> "Taste" is bound to devolve into "I like this" vs "I like that"
My read of the article was less "I like this" and more "I've seen xx work best in a situation like this where we're optimising for yy but if we're optimising for zz then something else would be more suitable"
It's less about what you like or dislike and more about aligning a collection of practices you've seen work well to the situation and constraints, which is why variety of experience helps
I'm not sure why stirring up shit or inflaming egos would necessarily happen with such conversations. Skilled engineers often start a solution proposal by explicitly outlining what they are optimising for, known limitations etc which all help create a baseline to describe "taste"
I think good taste and opinionated aren't quite the same thing but you do need to have some opinions to have good taste, it's almost like a precursor. Good taste then comes from knowing which of your opinions you're optimising for in the current situation and which of your opinions are either not relevant or perhaps the situation is not suitable or ready for them.
This topic seems to be in a holding pattern now. People are waiting to see how Ruby Central responds. Some are hoping for the Q&A to be rescheduled or at least another statement
It doesn't require any amount of digging to learn about DHH's opinions. He writes, tweets, speaks about them. He's an influential voice in the Ruby and Rails communities and any regular participants are likely to hear about him
In this case it's hard to separate the art from the artist. DHH wields significant power in the community and industry. Shopify is likely to back him and they are a major ruby / rails sponsor. He also has immense influence.
What does this mean for juniors? A few companies are now introducing expectations that all engineers will use coding agents including juniors and grads. If they haven't yet learnt what good looks like through experience how are they going to review code produced by AI agents?
>These people will be very persuasive - it’s their job! - but they won’t be there during your next promo discussion, and they’ll walk away from you the second it’s in their interest to do so
While I agree you don't want to be helpful at the expense of your role and definitely want to keep your manager in the loop, it can pay off to become useful to senior managers outside your org chart. With more companies including calibration-style conversations in performance reviews, often those managers will speak up in cross-team calibration conversations to plus-one your performance review. It's way more persuasive when they say you were useful vs your own manager going to bat for you.
It's less about what you like or dislike and more about aligning a collection of practices you've seen work well to the situation and constraints, which is why variety of experience helps
I'm not sure why stirring up shit or inflaming egos would necessarily happen with such conversations. Skilled engineers often start a solution proposal by explicitly outlining what they are optimising for, known limitations etc which all help create a baseline to describe "taste"