Managing Tradeoffs
Code School Book — Morgan Lopes and Tim Whitacre (20/30)
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There are problems to solve and tensions to manage.
A t a young age, most students receive tests. Each question on the test has one correct answer. During quizzes and exams, we earn some percentage of a “perfect score”. An instructor defines “success” and our answers as either wrong or right. There is no gray area or middle ground. There are wrong answers but only one right option.
There are few areas in life when this binary thinking serves us well. In most instances, especially software engineering, things function differently.
Rather than weighing right versus wrong, software engineers are confronted with endless tradeoffs. When faced with many acceptable answers, software engineers understand that some are better than others. We understand there are many wrong answers, but some are worse than others. There is no right answer.
When we realize there isn’t a right answer, it can be immobilizing. Without certainty, how do we know what we are doing is right? Acknowledging tensions and working within them is both the greatest challenge of engineers and our main value. We are expected to create and solve problems amidst uncertainty, not without it.
Andy Stanley, an excellent teacher and author on leadership and work, says, “There are problems to solve and tensions to manage.” Simply put, things that are broken should be fixed. Tensions, by contrast, must be managed. Issues emerge in our work when we don’t understand the difference between the two.
Consider the analogy of a car. While in motion, brakes apply tremendous friction which allow the car to stop. The tension between the accelerator and the gas pedal is essential for the car to function. Trying to remove that tension diminishes the overall value of the vehicle. Now, imagine the headlights didn’t work. This is a problem. Driving at night would be very dangerous. You could manage the problem by only driving during the day, but what would happen if an emergency arose late one night? The broken headlights don’t need to be managed; they need to be fixed.
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