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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Interesting framework. Perhaps one of the difficulties is that decision reversibility tends to lie on a spectrum between "reversible" and "irreversible", and sometimes it's hard to even know where on that spectrum it lies. Thus you end up having to figure out if a decision is "reversible", maybe even first needing to develop a decision framework in which to make such a determination. I think all of the truly difficult decisions I've made in work and life have been in this category.

Still, I appreciate this concept and I think it's better to have the mental model than not.

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Yes. And when it comes to having multiple people and teams involved and starting work it may become costly to reverse an otherwise reversible decision.

Right, Bezos & this blog are framing the world as black & white when its really just lots of gray.

Many things that you could bucket into "type 2" decisions which are not one-way doors, effectively are. For example, orgs that tend to never go back and fix technical debt means everything is a one-way door.

Further, design decisions that require substantial and growing effort once you go through the door .. are effectively one-way doors as well.

Maybe ZIRP era over staffed FAANG could afford to build and rebuilt, have multiple competing redundant systems to see who wins, etc.. but most tech orgs just don't work that way.

You are framing it as black & white - I think miscategorising the article and Bezos. From the article:

  Decisions fall somewhere on the continuum from reversible to irreversible. You can tell where a decision lies on this spectrum by asking how much it would cost to undo. The higher the cost to undo, the more irreversible it is. The lower the cost, the more reversible it is.

  Bezos considers 70% certainty as the cut-off point where it is appropriate to make a decision. That means acting once we have 70% of the required information, instead of waiting longer.

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