10 Years as a Career Programmer

Measure simple. Then we can easily see if your thing actually increases/decreases that number. Does that measure even matter? Is it correlated with something we actually care about? Do you have proof of that? Have you ever thought about what really matters?

No, "Here's a double blind randomized control trial proving this improves metric X across a wide range of people, places, and situations." Instead they use vague jargon, anecdotes, metaphors, their own and other's authority along with a good heap of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The hard part's that disproving their claims takes real effort. Effort they're not going to put in here. They just want you to use their product, pay for their courses, read their ad infested blog, or just do things their way because that's the way they like it.

Likewise when you read or hear "always" or "never," these people are also wrong. Don't ignore them, but try to find someone that disagrees with them and learn why. Everything in real life is situational and relative.

If you can't explain succinctly how something really works (not just by metaphor or abstraction), you probably don't understand it but you can totally fix that.

never ever let working rob you of the joy programming first brought you

Meanwhile the real problems, the ones your user is relying on you to solve, become an afterthought. The metrics that really matter to them get forgotten in favour of doing the things that this person pinky promises matters.

Honestly, the only skills that matter are;

1. a profound curiosity,
2. a high tolerance for ambiguity,
3. a desire to do more with less, and
4. the ability to solve problems.

Rhetoric's greatest enemy is data.

Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.