I used to imagine from the outside that such places must have highly elaborate testing regimes, backup systems, and genius-level developers. However, my lived experience is that they're just really good / disciplined about reverting to the previous known good state and backtracking. Much like a source control system lets you undo a bad change and go back to a known good solution, they do that with their releases and entire system.

Some anti-patterns are "roll-forward" with a fix for a problem (if you failed to reason about the original change with the problem properly, how can you be confident that your "roll-forward" / hotfix / patch will work? Roll it back, try again in dev, roll forward again.

This also means avoiding changes that can't be rolled back (because they wrote data in a new format that the previous version doesn't understand) wherever possible (and it usually is).

There are some one-way doors (cutting a long piece of timber), or doors that inflict a big cost if you back-track through them (gluing a precisely cut joint), and you're well served by minimizing them and planning your operations to make sure those ones safe.

So, you 'sneak up' on a cut line incrementally rather than cut directly to it, allowing you to check fit as you go and ensure your final, precise cut is removing not a big, clumsy chunk but a tiny controllable shaving.

Because that company talks about one way and two way doors a lot.

Another tongue in cheek line from the source is this:

> First off, I’d suggest buying “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, and NOT read it. Burn it, it’s a great symbolic gesture.

> the wrong one and the right one.

The context comes right before it:

> if you were wrong (and you will be wrong), you can always undo the damage later by backtracking

Ie: do a (small) wrong, then do a (small) right to fix it. That's my reading of it anyway.

You get to wield the power of being the person who makes big decisions, some might say the finest decisions: decision 1 pick wrong path - decision 2 backtrack and pick correct path.

I guess in contrast to the person who wont decide - everyone has stood around in a meeting room staring at the senior manager fumbling with the most basic of choices.

Having the knowledge and conviction that it doesnt really matter anyway makes decision 1 appear decisive and strong. If it turns out to be wrong and you have to backtrack, you arrive in the correct place, and can take credit for correcting the course.