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> I’d rather someone give me opinions that I violently disagree with than for them to have no opinions at all. I've been a developer for 15 years... anybody el

> I’d rather someone give me opinions that I violently disagree with than for them to have no opinions at all. I've been a developer for 15 years... anybody else feel like the further they get into their career, the more they want to keep their opinions to themselves? I feel like as a junior dev I had way stronger opinions and I was a lot more vocal about them. Now, I still have opinions, but I've learned that nobody gives a damn about my opinions so I just keep them to myself.

JackFr 5y ago
I got dinged in a 360 review by peers for not advocating for my views more. I feel that if I present what I think we should do, and why I think it's the best alternative, I shouldn't have to get into a shouting match or even a debate. I don't take it personally if people disagree with me. If I've got the best ideas and my managers are ignoring them for the loudest ideas, that's on them, not me.
- noisy_boy 5y ago
  Maybe they are pissed that they cant drag you in the failures by saying "even X had the same opinion..."
davemo 5y ago
It comes in waves. I'm in my 22nd year of developing software and I can reflect on times when I felt incredibly confident and didn't shy away from sharing my opinions, and other times when I felt like it was better to remain silent because I had things to learn from others. There are times for both speaking and listening in our careers; as I've progressed further in my career I have felt it is often more valuable to exercise active listening.
jimmyvalmer 5y ago
Junior dev: Let's use this amazing algo I learned in school! Senior dev: This won't work but it's no use explaning why since they've made up their minds (as have I).
TameAntelope 5y ago
What a depressing reaction to adversity. An alternative reaction is to try and figure out why nobody cared, and get better at expressing yourself in ways that people will care.
allenu 5y ago
Same here. Been working professionally as a dev for 20 years and each year I care less and less about changing other people’s minds about architecture. Just this year I was working with another team that wanted to move to an architecture that I thought was overengineered for their specific problems. They shared with me an article about some company that was using it. I explained my experiences with such a pattern and where the pitfalls were, hoping their lead dev would think about it or discuss the pros and cons. Well, it was met with silence. They went ahead with their plan anyway. Too many times that’s happened in the work world, so at least now I don’t invest a lot of effort into changing minds. Best advice I’ve learned these last few years is don’t tie yourself to your work. If you’re opinionated about how to do things because you love designing software, that’s great, but you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed by how things really get done.
d23 5y ago
I pick my battles pretty judiciously these days. I've learned that a huge amount of what people talk about doing ends up going nowhere anyway, so why burn the energy and look disagreeable? A lot of people with bad ideas also aren't very good at getting things done.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Having opinions is good, but only if they’re genuinely informed opinions and everyone is willing to disagree and commit. I’ve worked with too many people who think that their opinions are their identity and defended them as such. A difference of opinions shouldn’t become an excuse to go to war with your coworkers or argue endlessly instead of getting things done. One of my worst work experiences was with a team of developers who were old friends from a college debate team. We could never have any productive discussions because they entered every conversation intent on winning instead of having an honest, productive conversation. The best engineers I’ve worked with have had strong opinions but have also been happy and willing to go a different way if that’s what the team decides as a whole.
jb3689 5y ago
All said and done I think you tend to learn that opinions are just that - opinions. Often a team doesn't need more opinions, they need to make decisions and come to consensus, so helping them decide on which opinion is best is more important than bringing yet another complicating-but-not-discussion-progressing vote to the table
dosethree 5y ago
The longer you are in a career, the more you realize opinions are one of those things that always change (and should). Strong opinions weakly held
chronofar 5y ago
Most people mostly care about his/her own opinions, and others opinions only insofar as they reflect on himself/herself (even though of course the others are also thinking about themselves mostly), we're hopelessly self-involved creatures like that. Nonetheless there is inertia and subtle shifts that can come from sharing them, and though it may often feel like coming up against a brick wall if you look in the right way you'll see the bricks may be aligned a bit differently, and you can trace some of those differences to opinions you may have expressed. As always the wise approach is probably somewhere in the middle, in this case choosing your battles. You don't have to voice every opinion, but you shouldn't be silent if you have a strong and well-formed opinion about something important.
ozim 5y ago
I think that is also because as a Junior one thinks that he should have opinions and be vocal about them and be right to further their career or to become Senior/Manager/Leader. Just like getting good grades in school you would have to put your hand up and tell that smart thing to the class/teacher. After couple of years people realize that just having opinion and being vocal about it does not make one a Senior/Manager/Leader. There is much more to it and one learns about it on the job.
hereforphone 5y ago
It's the same in any area of life and is called maturity.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
No, I've been doing this for ~30 years now and I have really strong unpopular opinions on things. Like: - NPM/Yarn/Gems etc is a disaster waiting to happen. Having lots of dependencies is a security nightmare and a maintenance issue. As these projects get dropped by their original maintainers we'll start seeing more supply-side attacks and more vulnerabilities going unpatched. - Docker is a great solution for a specific problem. But I don't think it needs to be used for everything. Same for K8s. Same for microservices architecture. - Simplicity is an important design goal for all systems. Complexity breeds bugs. Boilerplate is simple. DRY can be taken too far. Every abstraction layer leaks at least a little. "clever" code is usually not what is needed for reliable software. I expect to get downvoted because these are unpopular opinions. But I'm used to arguing about them. It's always interesting to discuss.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Those seem like pretty unobjectionable opinions. Have an upvote! You want a controversial opinion (on HN), how about mine: "It's not always a good tradeoff to throw something under the bus to save developer time." So many important things are routinely sacrificed at the altar of developer speed and comfort, app runtime performance being the big one. It's used to justify all sorts of crazy things we do in modern software to ship faster, but so hard to push back on because developers are expensive and software needs to be done yesterday. Some things are worth giving up so that developers can move faster, but I argue not everything. Need to evaluate case by case.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Have an upvote yourself! yes, totally agree. Like Wordpress optimises for edit functionality, at the expense of render speed. Most of the internet is now slow, optimised for Susan From Marketing because they don't know how to edit HTML. Same for Ruby/Rails, same for Python/Django, same for Node/whatever. Web pages render slower so that whoever edits them can do that faster. This isn't good.
- paxys 5y ago
  Quite brave to share these unpopular opinions like “npm is bad” on HN.
barbazoo 5y ago
For me it's more a matter of putting those opinions into perspective. Example: I still highly value good API design but I'm not getting into debates anymore if an endpoint isn't RESTful or 100% consistent with every other endpoint. It's often just not that important at the end of the day.
stevage 5y ago
I mostly express opinions about things than affect my productivity. I don't care about npm vs yarn. It doesn't affect how I work. But I care a lot about not having excessively firm lint rules because they slow down my coding.

JackFr 5y ago

I got dinged in a 360 review by peers for not advocating for my views more. I feel that if I present what I think we should do, and why I think it's the best alternative, I shouldn't have to get into a shouting match or even a debate. I don't take it personally if people disagree with me. If I've got the best ideas and my managers are ignoring them for the loudest ideas, that's on them, not me.

noisy_boy 5y ago
Maybe they are pissed that they cant drag you in the failures by saying "even X had the same opinion..."

davemo 5y ago

It comes in waves. I'm in my 22nd year of developing software and I can reflect on times when I felt incredibly confident and didn't shy away from sharing my opinions, and other times when I felt like it was better to remain silent because I had things to learn from others. There are times for both speaking and listening in our careers; as I've progressed further in my career I have felt it is often more valuable to exercise active listening.

jimmyvalmer 5y ago

Junior dev: Let's use this amazing algo I learned in school! Senior dev: This won't work but it's no use explaning why since they've made up their minds (as have I).

TameAntelope 5y ago

What a depressing reaction to adversity. An alternative reaction is to try and figure out why nobody cared, and get better at expressing yourself in ways that people will care.

allenu 5y ago

Same here. Been working professionally as a dev for 20 years and each year I care less and less about changing other people’s minds about architecture. Just this year I was working with another team that wanted to move to an architecture that I thought was overengineered for their specific problems. They shared with me an article about some company that was using it. I explained my experiences with such a pattern and where the pitfalls were, hoping their lead dev would think about it or discuss the pros and cons. Well, it was met with silence. They went ahead with their plan anyway. Too many times that’s happened in the work world, so at least now I don’t invest a lot of effort into changing minds. Best advice I’ve learned these last few years is don’t tie yourself to your work. If you’re opinionated about how to do things because you love designing software, that’s great, but you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed by how things really get done.

d23 5y ago

I pick my battles pretty judiciously these days. I've learned that a huge amount of what people talk about doing ends up going nowhere anyway, so why burn the energy and look disagreeable? A lot of people with bad ideas also aren't very good at getting things done.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Having opinions is good, but only if they’re genuinely informed opinions and everyone is willing to disagree and commit. I’ve worked with too many people who think that their opinions are their identity and defended them as such. A difference of opinions shouldn’t become an excuse to go to war with your coworkers or argue endlessly instead of getting things done. One of my worst work experiences was with a team of developers who were old friends from a college debate team. We could never have any productive discussions because they entered every conversation intent on winning instead of having an honest, productive conversation. The best engineers I’ve worked with have had strong opinions but have also been happy and willing to go a different way if that’s what the team decides as a whole.

jb3689 5y ago

All said and done I think you tend to learn that opinions are just that - opinions. Often a team doesn't need more opinions, they need to make decisions and come to consensus, so helping them decide on which opinion is best is more important than bringing yet another complicating-but-not-discussion-progressing vote to the table

dosethree 5y ago

The longer you are in a career, the more you realize opinions are one of those things that always change (and should). Strong opinions weakly held

chronofar 5y ago

Most people mostly care about his/her own opinions, and others opinions only insofar as they reflect on himself/herself (even though of course the others are also thinking about themselves mostly), we're hopelessly self-involved creatures like that. Nonetheless there is inertia and subtle shifts that can come from sharing them, and though it may often feel like coming up against a brick wall if you look in the right way you'll see the bricks may be aligned a bit differently, and you can trace some of those differences to opinions you may have expressed. As always the wise approach is probably somewhere in the middle, in this case choosing your battles. You don't have to voice every opinion, but you shouldn't be silent if you have a strong and well-formed opinion about something important.

ozim 5y ago

I think that is also because as a Junior one thinks that he should have opinions and be vocal about them and be right to further their career or to become Senior/Manager/Leader. Just like getting good grades in school you would have to put your hand up and tell that smart thing to the class/teacher. After couple of years people realize that just having opinion and being vocal about it does not make one a Senior/Manager/Leader. There is much more to it and one learns about it on the job.

hereforphone 5y ago

It's the same in any area of life and is called maturity.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

No, I've been doing this for ~30 years now and I have really strong unpopular opinions on things. Like: - NPM/Yarn/Gems etc is a disaster waiting to happen. Having lots of dependencies is a security nightmare and a maintenance issue. As these projects get dropped by their original maintainers we'll start seeing more supply-side attacks and more vulnerabilities going unpatched. - Docker is a great solution for a specific problem. But I don't think it needs to be used for everything. Same for K8s. Same for microservices architecture. - Simplicity is an important design goal for all systems. Complexity breeds bugs. Boilerplate is simple. DRY can be taken too far. Every abstraction layer leaks at least a little. "clever" code is usually not what is needed for reliable software. I expect to get downvoted because these are unpopular opinions. But I'm used to arguing about them. It's always interesting to discuss.

ryandrake 5y ago
Those seem like pretty unobjectionable opinions. Have an upvote! You want a controversial opinion (on HN), how about mine: "It's not always a good tradeoff to throw something under the bus to save developer time." So many important things are routinely sacrificed at the altar of developer speed and comfort, app runtime performance being the big one. It's used to justify all sorts of crazy things we do in modern software to ship faster, but so hard to push back on because developers are expensive and software needs to be done yesterday. Some things are worth giving up so that developers can move faster, but I argue not everything. Need to evaluate case by case.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Have an upvote yourself! yes, totally agree. Like Wordpress optimises for edit functionality, at the expense of render speed. Most of the internet is now slow, optimised for Susan From Marketing because they don't know how to edit HTML. Same for Ruby/Rails, same for Python/Django, same for Node/whatever. Web pages render slower so that whoever edits them can do that faster. This isn't good.
paxys 5y ago
Quite brave to share these unpopular opinions like “npm is bad” on HN.

barbazoo 5y ago

For me it's more a matter of putting those opinions into perspective. Example: I still highly value good API design but I'm not getting into debates anymore if an endpoint isn't RESTful or 100% consistent with every other endpoint. It's often just not that important at the end of the day.

stevage 5y ago

I mostly express opinions about things than affect my productivity. I don't care about npm vs yarn. It doesn't affect how I work. But I care a lot about not having excessively firm lint rules because they slow down my coding.