Why I made Engineering Enigmas

Engineering Enigmas is simplified Tarot reading for working engineers.Any time you feel stuck and need help in finding a way forward, open that web page and follow the advice given. You may have to be creative in how you interpret the advice in order for it to apply to your situation – that’s intentional.Don’t refresh the page until you get advice that suits you better. Take what you are given and roll with it.… wait, what? But why?Humans hate deciding things randomly but do it anyway Humans like to be seen as eitherrational, analytical people capable of strategising their decisions down to the last detail; orin tune with their inner emotions and intuition, capable of understanding exactly all nuances of how they feel about alternatives.That’s what we tell ourselves, but we are never that analytical or intuitive. In its place, we have used randomness to decide things since time immemorial. When we do it, we do it in a way that allows us to hide that it has happened – even from ourselves. Here are three of the ways.We have entire professions legitimising arbitrary decisionsMany of our decisions have no strong rationale either way.Which of these four alternatives should we try first to improve our profitability?Which cloud provider should we rely on for primary services?Which job offer should I accept?How much time should we spend on paying down technical debt?A decision needs to be made, but among decent alternatives, we can’t really single out one clearly superior option. This means whatever we decide, it will ultimately be arbitrary.Admitting to an arbitrary decision makes us look not-analytical and not-intuitive, so we look to others to validate our decision and lend it legitimacy. This is the reason we pay astrologers, witch-doctors, macroeconomists, and management consultants; they are all people that generate decisions with the rational capacity of a pair of dice, but we pretend they know what they are doing so their support turns an arbitrary decision into a le