is fine when you’re a junior engineer, but at some point you’ll be the person in the room with the most context (or technical skill, or institutional power). At that point, you need to take a position, whether you feel particularly confident or not. If you don’t, you’re forcing people with less technical context than you to figure it out themselves. Often that means somebody will take a random guess. In the worst case, the weakest-but-loudest engineer on the team will take the opportunity to push for a spectacularly bad idea. If you’re a strong engineer, it’s your responsibility to take a position in order to prevent that from happening, even if you’re only 55% or 60% confide

Some engineers think it’s a virtue to remain non-committal in technical discussions. Should our team build a new feature in an event-driven or synchronous way? Well, it depends: there are many strong technical reasons on each side, so it’s better to keep an open mind and not come down on either side. This strategy is fine when you’re a junior engineer, but at some point you’ll be the person in the room with the most context (or technical skill, or institutional power). At that point, you need to take a position , whether you feel particularly confident or not. If you don’t, you’re forcing peop

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