There is a thread going.
Two people are wrong
in different directions,
and you can see the whole shape
of the argument they are missing.
You start typing.
Stop and ask one question first.
Will I live with the result?
If the answer is yes,
speak.
Speak early, speak plainly,
and stay in it
until it is decided,
because a decision you have to work under
is worth an hour of your reputation.
If the answer is no,
you are about to spend
your credibility on a thing
that will not touch your week.
There is a limited amount
of weight your opinion carries.
Every argument you enter
spends a little of it.
The people who are in everything
are eventually in nothing,
because their strong view on the linter
sounds exactly like
their strong view on the migration,
and nobody can tell
which one to take seriously.
Save it.
Be quiet about
the formatting rule,
the naming style,
the framework debate
that will resolve itself
when someone actually has to build with it.
Then be loud
about the schema
you cannot change later.
You do not need a position
on every tool you have never used.
Renting an opinion from a talk
you half remember
is not knowledge,
and it will not survive
one honest follow-up question.
I do not know
is a complete sentence,
and it is more credible
than a confident guess.
Silence is not agreement.
It is not weakness either.
Most of the time
it is somebody deciding
that this one is not theirs,
which is a skill,
and a rarer one
than being right in public.
There is a second cost
that is harder to see.
Every argument you join
takes the afternoon with it.
You win the thread,
you feel sharp,
and the thing you actually owed
somebody today
is still not written.
Pick the two things this quarter
you will genuinely defend.
Let the rest go past you.
Being right about everything
is a full time job
that nobody is paying for.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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