Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things
This gets at the heart of one of my big gripes about how we talk about engineering and technology.<p>Often a fancy new thing is introduced with a very long list of pros: "fast, scalable, flexible, safe". Rarely, is a list of cons included: "brittle, tough learning curve, complicated, new failure modes".<p>This practice always strikes me as odd because the first law of engineering is "everything is a trade-off". So, if I am going to do my job as an engineer I really need to understand both the "pros" and "cons". I need to understand what trade-off I'm making to get the "pros". And only then can I reason about wether the cost is justified.