Test your assumptions

Test your assumptions.

I’m not going to sit here and say “when you assume you make…”, well you know the rest. You have to make assumptions to make decisions and that’s okay.

Now that we have the obvious argument out of the way, let’s address properly testing your assumptions. A great way is to put them out there. Working in business and especially startups, you test a lot of assumptions in the market. That’s how you find out the problems people have and what they are willing to pay you to solve for them (if at all).

Another really great way is junior employees, and in my case junior engineers. Junior engineers have this amazing ability to actually not know things, and that’s wonderful in some cases. They ask the questions everyone else has just made assumptions around. They ask the “dumb” questions that should make you go “wait a minute…”. It’s probably not “dumb”, but even if it is, that doesn’t always mean it is invaluable. Sure, sometimes you’ll have a good answer/explanation, and it will just be a great teaching moment for them (and others who were too senior and afraid to ask). In other cases, you’ll start explaining it and find yourself thinking (or saying out loud) “well maybe this assumption isn’t true, we should test it”.

Before they asked, you weren’t even considering whether that should be tested. You have the years of experience, so you know the answer, right? Maybe, but it is unlikely you always have the exactly right answer, even with all of the experience. You can learn that the hard way in the market, or by a junior asking a simple question. One of these is significantly cheaper than the other.

I’ll let you decide if all of this “replacing junior engineers with AI” decision making is a good one. But I hope I’ve made a strong enough argument for juniors (albeit simplistic, but I really don’t think it is that complicated of an equation). And I didn’t even talk about the situation 5 years in the future where you have no mid-level or senior engineers because you didn’t hire and train juniors.

Put people and humans first.