My wife just hired someone with 36 years of experience. She is probably not getting past the 90-day probationary period. 1) Too many opinions, 2) no breadth: more like one year of experience repeated 36 times.
I would rather work with someone with a lot of opinions than someone with few opinions, even if those opinions are very different from mine. Someone with few opinions isn’t really going to contribute new ideas. They’re not going to foster debate, or try to teach others. They need to not be stubborn though, and willing to go along with a decision that they didn’t support.
I agree - I like when people disagree with me - as long as either I learn something from them, or they learn something from me - if we both dig in our heels, no one learns anything.
It's not about the quantity of opinions, it's the strength for which they are held. I'm talking about people whose ways are set in stone, and if you don't agree they'll whine about kids these days or newfangled things like jQuery. Using an intentionally outdated library to represent how absolutely behind the person in question tends to be.
I get it, but at the same time, there's not really anything new in computer science for the run of the mill enterprise developer. We're paying massive, massive complexity penalties to get a little bit of gain in productivity in only a few areas. React is a great example. High complexity to the same thing we used to do in SSR but in the browser just to find out we probably want to keep doing SSR in most cases. Was the 10 year battle we've been fighting on front end toolchain worth it? Depends on whether you fought it or you just inherited the results. If you fought it, you were dumb.
I'm not the expert, my wife is, and she has been around. I'm in government so she has had to get all sorts of jobs in different settings and now has a demonstrably broad resume, but with that breadth has come depth. She attracts the highest-end clientele in the world (CEOs of companies you know and love) and can afford to be choosy about which clients she takes on. What I get from my wife is that, this lady keeps proposing the same set of ideas, which are clearly drawn from her one specific job, which she held for 36 years.
They are repetitive and frequently off the mark. A client has issue A, and she strongly advocates for solution B1. A client has issue B, and she strongly advocates for solution B2. A client has issue C, and she strongly advocates for solution B3. A client has issue D, and she strongly advocates for solution B2 again.
She lacks the knowledge to access solution spaces A, C, and D.
I've often pondered on this, likely some survivorship biases involved as well.