Having data is fine, but even the richest dataset is wide open to misinterpretation. This is even more true when the data is a snapshot of a compression of huma

Having data is fine, but even the richest dataset is wide open to misinterpretation. This is even more true when the data is a snapshot of a compression of human opinion and feelings. The interpretation of information collected from a survey such as '60% of developers I asked say..', even assuming it's statistically valid and reasonably accurate (which is not trivial to achieve), still involves a lot of assumption, intuition, and frankly guesswork about the real problems and facts of the situation. It might provide slightly more of a hint towards the facts than just blindly following a strategy based on vision alone, and there are many success stories of data-driven approaches that vastly outperform the predictions of human 'experts', but implicitly trusting that this will always be the case is probably unwise. I'm for data-driven decision making in general, just saying that it's never a magic bullet and is often not even an advantage (could indeed be the opposite) if done naively.