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Articles tagged with #mental-models
The Planning Fallacy in Software Development Every software developer has experienced it. The task that was supposed to take two days took two weeks. The project estimated at three months shipped in nine. The "simple refactor" that turned into a mont...
Distributed Decision Making: Why Networks Outperform Hierarchies In 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 290 people aboard. The ship's crew had the technology to identify the aircraft correctly, but the hierarchical comm...
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime business partner, has a mental model he values above almost all others: inversion. The core idea is deceptively simple. Instead of asking "How do I achieve success?" ask "What would guarantee failure?" Then a...
When I was promoted to senior engineer, my manager said something that stuck with me: "We're not promoting you because you write better code. We're promoting you because you make better decisions about what code to write." At the time, I thought it w...
Three years ago, I hit a wall. Not technically — technically I was fine. I was a senior developer shipping features and reviewing code. But I kept making the same kinds of bad decisions on repeat. Overcommitting to timelines. Saying yes to projects I...
Last year I made the worst architectural decision of my career at 4:37 PM on a Thursday. I approved a data model change that created a circular dependency between two core services. It took three weeks and four engineers to untangle. When I looked ba...