Forty-five minutes. That's how long a brilliant engineer I've worked with spent presenting a comparison matrix for a backend framework. Performance benchmarks, learning curve, documentation quality, ecosystem maturity, hiring pool, long-term maintainability, etc. Color-coded. Beautifully researched. At the end, someone asked the obvious question: "so which one are we going with"?
Silence. Then, "well, it depends on how we weigh the criteria".
Nobody decided anything that day. Or the next week. Two more meetings and one sixteen-page RFC later, the project shipped two months late, which was what everyone privately suspected would happen from the start. For the record: the service handles about twenty requests per second at peak. Any of the presented frameworks would have been invisible in production.
I see too many engineers making poor decisions. And the irony is that the smartest engineers are often the ones most afraid to decide.
Intelligence makes indecision easier, not harder
