Past Challenges

You come home and your keys aren't in their usual spot. You always put them in the same place. You live alone. The door was locked when you arrived.

You manage a team of 5 engineers. A high-priority project is failing. You can either: (A) let the team keep trying and risk a public launch failure that could harm all 5 careers, or (B) bring in an outside contractor immediately, which will visibly signal to leadership that the team couldn't deliver, likely harming one junior engineer who led the work.

A tech company promotes its best individual-contributor engineer to engineering manager. Six months later, the team's velocity is down, the new manager is stressed and underperforming, and a key engineer on the team has quit. The company asks: what went wrong?

A hospital tests all incoming patients for a rare condition that affects 1 in 1,000 people. The test is 99% accurate — it correctly identifies positive cases 99% of the time, and correctly rules out negatives 99% of the time. A patient just tested positive.

You're about to leave for work. The weather app says there's a 40% chance of rain. You have a 20-minute walk each way. If you bring an umbrella and it doesn't rain, you carry it all day for nothing. If you don't bring one and it rains, you get soaked.