Kill It with Fire

A quick trick when two capable engineers cannot seem to agree on a decision is to ask yourself what each one is optimizing for with their suggested approach. Remember, technology has a number of trade-offs where optimizing for one characteristic diminishes another important characteristic. Examples include security versus usability, coupling versus complexity, fault tolerance versus consistency, and so on, and so forth. If two engineers really can’t agree on a decision, it’s usually because they have different beliefs about where the ideal optimization between two such poles is. Looking for absolute truths in situations that are ambiguous and value-based is painful. Sometimes it helps just to highlight the fact that the disagreement is really over what to optimize for, rather than pure technical correctness.