> They actually said that to me: it makes the code messy so they don't want to do it. I'm going to give one possible interpretation (my own) of the sentiment I

> They actually said that to me: it makes the code messy so they don't want to do it. I'm going to give one possible interpretation (my own) of the sentiment I believe the engineers were trying to get across with the statement "it makes the code messy". Functionality is an asset, and code is a liability. Minimizing the amount of code and making the code "less messy" is a way of reducing that liability. That doesn't excuse not checking for certain error conditions, but I think it's important to point out that non "messy code" has merit on its own. On the topic of effective error handling, the number of possible invalid states in a program (especially dealing with the messy real world) tends to be combinatoric. Error checking is vital to building a successful application, but my experience is that in practice it quickly becomes impractical to have _total_ potential error coverage. At some point tradeoffs need to be made, and effective engineering is the art of evaluating those tradeoffs. > "And yet, here we are, because it DID happen." I'm not trying to imply the author may be suffering from hindsight bias, I don't have any information that could tell me that. I do know that in similar situations I've been in in the past I feel like I've suffered from hindsight bias significantly. Here's a great article on hindsight bias that I think about often. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fkM9XsNvXdYH6PPAx/hindsight-bias https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fkM9XsNvXdYH6PPAx/hindsight-... The pivotal section from the lesswrong 2.0 article for me > Viewing history through the lens of hindsight, we vastly underestimate the cost of effective safety precautions. In 1986, the Challenger exploded for reasons traced to an O-ring losing flexibility at low temperature. There were warning signs of a problem with the O-rings. But preventing the Challenger disaster would have required, not attending to the problem with the O-rings, but attending to every warning sign which seemed as severe as the O-ring problem, without benefit of hindsight. It could have been done, but it would have required a general policy much more expensive than just fixing the O-Rings.