> ...multiple engineers argued about the "right" way to build something. I remember thinking that they had biases based on past experiences and assumptions about what mattered.

I usually resolve this by putting on the table the consequences and their impacts upon my team that I’m concerned about, and my proposed mitigation for those impacts. The mitigation always involves the other proposer’s team picking up the impact remediation. In writing. In the SOP’s. Calling out the design decision by day of the decision to jog memories and names of those present that wanted the design as the SME’s. Registered with the operations center. With automated monitoring and notification code we’re happy to offer.

Once people are asked to put accountable skin in the sustaining operations, we find out real fast who is taking into consideration the full spectrum end to end consequences of their decisions. And we find out the real tradeoffs people are making, and the externalities they’re hoping to unload or maybe don’t even perceive.

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gleenn 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's awesome, but I feel like half the time most people aren't in the position to add requirements so a lot of shenanigans still happens, especially in big corps

	▲	yourapostasy 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am satisfied when someone tells us we cannot change requirements, to get their acknowledgement that what we bring up does extract a specific trade-off, and their reason for accepting the trade-off, then recording it into design and operational documentation. The moment many people recognize this trade-off will be explicitly documented with their and their team's accountability in detail, is when you surface genuine trade-offs made with the debt to pay off in the future in mind and in the meantime a rationale to grant a ton of leeway to the team burdened with the externality going forward, and trade-offs made without understanding their externalities upon other teams (which happens a tremendous amount in large organizations). Most of the time, people are just very reasonably and understandably focusing tightly on their lane and honestly had no idea of the externalities of their conclusions and decisions, and I'm happy to have experienced all those times a rebalancing of the trade-offs that everyone can accept and is grateful to have documented to justify spending the story points upon cleaning up later instead of working on new features while the externality debt's unwanted impact keeps piling up. In fewer than a handful of times, I run into people deliberately, consciously with malice aforethought of the full externalities making trade-offs for the sake of expediently shifting burdens of of them without first consulting with partner teams they want to shift the burdens onto, simply so they can fatten their promo packet sooner at the expense of making other teams look worse. Getting these trade-offs documented about half the time makes them back down to a more reasonable trade-off, about half the time they don't back down but your team is now protected by explicit documentation and caveats upon the externality your team now has to carry, and 100% of the time my team and I put a ring fence upon all future interactions with that personality for at least the remaining duration of my gig.