Why “It Depends” Is a Mark of Expertise, Not Indecision

In the high-stakes world of software engineering, architectural design, and organizational leadership, there is perhaps no phrase more polarizing than “it depends.”

To a junior developer looking for a roadmap, it sounds like an evasion. To a project manager staring at a looming deadline, it sounds like a delay tactic. To a stakeholder looking for a "yes" or "no," it sounds like a lack of conviction. We live in a culture that fetishizes certainty. We reward the person who stands up in the meeting and points decisively toward a single technology stack, a single methodology, or a single timeline.

Yet, as systems grow in complexity, the most dangerous person in the room is often the one who is 100% certain. This article explores why the phrase “it depends” is not a sign of a wavering mind, but rather the hallmark of a seasoned expert who understands that in the real world, there are no solutions — only trade-offs.

The Answer Everyone Distrusts

When a stakeholder asks, "Should we migrate to microservices?" and the principal architect responds with "It depends," a palpable tension often enters the room. This friction stems from a fundamental disconnect between how we perceive intelligence and how complexity actually functions.

The Frustration of Ambiguity We are biologically wired to seek certainty. In an ancestral environment, quick decisions often meant the difference between survival and catastrophe. This evolutionary baggage translates poorly to technical systems. When an expert says “it depends,” they are refusing to give the dopamine hit that comes with a "simple" answer. This triggers suspicion: Do they actually know what they’re doing? Are they hiding something? Are they just trying to avoid being held accountable if things go wrong?

The Cult of the "Fast Answer" Our corporate cultures often mistake speed for competence. We admire the "decisive leader" who makes gut calls in seconds. However, in engineering, a fast answer is frequently a wrong answer that simply hasn't met its consequences yet. The bias toward certainty ignores the fact that software is not a static object; it is a living system influenced by team topology, market pressure, legacy debt, and fluctuating scales.

Confidence vs. Correctness There is a cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where those with the least expertise often display the most confidence because they lack the "meta-knowledge" to see what they don't know. An expert’s "it depends" is a manifestation of the opposite: the more you know, the more variables you see. The expert isn't being indecisive; they are being honest about the multi-dimensional nature of the problem.

The Fallacy of Universal Best Practices

The software industry loves best practices. We document them, teach them, automate them, and enforce them. Best practices promise safety. They suggest that if we follow the rule, we avoid failure.

The problem is not that best practices are useless. The problem is that they are contextual truths, often misapplied as universal laws.

Rules like:

• “Always keep methods short.”
• “Never share databases.”
• “Always prefer eventual consistency.”
• “Microservices scale better.”
• “Premature optimization is evil.”

Each of these statements is defensible in some contexts and harmful in others. At small scale, they may add unnecessary complexity. At large scale, ignoring them may create catastrophic risk. The rule itself is not wrong; the assumption that it applies everywhere is.

Words like always and never break down under scale, organizational diversity, and real operational constraints. They fail because they remove the very thing that engineering requires most: judgment.

There is also a subtle but important distinction between guidance and guarantees. Guidance helps you think. Guarantees promise outcomes. Many best practices are framed—and consumed—as guarantees. Follow the rule, and things will be fine. Reality does not work that way.

Experienced engineers understand that best practices are starting points, not conclusions. They are hypotheses to be tested against context, not answers to be memorized.

When someone says “it depends,” they are often pushing back against the false comfort of universal rules.

What Experts Actually Do When They Decide

Contrary to popular belief, senior engineers do not make decisions faster because they are more decisive. They make decisions differently because they evaluate constraints before they evaluate solutions.

When faced with a problem, experienced engineers instinctively scan for context:

• What is the current scale, and how fast is it changing?
• What are the operational realities?
• How reversible is this decision?
• Who will live with the consequences, and for how long?
• Where is the real cost — now or later?

This process is rarely visible. To an observer, it looks like hesitation. In reality, it is rapid internal trade-off analysis built on years of pattern recognition.

A useful way to understand expert decision-making is through trade-off scanning. Before committing, experts implicitly assess:

• Cost: Development effort, operational overhead, cognitive load.
• Reversibility: Can we undo this decision cheaply if it turns out to be wrong?
• Blast radius: If this fails, how much of the system or organization does it affect?

Junior engineers often jump to solutions because solutions feel productive. Experts delay solutions because premature commitment is expensive. They ask better questions, not faster answers.

“It depends” is often shorthand for I need to understand the constraints before I can responsibly answer.

“It Depends” as Compressed Experience

If you could visualize the mind of an expert during a technical discussion, you wouldn't see a straight line. You would see a branching decision tree with thousands of nodes, each representing a past failure, a learned lesson, or a documented edge case.

Conditional Reasoning

Expertise is essentially a massive library of "if-then" statements.

• If we need high availability and we have a small team, then we should use a managed service.
• But if cost is the primary driver and we have in-house Linux experts, then self-hosting might be viable. The phrase "it depends" is the verbal shorthand for this massive internal computation.

Pattern Recognition and Nuance

Over years of practice, engineers stop seeing "New Technology X" as a revolution and start seeing it as a variation of "Old Technology Y" with a different set of trade-offs. This pattern recognition allows them to see the nuance that others miss. They know that "simple" answers often hide complex assumptions that will surface six months into the project as technical debt.

Simple answers are attractive because they hide assumptions. They assume scale, stability, team maturity, operational competence, and future requirements that may not exist. Experts recognize these hidden assumptions immediately, which is why they resist giving definitive answers without context.

When “It Depends” Is a Red Flag

To be fair to the skeptics, "it depends" is not always a mark of expertise. Like any powerful tool, it can be misused. To maintain the integrity of the phrase, we must recognize when it is being used as a shield rather than a lens.

Indecision Disguised as Sophistication

Sometimes, people say "it depends" because they are genuinely stuck in analysis paralysis. They are so afraid of making a wrong choice that they refuse to make any choice at all. This isn't expertise; it's a lack of courage.

Avoiding Accountability

In toxic corporate environments, "it depends" can be used as a "get out of jail free" card. If a project fails, the person can point back to their ambiguity and say, "I never said it would definitely work; I said it depended on the circumstances." This is an evasion of the responsibility that comes with seniority.

Distinguishing Judgment from Evasion

How can you tell the difference?

• Expertise: "It depends on [Factor A]. If [A] is true, we go with [Option X]. If [A] is false, we go with [Option Y]."
• Evasion: "It depends. There are a lot of factors. It’s hard to say right now. We need more meetings." Expertise provides a path forward based on conditions; evasion provides a loop.

Expert engineers use “it depends” as an opening, not a conclusion. They follow it with structure: It depends on scale, consistency requirements, operational maturity, and failure tolerance. Even if a final decision is deferred, the reasoning progresses.

The difference lies in direction. Judgment moves the conversation forward by framing the problem. Evasion keeps it safely unresolved.

Making Context Explicit Without Losing Authority

The challenge for the expert is to communicate nuance without sounding like they lack a plan. The goal is to turn "it depends" into Structured Reasoning.

Naming the Variables

The moment you say "it depends," you must immediately follow up with the what.

• "It depends on our expected traffic growth."
• "It depends on whether we prioritize time-to-market or long-term maintainability." By naming the variables, you invite the stakeholders into the decision-making process. You aren't being vague; you are being precise about the uncertainty.

Defining Boundaries and Assumptions

Experts define the "envelope" within which a decision is valid. "This architecture will serve us well as long as our data fits on a single node. If we exceed 1TB, it depends — we will either need to shard or move to a NoSQL solution." This approach builds immense trust because it shows you are thinking about the future failure points.

Helping Stakeholders Understand the "Why"

Your job as an expert is not just to provide the answer, but to educate the organization on the landscape of the problem. When you explain the dependencies, you empower the business to make an informed choice about which risks they are willing to take. You move from being a "code monkey" to a "strategic partner."

Organizational Cost of Absolutism

When organizations punish "it depends" and reward "certainty," they create a culture of Absolutism. This has real, measurable costs.

Suppressing Learning and Adaptability

If a team is told they must "always use Microservices" because it's the company standard, they stop looking for the best tool for the specific job. They stop learning. They become order-takers rather than problem-solvers. A healthy organization rewards contextual thinking because it allows the company to pivot when reality changes.

The Danger of Cargo-Culting

Absolutism leads to "Google-envy." Companies with 50 employees try to implement the infrastructure of a company with 50,000 employees. This results in massive over-engineering, wasted capital, and a system so complex that no one on the small team actually understands how it works.

Rewarding the "Nuanced" Team

Mature engineering organizations recognize that the best teams are the ones that can say, "We used a monolith for the MVP because we needed speed, but now that we're scaling the payment module, it's time to break that piece out." These teams treat architecture as a series of evolving decisions, not a set of stone tablets.

Closing Reframe: Expertise Is Conditional by Nature

Certainty is easy. You can find certainty in a textbook, a marketing brochure, or a "Top 10 Frameworks" blog post. But judgment? Judgment is earned. It is the result of scars from past outages, the debris of failed migrations, and the hard-won wisdom of seeing "perfect" plans meet the messy reality of human users and shifting markets.

Respect for Reality

When an engineer says “it depends,” they are expressing a profound respect for the complexity of reality. They are acknowledging that they do not control all the variables. They are refusing to lie to you for the sake of a comfortable meeting.

The Best Engineers Know When Answers Change

The ultimate mark of expertise is the ability to change your mind when the "depends" part of the equation changes. Yesterday’s "correct" answer is today's "technical debt" because the context shifted.

In engineering, the most honest answer is often conditional—because reality is. Next time you hear "it depends," don't roll your eyes. Instead, lean in and ask: "On what?" That is where the real work begins.

Final Insight

In the world of high-level engineering and leadership, certainty is a snapshot, but nuance is the movie. Embracing the "it depends" mindset allows us to build systems that aren't just "right" for a moment, but resilient for a lifetime.

Disclaimer: This post provides general information and is not tailored to any specific individual or entity. It includes only publicly available information for general awareness purposes. Do not warrant that this post is free from errors or omissions. Views are personal.