A lot of the discussion here seems to rest on the idea that there is a "right" option that was ignored in favor of a "wrong" option. I've rarely seen that be t

A lot of the discussion here seems to rest on the idea that there is a "right" option that was ignored in favor of a "wrong" option. I've rarely seen that be the case. Setting aside politics - the "right decision" would be bad for a team with a very influential manager, say - there's still plenty of extra nuance to purely technical choices. "This will break at some point but probably by then we'll have gotten a lot of value of it and we can afford to fix it then." "This might break but there's a 70% chance it won't and it would cost twice as much to do it the safer way." "This will probably break in this specific way, but we don't understand the alternative technology well enough to even predict the odds of it breaking." And so on. Bad leaders aren't often transparent about all those sorts of considerations, so if you find yourself in that situation, be wary. But if you aren't making your arguments in a tradeoff-aware way, your "I told you so" may not be very useful.