Adrian Reid recounts a troubleshooting episode with his trading automation: after running automated systems he encountered failures and, over roughly two hours and "about 15 leaps of observation, logic and curiosity," traced the issue to an innocuous cause (a switch). He argues that curiosity—investigating what goes wrong—rather than assuming things will go smoothly, is the key to handling trading/automation challenges.
Today I was playing with the automation, trying to put a few more of my systems into it, and I ran it. Ah, that didn't work. Crap. What happened? And so I played around with it. Oh, the data's not updated. Oh, and then it's just like this whole cascade of. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, I wonder why that happened. Oh, look at that. Oh, that was different than I expected. And I was like, took about like 15 leaps of observation, logic and curiosity to get to the root cause of the problem. Holy. If I was.
Operating under the belief that everything was going to go smoothly, I would have given up. This took about two, about two hours to figure out the problem. And it was something completely innocuous at the end of the day. But if I was operating under the belief that everything was going to go smoothly, I would have had the shittiest day in history because it was just frustration after frustration of things not working. But instead I took this idea of curiosity and gone, oh, huh? What? Oh, what happened? Where's, you know, and just got to the root of the problem eventually. And then it was just a matter of going, ah, okay, I just need to flick this little switch and everything works again. So I think that curiosity rather than expectation, that curiosity about what's going wrong, rather than expectation that things are going to go right for me is the key.
