Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 6 years in the industry

^{Published: 2021-01-23}

Things I've changed my mind on:

Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with:

Typed languages are better when you're working on a team of people with various experience levels
Standups are actually useful for keeping an eye on the newbies.
Sprint retrospectives have their place so long as they're for actual course correction (i.e. "holy shit, that went poorly!") and not some god awful 'agile' / 'scum master' driven waste of everyone's time
Software architecture probably matters more than anything else. A shitty implementation of a good abstraction causes no net harm to the code base. A bad abstraction or missing layer causes everything to rot.
Java isn't that terrible of a language.
Clever code isn't usually good code. Clarity trumps all other concerns.
Bad code can be written in any paradigm
So called "best practices" are contextual and not broadly applicable. Blindly following them makes you an idiot
Designing scalable systems when you don't need to makes you a bad engineer.
Static analysis is useful
DRY is about avoiding a specific problem, not an end goal unto itself.
In general, RDBMS > NoSql
Functional programming is another tool, not a panacea.

YAGNI, SOLID, DRY. In that order.
Pencil and paper are the best programming tools and vastly under used
Trading purity in exchange for practicality is usually a good call
Adding more technology is rarely a good call
Talking directly to the customer always reveals more about the problem, in less time, and with higher accuracy
The word "scalable" has a mystical and stupefying power over the mind of the software engineer. Its mere utterance can whip them into a depraved frenzy. Grim actions have been justified using this word
Despite being called "engineers," most decision are pure cargo-cult with no backing analysis, data, or numbers
90% – maybe 93% – of project managers, could probably disappear tomorrow to either no effect or a net gain in efficiency.
After performing over 100 interviews: interviewing is thoroughly broken. I also have no idea how to actually make it better.

People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia are insane weirdos
Code coverage has absolutely nothing to do with code quality
Monoliths are pretty good in most circumstances
TDD purists are just the worst. Their frail little minds can't process the existence of different workflows.

We'll see which of these have flipped or changed at year 10.