Hacker News Reader

Comment by naikrovek | Hacker News Reader

> Emotions are underrated as drivers for decisions

and also extremely overrated. the number of times my work life has been made a nightmare because A) the decision-maker was shielded from the consequences of their decisions, and B) their technical decisions were based on "vibe" or how good the salesperson made them feel over 25 paid lunches, numbers easily over two dozen.

the worst periods of my career have always been because technical decisions were made on an emotional basis.

I realize that the my parent comment is almost certainly referring to personal decisions in the bit that I quoted; I'm just hoping to bring awareness to bad decisions based on emotion. it's endemic and terrible.

View on HN

You have chosen a very bad example: a "decision maker" that is both "shielded from the consequences of their decisions", and who also lacks technical depth if I'm to read between the lines.

Except with a miracle, no amount of reasoning can save this person from taking a bad decision.

And no, I'm not referring to "personal decisions" - I make technical decisions based on emotions all the time.

It works for me because I have both skin in the game, and the technical knowledge.

Yet I chose to use emotions as a shortcut, because I have no time and no interest to put on paper why I recommend clickhouse for a timeseries. I do it because it feels right, because I have a bad vibe from the weird benchmarks published by competitors, and a good vibe from clickhouse based on when I last played with it.

This saves me time and effort, which is best spend on things that matter.

Some people use different names for this heuristic (cf "thinking hard and slow"), because emotions have a bad reputation, based solely on bad examples of people who can't rely on anything else, and just don't care about the consequences.

Emotions integrate inputs. Lack of good inputs = bad decisions, emotions or not, aka "garbage in, garbage out"

Hah, I kind of do the same, but I was then put on the spot when an interviewer asked me why I made certain technical decisions/tradeoffs. Somehow I don’t think they were impressed with the answer.

Oh well, their loss.

I usually get back at them by saying something like, "When you have experience as much as I do, sometimes my subconscious mind will recognize patterns that will drive my decision. You may call it 'gut feeling', I call it autonomous decision weighting using experiential pattern matching. And there's no shortcut to that ability; you just have to have decades of experience. Which I do."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com