I am a mechanical engineer by trade. By "heuristics nobody really understands" I do mean just that. Some of it may be grounded in experimentation, some of it mi

I am a mechanical engineer by trade. By "heuristics nobody really understands" I do mean just that. Some of it may be grounded in experimentation, some of it might be grounded in data sets collected by god knows whom go knows when, some of it might just be "do it this way because the graybeards/application manuals say so". So on and so forth. I find that a lot of software people have a highly idealized notion of how the "traditional" engineering disciplines work. Generalizing strict safety procedures found in some niche industries like aerospace to other fields where they don't exist. The truth is that working under time or budget pressures and without fully understanding what you're doing is extremely prevalent outside of software too.