Good engineers make swift decisions

We all love to think things thoroughly. Part of what pushed us into being engineers is the love for the puzzles. The thrill of finding the optimal solution. However the truth is that most of the time finding the optimal solution simply does not matter.

What you should strive to find is the best solution you can find within a limited budget of time.

The best solution you can find given your constraints is also usually good enough. It is far more important for you to move and test a concept, than to stall a decision because you are set on optimizing that last 5% out of whatever you are doing.

If you struggle deciding when to stop looking at alternatives, you can even leave that to math. A while ago I read about the 37% rule in the book “Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions” and it stuck with me.

The 37% rule is a strategy derived from optimal stopping theory. It suggests that when faced with a series of options you should spend 37% of the time exploring and gathering information, and then chose the next best option that comes along.

Let me illustrate this with an example:

Imagine you're hiring for a position and have 100 applicants. You can interview them one at a time, and after each interview, you must decide whether to hire that person or move on to the next candidate. Once you reject a candidate, you can't go back and hire them later.

Using the 37% rule:

  1. You would interview the first 37 candidates (37% of 100) without hiring anyone. This allows you to establish a baseline for comparison.
  2. Starting with the 38th candidate, you would hire the first person who is better than all the previous 37 candidates you've interviewed.
  3. If you reach the last candidate without finding anyone better than those in the first 37%, you would hire the last person (since you must make a choice).

This strategy gives you the best mathematical chance (about 37%) of hiring the top candidate from the pool.

While this example is an exaggeration (in the real world you will choose from several candidates at a time), it demonstrates the core of the rule, going by statistics is very likely that you will not find anything better even if you exhaust all options available to you.

Good engineers people exemplify this principle. They know that sometimes you have to make a decision and move forward. They understand that time is a precious resource, and dilly-dallying can end up costing more than the potential difference between the options on the table.

So unless you are engaged in a project that requires the kind of precision reserved for launching rockets to Mars, prioritize making fast, effective decisions over slow and perfect ones. In a constantly evolving world, being able to make decisions quickly is a competitive edge.