‘9790722, 810 AM {8 Ant-Patioms Every Programmer Should Be Aware Of we were asked to vote. | thought it would be most efficient to vote for the same color we had decided on in the meeting before, but it turned out | was always in the minority! We finally chose red. (It came out blue.)” — Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? What is it? Tendency to spend excessive amounts of time debating and deciding on trivial and often subjective issues Why it's bad It’s a waste of time, Poul-Henning Kamp goes into depth in an excellent email here, How to avoid it Encourage team members to be aware of this tendency, and to prioritize reaching a decision (vote, flip a coin, etc, if you have to) when you notice it. Consider A/B testing later to revisit the decision, when it is meaningful to do so (e.g. deciding between two different UI designs), instead of further internal debating. Richard Feynman was not a fan of bikeshedding, Examples and signs Spending hours or days debating over what background color to use in your app, or whether to put a button on the left or the right of the UI, or to use tabs instead of spaces for indentation in your code base. The tricky part hitpss/sahandsaba convnine-ant-paltoms-overy-programmor-should-be-aware-of-wih-exampls hil 3126