Compared to most other people and industries techies are actually relatively good on this front, however I still agree with the article that there is a lot of c

Compared to most other people and industries techies are actually relatively good on this front, however I still agree with the article that there is a lot of cargo culting. The author mentions a few reasons why this occurs, but I think it's primarily due to time constraints. Not even "I have deadlines", but "I cannot physically audit everything". You simply don't have enough time to independently verify every decision that has made in the codebase, and even if you did by the time you were finished there would have been new edits and additions. Chesterton's fence also applies here. A decision made on a whim might take you hours to investigate, gather context and decide whether it was appropriate or not. --- Something the author doesn't mention which I think matters a lot here is the level of impact the decision has. Deciding what to name a variable? Unimportant and reversible. Low impact on other people. Deciding which framework to use? Important and irreversible. High impact on other people. Having the correct context and a good mental model for making decisions can help you a lot here. Outsourcing your thinking is useful and correct for a lot of things, but sometimes it can be terrible. Figure out which problems you cannot safely outsource and spend your brain power on them. They tend to be things which are core to your work, so investigating them almost always gives you valuable knowledge and context that you can share with the rest of your team!