All the Best Engineering Advice I Stole from Non-Technical People

[Ed note: This is highly summarized; it is well-worth reading the entire article.]

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people:

Marianne Bellotti

[...] As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. More often than not the best advice, the things that stuck with me, came from people who had no background at all in software.

[...] These are five of my favorites.

1. "People like us make our money in the seams of things"

[...] Security and reliability are more likely to go wrong in the seams between components. That means literal integrations, but it also means organization seams. Places where no one is sure who owns what, or who is responsible for what are unlikely to have proper monitoring and much more likely to be two or three upgrades behind. The seams are where things get lost, sometimes for years. So if your mandate is security or availability the seams are your best bet of finding a big pay off.

[...] Often I find it useful to just acknowledge the situation up front: I tend to think in edge cases, but edge cases by definition are unlikely. As a result I tend to bring up a lot of irrelevant things. When you're discussing a problem or situation there are basically three buckets of information: things that are true, things that are false, and things that are true but irrelevant. Having a culture where people are not optimizing to avoid mentioning something true but irrelevant means we make better technical decisions overall because we get the benefit of every teammate's complete perspective.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.