Yes, and it had enough backup to run the grid for 5 minutes, at the low low price of $200m. Now you'd only need another $50,000,000 to have enough storage to run it overnight.
As a kid my main source of new games was to hire it from the video store overnight, install it and then download a no-cd crack. I dont recall ever running into issues finding one.
Your local video store rented PC games? Where I grew up, console games for sure were available in video rental places but there was never a business in renting PC games. I wish there had been!
The issue I have with this principle is how the strong opinions are presented. It's often not easy to tell the difference between "an inexperienced, non-authoritative, strong opinion weakly held" and "an experienced, authoritative, strong opinion strongly held".
If it's obvious that you're a junior dev -- that you have both little experience and little influence -- then expressing a strong opinion isn't really problematic, because other people will feel comfortable challenging it.
The problem comes as you start to gain experience and influence. As it becomes clear that you do have experience in general, then people are likely to assume that all of your strongly stated opinions are the result of experience, even when they're not. Thus people with a little bit of experience in X, hearing your strong opinion on X (even though you have zero experience) are more likely to discount their experience, rather than sharing their experience with you.
Similarly, people who are coming from the outside -- say, people from other companies talking to a team lead of a project; or contributors submitting to an open source project -- are more likely to hear opinion X as being, "This is the rule for this project", rather than "This is my current opinion, but feel free to challenge me if you think it's wrong".
So if you're going to hold strong opinions, you need to make it clear when you express them that they are in fact weakly held; and the more you grow as a developer, the more important it is.
I have heard of an anecdote that in some company, can't remember which, when meeting to take a decision, they would have people speak up in order of seniority, from the most junior to the most senior in the room. That way they could avoid the problem you're describing: you don't risk contradicting someone preceived as more experienced, or worse, your boss.
I found that an elegant solution, at least in abstract, I've never actually see it in practical use.
I can see how this sounds good, but my first reaction is that I think it is the kind of thing that would work great in a really good team that wouldn't even need it, and it would be awful for juniors in the kind of team that would get really excited about implementing it. Who wants to speak up when you don't know the ropes, you haven't gotten used to the social dynamic, etc? Seems to select for people with excessive confidence, who already have no difficulty advancing themselves.
This model seems insufficient and exclusionist to people who are socially withdrawn, or have a social disability, or come from a marginalized background, or any of the myriad reasons some developers already don't speak up. But it's a good starting point. I just would not implement it without additional frameworking to guide and encourage useful input from the juniors. In which case, if you're putting in the effort to understand why people aren't speaking more freely, this framework may be superfluous (or it could still be a valuable part of your practices).
That’s generally a good approach: it gets the thought out there, and others can take it under consideration, but without causing an ego wall to be erected.
If the subject is too important, you can “kindly emphasize”, but after that you’ve done your duty, and when the shit hits the fan, you’re covered.
It's not... you can feel really good or bad about something, but also be completely open to having your opinion shaped by new information and be willing to switch. That's what it means. As opposed to strongly holding opinions (whether they are strong or weak) and actively resisting conversion attempts.
The opinion itself is strong because it's absolute. It will be weakly held if, when presented a case where gotos really are a better solution, you give it up and decide to modify it to, "Never use gotos, except in a handful of well-defined cases, such as X."
Thanks. I think I am already following that policy. "Strong Opinions Weakly held". But generally, people see your strong opinions and automatically think you are difficult to work with or make some assumptions about you. They do not care about the "weakly held" part. Atleast, that is what I believe. But it works personally very well.
