Am I the only one who thinks that the first one is a terrible heuristic? In my experience, people who don't have a lot of experience tend to be the most opinionated. I may just be thinking of the wrong kind of opinionated, but as far as I can tell any programming language's biggest fans tend to be the programmers who only know one language.
I was really opinionated ten years ago, before I had tried to build anything serious. These days, I think every choice is a trade-off. I wonder if I'll ever be opinionated again.
I'm the same way, but I'm going to expand on that a bit.
It's not that I'm no longer opinionated, but I've matured as a programmer. I no longer view any solution as the only/best solution to any given problem. So rather than being so opinionated that you don't concede, I find myself listening to other possible solutions with an open mind and admitting that I'm wrong.
I feel that people who are overly opinionated just haven't matured to the point where they can comfortably say that they're wrong or that another solution exists that performs just as well.
Not only that, but the specific example they gave is even worse.
Ruby vs Python? My only opinion on Ruby vs Python is that I wish one would die so that we don't have two utterly similar languages fragmenting the same niche and causing lots of duplicated effort (e.g., ruby oauth and python-oauth2). Does that make me a bad programmer?
I think you're right in thinking the "wrong kind of opinionated".
I'm pretty f'ing opinionated about certain things and those are not trivial things - testing for instance.
I'm also opinionated about languages but I can clearly articulate why I would choose python over ruby and vice versa in any given situation. Same goes for rdbms vs. schemaless data stores.
Some of my favorite and best interviews have been geeking out discussing technology with a potential employeer.
What was really left out was "make friends with a trusted geek". Have someone you can call on to perform the interview on your behalf. I have pretty solid bullshit detector and have frequently helped out friends who couldn't find a technical resource to perform a phone screen.
Maybe they should have drawn a distinction between "Opinionated because they're ignorant" and "Appears opinionated because they're committed to principles which may be inconvenient."
I agree with you. I almost stopped reading the article at that point, because it will tend to get you clueless zealots rather than competent engineers.
