The Interplay of Failure, Learning, and Options
We talk about failures a lot. Fail Fast! Safe to Fail! Learn from Failure! One would think that people hire us to screw things up. Why the fascination with failures? Why not talk about successes? Admittedly, the dialog is off-base a bit. We're not really keen on failure at all. We don't like to be wrong, and would hesitate to ship a product if we knew it was the wrong thing to build, or it was built in the wrong way. There are problems that can be solved without error by one person who thinks about them for a little while and types in the code that solves the problem. The term for this kind of problem is uninteresting problems. These problems are smaller than one brain, or else the solution is already well-known. We tend to either shuffle this problems off on the noobies, or else we scribble down the answer and move on without any real sense of accomplishment. Any problem that is interesting will involve experimentation and learning. Those problems cy...