"Hidden behaviors and choices have a broad impact on the engineering work we eventually see "Sometimes, as engineers, the right decision for us is not to build," they said. The hidden decision to build implicitly accepts the costs and risks of building and maintaining something new. As developers, we often love to solve problems with code. But we never stop to ask ourselves, "Is this the correct solution?" when, many times, it isn't."
"Rather than prescribing solutions, the speakers offered a diagnostic framework for recognizing hidden decisions. Their approach echoes broader industry conversations about Architecture Decision Records. The key insight: hidden decisions can be named and examined once teams learn to identify them. The problem, they explain, is that engineering organizations measure outcomes such as features shipped or system uptime but rarely examine the decision quality that produced those results. This phenomenon creates a dangerous blind spot where teams optimize for the wrong things without realizing it."
Engineering teams often make consequential choices through implicit metrics, inherited defaults, and everyday behaviors rather than explicit architectural or planning decisions. CI/CD speeds, measurement targets, and platform defaults create incentives that shape actions and trade-offs. Organizations frequently measure outputs like features shipped or uptime without assessing the decision quality that produced them, creating blind spots that drive harmful optimization. A diagnostic framework for detecting hidden decisions enables teams to name, examine, and mitigate those implicit choices. The decision to build accepts maintenance costs and risks, so alternative solutions and decision quality should be evaluated before coding.
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