Acting with Confidence

About this episode

The episode discusses the impact of decision-making in technology, particularly for DBAs and developers, highlighting the balance between reversibility and consequences.

Recently, I saw a graph about making decisions that showed the impact of both reversibility and consequences. Here is an example of such a graph and how one might approach decisions. If things are easily reversible or have a low consequence, we tend to make a decision and move on. Or we are willing to make a decision. One of the examples of such a decision was choosing what to wear out to dinner. It's easy to change, and (in general) of little consequence. Choosing to send a large amount of money to someone through Venmo (or some other mechanism), can be hard to reverse and have substantial consequences. This made me think of some of the DBA and developer decisions I've made in the past. When we work with databases, the changes we make can have a large impact and be quite consequential to our organization. Downtime, data quality, etc. could all impact revenue, profit, reputation, or even future prospects of survival. That can be a lot of pressure when you are deciding to refactor a data model or adjust a lot of data during a deployment. Read the rest of Acting with Confidence

People in this episode

Host: Steve Jones

Topics covered

• decision making
• consequences
• DBA decisions
• data quality
• pressure in tech

Keywords

• decision making
• DBA
• data model
• consequences
• reversibility
• data quality
• deployment
• pressure

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