What I Learned from a Technical Debate with My Project Manager

A few days ago, I had a discussion with my project manager. We were talking about a decision he made choosing option B, which in my view felt like double the work and higher resource usage.

So, I asked him:

Why are we going with option B instead of something simpler?

He calmly explained the current situation, and after hearing him out, I realized his decision made sense of our context.

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Here's the situation:

At the time, another high-priority feature was in development. Meanwhile, a different division wanted to start building a feature that relied on data from a third-party API. I was assigned to build a POC (Proof of Concept) for this.

When I saw the approach, I was confused and maybe a bit too eager to argue. So I brought up my concerns and asked why we didn't take a different route.

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Here were the options:

1.Option A
Store the data in our own database, with a structure similar to the third-party API.
✅Fast, simple, and Efficient
❌But the data isn't stable yet, and it may change often, leading to future maintenance headaches.

2.Option B
Consume a large JSON file and filter it using code (with fuse.js to speed things up).
❌Risk of large file sizes and longer load times
✅My workaround: Load the JSON once on server startup, store it in RAM, and refresh it only when we redeploy.

3.Option C
Directly call the third-party API every time.
❌Bad idea. It depends on the third-party server's performance and could slow everything down.

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My PM then explained the full context:

•The third-party data is still unstable (POC)

•Going with Option A would slow us down in the future

•Option C is too risky and unreliable
So Option B, while imperfect, was the best choice for now.

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What I learned:

This experience taught me something valuable about decision-making as a developer. Sometimes the "less elegant" solution is actually the smarter one, if you consider long term impact, maintenance, and stability.

Maybe this conversation didn't seem important at first, but for me, it was a small moment of growth.

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Have you ever experienced something similar?

Let me know. I'd love to hear how you make tough technical decisions👨‍💻👨‍💻

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