Shawna Martell on Hidden Decisions You Don't Know You're Making at QCon San Francisco

On November 18th, one of Imprint’s Principal Engineers, Shawna Martell, spoke at QCon about Hidden Decisions You Don’t Know You’re Making. The core argument is that the most consequential decisions in engineering organizations aren’t made in architecture reviews or planning sessions. They’re made invisibly, embedded in your metrics, your defaults, and your team’s everyday behaviors.

The example that stuck with me: slow CI/CD pipelines don’t just waste time, they reshape how engineers work. When the pipeline is slow, engineers start bundling PRs together. Bundled PRs are too large to review carefully, so they get rubber-stamped. Rubber-stamped reviews erode quality. You never decided to have lower quality code reviews, but you’re getting them anyway because you accepted a slow pipeline. That’s the hidden decision. Shawna’s other point that I keep coming back to: “Sometimes, as engineers, the right decision for us is not to build.” Every decision to build something new is also a decision to maintain it forever, but we rarely acknowledge that tradeoff explicitly.

The talk is a good framework for surfacing these invisible choices. You can read the full coverage on InfoQ: The Hidden Decisions That Shape Engineering Teams.