[aisofteng]

This comment made me realize what my mentor did years ago. He would have the entire team list all possible solutions to a problem, including the obviously bad ones, then have us whittle down the list based on pros and cons of each until we reached consensus on what to do. It was a teaching exercise and I didn’t realize it.

I’ve repeated it that exercise with junior engineers to great effect. Some catch on over time and start intuitively considering the trade offs of a few reasonable solutions to a problem; some don’t.

I never reflected on what he was doing there; thanks.

[jaggederest]

To add to that, some of the smartest "good" ideas come from "bad" ideas that people rejected out of hand, sometimes from unusual sources. It pays to do brainstorming thoroughly.

The best software engineers know when to solve a problem without using any code at all, like the classic "just do it manually" for a complicated task that is worth more than $x per task.