[andrewcooke]

"Talented people with a lot of experience have strong opinions."

i hear this often. and i've worked with some people like that, many of whom i admire (in some ways).

yet i am not at all opinionated (as far as i can tell). when people ask me for advice, i often find it very hard to guide them because there are so many options, and what will work best seems to depend so much on non-technical factors.

and i am not sure what to do about this. i have tried being more opinionated, and there are times when a decision affected my work and i have fought for what was right, because i am doing the work. but often other people, opinionating, just seem like noise (worse, sometimes i suspect people confuse being opinionated with understanding something).

no real conclusion here, sorry. sometimes i wonder if people are too opinionated; sometimes i wonder if i am not opinionated enough (or if i am not that talented - although i do take re-assurance from the d-k effect). but that part of the post, and a related comment by the author here, disturbed me a little. i am not sure a place full of opinionated people is that pleasant (or optimal).

i was wondering if this touches a chord with anyone else?

[shykes]

We hit the "opinion overload" problem at dotCloud about a year ago, at 10 employees. It took us a while to fix it. We could feel the beginning of a vicious circle where an eloquent opinion brought the same peer recognition as a working piece of code. The symptoms were more talking, less coding, recurring debates which everybody was sick of but nobody could put to rest, and worst of all, a tendency to say "I told you so" and blame each other for oversights. We noticed this when junior hires started mimicking the most verbose "opinionaters" instead of the most prolific doers. The wrong "genes" were reproducing in the company's dna!

Fortunately we found a solution and the group self-corrected wonderfully. The team is now 20 strong and an awesome no-bullshit engineering culture. We found that the key to a constructive conversation is to have an owner: someone in charge of the subject at hand, who is held responsible for the result, and in return has authority on how to go about it. Everyone else in the conversation is a peer, voicing their opinion non-authoritatively and acknowledging that the owner has the final say. Rule of thumb: ask "who's the owner?". If there's no clear answer, you're not getting work done.

In a group of smart and trusted people, this creates a culture where you earn your spurs with what you do, not what you say. Opinions become more like washing the dishes: useful and necessary, but not something that will get you pats in the back either. In fact if you take your dishwashing skills too seriously you might find yourself a source of amusement.

We later found out that Pixar uses a very similar peer feedback system for its productions.

[samdk]

Having strong opinions is different from having an opinion on everything.

Being in a place full of opinionated people is nice, so long as those people are able to discuss their opinions rationally and are okay with not getting their way every time.

[cmoylan]

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

[andrewcooke]

also, "second coming" by yeats, but i am not sure it is true - i have been lucky enough to work with some very good people, and some of the best were like this.

as j_baker says, it seems like it's just one of those "life is complicated" things...

[confluence]

"Have strong opinions - weakly held" is probably what he meant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/strong-opinions-wea...

One should be able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in one's head (double think), each with varying amounts of evidence depending on the current situation. Furthermore, one should be able to switch between said ideas quickly and easily depending on what is needed to successfully complete the task at hand.

For example:

If you want high perf/dollar when doing a data analysis across billions of rows you know that you should run on a commodity cluster and with bare metal high performant C++.

You also know that if you want to get something done really quickly (elegant - not performant/efficient), you stick to what you know (Python/Ruby/Perl etc.) and get it done today. You know that if need be, you can just scale it out later with a more performant architecture.

Both opinions are strong. Both are weakly held. The best one wins depending on the situation.

[j_baker]

Everyone's different, and that makes for a great number of different strengths and weaknesses. The biggest problem you run into with opinionated people is that they're frequently more interested in offering their opinion than doing anything about it. On the other hand, that means there's no shortage of constructive criticism when you want it.

In short, opinionated people are just another type of person you have to deal with. If you can't make yourself be as opinionated, that's no big deal. If this is a significant problem for you, perhaps it's best to figure out what skills you have that would complement "opinionation".

[ionforce]

Have you ever taken an MBTI test before?