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Making mistakes is one way to learn.
But no matter how many times someone says that to me, it still feels bad when it happens. This talk shares some ways to help you make fewer mistakes by making better decisions. I’ve heard people say as a joke that engineers “type for a living”, but I think it’s more realistic to say that we make decisions for a living. Decisions about what code to write (or not write), what to learn next, whether to hire a candidate or not. Whether to invest in or close down one project or another, or to reorganise teams. And that’s saying nothing about personal decisions like whether to move house or change jobs. And then even if you make the decision, how do you know it was the right one?
Making a bad choice, in hindsight, usually feels bad, and could have a negative impact. Making mistakes is not necessarily bad – it’s one way to learn – but it can be stressful. But there are tools and frameworks that you can use to sense-check when you’re about to make a difficult choice, to help you have the best possible outcome (or to learn better from a choice that in hindsight you think was wrong). This talk is aimed at engineers, tech leads, managers, humans – anyone who makes decisions. Making better decisions is a skill that you can improve on, and this talk will introduce some ways to do that.
