One morning, taking a cold shower (against my will) a thought crossed my mind. I realised how complaining about the absence of hot water due to my landlord’s decisions is similar to what I have been hearing from software engineers.

(Yes, ideas come during taking shower)

It all started in July 2021. I received an email from my landlord saying something along the lines of “I decided to replace the hearing system so that we all benefit from less emission and less costs”. The plan was to complete the project in 2 weeks. It didn’t happen (I’ll explain why a bit later). Now it’s September and there’s still no hot water in our building. Needless to say, nobody is happy about this situation, especially families.

I kept hearing from some of our neighbours complaints directed to our landlord. Why would he even start with this? Everything was working fine. However, if we zoomed out and look at the whole picture, we’ll see that it wasn’t landlord’s fault. The reason why it is not finished is that some detail is missing and the contractor could not finalise the installation.

And then it hit me.

I heard this before. How many times did we all hear phrases like “who wrote this code?!” or “who chose this framework?!” or “who picked this cloud provider?!” or “who chose this strategy?!”. How similar these complaints are, huh!

Making decisions is hard, especially if we assume a lot. My landlord assumed that the contractor will finish in time (given their experience). Engineers also make decisions assuming that “this new framework is what we need”. Managers make decisions like “this strategy will yield such and such results”. We can increase the chances of success of a decision by backing our assumptions up with research or opinions of asking experienced people or observations or data, etc. However, we will never reach a 100% certainty. Simply because we cannot predict every aspect of the future. Therefore, the best we can do is to make the decision and to see what happens.

However, the main idea here is that our life is too short to complain about bad decisions of others. Instead we should find ways to improve the current situation. This will bring more joy and happiness rather than staying in that negativity bubble.