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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I'm unable to read the article at the moment, but I certainly agree with the title. I recently had to hire 4 new developers for my team, and I found 4 I'm really happy with, but the one I'm most happy with is the one I hired primary because he was very opinionated, and now after two weeks, he's already having a major positive impact on our way of working.

By contrast, the two developers with the most experience on paper are very timid, and it's hard to get a straight answer out of them. It's probably a cultural issue. Which makes it extra annoying, because in many situation, it's valuable to have opinions from all cultures represented, and not just the most direct cultures.

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I'm 4 months into my new job and was pulled into a meeting on thursday. Apparently I ruffled feathers by asking questions in an email chain, which is how I found myself spending this weekend thinking about how I'm going to transition out of this job.

You don't just lose out on the opportunity to improve, you lose your best developers.

And the way they went about it was just shitty. I suddenly found myself getting blamed for lost productivity because I turned on MySQL's "strict" mode in our QA DB. Apparently it was better to continue allowing MySQL to silently truncate data across the app.

This was my first foray back into a "job" and I've decided it isn't for me. I don't think I'm built for it, I'm going back to working for myself.

You seem to be failing at listening to dissenters yourself.

Turning on strict mode was wrong - yesterday. The correct thing is to understand why it isn't on, come up with a plan to get strict on, and then convince everybody the plan is correct. This is much harder and takes longer but is correct.

I guess I'll add context since I've been "well akschually'd".

There was time planned for this in that we were updating MariaDB and we had estimated extra time for unforeseen problems.. The defaults changed to strict, I realized we had severe data integrity problems and as the senior developer on the team I made the decision to turn off strict mode in production and turn it on in QA and our dev environments so we can prioritize the integrity of the data.

This is literally my job as a senior developer. If this is not what a senior developer is for in most companies, it goes back to what I said before about not being built for such environments. I made a judgement call here, and I'll continue to defend that judgement call as me doing my damned job.

Maybe in your world data integrity sits behind the newest dropdown on the UI, but not in mine.

But the thing is, everyone was ok with it until about a week later when this VP sent it down the line that I was to be reprimanded for "behavioral" problems because they mistook me asking questions as me not wanting to do the work.

And I got reprimanded, and then the QA environment wasn't changed because this reprimand was insisted on by a VP, my direct manager was forced to do it, and then ignored it afterwards.

I'd rather go back to working for myself than to deal with this shit.

edit: as for why strict mode wasn't on before, this application was developed by an incompetent. To give an example of the level of skill that built this app.

I once came across code the following (psuedocode):

foreach(object)

  sql += generate_insert_statement(object).

$parts = split("INSERT INTO", sql);

foreach(part from parts):

  sql = "INSERT INTO" + part;

  do_query(sql)

I've been tempted to send in submissions to the daily WTF on more than 1 occasion.

Regardless of your reasons for your decision, responding to dissent by calling it a "well akschually” isn’t a good way to respond to dissent.

this smacks of the "intolerance of intolerance is itself intolerance" arguments.

My response to a bullshit power play is to use the mobility of my profession to remove myself from the situation.

I will not continue to subject myself to such bullshit just for sake of appearing as if I'm accepting of "dissent".

edit: and yes, I'm still angry about it. Which is part of the reason why I'm leaving. In 20+ years of development I've never experiences something like this, and I refuse to deal with it.

And the entire thing about the DB is a red herring anyways, it was the asking of questions that pissed off a VP that started the entire mudslide.

Your reply aptly explains why your peers aren't a fan of working with you. You sound like an a-hole. Even if you were the principal engineer of the entire org and made dumb, rash decisions like this, I'd tell you to go pound sand irrespective of your seniority and title.

So you're 4 months in, you made a hasty prod change on a database with very little oversight. That tells me you're neither senior nor someone who can work well with others.

I'm not saying having 'strict' turned off was a good idea, but nobody working at your firm wants to deal with some new unexpected behavior over the weekend caused by some over zealous dev who made some change because he/she believed they were right.

It's obvious that something about this is personal for you.

You're making specific claims here that directly contradict what I've stated. I'd list them out, but really I don't want to waste my time on someone who is obviously angry about something unrelated.

Where are you getting the idea that this was a dumb rash decision? It sounds like they upgraded the database instance without proper QA in the first place and that this created a lot of issues. OP didn't specify if this was their decision or not, but even if it was there might be some good reasons for it and many of those reasons point to further organisation incompetence. The only rash decision OP made (from the information available) was to disable the feature in production to at least get the appearance of everything working, which was the status quo.

This is shooting the messenger, the product was silently failing for god knows how long and your blaming the person that forced the organisation to acknowledge those failures and their own personal incompetence. And they did this in a way that only had an immediate impact on non-production systems.

I get the impressions you can't work well with others, because it requires a good dose of humility and the ability to acknowledge problems. Sweeping those problems under the carpet to bite people in mysterious ways at odd times is someone that's difficult to work with.

Thank you for this response. What you've described is pretty much how I see it.

And I'm not claiming that there weren't things I could have done better, I've thought about it and I definitely could have done things differently.

But at the end of the day their response was a gross overreaction and was politically motivated. No one had any real problem with my decisions until that email chain.

> I'm most happy with is the one I hired primary because he was very opinionated, and now after two weeks, he's already having a major positive impact on our way of working

It's also good that you are willing to listen to his advice. It sometimes hard for opinions to be heard in conservative environments. It should be the role of a good manager to make sure that everyone is encouraged to share his views, especially those who wouldn't do it naturally.

Sometimes, I'm amazed that so many people simply keep their mouth shut even if they totally disagree with their management or project organization!

> Sometimes, I'm amazed that so many people simply keep their mouth shut even if they totally disagree with their management or project organization!

I don't want to assume your level or length of experience, but I'm not amazed by this at all. Anyone who has worked in one or more mid-to-large-sized organizations for a few years has either been or seen people punished or fired for expressing dissenting opinion to management. Even, sometimes especially, if that dissenting opinion happens to be correct. If you haven't experienced this yourself, consider yourself lucky you haven't found yourself in such an organization; they are the norm rather than the exception.

Keep working on encouraging opinions of the others. Assure them it’s not rude; that you need to know what they think to ensure the best decision gets made.

The culture has to go beyond making it safe to share opinions, and more to a place of making opinions known to be essential and appreciated, without going overboard.

I'm curious which phrase you find is a better expression of this dev's communication:

- "Strong opinions, weakly held"

- "Clear opinions, openly offered"

Those two don't appear mutually exclusive

I'm not sure what you mean by this. That opinionated dev comes across to me as having strong opinions, which he expresses clearly when relevant. But when I disagree, he sees my point and is willing to do it my way if I insist, which I rarely do, because he often has a good point.

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