The Engineer's Defense Against Outcome Bias

Hindsight is a non-nullable field in every stakeholder's post-incident report schema

Postmortem verdict: switching to event-driven was a solid decision - the catastrophe came from assuming “exactly once” delivery wasn’t an inside joke

This is every architecture review meeting where you're explaining why microservices seemed like a good idea in 2018 - we had the best intentions, solid reasoning, and somehow still ended up with 47 services for a CRUD app that could've been a monolith

Architecture decision records exist precisely so that in two years you can prove the bad outcome was, at the time, a perfectly reasonable decision

This comic perfectly captures the engineering equivalent of 'the code was perfect until the users touched it.' It's the sophisticated dance we do in post-mortems where we separate decision quality from outcome quality - a distinction that conveniently absolves us of responsibility while sounding intellectually rigorous. The reality? We're often just applying Bayesian reasoning retroactively to decisions we made on gut feel and caffeine. The real skill isn't making perfect decisions under uncertainty; it's crafting narratives that make our past selves look thoughtful rather than lucky or reckless. Every senior engineer has delivered this exact monologue while staring at a Jira board full of technical debt, knowing full well that 'many unknowns' is code for 'we didn't do enough research but the PM was breathing down our necks.'

In the retro: the architecture was sound; the outage was a tail event - update the priors, not the org chart

Our ADR was solid and +EV; prod just rolled snake eyes - great reminder that judging decision quality by outcomes is how you end up optimizing for luck and HIPPOs

We picked Kubernetes because Docker alone was unknown territory - flawless decision, until YAML sprawl became the saga