A Million Micro Decisions (and no time to make them)

June 2016

This post is a draft. Content may be incomplete or missing.

Brain dump

Maybe the reason software development so induces stress and mental health problems is because you have a million tiny decisions to make, you have little to no time to deliberate, and 99% of what you decide will be permanent. And any mistake can become a big issue at any time.

If this is why developers are getting stressed and burned out, what can we do to help remedy the situation?

  • Reviews with a team (share the burden, be more confident about your decisions because other people agree)
  • Identify the core decisions and make them up front, let the smaller decisions follow
  • Discipline and processes, so fewer decisions need to be made
  • No stigma for making the wrong decisions – instead, feed the steps above with learnings from the wrong decision