And there he goes, yet another opinionated guy…

Surely you´ve met this kind of guys. You were having a few drinks with your mates, including your opinionated friend. You started talking about computers, it was a positive and chilled out conversation. But suddenly that guy spoke. He quickly started his discourse about why Dell computers are so awesome, he didn´t leave any room for others to speak, he was the biggest ever Dell´s computer fan. Some the other guys tried to tell him about Lenovo computers but it was an impossible task.

Building opinionated people in IT

You can find them everywhere, but we get a lot of this kind of people in our tech industry. I´d rather think we build them, that we create that kind of character…

Our Tech industry is a tough world to be in.

There is a thousand things to learn, you could spend a couple of lives learning about backend technologies. You need to know about the user and the product, you need to be looking into new technologies while maintaining that legacy system that nobody understand. You start learning Javascript and there are dozens of frameworks to chose: EmberJS, Knockout, Angular, look at that Facebook created a new React framework. You need to do TDD while doing BDD and applying DDD at the same time.

It really is a hard world. It´s that hard that when you learn properly BDD and know how awesome it is, you want to champion it. You want to speak about it.

BDD is the way to go, everyone should use it. I can champion BDD in my place and everybody will go asking me. I don´t know anything about automation but I can grow in the company by being the master of BDD.

Having this kind of people in your organization is not necessarily bad. You don´t want to have people that don´t care about stuff, you want to have people that believe in things because these things were proven to be effective in their careers. You want to have people that champion things and that help moving forward and spreading the knowledge. But a really skilled developer with opinion about things, also listens to other people and changes his point if necessary.

You want people that listen in your organization.

Overopinionated people is the danger.

Recognizing them

When you have to work closely with one of them, it can be both time and energy consuming. Not to mention offensive and insulting, in a passive-aggressive kind of way. You don´t want to waste your energy arguing with somebody that just doesn´t listen.

Here is how you recognize them:

• They don’t listen. Not really. Sometimes it will look like they do, but they don’t

• They are arrogant, and tend to think most people are stupid

• They can not handle criticism

• They tend to lecture

• They are very impatient

Handling them

Of course, some of them can be great people. They are sometimes very talented, and there is often a lot to learn from them. Also, sometimes they can be really nice people. Spending time avoiding or boycotting them is also energy and time consuming. Just recognize this weak spot in them, and save time, energy and good vibes.

This is how you can handle:

• Recognize them. Once you have done it, you can be more forgiving and avoid wasting time. At least some of it.

• Dry them out. When a debate starts, stop feeding the fire, provide neutral comments instead. That works well, they aren’t really interested in your opinion most of the time.

• If you still want to fall for it, it´s a good chance to improve your oratory and communication skills. In front of you, you´ve got someone who is not willing to change his mind. If you really believe in your point is a good chance to learn about it, learning how to be assertive and learning how to defeat it.

What about me?

Of course, I´m an opinionated guy, I can be really stubborn sometimes. Why am I writing this post? Because I´m opinionated. When I like something I talk so much about it that I can be even irritating. I need to stop myself from being overwhelming with the stuff.

But I try to listen to other people´s points. In my opinion that´s the only way to learn and grow. I really like modest people that listen, when you are talking to them you can see in their eyes that they are paying attention. Modest people that when you talk to them you notice how many things they know.

We really need talented modest people that listen.

In the UK they have an expression:

You can lead a horse to the water but you can´t make it drink.

I like to think that sometimes I´m willing to drink that water.

Anyway, that was just my opinion, what is yours? :)