> If it doesn't make sense to a lot of people after a lot of thought, and there's a lot of rationalization required to plug that gap, it's probably not working out very well.
This makes me think of an interesting/bothersome phenomenon I've seen a lot in web development (it seems to be more present here than in other domains—but I won't pretend to have any profound objectivity on the subject). People speak confidently about rationales for architectural decisions—and at first it sounds coherent and persuasive (especially paired with their confidence), but if you start trying to test it, considering specific cases, or more generally just drilling into the specific meanings of the very abstract statements—then you are likely to discover that the supposed rationale is really a justification.
I'm guessing this comes about because decisions about technology often have to be made with time constraints, and the time required to really investigate the set of viable alternatives exceeds what's available. So you're left with a partially completed search process, where the engineer has told himself a story about why choice X was the best, based on promising looking aspects of the search so far completed.
At this point, you're sort of committed to the decision you made, so you have to continue justifying it to yourself and others; and since there isn't necessarily a valid justification, the one you employ has to succeed in part through its obfuscation and your rhetoric.
This makes me think of an interesting/bothersome phenomenon I've seen a lot in web development (it seems to be more present here than in other domains—but I won't pretend to have any profound objectivity on the subject). People speak confidently about rationales for architectural decisions—and at first it sounds coherent and persuasive (especially paired with their confidence), but if you start trying to test it, considering specific cases, or more generally just drilling into the specific meanings of the very abstract statements—then you are likely to discover that the supposed rationale is really a justification.
I'm guessing this comes about because decisions about technology often have to be made with time constraints, and the time required to really investigate the set of viable alternatives exceeds what's available. So you're left with a partially completed search process, where the engineer has told himself a story about why choice X was the best, based on promising looking aspects of the search so far completed.
At this point, you're sort of committed to the decision you made, so you have to continue justifying it to yourself and others; and since there isn't necessarily a valid justification, the one you employ has to succeed in part through its obfuscation and your rhetoric.