Comment by burakemir

Enjoyed this, but looking at these from manager decision scenario is of course going to bias towards the more subjective.

For a different scenario, imagine you operate a large distributed system and have been paged at 3 am because there is a problem. Besides taking steps to contain the fallout, you want to quickly locate the error and take steps to prevent this stuff from ever happening again.

Unlike a hiring decision, you want to propose measures such that a large number of people get to agree that the state of affairs will improve. It is a truism that we don't want software to fail, so considering expectations may not necessarily help here, and rationality would suggest to strive to achieve an "objective" improvement - and one that does not make the system harder to understand or invite new, different failures.

So all in all, I enjoyed this advocacy of Tellman's perspective, but it does not always seem appropriate to apply it and more meta than the others.