We dismiss the ideas because they contradict our priors. Knowing that someone else holds them adds no new information. Strong objective evidence is rarely avail

We dismiss the ideas because they contradict our priors. Knowing that someone else holds them adds no new information. Strong objective evidence is rarely available. But seeing that an opinion is correlated with superior skill will tend to make people take it seriously. (Sometimes too seriously! Why does everybody cargo cult Google?) For example, several Amazonians have joined my team and been horrified at the lack of central tracking and control over sprint tasks and productivity KPIs. I like my autonomy. I like not taking orders from JIRA. There is a reason I don’t work at Amazon. My team already ships, and well. So I am not excited about their campaigns. I am not a fan of test coverage as a KPI. I’ve seen lots of high-coverage but meaningless and brittle test suites, full of copy-paste and implementation-coupled mock expectations, do more harm than good. At the same time, I find that covering increasingly obscure “if err != nil { return nil, err }” blocks is a waste of time, so my stats aren’t always high. But I have seen SREs I deeply respect, people who have stopped major train wrecks and held insightful technical conversations, decide to use it in their recommendations. Because of that, I’m grudgingly coming around. That’s so much more convincing than the Sr. Staff and above saying “let’s set a minimum coverage threshold for the org [because KPIs and standards are inherently good].” That just reads as careerist sucking up to management. It's people who haven't touched code in 10 years and don't even know the language we use, claiming their judgement is so good that they don't even need to look at a situation to decide how it should be handled. They are the wrong messengers, even for a right idea.