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Held too many strong opinions for really no good reason other than technical "virtue signaling" of sorts. At the time, it felt so right. I had all the perfect,

Held too many strong opinions for really no good reason other than technical "virtue signaling" of sorts. At the time, it felt so right. I had all the perfect, rational arguments. Years passed, experience and nuance decayed the strength of my opinions, and it was fascinating to realize -- even where I was perfectly right, I was mostly only right accidentally, my arguments were just a story to fit the narrative, never really fully internalized.

lemarchr 5y ago
This is frequently still beneficial for the organisation, even when you're doing it for the wrong reasons, and is almost a necessary stepping stone towards achieving true understanding. It's hard to identify nuance until you discover some strongly held belief doesn't apply as well you once thought. But I suppose if you could go back and do it differently, you would, so I can appreciate why you consider this to be a mistake.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  One important distinction is between holding strong opinions personally vs being in a position of authority and forcing those (strongly held, weakly justified) opinions on the rest of the team. That’s a quick way to erode morale. Flip side of the coin: having strong opinions but being open to discussion and reconsidering your position in the face of new evidence is a great way to earn respect.
  - justrudd 5y ago
    “Strong opinions loosely held”. I learned this at about the 15 year mark of my career. Made the next 10 much easier.
rramadass 5y ago
Great phrasing!
iKevinShah 5y ago
> Held too many strong opinions for really no good reason other than technical "virtue signaling" of sorts. Oh my god this is so true for me too. I had really strong opinions on so many things that if I put aside my ignorant opinions about them, I / my life / career would have been better. Strong opinions I had included I don't need to use OOP in PHP (had to until too late), Bitcoin is worthless who would ever invest in it (had to until too late / costly), NoSQL is just useless, what's so wrong with PostgreSQL (had to swallow my words until I used Redis), so many more. The current opinion I am holding is "who needs Kubernetes" when individual VMs do the trick and slowly but steadily I feel these words will be regretted too.
- alexchamberlain 5y ago
  Is Redis really "NoSQL" in the hype sense? Redis is a great, in memory key-value store, but no one's arguing it replaces a relational database for relational models.
Aeolun 5y ago
I think this has changed in the other direction for me over time. I used to always question my own opinions, accept that others might have the better idea, only to see things spectacularly fail. Now I assume I’m right until someone proves me false. Still willing to accept other people’s opinions when I have no clue, but evidence seems to point towards my gut feeling being a better indicator of viability than whatever method those other people use.

lemarchr 5y ago

This is frequently still beneficial for the organisation, even when you're doing it for the wrong reasons, and is almost a necessary stepping stone towards achieving true understanding. It's hard to identify nuance until you discover some strongly held belief doesn't apply as well you once thought. But I suppose if you could go back and do it differently, you would, so I can appreciate why you consider this to be a mistake.

cellularmitosis 5y ago
One important distinction is between holding strong opinions personally vs being in a position of authority and forcing those (strongly held, weakly justified) opinions on the rest of the team. That’s a quick way to erode morale. Flip side of the coin: having strong opinions but being open to discussion and reconsidering your position in the face of new evidence is a great way to earn respect.
- justrudd 5y ago
  “Strong opinions loosely held”. I learned this at about the 15 year mark of my career. Made the next 10 much easier.

rramadass 5y ago

Great phrasing!

iKevinShah 5y ago

> Held too many strong opinions for really no good reason other than technical "virtue signaling" of sorts. Oh my god this is so true for me too. I had really strong opinions on so many things that if I put aside my ignorant opinions about them, I / my life / career would have been better. Strong opinions I had included I don't need to use OOP in PHP (had to until too late), Bitcoin is worthless who would ever invest in it (had to until too late / costly), NoSQL is just useless, what's so wrong with PostgreSQL (had to swallow my words until I used Redis), so many more. The current opinion I am holding is "who needs Kubernetes" when individual VMs do the trick and slowly but steadily I feel these words will be regretted too.

alexchamberlain 5y ago
Is Redis really "NoSQL" in the hype sense? Redis is a great, in memory key-value store, but no one's arguing it replaces a relational database for relational models.

Aeolun 5y ago

I think this has changed in the other direction for me over time. I used to always question my own opinions, accept that others might have the better idea, only to see things spectacularly fail. Now I assume I’m right until someone proves me false. Still willing to accept other people’s opinions when I have no clue, but evidence seems to point towards my gut feeling being a better indicator of viability than whatever method those other people use.