I just needed to write some thoughts "down" as a reminder for myself in the future.
Accepting change is hard. Crazy hard. It's so easy to pick a side and remain stubborn about it. Look at politics for instance. But the thing is, most things are not binary. There is a scale of options or opinions that are possible, not just two. Like a former manager of mine used to say, "the truth lies somewhere in between".
I'd like to mention a few examples to give context, from work:
- I used to be against TypeScript. I know advocate for it.
- I used to distrust most people above me in the hierarchy, and I liked to believe that I could do their job better at best, or that their role was useless at worst. I've now been a manager for 2 years and I see things COMPLETELY differently. I still do believe that some managers are totally slacking off or just bad at their job though...
- I used to be against new processes. I just would not event try to put myself in other people's shoes and claim existing processes were enough. Again, I've changed my approach.
A perfect example is mandatory pull request reviews from code owners. I fought very hard against this. I thought this was a vast of my time: it would slow me down as I'd need to wait for approvals, and also would distract me by having me review things I had no clue about. When it was first implemented at work, I even created a cron job that would automatically approve PRs for which my review was requested. I think I kept it running a day or two before realizing how stupid this was. Nowadays, I'm 100% convinced by the value of mandary reviews by code owners.
There are plenty of other examples... Anyways, I just wanted to write a short article about that. I might develop these thoughts further some day, for now I'll stop here.