Facilitating technical disagreements with a joker card
Disagreements are incredibly important. In tech, disagreements can easily be found. Just post “JavaScript is the best functional language” anywhere on the Internet and bam, you'll instantly have a flamewar on your hands.
Flamewars based on personal opinions often end up falling into the fruitless category, because they mostly come down to “which language do I personally like best?”. On the internet, that’s not much worth value. In a company though, personal preferences can often affect team happiness. Making a C# team use JavaScript probably will negatively impact the team.
Useful disagreements on the other hand tend to have productive outcomes. In open source communities, it can influence what direction a project goes in. The same applies to companies. What frameworks should we use? How should we build services? What infrastructure setup do we need?
In a company, people’s seniority and role tends to play a factor in whether people will disagree with them or not. In particular, people may disagree with more senior people, but not voice it in productive ways. Either people are silent, or they are too vocal.
