The two most powerful tools of thought, in my opinion, are the two questions: “What's the test?” and “What's the alternative?”.
It's easy to complain about anything. The problem is, complaining is also inconsequential.
Dissatisfaction is only ever useful when coupled with a proposed alternative and an argument for how it can be expected to be better.
Say I don't like looking up the weather forecast to check for rain because I'm annoyed it is often wrong.
When planning outdoor activities, there are two alternatives: I either roll the dice or I check the forecast.
The test is, compared to never checking it, “Is the weather forecast useful more often than not?”
Weather forecasts aren't perfect and, in general, no solution is ever perfect for every case.
To be blunt, besides mathematical problems, there are often no solutions: only alternatives, which present different trade-offs.
Alternatives can be evaluated qualitatively, by estimating hypothetical outcomes, and quantitatively, by evaluating actual outcomes in controlled experiments.
More generally, instead of absolute platitudes like “X is good” and “Y is bad”, it's often more useful to establish nuance: “X is good, compared to Y, if we consider Z to be important”.
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Hi, I'm Victor -- a Brazilian computer engineer at Microsoft with 7+ years of industry experience architecting and building highly polished software. I enjoy deep technical dives, hard problems, and working across all layers of the stack. My work centers on robust, cloud-based, distributed systems and web-based applications that serve millions of users.
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