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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.