One common mistake I see often is in step 1, understand the problem. Assuming the problem is not understanding the problem. I'm reminded of an issue my old bos

One common mistake I see often is in step 1, understand the problem. Assuming the problem is not understanding the problem. I'm reminded of an issue my old boss had at his house. His power bill was raising at an alarming rate, he assumed it was the central hvac, spent a few hundred getting it tuned up, no effect. Spent a bunch of weekends replacing weather stripping, adding sealant, etc. minor effect. I came in with an app that lets you estimate current power usage by looking at the power meter[1], and killed circit breakers one by one while measuring current usage. The cause turned out to be a malfunctioning swamp pump he forgot the house even had. He assumed he knew the problem, by focusing on the common cause of such problems, he assumed wrong, and because of this, every solution was addressing a different problem than the one he was trying to solve. - Another example is the story[2] of the old as fuck ibm mainframe that was powering a website that would take on the order of 10s of seconds to return data. Everybody assumed all of the delays was to be blamed by the "legacy hardware". Every solution pitched involved migrating off of it, a daunting task no manager wanted to green light. Finally they brought a consultant in to figure out what was going on. Turned out it returned data in 6ms or less, the cause of the lag was the java app that would read the output from the mainframe to transform and send to the browser. They could have solved the problem years ago if they had just actually tried to understand the problem. - [1] (power meters have a thing that happens every n watts, along with a decal that tells you what n is, so you can determine current power usage by measuring time between these n watts, there is a handy dandy app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sam.instantaneous_power_timer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sam.instan...) [2] 7074 says Hello World