Part of becoming a great engineer, in my limited experience, is developing a sense of taste for what problems are worth solving and which approaches to consider

Part of becoming a great engineer, in my limited experience, is developing a sense of taste for what problems are worth solving and which approaches to consider. The software we build ends up baking in those opinions: into the frameworks and libraries, into our philosophies, into the algorithms themselves, and ultimately into our culture. We end up with Rails whose claim to fame is being based, unabashedly, on its strong opinions. We end up with the LKML being what it is. We end up with ML algorithms with our biases built in. That's why our opinions are rather important. Our opinions signal our status to other groups. If you're an opinionated statically-typed functional programming aficionado it's quite likely you're not going to fit in with people who are serious adherents to object oriented programming. And you will find many people without any opinions or whose opinions lie somewhere in between. We can't avoid having them and it's important to be able to work with other programmers and so being able to set those things aside to focus on the customers' needs, the business context, and the well-being of your team takes precedence!